“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
reasons: I wasn’t making light of racism, as much as I was attempting to satirise what I think is the prevalent ideological illusion that good and bad (and even the task of combatting present present social injustices stemming from historical ones) is in the end a matter of making sure the right people have the right attitude, that everything will be all right as long as the privileged groups have the right (“Aw…we like those people…they make nice food…”) aesthetic outlook on the victims of the injustice.
Now, what I’m worried about here is the potential for a kind of ‘consumerist’ distortion of what it means to hold ethical and political positions. The distortion operates like this: under the perpetual “Web 2.0”, “find celebrity or die” imperatives of the present, potentially any and all decisions (always conceived as choices from life’s extensive menu) can be perverted such that they are principally a means of ‘expressing ourselves’ through our consumer choices.
In an environment governed by the imperative to ‘make sure you show what kind of person you are at all times because this is somehow terribly important’ the danger is that even our most passionately proclaimed ethical and political can take on the appearance of (even if they don’t actually become this) nothing more than tribal tattoos which we desperately try to make intricate or distinctive enough to not be mistaken for everyone else’s (crappier, duller, less “edgy”) attempts to have their selfhood recognized and thus given substance.
I think you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about: the weird contexts in which even perfectly honourable moral and political positions that are supposed to be about solidarity, equality, justice and which are supposed to give rise to what Badiou calls the ‘tent-words’ under which an elusive ‘we’ might shelter together, and work together for a better world, suddenly becomes instead less about ending oppression or actually achieving certain goals than a convenient way for me to show the (apparently perpetually watching) world my latest kung fu move in the endless game of (to quote Fight Club) “which colour scheme best expresses who I am as a person: the fuchsia, the cobalt or the cafe latte creme caramel?”
Now, I’m not saying that I think that politics needs to be like this or even that it is like this most of the time: but I am saying that there’s at least a marked tendency given the way selfhood in our epoch is thought of (as a function of shopping and other gestures of self-display) that we will turn our political “alignments” as well as our attested to (as opposed to acted upon) moral principles into just another way of selling ourselves.
As an example, of this, I’d point to the Australian columinist Catherine Deveney, who is familiar to me chiefly for what seems to be her horrifying genius for spouting deceptively progressive sounding rhetoric in a way that must be incredibly comforting for the political right that she thinks of herself as opposing.
This is because, in her amazingly self-regarding discourse, ‘politics’ is persistently portrayed as if its main purpose was to provide an outlet for the smug self-assertion practiced by the inhabitants of the hipper suburbs, a self-assertion that consists in finding any opportunity to imply one’s both moral and aesthetic superiority to all of those crass, ignorant unenlightened types who don’t share Our Way of Life [sic] and who will thus be deservedly Passed Over when the revolution finally acknowledges that the aforementioned ‘let’s live in the interesting parts of the city with access to real life types’ are the saviours of muddled humanity….
Now, I won’t surprise anyone when I say that the ideology of “it’s all about your attitudes and choices” is particularly common to Hollywood and even more so to American television.
To explain: how many films have you seen where a problem of “race”, poverty and Imperialism” is portrayed largely as a consequence of the subjective nastiness or prejudice of individual imperialists/capitalists?
The recent apotheosis (or perhaps Apocolocyntosis) of this sort of thing is James Cameron’s Avatar, a film which though it does feature an undeniably pretty and pleasingly blue CGI jungle for its puppy-dog eyed, noble savages with sexy feline noses to frolic in, is, despite this saving grace, unbearably, pompously earnest in its constant, humourless attempts to portray the evils of Imperialist exploitation as ultimately the handiwork of psychopathic crew-cutted military fucknuts doing the bidding of smarmy, slump-shouldered, cynical corporate half-humans, who together constitute an alliance so evil that it wears a death’s head mask on either nipple and has a smiling corporate logo that says “we’re the bad guys” and goes on to explain how said alliance is dedicated to stomping on every