I’ve recently returned from a month in coalition Britain, and I’ve been trying to figure out how, if at all, the general ideological tenor of the country has changed. Certainly Radio 1 is much more reactionary than it used to be; I think it’s managed to get worse every time I go back to the UK, but, now, with a new Tory government, it seems to be on a full-bore rush back to the DLT-days of the 80s. Well, actually, that’s not quite right, and the truth is possibly more disturbing: the Radio 1 of the 80s was about DJs in their 40s and 50s broadcasting for their patronizingly imagined younger audience, but today’s Radio 1 is built around young people patronizing themselves (and I know pop music isn’t that exciting at the moment, but surely there’s no excuse for Biffy Clyro).
Even as emotionally invested as I am in Radio 1, though, the reactionaryness of the coalition is obviously more worrying, although it does occur to me that there is a way in which New Labour was more neoliberal than the coalition are. Read more↴
I think Lenin underestimates the genuine pathos of the Toy Story films in his review, which reinforces (and is reinforced by) his pedagogical theory of ideology, which tends to emphasize the power of cultural products to impart ideology, thereby underemphasizing why audiences accept and inhabit this ideology. To describe the emotional charge of the films as merely manipulative misses the way in which they allegorize quite real aspects of contemporary life in ways which are both insightful and genuinely affecting (which doesn’t mean they aren’t ideological). Lenin damns the films for “reminding you that your alienated, commodified relationships are perfectly normal, human, desirable and moreover actually protected as human rights in the advanced capitalist states,” but under capitalism human beings really are commodities, and to explore the emotional terrain of that condition is not mystificatory or necessarily reactionary. Read more↴
“That it’s deeply boring. An excess of boringness does not make something interesting except in the driest academic sense.” (Iain M. Banks, “The State of the Art”)
It’s clear that the primary problem, both aesthetic and political, with contemporary pornography, is how boring it is. The particular boringness of porn encapsulates a specific vision of the world and of humanity, which is not at all attractive. Read more↴
