A new series of Californication starts soon, which happens to be my guiltiest of guilty pleasures; I just don’t know what it is that keeps me coming back to it, because it’s frankly awful. Perhaps it’s that it retains at least a modicum of faith in the possibility of reading and writing still having some kind of counter-cultural relevance. But the fact that this is the case – that this programme, which is at heart a reactionary, puerile and anti-intellectual show, is the only thing on offer in the mainstream for at least some kind of literate counter-cultural figure, is seriously depressing.
Right, so let’s take the protagonist Hank Moody. He’s a writer and, apparently, a rebel. This rebellion takes the form of insouciant substance abuse and the perpetual fucking-of-anything-that-moves. So far so jealous. But there is also something deeply depressing about Hank. He embodies a bankrupt fantasy of a counter-cultural figure; what he provides is nothing but a rude antagonism towards some social niceties like manners, or not fucking other people’s wives. Although Hank would likely claim to loath ‘the man’ or ‘the system’ or whatever, he in reality does nothing which might be seen as subversive towards these things.
Take this scenario for instance: Hank is talking to his agent/friend about his days, years ago, of working at Blockbusters, a job which has obvious corporate connotations which do not sit well with Hank’s counter-cultural ego. But the rebel-writer redeems himself in this scenario by claiming he used the job as an opportunity to splice pornography into children’s films. This evidently sticks it to the man; but what exactly is this American counter-cultural obsession with displaying pornography to children? Because it’s not just Hank: one of the acts of rebellion in Fight Club was splicing pornography into children’s films, a form of rebellion which that movie ends up implicitly endorsing while rejecting the possibility of a meaningful confrontation with the systems of financial capitalism (see my entry below). But is the premature initiation of children to sexually explicit imagery really the horizon of rebellion now?
In a way, this is rather apt. Considering that we are living through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression yet no political party in the mainstream is seriously talking about an alternative to the extreme form of neoliberal (i.e. unfettered) capitalism which precipitated it – never mind talking about an alternative to capitalism itself – it seems that in terms of rebellious ideas we’re still quite a few sans-culottes short of a revolution. This kind of ideological stagnation has been with us since communism fell and capitalism proclaimed its triumph at the End of History; politics supposedly became ‘post-ideological’ and turned towards dealing with rights for minorities and the like, as well as the continuing liberalisation of society’s attitude towards sex and sexual preference. Within this terrain, where a lack of real political choice is compensated for by the freedom to buy things and have sex with anyone you like, is it any wonder that a trope of rebellion has become exposing children to pornography – with the sexualisation of children being the final taboo, that which you are still not free to do? Paedophilia creates such regular storms of controversy in the media that it does seem to function as a point of grisly obsession, perhaps born of the recognition that this is the grim logical endpoint of a culture which allows almost unmitigated freedom of choice in the sexual arena but none in the political. People are quick to blame sexual repression for the abuses committed by priest on children – but what about mass political repression? What might that do to a society?
Thus it is proven that capitalism creates paedophiles... Bring on the revolution!
Right, so let’s take the protagonist Hank Moody. He’s a writer and, apparently, a rebel. This rebellion takes the form of insouciant substance abuse and the perpetual fucking-of-anything-that-moves. So far so jealous. But there is also something deeply depressing about Hank. He embodies a bankrupt fantasy of a counter-cultural figure; what he provides is nothing but a rude antagonism towards some social niceties like manners, or not fucking other people’s wives. Although Hank would likely claim to loath ‘the man’ or ‘the system’ or whatever, he in reality does nothing which might be seen as subversive towards these things.
Take this scenario for instance: Hank is talking to his agent/friend about his days, years ago, of working at Blockbusters, a job which has obvious corporate connotations which do not sit well with Hank’s counter-cultural ego. But the rebel-writer redeems himself in this scenario by claiming he used the job as an opportunity to splice pornography into children’s films. This evidently sticks it to the man; but what exactly is this American counter-cultural obsession with displaying pornography to children? Because it’s not just Hank: one of the acts of rebellion in Fight Club was splicing pornography into children’s films, a form of rebellion which that movie ends up implicitly endorsing while rejecting the possibility of a meaningful confrontation with the systems of financial capitalism (see my entry below). But is the premature initiation of children to sexually explicit imagery really the horizon of rebellion now?
In a way, this is rather apt. Considering that we are living through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression yet no political party in the mainstream is seriously talking about an alternative to the extreme form of neoliberal (i.e. unfettered) capitalism which precipitated it – never mind talking about an alternative to capitalism itself – it seems that in terms of rebellious ideas we’re still quite a few sans-culottes short of a revolution. This kind of ideological stagnation has been with us since communism fell and capitalism proclaimed its triumph at the End of History; politics supposedly became ‘post-ideological’ and turned towards dealing with rights for minorities and the like, as well as the continuing liberalisation of society’s attitude towards sex and sexual preference. Within this terrain, where a lack of real political choice is compensated for by the freedom to buy things and have sex with anyone you like, is it any wonder that a trope of rebellion has become exposing children to pornography – with the sexualisation of children being the final taboo, that which you are still not free to do? Paedophilia creates such regular storms of controversy in the media that it does seem to function as a point of grisly obsession, perhaps born of the recognition that this is the grim logical endpoint of a culture which allows almost unmitigated freedom of choice in the sexual arena but none in the political. People are quick to blame sexual repression for the abuses committed by priest on children – but what about mass political repression? What might that do to a society?
Thus it is proven that capitalism creates paedophiles... Bring on the revolution!
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