The United Cities of the World

“Beyond Plague Urbanism” by Andy Merrifield, 2023

This book grows out of the CoVid epidemic in New York City, reflecting on its empty streets, lack of traffic, howling sirens, fear of infection and isolation. As you might remember in New York, many got sick or died until masking, distancing and vaccines became prominent. It is written in an overly literary style and references, which should probably be banned when talking about social policy, as it becomes more about the writer’s erudition than the issue.  But I digress. 

What does Merrifield suggest, outside of the Baudelaire, Rimbaud and flâneur references?

    1.   The ‘social contract’ is necessary for a city to live together.  ‘Freedom’ without responsibility to others is not possible.  That is anti-social individualism.

     2.   Rent control.

     3.   Rent control for small businesses, which are disappearing.

     4.   City seizure of property that is handled badly by landlord capital.

     5.   Referencing Henri Lefebvre and the Paris Commune, he insists ‘the city’ is a festival of the citizens, not a hostile power over them.

     6.   Lefebvre demanded a ‘right to the city’ where public-use values not corporate exchange-values dominate in the “secondary circuits of capital” of rent and real estate speculation.

     7.   Merrifield goes into the benefits of density and the problems of overcrowding.  Overcrowding inside small living spaces due to poverty led to more CoVid deaths

8.   He celebrates main streets, high streets, promenades, malecons, boardwalks and boulevards that draw social crowds.

9.   Studies showed that communities that came together to deal with CoVid did better health-wise.

10.         Urban removal and evictions deeply affect those who lose their homes.

11.         Corporate chains brought sterility and sameness to high streets.  Merrifeld’s hilarious 3 mile trek through ‘ye olde London’ is full of chain stores, glass and steel high-rises & empty store-fronts until he gets to a real street – Marchmont Street.

12.         New York corporations find it cheaper to work remotely than renting office space, killing street life and small businesses in the city, along with taxes and transit.

13.         Billions in public money in New York went to a Buffalo Bill’s sports stadium and mega-projects like the ‘luxurious’ Hudson Yards – an empty joke seemingly imported from corrupt desert kingdoms like Abu Dhabi.

14.         Merrifield, riffing off of Leopold Bloom’s favorite bar in Ulysses, Barney Kiernan’s pub, discusses a similar ‘moral’ New York bar, Coogan’s, a ‘third’ social space.  Coogan’s closed after CoVid. 

15.          He goes to an Eco-Cities conference in Australia where everything essential is removed from the conference document – about coal, oil, meat, degrowth.  The ‘most livable cities’ like Sydney and Melbourne are sometimes also the most expensive.

16.         Somehow ‘livability,’ ‘sustainability’ and affordability don’t go together.

17.         Due to climate change, war and political hostility, up to a billion people will become refugees, seeking solace in a city.  It is already happening. Instead they will find temporary shanty-towns located ‘nowhere’ outside cities.

18.         Cities are more progressive than capitalist nation states according to Merrifield, pointing to a “United Cities of America.”

19.         Memory of times before harsh neo-liberalism are necessary in order to combat landlords, city collaborators and lawyers.

20.         He promotes Melanchon’s French party, the “New Popular Union of Greens and Socialists.”  But as to overall solutions, they are only hinted at.

No mention in the book of the word ‘gentrification,’ urban gardening, the damage of capitalist-generated poverty and the unhoused or the need to ban many high rises and skyscrapers.  Others might find similar absences, like who runs cities?  Who runs the police force?  City councils?  Or the power of real estate developers and corporations, though this is hinted at.  The issue of who owns the land is never approached.

Climate change is telling us our urban and especially sub-urban housing and business environments are improperly built and car-dependent, leading to sprawl and building in improper locations.  While the ’15 minute city’ without cars is still possible in many places, including New York and London, it’s not in many more, especially in the U.S.  New construction or retrofitting of housing is also lacking.  There are no controls on new housing – requirements for grey or cistern water systems, heat pumps, electric / induction stoves and electric water heaters, solar panels, hemp concrete, reusable materials or limitations on size, among other things. This is all left to the stupid ‘market’ - which is one reason why climate change will destroy us. He mentions none of this.  

