It’s been a while since I have posted anything on this blog. I will get round it, particularly this week when I have a couple of deadlines looming and I’m being lulled by the sweet siren calls of procrastination. In the meantime I’ve been moonlighting for …Wins The Internet, a site cowritten with two far wittier friends. If anything you should check out their posts.
[video]
“Inspired” by Apple: Some limericks about SOPA -
There once was an bill called SOPA;
which resulted in blackouts all over.
Wikipedia went down*,
making school kids frown
in the US, Oz and Europa.The bill’s meant to target “rogue sites”
but it’s drafted so widely it might
catch others which play
by the rules so they may
be closed in the dead of…
Few things can make me as misanthropic as the recurrent popularity of doomsday druids. These days, it seems, slapping “dystopia” on anything automatically furnishes every old rant with deep social commentary and perennial fears towards ongoing technological progress masquerades as shocking incisive reflections. And the more apocalyptic their visions, the shallower they become. I call it “nihilistic porn”. No character development, no plot, just the money shot.
Which brings me to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a veritable hashtag stew of tweetable nihilism, wherein the viewer is spoon-fed Brooker’s trademark hyperbolic grumbling like an unsuspecting French goose. There’s no food for thought, only despairing dyspepsia, because everything is broken in Black Mirror. Every episode is a bleak yet hollow void with an almost complete lack of sympathetic characters taking part in this pantomime dystopia. It is the Daily Mail’s much ridiculed Broken Society but repackaged for Guardian readers by covering it with a shiny new coat of New Media buzzwords. In the first episode, in which the Prime Minister is forced to copulate with a sow live on TV to save the nation’s royal sweetheart, characters are unable to articulate any thought without wedging Youtube, Twitter or Facebook into every remark. Brooker’s version of Newspeak has replaced full stops and commas with hashtags as punctuation marks. What is initially amusing soon reaches saturation point, illustrated by an armed soldier who mistakenly aims at a journalist believing her to be the princess’s abductor. Instead of apologizing or ensuring she is not wounded, he shoots at her mobile and quips “There’s your RTS award!”. At this point I was expecting a ham-fisted Abu Ghraib reference to round it off.
The second episode set its sights on reality TV, so all us viewers who have Ocado on speed dial can sit and quaff about the plebe who watches The X Factor sans the required ironic hat. Then we can all make disparaging and completely original remarks about wheat products and circuses. The story is set in a nightmarish panopticon where the 99% are forced to pedal bikes all day - the reason is never given - and sedated through forced exposure to pornography. That’s right, by now we have come to understand that ‘subtle’ is not part of Hashtag Dystopia’s vocabulary.
The third and final part of the arc has been concocted by Jesse Armstrong, best known for the Peep Show and for being one of the writers for the brilliant political satire The Thick of It. It reworks the Perfect Recall trope familiar to science fiction and comic readers, and famously addressed in the Jorge Luis Borges short story Funes the Memorious (1942). In the Black Mirror version, a new technology allows people to carry a chip that records everything and can be played back on demand, with the possibility of sharing it on those -you guessed it! - omniscient menacing screens that rule our lives. Nobody else seems to have a particular good memory because the story very quickly descends into the classic alarmist ‘New Technology Ruins People’s Lives. And This Time We Mean It!’ Yes, there is the atomic bomb and countless other horrific examples. But take the internet - What would people have imagined 10 years ago if they knew we would all have portable devices that let us access and broadcast repository of information. I’m sure no forecast would have included lolcats. I will leave the Arab Spring to more respectable bloggers.
For somebody so seemingly intimate with new technology and who still - rightly so - extolls the creative possibilities of video games, Charlie Brooker sure takes an unnecessarily paranoid attitude towards progress more characteristic of somebody eligible for a Freedom Pass. Particularly when he occupies a privileged position from where he should be showing a more nuanced picture. This tirade is borne out of a sense of disappointment from somebody who loved TVGoHome and Screenwipe, but the misanthropic coat Brooke is fond of wearing has barely been changed and it is starting to exude a faint whiff of the reactionary.
