Endless Variations on a Drearily Glossy Theme

k-punk, excellent as ever on the homogeneity of capitalist culture, and the need to recognize what was worth keeping about the past, without engaging in fatuous nostalgia (a theme nicely dovetailing with some of my concerns here):

'Diversity' and 'choice' are of course the very names by which today’s homogeneity goes. Yet it is by now clear that it is not 'paternalistic' but consumer-driven broadcasting that leads to infantilisation, and that a proliferation of barely-rejigged formats does not constitute choice.

[...]

What is important, now, is not simply a nostalgia for an earlier time, but a rescuing of what was valuable in that era from its slandering in the false memory that neo-liberalism has installed and naturalised - a task characterised by Dan on The End Times as 'reinterpreting the past in order to find a way out of the present'. From the commanding heights of the post 89 End of History, the pre-Style, pre-consumer 70s represents in time what the Soviet Union represents in space: stagnancy and shortage. Yet public funding yielded more than the dreary State propaganda or dour Reithian austerity that neo-liberalism painted as its sole products. In the December issue of Sight and Sound, Ian Christie reinforced the point I made about Tarkovsky in Marxist Supernanny:

Tarkovsky is now generally acknowledged to be a great artist… But it is worth recalling just how much his genius owed to the limitations and freedoms of being a Soviet film maker. Back in 1981, well before the Soviet edifice began to crumble and before his own defiant departure into exile, Tarkovsky walked a tightrope between being the USSR’s highest profile director and a standing reproach to its values … Russian culture of the Soviet era was Tarkovksy’s culture, despite his contempt for its pettiness and mendacity.

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Once again, the point is not to indulge in Old Left nostalgia for the Soviet state apparatus. The point is to correct the misapprehension that neo-liberalism has successfully propagated that only capitalism can produce a vibrant culture. Not only is it by now clear that the ‘dynamic’ culture of ultra-precarious capitalism would never produce something like Tarkovsky’s films, it is beginning to appear that - as Jameson suspected over a decade ago - unchallenged and unsheathed capitalism cannot produce any sort of vibrant culture at all, only endless variations on a drearily glossy theme.

Paris Hilton and Cars

Two things I don't care about in the least. Two things I would normally never post about.

First, Paris Hilton. I have little interest in her, but I tend to think that she's way too easy a target, that hatred of her does not reveal ourselves at our best and is all too often couched in transparently misogynist language, and that she's a symptom of much bigger social problems. Beyond that, I don't really give her much thought. But I was nevertheless interested to read this post at Voyou Desoeuvre, coming to her defense (along with this article at the World Socialist Web Site) on the grounds that (especially leftwing) criticism of her because of her idleness is misguided:

Hilton seems to get a lot of stick not just because she’s rich, but because she hasn’t either earned her wealth or used it in some kind of worthwhile way. To a communist, on the other hand, this is one of Hilton’s most positive qualities. Certainly, on any reasonably calibrated ethical scale, Paris Hilton is obviously superior to, say, Bill Gates or George Soros. There’s a name for the sort of argument involved in criticizing the “useless” Paris Hilton: productivism. The problem is that it completely misunderstands what’s wrong with capitalism. The Marxist theory of exploitation is not based on a distinction between those who are productive and those who are idle; note that the only way that such a distinction could be made is on the basis of a moralized notion of productivity which is itself the defining feature of capitalism.

I came to voyou's post via k-punk's reply, which says in part:

The truth is that Hilton is an object I am unable to cathect in any way whatsoever - in other words, she is boring. She is a symptom - of her class and background - but an uninteresting one. In fact, her utter lack of remarkable features, the so-formulaic-a-computer-program-could-have-predicted-it pattern of her dreary rich girl life, may be the only interesting thing about her - but you would have to the austere asceticism of a Warhol to maintain that position.

More than the dull reality of Hilton herself, it is the pro-Hilton posturing that is a serious symptom - of a suiciding of intelligence, of cultural bankruptcy and exhaustion. It is the logic of cultural depression, of gradually but implacably lowered expectations, that has produced the over-investment in Hilton; a logic of devaluation, not revaluation - a logic of betrayal, of a failure of fidelity to pop culture's great events.

I tend to be closer to k-punk's position on this, but I really like what voyou is saying about capitalism and productivism.

Finally, in the spirit of Ellis Sharp's semi-regular posts about the menace of cars and car culture and road safety and triumphalist media coverage of new models ("reviews"), I offer, from The Los Angeles Times, more or less without comment, excerpts opening and closing this staggeringly awesome review of a new Jeep (I saw a shortened version of it this morning in the crappy free Express tabloid thing The Washington Post publishes and couldn't believe it was for real):

WITH the 2007 Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon, Natty Bumppo has traded his buckskins for some designer jeans.

Yes, Natty Bumppo, hero of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," the great woody prose of which has prompted many an undergraduate to throw themselves off a tall building. What would Cooper think if he met the Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon? Would he marvel that it, like his famed protagonist, embodies the dual nature of wilderness and civilization, the very essence of American individualism? Would he recognize that, like his famed Deerslayer, the Wrangler combines "the soul of a poet and the nature of a redneck." Or would Cooper just play with the windshield wipers like a doofus? We may never know.

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If I had to pick one vehicle in which to ride out the End Times, it would have to be a Wrangler Rubicon. [...]

...the Wrangler Rubicon — two-door or four — is unquestionably the stoutest piece of off-road hardware you can buy off a showroom floor. True, it doesn't have quite the integrated design and packaging of the Nissan Xterra or Toyota FJ Cruiser; both of those vehicles were clean-sheet projects, while the Wrangler has a lot of legacy to cope with. Call it literary tradition, if you like. The Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon is more civilized than ever, but it's still a noble savage. Cooper would have been proud.

We may never know.