The book is basically a celebration of and a plea for the renewal of cities, which are really the heart of societies all over the world. Merrifield celebrates Jane Jacobs and Mindy Fullilove; Theolonius Monk, Jackson Pollock, Ulysses, Andre Kertesz and Surrealism, along with others.  He’s some kind of traditional left-liberal urbanist and if that is your thing, buy the book. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “How to Kill a City,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Extreme Cities,” “Capital City,” “From Factory to Metropolis” (Negri); “Tales of Two Cities,” “Minneapolis 2040 Housing Plan,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Beach Beneath the Street.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 16, 2023

With Friends Like These ...

 “Friendship” by Michal Herer, 2023

This is an anti-capitalist essay that explores alienation and the answer to it.  Herer is doubtful that a social movement full of people who can’t get along or close to neighbors, co-workers, fellow cadre or organizational associates, even spouses and children - is capable of having the necessary social cohesion to build a powerful movement towards socialism.  That is what you might think by reading the book, but he has a broader point about friendship.

Capital has given us the false or inadequate social ‘cohesions’ of family; of nation; of work; of perhaps a neo-liberal NGO or social organization.  He does not mention churches or unions oddly enough.  Herer rejects his list as not leading to ‘common living’ and common struggle. He rightly opposes the faux-leftist hostility to counter-culture communalism and cooperation in the 1960s and 1970s.  These leftists thought this movement led to neo-liberalism but these were actually anti-capitalist trends.  He cites Foucault (you knew this was coming) as becoming concerned with the concept of friendship in several essays.  Herer wants to follow up.

It’s not about the liberal and religious idealism of ‘love’ as a political angle or even the practical, proletarian goal of ‘working together’ that will bind people together in his estimation.  Herer is mostly interested in a philosophic dialog, so goes into a discussion of the differences between love – erotic, neurotic and true love – and friendship, which has some parallels with certain kinds of love.  Herer provides few  facts or examples in his dialog, which is problematic as he looks at the present situation.  He even admits he is working at a too high level of generalization. He quotes Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Freud, Foucault, Fromm, Barthes, Derrida and for Marxists, Wilhelm Reich.  Reich posited that prior to the patriarchal family and the subsequent development of class society, there was a free sexuality practiced in communal, primitive communism.  As Engels put it, prior to “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.” The development of the bourgeois nuclear family under capitalism brought repression and suffocation. Herer is not convinced Reich’s history has enough of a factual background but it does illustrate some well-known limitations of ‘the family.’ 

Friendship shares these characteristics:  It allows distance; it is non-compulsive; it is without thought of gain or sex.  At present it is defined as a personal issue. At least that is a sketch, as even he can’t define it.  Herer however believes ‘friendship’ should be a ‘transcendent’ social and eventually political goal, a sort of soft version of love.  This kind of ‘transcendent’ utopian liberal-anarchism seems to be more fit for relations within socialism or communism than the present.  

Let’s think of a few obvious examples, some of which he deals with. Herer mentions how some men reject the family and women and join the military or fascist groups to find ‘friendship.’ In that vein is “Band of Brothers,” a concept purely male and oriented towards violence.  Or the solidarity of group sports, which is based on winning against others. “Libertié, Egalitié, Franternité!” is a slogan of the French Revolution. Fraternity here is seen as solidarity of some sort, yet aimed at royalty and the rich.  It eventually ended up in the triumph of partial reaction under Napoleon I, a former fraternal brother.  (Fraternity is closely related to friendship according to Herer.) “Brothers and Sisters” is a union greeting and is a bit better, but it is in the context of class struggle against people who are not brothers and sisters.  In fact Herer doesn’t use the words ‘class struggle’ once because this contradiction upsets his transcendent claim.  All he can come up with is the ‘99% versus the 1% once.  In the present social context, ‘friends’ are sometimes understood as those who oppose the same ‘enemies’ – again limiting the concept of transcendent friendships.  A fraternity on a campus is male and attempts to bind frat boys together, perhaps through hazing, joint housing, parties and group dynamics.  Fraternity houses are problematic places as we all know. “Brother versus brother” was one of the concepts of the U.S. Civil War - no more need to be said. Until reversals in the Soviet 1930s, a new version of the family, love, housing, gay rights, abortion, child-care and the like existed. Yet the revolutionary solidarity of the Russian Revolution ended in one faction destroying the other and reversing these policies…something he vaguely refers to.  

The problem with friendship as a ‘transcendent,’ ‘supra-individual,’ ‘egalitarian-libertarian’ or utopian prospect is that it is not dialectical or historically-based.  Herer at one point says friendship is a ‘luxury’ yet actual friends have also been involved in literal survival.  He claims his discourse is not to adopt ‘harmony and unity that would mask conflict” but that is what it seems to do.