This uninformed rant was inspired by a recent visit to ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ at the V&A Museum. What follows is an attempt to articulate my misgivings about Postmodernism, understood by few and used by many, with a brief description of its predecessor Modernism, in the hope that a comparison between the two might sharpen the edges of blurry Postmodernism.
The more I think about it, the more I realise how much I dislike the term Postmodernism. What exactly does it stand for? The manipulative nature of its essentially empty rhetoric irks me, as when the Daily Mail resorts to ‘common sense’ or some luminaire in the Literary Review ponderously declaims that we inhabit a post-ideological world, then relentlessly pushes their own agenda, wrapped in an oratorical blanket of increasingly fatigued and meaningless prefixes. Postmodernism is the most recent movement and so exerts a great influence on our world-view, and yet there have been previous movements, and there will be something post-postmodernism, whatever we decide to name it. If I knew this future buzzword, I would probably not be a rich woman, but I would certainly get misquoted a lot, and you know that the more you are misquoted the more people you have reached. And the fewer have read you.
But I am ignorant as to what the future holds. Frankly, I am not even sure about the state of the present. That there is a retrospective on Postmodernism at the V&A would indicate that it is firmly in the past, further confirmed by the subheading ‘Style and Subversion: 1970-1990’. And yet the term ‘postmodern’ still gets its fair share of airplay in 2011. What I have noticed is that its temporal proximity - whether it has happened or is still unfolding - has led many to lose perspective. There is nothing revolutionary about Postmodernism, no more than there was about the Enlightenment or Romanticism. What makes it special is precisely the same immediacy that has rendered us so short-sighted; We are living it. Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things, yet everything is different, as it always is and always will be.
Thus we are uncertain if we inhabit Postmodern times, or what this entails, apart from this penchant for sticking arbitrary prefixes on words to increase their emotional resonance and impact. ‘Neo’ has become the preferred, catch-all, semantically slurred yet emotionally charged prefix for right-wing resurgences - neoliberalism, neocon, neonazism, neoprene. ‘Post’, on the other hand, is the default indicator for the discourse deconstruction and ‘decentredness’ that ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ celebrate. Whatever that means. We are constantly reminded that there is no ‘truth’ to be found, that everything is subjective and the idea of an objective independent reality is a mere mirage. The era of grand all-encompassing narratives like Christianity or Marxism is over. Yet people keep telling each other stories, only this time with more prefixes. These days, one has to muse about ‘subversion’ and ‘dystopia’, suspiciously close sometimes to the old ‘progress’ and ‘utopia’ but masquerading under less politically charged names, and without the whiff of fascism that ‘progress’ now gives off.
So what is ‘Postmodernism’? It peppers our academic speech and generously seasons our (my) half-baked remarks about art, music, and society. Even ‘conditions’. What exactly is the postmodern condition? Postmodernism was always one of those words that was semantically unstable, because it defined itself against the equally porous ‘modern’. The latter is normally applied to the first half of the 20th century - the era of Modernism. It is the term given to different artistic movements that rejected objectivity in favour of subjectivity — no longer was it about what we saw, but how we saw it. This was partly spurred — as are all new cultural expressions — by new technological developments. With (for instance) the increased popularity and availability of the camera, painters no longer needed to strive to perfectly reproduce reality. Instead they started to ponder the exact nature of this reality. They revisited that age old ontological conundrum that had taken Plato to his imaginary caves — what, if anything, is the essence of something? Picasso famously painted a violin from all angles simultaneously, which created a distorted image, but one still recognisable as a violin. In literature, the omniscient narrator and linear narrative were abandoned in favour of stream-of-consciousness and fragmented narrative, traditionally interpreted a reactions to the the totalitarian discourses and blind belief in progress that had led to both world wars.
