Californication as Counter-Culture

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!

The Capitalist (use of) Sentiment

What role does sentimentality play in capitalist culture today? We need look no further than the X-Factor – a new series of which has just started, with its standard combination of hyper-sentimentality and cruel spectacles of ostracism, all underpinned by the ruthless pursuit of profit (which finds its pantomimic personification in the figure of Simon Cowell). The programme can be seen as epitomising the role which sentiment plays in the West with regard to the accumulation of capital. Take, for instance, the stage in the show when each judge retires to one of their many mansions with a group of contestants. After having sang, the hopefuls are then given a one-on-one session with the judge in which they are told whether or not they pass to the next round. Those who are rejected are understandably upset, but interesting here is the role which the judge Cheryl Cole/Tweedy normally plays in these scenarios. She – who is effectively inflicting this misery – commiserates dramatically with them, even sharing in their tears! In doing so, Cheryl attempts to highlight that she is a mere instrument enforcing the immutable laws of the programme, and as such not only is she exempt from blame for inducing this misery, but she should in fact be celebrated as a good person for attempting to partially ameliorate the upset which she herself has caused (and which is a fundamental aspect of the programme from which she profits hugely). This, then, is the role of sentiment in capitalist society: it is a conscience-pleasing mask underneath which the pitiless extraction of profit can be performed. For who is it really that is comforted during the maudlin embrace of Cheryl and her cast-off? It is Cheryl.

But sentimentality in the X-Factor is also a mask for the contestants, who upon entering the programme’s symbolic universe are expected to effuse saccharin gratefulness while articulating a sufficiently piquant life story to stimulate the sentimentality of the public. It seems that the contestants have to compensate for the banal selfishness of their idiotic dreams with these ritualised spectacles of mawkishness, in which is supposedly displayed an ‘identity’ through which a connection with the viewing public can be formed. The typical identity usually amounts to each singer’s idealised expression of their own myopic preoccupation with fame – but within this world the pathological pursuit of stardom is treated with respect. Although to ‘really, really want this’ is not in itself enough to get ahead in the competition, it is certainly enough to constitute an identity for the contestant, with this wanting-but-not-having of fame being considered fairly poignant by contestant, crowd and judges alike. Interesting here, though, is that for the contestant sentimentality functions in much the same way as it does for Cheryl – as an empty gesture of connectedness which conceals the ugliness of an ego gorging itself on wealth and fame.

In the X-Factor format the wider dynamics of the capitalist (use of) sentiment are thus apparent. Sentimentality transposes an ideal of beneficent selfhood onto the essential selfishness of the capitalist personality, imbuing the rampant individualism of society with a feel good sense of emotional – but not material – communism. For while in reality capitalism is an amoral, inhuman system that proceeds according to its own internal logic of growth and profit, terrifyingly indifference to the real-life concerns of people, the communal sentimentality which simultaneously cloaks and combats that system creates a sense of shared humanity within the fractiously iniquitous area of the social. Think, for instance, of the charity advert and its reliance on sentimentality to make the rich western public give money to the poverty-stricken Other – just as the X-Factor contestant must be made accessible by sentiment, so too it seems must the African be sentimentally subjectivised in order to receive charity. Sentimentality, with its privileging of virtues such as sympathy and its prioritising of the emotional over the political, therefore offers a way to rhetorically suture capitalism’s fragmentation of real-life relations – both global and local – between people living in radically different levels of material comfort.

But this suture of relations is only rhetorical – as Zizek has written, ‘Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation...the developed countries “help” the undeveloped with aid, credits and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped’. Furthermore, Zizek argues that capitalism is in fact fortified by the partially palliative nature of charity, since capitalism ‘needs extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction’. Sentimentality thus not only makes life tolerable by acting as a sympathetic counterweight to the pitiless machinations of capital, but in fact also aids the very perpetuation of capitalism: without the counterweight, capitalism would crash into the ground.