This book is not really dealing with present mass struggle against capital, but a more intimate approach to alienation, which might lead to closer relations between smaller groups of people.  Friendship really helps in stressful or military situations, such as strikes, demonstrations, occupations and political combat - as it brings closer cooperation between individuals in difficult circumstances.  But it also helps in normal operating. It allows stronger ties within ‘working’ groups, sinews of muscle so to speak.  Experience has shown that friendship on the Left is limited, not wide-spread, nor could it possibly be widespread – though it certainly beats the idiotic Democratic slogan of abstract ‘love.’  Smaller groups might be more susceptible to friendship, but that is it.  Friendships sometimes underlie political relationships, and not always in a good way.  Witness cronies and boot-lickers getting plum jobs in political contexts. Friendship is really a ‘sliding scale’ of less or more cooperation and unity.  It is not an overall social goal except in a future socialistic way… an intimation of what Herer calls the coming ‘hyper-democracy.’       

Herer is closer to anarchism than anything else, claiming they are “testing solutions for a possible future.” If this kind of thinking is your cup of tea, you might like this book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “Missoula – Rape and Justice in a College Town” (Krakauer).     

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 13, 2023

OxyCoffin

 “Painkiller,” directed by Peter Berg, 2023

This is a semi-fictional limited series based on the actual facts of the Sackler family's production and sale of OxyContin. It features a relentless African-American investigator, Edie Flowers, who represents the state of Virginia. She is tracking one doctor's very high claims for x-rays, only to discover that he's fabricating 50 x-rays a day in order to rake in state money. He claims there is nothing else untoward going on at his clinic, but then she discovers he's writing tons of script for a 'new' opiod painkiller called Oxycontin. And he's not alone. She also finds out young, cute former sorority sisters are pitching Oxy to male doctors to prescribe and then 'up' the dose of the Oxy pills they dole out. Some of them snort Oxy and sleep with the doctors to get their commissions, and the higher the dose, the more profit to Sackler's Purdue Pharma. Flowers calls them 'the Barbies.'

The sorry facts of the epidemic are laid out in personal detail in the story of a tire repair shop owner whose injured at work, and becomes addicted, losing his wife, family and business to his addiction. OxyContin was basically a legal form of heroin. People crushed the pills and snorted them. Crimes are committed to get more drugs, and some rave into violence. It became a street drug sold by dealers. Overdoses become common-place in some towns and cities. Between 350-500K died from Oxy and other opioids. Now Fentanyl has taken OxyContin's place and overdoses continue, as the social context has not changed.

How did OxyContin happen? Sackler bribed the one scientist in the FDA in charge of Ok'ing OxyContin with a $400k job to get it finally approved. They hired the first open anti-Oxy politician from Maine to become a lucrative Sackler 'consultant' instead. This is a good snapshot of obvious 'regulatory capture.' Since Oxycontin was 'legal' the Virginia DA and eventually the U.S. DOJ had to find what the crime was. This was the investigator's final job and Flowers finds external and internal sources to make the case.

Mathew Broderick plays the vile greed-bag 'Dr.' Richard Sackler whose first principle is never admit wrong, always deny and instead attack and blame the druggies and junkies for their addiction. This is advice he gets from the 'ghost' of his hard-ass uncle, who constantly primes him to defend the honor and reputation of the Sackler name. That name is scattered across many art museums, including one I found on the French Riviera town of Antibes in a Picasso museum of all places.

The name will live on in infamy

One of the creepiest scenes is a Purdue 'sales' convention in a Florida hotel where all the sales reps are invited. It's a little like rah-rah conventions celebrating pyramid schemes. Everyone is cheering, drinking, some snorting Oxy, dancing along with a blue stuffed pill as confetti rains down and Richard Sackler smirks. Holy shit! It's a banner year for sales.

The Sackler defendants were represented in court at the first trial in 2007 by a high-end team – among them: Mary Jo White, former SDNY DA and now head of the SEC appointed by Obama; Rudy Giuliani, former SDNY DA and now indicted and disgraced Trump lawyer. The prosecution spent countless hours reading documents, texts and e-mails; viewing training videos; interviewing witnesses; making phone calls trying to accumulate enough facts to indict. The settlement got the Sacklers small fines, a slap on the wrist and were still allowed to crank out Oxy pills, even after being criminally charged with false advertising! And that advertising continued... This weak settlement was after a Sackler lawyer's phone call to the tops of the DOJ, who then contacted the Bush White House. The DOJ then counseled the DOJ attorney handling the case on the appropriate weak 'settlement.' This shows you that the legal system is vulnerable to 'legal capture' by corporations and powerful individuals.