Unsurprisingly, many people became wary of panoptic narratives with such an unwavering faith in their authority, and which caused so much pain and destruction in Europe. Modernism, then, is about the rejection of this authority. Modernists do not share the teleological views of history popularly associated with their predecessors, the Victorians. The two world wars put a dent in the the idea that humanity is progressing, that it has a final destiny towards which it has been advancing (‘telos’ being ‘end’ or ‘purpose’). Postmodernism is not particularly fond of grandiose statements either and, like Modernism, it is also characterised by fragmentation. The difference lies in how they approach this SHATTERED EXISTENTIAL MIRROR. Modernism traditionally laments the loss of this age of innocence in esoteric elegies about waste lands whilst Postmodernism famously celebrates this fragmentation through ironic pastiches and meta-patchworks of intertextuality set to groovy soundtracks. Basically, Postmodernists like Tarantino films and Tumblr, with its assorted quotations, random fonts, existential Instagrams and amusing gifs. What this definition tells us is that Postmodernism has really good PR. Any undergraduate who has trudged through the compulsory Critical Theory module will tell you that Baudrillard & co are not precisely happy chappies when they postulate the loss of objectivity, fixed meaning, and even reality in magnificently obscure sentences that sometimes undermine the most basic premises of grammar. They fill their intentionally playful and ambiguous prose with an irresistible intertextual insouciance. Apparently. (???)
Modernism, on the other hand, lacks such professional PR, partly because everybody involved is kicking up the daisies in Elliot’s wasteland, and can no longer defend themselves. Also, partly because everybody of my generation had to read Mrs Dalloway at school, a book that contains a disappointingly low number of ninjas and a complete lack of 70s blaxploitation musical references. The classic stereotype of the Modernist woman is of course Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide, and is hailed as part of the literary canon. But Modernists, particularly female, were not all as despondent as this portrayal. Many women were rather excited about the emancipatory possibilities that industrialisation brought. And as devastating as the two armed conflicts were, the absence of men meant that women had to replace them in factories, hospital wards, offices, even in the streets as bus drivers, as well as other public spaces normally reserved to men (they were sent packing back to their domestic spheres after the war, but the seed had been planted).
So things are not as simple as they seem. I want to finish this post with the classic ‘it’s complicated’, which is a rather fittingly postmodern end to this unfocused rant. I will, of course, describe my argument as ‘fluid’. Postmodernism - whatever it is - has claimed a monopoly on ambiguity. And yes, the irony is not lost on me. Ambiguity, together with subversion, seems to be one of its most frequent escorts whenever Postmodernism puts its ironic hat on and goes for a spin round the cultural landscape. Perhaps that is the reason why I have developed a dislike for Postmodernism — because it is so omniscient and at same time nobody can explain exactly what it is. A bit like gravity really. When it comes to gravity, few people gripe about the impossibility of escaping the laws of physics. But can we escape the Postmodern condition? Are we all Postmodern now? This was the question posed at the recent V&A retrospective, as we left the exhibition to the sound of New Order. What a fatuous thing to ask. Is this meant to be food for thought, something to ponder on the way back home? Of course we are all Postmodern now. And post-Renaissance, and post-Enlightenment, and post-Industrial Revolution, and post-Victorian and post-Capitalist and first-past-the-post and any other post you care to think about. It is all part of our cultural DNA.
Postmodernism has just made us hyperaware of the hybrid nature of our culture, that we are all assembled from the different discourses and ideologies that we have inherited and picked up along our trajectory. Just as it is difficult in this post-Freudian era to analyse our actions without resorting to the language of psychoanalysis, Postmodernism has simply given us a new vocabulary with which to articulate our experiences and preoccupations. Some are specific to our time and the moral dilemmas and problematic developments that advancement brings, such as cloning, or the internet. Other are age-old longings revisited, like the yearn for authenticity and distinction, now threatened by new technologies that can easily and cheaply reproduce anything, from an image to an expensive leather bag. All movements and cultural expressions have attempted to conceptualise and give voice to cultural neurosis and anxieties (in a post-Freudian era _everything_ is an anxiety). This is not new to Postmodernism. I’m still not sure if Postmodernism isn’t just Modernism in drag.
It’s complicated.
