Continuing the Trump-related posts, here's part of a talk I delivered early in 2016 at a conference in Lyon. The talk was titled TOMORROW NEVER KNOWN : LE FUTUR IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA POP CULTURE and as is my frequent wont, the text was way too long to deliver in the allotted time. So I never actually got to read out this final section - perhaps just as well, given its speculative nature.
NEW PURITANISM
Recently I interviewed the author Chuck Klosterman about his forthcoming book But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past - a series of thought experiments trying to imagine what aspects of knowledge today – things we are certain about, in terms of science or what we think is important in culture or the arts – which of these could be completely rejected or thought about in a radically different way, at some point in the near future – 50 years, 100 years, 200 years from now. He looks at music, literature, sports as well as scientific knowledge like our understanding of gravity.
One thing Klosterman suggests is that whatever we can imagine, is precisely the thing that won’t happen - because it’s those assumptions, those limits to what we can conceive or that are thinkable for us, all of that is precisely what will disappear. And it’s true that there are plenty of examples of discredited knowledge in history, not just of discredited values or ideology, but actually discredited quasi-scientific belief – the late 18th Century belief that masturbation was the cause of physical and emotional debility – the concept of hysteria – phrenology.
So right
now, we think of the culture heroes of the present as the sexually adventurous,
the gender experimenters -- that’s the story of rock - Prince for instance is
celebrated in those terms, playing games with gender, inciting us all to free
our bodies – and I as a vulture, someone descending on the corpse to write athinkpiece about his career, that’s what I argued – the genius of Prince’s
androgyny – but in the back of my mind, even as I wrote it, I was thinking:
hmmm. Maybe one day – sooner than we think - all these figures – Mick Jagger,
Prince, Madonna or Lady Gaga – they will seem mystifying - That could be
because we’ll all live in some kind of trans utopia where the battles of gender
will have been won and we’ll be whatever we define ourselves as – man-woman
will be a spectrum not a binary.
However it
could also be because the whole investment in sexual liberation and sexual
expression that is the dominant ideology of our time, that maybe will just be left
behind.
Michel
Foucault speculated about this in the History of Sexuality, a book I read at
the age of 19 and which rearranged my mind, I’ve never covered from the
perspectival turnaround - he wonders whether in the future people will look back
on the 20the Century and wonder why we regard sex as the truth of our being,
rather than anything else – our minds, our hobbies, our citizenship, our public
participation in democracy or whatever.
So I can easily imagine a time when the cultural heroes of the late 20th and early
21st Century will the few public figures who are militantly
vegetarian or vegan – Morrissey and Prince would be among them, remembered not
for Morrissey’s sexual ambiguity and being celibate, or Prince for his
polymorphous perversity – but both remembered only as pop stars who were vegan and publicly stood up for that cause.
Imagine in
two hundred years time, there’s a world government, the eating of meat is
banned – I know we’re in Lyon, you like to eat animals, every bit of the animal
–but a lot can change in two hundred years – so there’s a world government and
meat eating is abolished for reasons of ecology, personal health, and for
ethical-humanitarian reasons - only a
few hundred thousand livestock still exist on the planet in agricultural
museums – there is a black market underground of carnivores, who are prosecuted
as perverts – and meanwhile the grand project of the human race is repairing
and restoring the biosphere.
Just as we
look back to the abolitionists of the 19th Century as cultural
heroes – resisting the obvious evil of slavery – one day our descendants may
look back to Morrissey, Prince, Ariana Grande, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto,
Ellie Goulding, not for their music or their acting but for being public vegans
– abolitionists of the slave trade in animal flesh.
Paul McCartney will be remembered only as the musician spouse of Linda McCartney.
But in a
larger sense, it could be that the entire rock era with its incitement to self
indulgence and excess and living for the now, that will seem not only decadent
but inexplicable - the cultural values of this future
world-society would be equilibrium, continence, restraint, dedication to
communal values and duty for the future.
Our era’s popular culture would be seen as antagonistic to those values.
Perhaps even criminal, in the biospheric sense.
So if you
ask me about the future of popular culture – then what I’m arguing, or at least
what I’m playing with as an idea – is that popular culture as we understand it
– which is the riotous rebellion of the id against the super-ego – a dark
carnival of sexuality, violence, narcissism, vanity, self aggrandizement, poor
impulse control, the cult of adolescence as a supreme states of being - there may be not much of a future for this - humanity might just grow out of it, it might
have to mature out of it.
That’s a thought experiment to play with, have fun with.
But is there any evidence that humanity is suddenly going to get virtuous and self-sacrificing and self-denying?