This sad result basically irritated the investigator to the point Flowers could no longer pursue the matter to justice, handing off the baton to others. Later, state attorney-generals – with the notable absence of southern states – got settlements from the firm. The 'others' in this series are a battery of high-priced lawyers who finally get reclusive Richard Sackler into a deposition, and so they interview Flowers too. The DOJ never actually subpoenaed Sackler.

The OxyContin / Sackler saga continues to this day, as the state fines and subsequent bankruptcy of Purdue still left the family with millions, along with guaranteed personal immunity. They took money out of Purdue before declaring bankruptcy, looting the firm to enrich themselves. The main settlement is paid by their fortune's interest over 9 years, so it avoids their capital. Purdue Pharma's bankruptcy settlement and the Sackler's personal immunity provision were astonishingly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court last month in August 2023. So the legal case continues long after 2007, reflecting our wretched legal system.

This entertaining 6 part series is worth watching, if only to see how one branch of Big Pharma functioned. The no-nonsense investigator, Flowers, is the main draw. She's experienced drug addiction in her family, so its personal.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Truth About the Drug Companies," "Drug War Capitalism," "Lost Connections" (Hari); "Dallas Buyers Club," "The Marijuana Manifesto" (Ventura); "American Made," "The Long, Strange Trip."  

The Cultural Marxist

September 8, 2023

A WInter's Tale

 “The Left Hand of Darkness,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

This is a science-fiction novel set on a planet inhabited by ambisexual humans.  In ‘rut’ – called klemmer – they can be either male or female, and then either person can produce a baby.  The story is about an ambassador from a well-organized, advanced league of 84 planets named Genly Ai and a league called Ekumen.  It is a sort of a Star Wars ‘galactic republic’ which still has sex and babies the old-fashioned way. The world Ai is visiting, Gethen, is more primitive in many ways.  One is a ‘centuries-old’ local medieval economy run by kings that has yet to experience full-scale war - Karhide.  Another is an organized bureaucracy dominated by the secret police – Orgoreyn – where everything is owned by the government and there are ‘communal’ farms.  (That should rings some bells…) They both are suspicious of space travel, his communication device and the broad social organization Ai speaks of.  Like all science fiction, there are obvious parallels and inspirations in human social reality.

I’m not sure why Le Guin wrote this except as a kind of ‘thought experiment.’  It is part of a story cycle of 6 novels, of which The Dispossessed is one of the latter.   At the time it was published it became some kind of feminist novel by bringing up genetic androgyny.  The story is mostly narrated by the envoy, with primitive tales and mystic mediations of past times interspersed into the narrative; the thoughts of an ally, who had to escape the monarchy as a ‘traitor;’ along with records of prior ‘Investigators’ who visited the planet. The envoy Ai wants to enlist the whole planet, or its societies, into the republican confederation of Ekumen.  Ekumen (‘ecumenical’) is an organizer, not a ruler of 84 worlds, so in a way a U.N. without an army, jails or a police force.  It is more interested in trade, communication and social goods … sort of a communistic international body.  On the other hand planet Gethen is very cold and isolated, and Ai suffers because his home Terra is much warmer and more comfortable.  His people call the planet Winter due to its icy nature.  There are clear parallels with Siberia and prison camps in Gethen.  Overall it’s a pretty sad place, no matter how they have babies or sex.

The envoy speculates that due to the totally ambiguous sexual role each person plays, there are no hard and fast gender roles throughout the societies … no expectations of gender, sex, personality, strength or abilities given your birth.  There are ‘kemmerhouses’ for those without a partner or still sexually high.  Ruts are periodic, lasting for 3 days, usually successful, so sexual loneliness is uncommon.  The locals mate for life, though seduction by others is possible.  You can take a drug to stop klemmering, something given to prisoners.  Even the King has a baby, but the baby dies.  This setup should thrill the trans ideology caucus. 