I finally got round to watching The Killing (or Fobrydelsen, to use the original title), which most English viewers will by now know actually translates to “the crime”. And for somebody so fond of Scandinavian crime as me, it was positively - cliché alert - criminal that I had yet to be acquainted with Sarah Lund’s splendid collection of knitwear. When it was originally screened back in Denmark I was living in London, blissfully ignorant of the jumper fever that had gripped the nation. It certainly didn’t grip my family. When the BBC decided to finally broadcast it, I was based in Berlin. True, the Germans acquired the rights too and then dubbed it. But I didn’t want to see Das Verbrechen, I wanted to see Forbrydelsen. It was already quite amusing watching the subtitled version with my English boyfriend and noticing that many of the colourful expressions with which Copenhageners regularly pepper their speech had not made it into English. “Tager du pis?” became the prim “are you being serious?”. Even taking into account differing cultural expectations, it was always my impression that a great number of Brits swear like perpetually pissed sailors. Which is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here.
Anyway, my Berlin bubble kept being burst by news of this paradigm shifting Danish export that held BBC4 viewers - my people - enthralled every week. The Guardian was crushing so hard on Sarah Lund’s Faroese wool - henceforth referred as THE JUMPER - that it even made the smooth grey Mad Men suits turn green with jealousy. The Killing was even threatening to usurp The Wire’s crown and to steal its status as THE MOST NUANCED PORTRAYAL OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY EVER. People would ask me if it was always this dark in Denmark (it’s called winter) and how you pronounced “Theis Birk Larsen” or “Vagn Skærbæk” without dislocating your vocal chords (you can’t). And did Danes really wear THE JUMPER? It soon became clear that I was contractually obliged to see it, lest I risk expulsion from the Guardian guild, particularly before the broadcast of the second series this autumn when I would be back on the island. So I dutifully bought the entire series on iTunes and prepared to go on a Scandinavian noir bender, because if it was anything like The Wire the default mode is always “boxed set binge”.
I liked it. I really did. It was a bittersweet treat to have so much screen time dedicated to the family of the murdered girl. It was a reminder that every crime has its victim, a rather obvious point but rarely one developed in the standard formula followed by crime fiction, where the focus is on the investigator. And the acting was solidly lead by the very talented Sophie Grabøl and the eminently watchable and charismatic Lars Mikkelsen (he and his brother Mads Mikkelsen take up far too much prime estate in my head. The scene where Lars takes off his shirt - to show his vulnerability of course - made my ovaries stand up and give a loud standing ovation). Perennially rainy Copenhagen was bathed in lush non-light that made perpetual winter look positively attractive. Hell, it even made me homesick, a feeling I normally only experience in summer.
Now I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, as if anybody at this point would notice, but groundbreaking it wasn’t. Maybe BBC 4 viewers haven’t read and watched as much crime fiction as I (probably a good thing), but to me it was blindingly obvious who it was from around episode 3. The meta-narrative was just too predictable. It was meant to be dark and gritty, which normally translates into the expected shattering of domestic bliss and the crumble of institutions that are dear to us, like democracy. And it was it was 20 episodes long, so you could watch the first three episodes and the last two and not miss too much background, apart from more red herrings than a Christmas Day smorgasbord. You _know_ that the suspect in episode 4 was not going to be the killer. But then maybe he was, because I had repeatedly been told that The Killing challenged more conventions than an Iranian art house film at Sundance. In fact, since I’ve heard it had such a shocking ending, I spent considerable time building increasingly byzantine theories to dissuade myself from the textbook ending I had already sensed earlier in the series. I was desperately seeking subversion, I _wanted_ to see semiotic subversion everywhere, like a poststructuralist third-wave feminist analysing Almodóvar cinematography. This never came. As much as I enjoyed watching it, it would have been a less neurotic experience, and therefore slightly anticlimactic, if viewers had filled in my Scandinavian bingo card beforehand. I could thus have more accurately assessed its revolutionary credentials.
I would like people to complete it _before_ the start of season 2 due this autumn:
1) Does it assume GRITTY means REALISTIC?