I don’t
necessarily humans will, but I do think there’s evidence for the coming of
a new puritanism – my new book Shock and Awe is about glam rock in the 70s and
the idea of decadence, and one thing I’ve learned is that pop history goes
through cycles of glam and anti-glam – anti-glam phases would be the
counterculture, where the values were those of Rousseau – nature, primitivism,
childhood, purity, authenticity – then the next anti-glam phase would be punk
and postpunk: hedonism distrusted and despised, an emphasis on the didactic, on
content over form - the Eighties are
very glam, very narcissistic, image-oriented – and then you have another wave
of anti-glam – grunge and to an extent gangsta rap, the values are underground,
they’re not to do with looking fabulous or glamorous or being famous.
Right now we have een in the longest glam cycle I
can think of - from late 90s rap with its bling aesthetic through the last 15
years of Beyonce, Lady Gaga, it's been nonstop glitz and glamour, obsession with fame....
I think we are long overdue a switch back to anti-glam, to underground values and a
rejection of the idea of music as simply showbiz, simply entertainment.
What
evidence do I have for this new puritanism, this suspicion of pleasure and
spectacle and glamorous appearance?
I would
point not to music or even entertainment but to the huge cult following among
young people for Bernie Sanders in the USA and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
First thing
that is striking about this development is that these are old men – they’re not
young and hip like Obama, or young and slick like Tony Blair and David Cameron
when they first came to power - these
are old men who look old – they aren’t telegenic or handsome, they don’t put
any effort into appearance or image.
They are
wholly lacking charisma as we’ve come to understand as a political necessity
They don’t
go in for political theater – statesmanship as stagecraft (pseudo-events, photo
ops) - Sanders and Corbyn are not even that good at
oratory or uplifting rhetoric or slogans
Corbyn and
Sanders are the opposite of politicians like Cameron or Mitt Romney or Trump, who is an entertainer, a salesman, a
huckster.
What Corbyn
and Sanders offer isn’t image but pure substance – policy policy policy.
Technical solutions.
There is a
taste out there, a demand, for politics without theatre, without spin, without
optics or any of the bullshit of public relations.
And these
candidates’ very ineptness and lack of polish signifies authenticity, their
being in touch with the common people, with reality.
I use the
term Puritan in reference to the historical phenomenon – the Protestants who
disdained theatricality – the paganism and irrationalism of
Catholic ceremony – along with worldly, earthly pleasure.
Corbyn is
actually a modern day Puritan – he’s famous for his drab clothing, his
frugality (he had the lowest expenses claim of any member of parliament, just
13 Euros in one year for a printer ribbon), he has described himself as a
parsimonious MP - he rides a bicycle,
grows vegetables, he’s a vegetarian and he doesn’t drink.
Like the original Puritans of the 17th
Century he is anti-royalist, a republican who refuses to kneel to the Queen..
Corbyn is an anti-dandy, a Roundhead who despises the Cavaliers for their frivolous ways, their vanity. He said this about the House of Commons: "It's not a fashion parade, it's not a gentleman's club, it's not a bankers institute. It's a place where the people are represented."
Like many on
the Left he has an unconscious sympathy for radical Islamic critiques of the
West as decadent, sexually permissive, narcissistic – the contempt for a
culture that produced pornography, cosmetic surgery, reality TV, and so forth.
Now let’s
say global warming gets worse, various other ecological crises get worse – I
could imagine in the near future a confluence between Sanders and Corbyn style
politics – which is anti-capitalist, anti-plutocratic - I could imagine this populist anticapitalism
merging with Green politics into a potent cultural wave. Probably it’s already
happening – but what if it wasn’t just a
revolt against the corporations who are destroying the Earth, causing climate
change – what if it was a revolt against the culture of that kind of capitalism? Hyper-competitive,
disruptive, oriented around winners – around fame, around glamour, around
advertising and PR - this is the
definition of popular culture today.
A new
resurgent populism that would define pop culture as the culture of
uncontrollable greed, irrationality, world-destruction.
It’s not
hard to imagine because things like the folk revival in the 50s were based
around the same set of ideas. So was anarcho-punk and the more straight-edge, ascetic forms of hardcore punk in the USA.
Adding Green
politics to this mix makes it all the more consistent – Green is about zero-growth,
which mean consuming less, it means a restraint on hedonism, the cultivation of
a balanced and quiet lifestyle, a
stilling of the ego – all these things feed into a new puritanism. You could
factor the ideal of purity in here too - organic food sources, locally produced
foods – these are all based around the idea of authenticity and a rejection of
artifice, the synthetic.
So the cult
of health and fitness – young people increasingly giving up drinking for
staying fit – could factor into this. In a culture that incites you to impulsive expression of your appetites,
constantly tempting you to indulge, what’s needed is discipline and imposition
of restrictions on the self - for the survival of the individual self as much as the biosphere.