Le Guin graces the story with made-up words and portmanteaus, a common practice in science-fiction, along with some technical advancements.  One word – shifgrefor – is almost incomprehensible, so this method is tricky. They have electric cars and trucks on the planet, though how the Gethens figured that out is left unsaid.  There are no sign of windmills or power plants of any kind.   She creates two different though similar ‘worlds’ (societies) edging towards war due to the violent patriotic ravings of a proconsul on one side and the secret police on the other.  Ekumen abandoned war after suffering its effects for years and the envoy gets caught in the middle of their crude conflict.  A small faction in the Orgoreyn bureaucracy wants to align with Ekumen but they are a minority. Others believe the envoy, his space ship, the other planets, Ekumen itself – is a hoax.  No one in the Karhide kingdom is positive about Ekumen, so there’s that.  These reactionary nationalisms are resonant in the world today.

The Siberia of 'Winter'

The androgyny side of this story doesn’t save Gethen from being a troubled and backward place, which puts androgyny in its real location in Le Guin’s anthropological view.  Ultimately the retrograde Gethens in Orgoreyn treat Ai like a pervert, a spy or a hoax and threaten his freedom and life.  Here follows the key scenes in the book, as he and his multi-sex ally Estraven (estrogen?) escape across hundreds of miles of ice, snow, crevasses and the like, like scenes out of Jack London.  There is even some sexual tension in the tent between the two unlike friends.  

Ai's attempt to get this world to join Ekumen is like a socialist trying to convince capitalists and backward nationalists to join in a socially-useful society.  Without some form of force, the mission should be a failure.  Except in this case it is successful due to political circumstances that change, giving the book a 'happy ending.'  In a way, Le Guin probably felt like Ai, an alien on this sorry planet.  The book is not as progressive and political as The Dispossessed though it hints at a trajectory away from standard U.S. sci-fi tropes of dystopia, war, social medievalism and hyper-technical inventions.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin); “The Road” (McCarthy); “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (Dick); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “People’s Future of the United States,” “Damnificados,” “Blade Runner,” “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson)’ “Hunger Games,” “The Matrix,” “Divergent,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (both by Atwood); “Cloud Atlas,” “Good News” (Abbey).    

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent progressive fiction section!

Red Frog

September 5, 2023

And Now For Something Completely Different...

 Unlikable Protagonists and Ulysses

Unlikeable Protagonists

The more fiction or films or streaming series you see a certain pattern takes place.  You can't actually place it for a while.  But it happens again and again in current work as you watch characters writhe around under the camera lights or through the author's typing.  It's this.  The characters are many times drama queens and kings - idiots, emotional wrecks, damaged, childish, clueless, angry, depressed, violent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, incompetent, crazed, sad, fucked-up, neurotic, addicted, evil, thuggish, generally dysfunctional.  And that’s just the adults.  Name your diagnosis.  This overly-emotional baggage seems to be the only character currency that modern fiction spends.  You wonder – who are these fuckin' theatrical people?  They are all over the top.  Are these figures drama and comedy click-bait or real?   People I've rarely met? I'm not talking about super-heroes, cartoon characters or some fake avenger who can't be killed by a thousand bullets.  Those are made-up. Instead these people are deeply but cutely flawed.  Angerholics, assassins, criminals, killers, druggies, alkies, neurotics, narcissists, fools and cops. So much comedy!  So much drama!  So many clicks!

So the question that follows is – is this descriptive or prescriptive?  Or a combination of both?  In other words, do these kind of portrayals actually encourage dysfunctional human emotions and normalize them, making them seem just fine?  Giving neo-liberal capitalism and its psychological impact a 'normality' it shouldn't?  Or is this a literary therapy mentality, being considerate and observant of 'the human condition' or 'the human comedy' with the aim of enlightening the viewer or reader or cozily identifying with them?  Or is portraying these kinds of overwrought people a trick so we can gawk?   Quirky dysfunctional fuckups, aye!  It's like psych porn.  I think it is a form of normalization in the end.

JAMEY JOYCE

James Joyce's main works – 1922's Ulysses and 1939's Finnegan's Wake – are usually considered as strictly modernist books given their sexual undertones, interior monologues, fractured structural techniques, inventiveness and playful use of language.  Most critics agree with this approach. However, if you delve into the philosophy behind them, you will find pre-modern thinking ... really becoming the last major classical works in English literature.  They straddle two worlds but are intellectually tethered to the past, perhaps attempting to create a 'wholeness' of some sort between the two periods.   