2) Does everybody end up depressed and miserable? And by everybody I mean everybody. Scandinavians are very literal people. We’re not only talking about the victim/s family/partner/friends but also the police, and neighbours, and distant relatives and acquaintances. And their Facebook friends. The police’s Facebook friends. The Facebook friends of Facebook friends. That random guy in episode 2 who was asking for directions. His Facebook friends. In fact everybody involved should just join Google+ and add each other to the all-engulfing circle of misery.
3) Does there seem to be a shortage of lightbulbs / sunlight in general?
4) If the investigator is male, is he an alcoholic? Does he have - at least one - a failed marriage? If she is female, does she get branded mentally unstable at some point? Does her long-suffering partner leave her at some point? (I presume that Sarah Lund is also familiar with this convention and has already prepared for this inevitability by dating a psychologist.)
5) Does anybody have time to finish eating their already harried kebab, pizza or burger grabbed from the local take away run by the token friendly “totally integrated” immigrant to remind the viewer that Scandinavian capitals are like SO MULTIETHNIC (read “gritty”, see point 1)
6) Corruption: is something rotten in the state of Denmark (read: EVERYTHING, see point 2)
7) Is the happy Scandinavian welfare model just a mirage? Are you being shown the dark underbelly of this seemingly perfect society where everybody is actually miserable, or will be soon (see point 2) and from which not even their stylish knitwear or flair for interior decoration can protect them?
8) Do bad things happen in woods? Do people go into woods despite knowing that bad things happen in woods? Are they familiar with Hansel and Gretel?
9) The weather heightens the misery:
Choose between these options:
a) It’s raining, ideally a constant drizzle that makes everybody soggy and miserable. A corpse appears. Everybody’s day, especially the corpse’s, just got more soggy and miserable.
b) It has been heavily snowing, and a frozen corpse of woman appears the day after. It’s always a woman and she is always described as a macabre ice figure or a morbidly beautiful snow queen. I think there’s some metaphor or deep cultural commentary here. So far I’ve only managed “don’t be a woman when it snows in Scandinavia”.
c) There’s a heat wave, i.e. More than 20 degrees celsius and a less than fragrant corpse appears in the woods (see point 8). The investigator/s spend the entire book sweating like an overripe stilton. Apparently nobody has heard of air conditioning in Scandinavia. This mystery is never resolved.
10) It stars one of the Mikkelsen brothers, preferably shirtless. If it contains both, just drop everything and alert me immediately.This point might not be necessarily related with any of the ones above. Or the article at all.
I will add more points as they occur to me but that should do for the moment.
Today was one of those muggy languid days that compels you to dramatically lower your standards to reap a sense of achievement, any achievement, at the end of it. Or dispose of standards altogether. In this way such mundane pedestrian activities such as cheese eating, wall staring or even hand-eye coordination will seem like a veritable tour de force.
Speaking of which, I was browsing GQ today.
Reason 540 why I hate GQ: Spinning some vacuous bile about the fear of appearing middlebrow as if you were the freaking Bourdieu of coolness, while failing to mention that the high/low culture divide is a deeply ingrained arbitrary divide borne out of the Industrial Revolution, developed specifically to preserve a condition conceived of as “high” from dilution and corruption by new forces seen as “lower” - for instance mass-production and increased purchasing power. See how easy it is? I don’t even know what I wrote there - I just turned on my cultural theory babble mode. Obviously this writer’s switch has been stuck since 1960. Which would explain GQ’s attitude towards women.
(Yes I did just lambast GQ’s lack of incisive cultural critique. I must obviously be insanely highbrow. In fact my brows are so divorced from my eyes that a look of permanent incredulity frames my face. Like finding out that Zach Galifianakis’ beard is apparently lowbrow. And that I should care.)