Another
factor that could feed into this new puritanism would be political correctness
– the kind of close scrutiny of conduct and speech for infractions of
offensiveness, insufficient respect and soundness of value – a new piety in which conduct and speech held
up to very exacting principles.
If this new
puritanism became anything like a prominent force in popular culture, a lot of
what we think popular culture is about today – freedom, wildness, un-repression
– would start to seem like it was regressive. The entire rock era would be
suddenly seen as very much on the same side as capitalism – promoting self-ishness,
hedonism, impulsiveness, excess, waste, living for the moment, irrationalism
and emotionalism. The libertinism of
rock and the libertarian capitalist view of the world actually have a far better
fit than rock and socialism, or rock and ecology – capitalism wants us to
spend, to enjoy, to indulge ourselves.
You could
even imagine a revulsion against mediation itself.
- Again
I think of the communitarian aspect to the Sanders and Corbyn phenomenon - the
huge throngs that Sanders convened in America, the large hall events
Corbyn organized, with people unable to get into the hall it’s so crowded, such
that he had to have a second speech given for the benefit of the people outside
– and this is not someone who is great orator, not a very inspiring speaker really – but that plain
spoken, dour list of policies and ideals is what people want to hear, rather
than empty uplifting rhetoric.
A A hunger for communitas, for fellowship and collective purpose.
At At the extreme you could imagine that the pseudo-community and the pseudo-politics of
social media would be rejected in favour
of an insistence of physical togetherness in a collective space, face to face
politics – the agora of Greek democracy. Politics as a Quaker-style society of friends, meetings without hierarchy.
Now the
final thing in this speculative fantasy of a new Puritanism – which is not
something I predict with any great enthusiasm, being a creature of the rock era
– but the final aspect is I think that we are overdue a wave of revulsion
against the culture of fame – the ideal of worldly glory as publicity
The original
Puritans were virulently opposed to theatre, for a whole bunch of reasons
ranging from the very idea of mimesis and actors pretending to be something
they were not, to the association of theatre with vice and with the stirring up
of emotions, violent passions,
During Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the mid-17th
Century they actually closed down the theatres. Theatre went underground. There were troupes of actors who perform secretly in the manors and large country houses of the upper class.
You can hear
an echo of this when Corbyn talks about removing the theatre from politics,
making it about substance and policy – in a recent Parliamentary debate at
which Cameron was making scripted jokes at his expense, Corbyn said “I invite
the prime minister to leave the theatre and return to reality” – Cameron who
formerly worked in public relations for Carlton TV company in the UK
So that’s a
call to leave the seductively irrational elements of politics – image,
rhetoric, projection of authority or power using image and gesture - the stuff
that Donald Trump excels at, what in old English was called Trumpery – which I
believe comes from your French word tromper, to deceive – in English trumpery
means empty show, bluster, “practices that are superficially or visually appealing but
have little real value or worth”
It’s a call to
leave behind illusion and delusion
The Puritans
were anti theatre; today they'd be opposed to the entire landscape of modern
entertainment -- TV movies pop music –
anything involving escape, fantasy, spectacle, and intoxicating depictions of
sex and violence.
It’s not
inconceivable to imagine a virulent reaction against the trumpery of pop
culture in its totality, what Guy Debord called the Spectacle.
So imagine -
perhaps 30 years from now – as various crises deepen, converge, aggravate each
other – imagine the emergence of a
modern Savonarola - Savonarola, the 15th
Century priest who led a movement to renew the Church and purge society of its
indulgences – a new Savanorola who possesses a compelling anti-charisma, a
contagious and persuasive sense of the corruption of the contemporary world
Imagine the rejected and excluded who follow him
rising up and igniting 21st Century equivalents of Savonarola’s bonfires of
the vanities
Into the flames go not just mirrors and cosmetics, but selfie
sticks and smartphones and unimaginable communication devices yet to be
developed, into the flames go breast implants and lip-filler and fake eyelashes
and bronzer and every kind of name brand fashion item you can think of
In its place a new modesty, self-restraint,
reticence, a dour renunciation of beauty, style and all forms of seeking
attention for oneself.
Now this new puritanism won’t be a majority of
population – but it doesn’t need to be – history shows that a forceful minority
convinced of the righteousness of its own historical project can have a
disproportionate influence on events –
look at the Nazis, look at the counterculture, look at the followers of
Ayatollah Khomeini who brought down the Shah of Iran despite the relative
prosperity and peace of the country at that time.
A new
theocracy in which the ‘theo’ element, the god part, might not be God but might be
Gaia or some kind of principle of natural balance or homeostasis – not a new
world order but a new ordered world.
For security
and stability, the cult of freedom and self-expression
itself might be relinquished.
Rock itself would be an absurd relic, inexplicable, denounced, or just forgotten in embarrassment - a childish thing put away as humanity reaches maturity.