“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
attract money with happy thoughts” kind or pandering to the inveterate belief of the well-meaning liberal audience of HBO programming that the main reason that bad things happen is that there are unenlightened, insensitive people in the world and that everything would be okay, as long as People Like Us could rule the world from our living rooms.
Of course, I’m not saying that outright bigots don’t exist; they obviously do, and (much worse) they’re seemingly self-consciously summoned into existence with alarming frequency by the prestidigitations of unscrupulous right-wing demagogues of the kind who seem to have unleashed the tea party on Obama’s America, Le Pen on France to start what would have to be a very long list. But a remarkable thing about The Wire, is how rarely individual sentiments (as opposed to individual actions) are portrayed as being in the least bit important to the on-going functions of the system. It’s not that the world is portrayed, as an arch-cynic might, as being totally devoid of individual virtue — we’re not talking about Mad Men after all 😛 — it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.
(For, any Lacan lovers among you, out there, I’ll just quickly say that The Wireconstantly shows the destitution of the imaginary – the sphere of ego and alter – in the symbolic, while at the same time showing the terrible actions of those who will not admit the existence of a ‘hole in the Real’: i.e. the properly capitalist-bureaucratic psychosis that equates what can be counted with what ‘is’. But, to spare the rest of you, that’s all I’ll say on the matter, for now.)
To put this another way, in The Wire, racism is not so much an attitude, as an organizing principle: it’s autopoietic, self-perpetuating, built into the heart of things like an inherited disease that is now encoded in every cell of the body, it’s like the information contained in every cell that dictates the direction in which the social body will grow.
Now, you might object here, that racism is, by definition, a subjective disposition/attitude that we usually infer from certain forms of speech and action. And you’d be right. However, it’s precisely these kinds of subjective dispositions that, in the world of The Wire seem, if not exactly irrelevant to the way “Baltimore” operates than something very close to this. It’s as if the series at once suggests that, yes, “life in the city” is, as neo-liberal economic theory would have it, simply the aggregate of all those atoms bumping into each other a la Democritus (or, in a different sense, Friedrich Hayek’s) binding together to handle a complexity beyond that which could be ‘managed’ by any government. And yet the show continually shows us how illusory is the neo-liberal notion that this social reality can ‘be anything at all’ in a way that would suggest these individual encounters and reactions are not already structured by the whole of which they form parts. Instead, what we see in The Wire is the tendency for an already existing pattern (of social injustice, inequality et cetera) gets perpetuated through, by, and very occasionally despite the seemingly isolated and autonomous actions of these same individuals. The point is not to suggest skepticism about the possibilities of human autonomy, but rather skepticism about ‘atomic’ social theory: as the philosophically inclined, among you, will already know, society may be made up of monads, but monads are most definitely not atoms.
Put differently, the fact that Baltimore is, as they tell us somewhere in The Wire’s third season, 65 per cent “African American” added to the fact the show’s universe has a black mayor, police commissioner, senators and generally no lack of prominent black, Hispanic, Polish and Irish citizens and that WASPS of any kind seem conspicuous only in their absence, doesn’t change the fact that Baltimore’s indigent and incarcerated populations are disproportionately African-American.
The show manages — without needing to invent a single easily despised, pot-bellied bigot to fuel audience indignation by coming over all Ku Klux Klan — to show that whatever the attitudes of individuals the fact stilll remains that the poorest districts on