Berlin is now part of my imaginary landscape, joining Copenhagen, but not London, which once more becomes my home. And as much as I like Berlin, I must admit, that I occasionally prefer its imaginary, more malleable counterpart. An imaginary city is a thing of beauty, built on fragmented, diffused, sunny memories filtered through the prism of nostalgia. Like an old faded overexposed photograph. Yes, all my memories of Berlin are in Instagram, a visual condition that seems to affect an alarming number of Berlin residents, perhaps caused by their beloved skinny jeans that lead to poor circulation and, presumably, impaired colour vision. My imaginary Berlin contains a significantly smaller number of these self-appointed urban bohemians. They have either been brushed out or made more tolerable by nostalgia, the photoshop of memory. Bills, bureaucracy and other blemishes that could tarnish these recollections have been omitted. This is a Berlin without long cryptic dispatches from the health insurance, without icy slippery pavements that conceal frozen dog excrement and discarded cigarette butts. In my Berlin, it is always summer. In my Berlin I am never bored, never afflicted by existential ennui. I never mope or procrastinate. Youtube doesn’t exist. There are no videos of dancing budgies balancing precariously atop tennis balls.
This is my Berlin, the idealised version of a metropolis I once called my home. A whimsical version perhaps, but no less quixotic than the Berlin celebrated in the countless blogs, articles, travel guides, and assorted Instagram eulogies that populate Tumblr. Like one of those polaroids sold at Mauerpark, forever static, frozen in time, before it was tainted by Capitalism and dismantled by gentrification. The Berlin of counterculture, the postmodern capital par excellence, the forever changing yet permanently static cosmopolitan hub, where everywhere permutation paradoxically needs to be previously approved by the committee of urban desolation fetishists. This explains, perhaps, most members’s fascination with photography, as if constantly portraying the city with a Leica keeps the city safe in a pre-digital age. The only difference between their Berlin and mine is that theirs is mostly imagined whereas mine is hundred percent imaginary.
Imaginary cities have many benefits. They are blissfully free from those pesky people that have stridently different opinions and life goals, and insist in living in your beloved metropolis, despite you making it adamantly and constantly clear in your livestream that these philistines are diluting the city’s essence and making it less genuine. Yes, multiculturalism is an essential part of the urban experience, but bad taste is not a culture, and should be derided and despaired through the medium of Helvetica Neue! In imaginary (and imagined) cities everybody thinks like you.
Imaginary cities are also very cheap destinations, a major benefit in the current economic climate, particularly since I have become once more a student. They are also easily accessible from anywhere. This morning, for example, I spent a couple of hours in a sunny Berlin park downing beer when I should have been engaged in archival work in rainy London. In fact, there are days where I seem to invest more time bumbling round my mythological atlas than at my current location, a universe that contains unanswered emails, unfilled paperwork and unhelpful bureaucrats. You are welcome to join. In fact, to all those people in Berlin that made my stay so memorable, please do so. Our shared memories is what makes this Berlin, my imaginary Berlin, so special. Did I mention it is always summer?
Once you decide to leave, you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, times swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakery, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you get your boots fixed at the cobbler, the last time you go to the newsagent’s for a travel pass or a pack of gum. There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-face museum guards from the days when I still went to museums and the scenester kids plowing through the flea markets in search of the holy vintage grail and the stern women from the bank and the post office with their eighties hairdos and the ice-cream place on Stargarder Straße, where there was always a line, even in winter, and that German punctuality, which made you miss your bus by seven seconds but also ensured you arrived at your appointments on time, and of course the voice of the S-Bahn announcer as he rolled off the stations and Alexanderplatz with its ever-changing face and the yellow streetcars, napping or in motion.
Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds
First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let’s imagine you want to say something like, “We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us.” This is honest but dull. Take the word “views.” Postmodernspeak would change that to “voices,” or better, “vocalities,” or even better, “multivocalities.” Add an adjective like “intertextual,” and you’re covered. “People outside” is also too plain. How about “postcolonial others”? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentrism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic).
Finally “affect us” sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like “mediate our identities.” So, the final statement should say, “We should listen to the intertextual multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities.” Now you’re talking postmodern!
Stephen Katz, How to Speak and Write Postmodern