Ulysses is based on the Greek myth, carefully structured to mimic each of the 18 episodes in Homer's original epic written in the 8^th Century.  In Ulysses Homeric characters interpenetrate with Dublin ones - Greece and Ireland together. Few now follow Greek myths - except maybe the Cohen brothers.  New myths are being created yearly and have more relevancy for all but the classically-trained - like Lord of the Rings and even Game of Thrones. Someone please tell Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. The Bible still packs a small punch, but its influence is waning in fiction except for The Book of Revelation.  While Nordic sagas are having a bit of a comeback on streaming, they are still relatively unknown except, again, Ragnarok.  Using a Greek fable set in modern times could be construed as adapting the past to the present – substituting a normal human salesman, Leopold Bloom, for a heroic Phoenician mariner.  Bloom sallies forth from 7 Eccles Street in Dublin like Odysseus, then returns in the evening, a perfect loop. Like Picasso's Minotaur or Dali's Renaissance surrealism, Ulysses brings the past into modernity.  In this case this approach is a hint that the philosophic view is backward, towards some kind of aesthetic 'eternal.'

There is politics of a sort in Ulysses. A 'cyclops' Fenian Irish nationalist in a bar is an anti-Semite, a hater of Scots and any non-Irish.  Bloom the Semite gets his ire.  The cyclops is the typical right-wing nationalist found in nearly every nation. In chapter one Stephen Daedalus says that he, like Ireland, is cursed by Catholicism and the British, both repressive forces.  And many nationalists were just that, virulent Catholics.  Joyce goes on to make fun of sensationalist newspapers and undermines prudes and religious nuts – easy to do now, but not then. This is why he moved to Paris and Europe.  But other than that ... politics is a dim sidelight in this book.   Joyce himself was involved in the Easter Rising as a young man, and took over a café from his boss for a time during that event.  Joyce was clearly a liberal humanist of some sort.  Ulysses was banned by the censors, but that ban was eventually defeated, as the books are in no way ‘prurient.’ The bourgeois press excoriated Ulysses anyway.   

They still call him 'the prick with a stick.'

The Philosophy

The philosophy animating both of Joyce's books is 'recurrence' – a circular view of history, human life, nature, technology, etc.  The focus on the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose idea this was, is littered throughout Ulysses.  Vico considered his idea to be an 'empirical deduction' based on his study of history.  In the same breath Vico opposed rationalism in the name of classical antiquity.  The title Finnegan's Wake is word play on circularity – Finn Again, Finn Awakes.  Which Finn kinda does when beer is spilled on his corpse in an open casket.  Recurrence relates to the idea of Hindu reincarnation scattered through the books ... another religious, circular idea. Joyce uses the term 'metempsychosis' – the transmigration of the soul after death – for this same idea.  The reactionary philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer dwelled on transmigration. Circular ideas of history are also related to transcendentalism.

A funeral, a birth; a butterfly, a man; a death, a return. Christ's death and resurrection, Christ Again.  In Ulysses, Leopold is the Jewish father and his spiritual son, Stephen, is not - he's a renegade Christian.  Molly, his wife, might be the Holy Ghost, but she is really a lover of life.  They are really a very odd  Trinity.  Now reincarnation does not account for the rise in the Irish population, nor the planetary one by any scientific logic.  Somehow the butterflies are so 'good' they've become humans on an algebraic scale.  It's a joke as a philosophy but it provides some kind of conservative comfort.  We're still waiting for the 'second coming,' another chimerical idea. This eternal return is the logic embedded in the books - and not shyly.  Finnegan's Wake begins with a half sentence which connects it to the half last sentence in the book - making a circle. 

Aesthetically it means a calm, all-encompassing stasis, which was Joyce's literary goal in spite of his avant-garde techniques. I think it was achieved.  These are great, if complex and dense works of art, of artifice, of artificial construction, of humanity.  But that humanity is not unusual, as many pre-modern writers attest.  For Ulysses you need a deep knowledge of Irish history, the Odyssey, Greek culture, Shakespeare, Hamlet, mysticism, Dublin, rhetoric, Christianity, the Bible, languages and music, along with a perceptive toleration for word fun.  No one has all this, which is why it remains a partial mystery to nearly every reader and every avoider.

Circular thinking is conservative because it ignores change.  At the time Joyce was writing these books Marxist dialectics and revolutionary movements were intruding on normal bourgeois philosophy and life.  Not to mention the capitalist disasters of the First World War and fascism.  'Human nature' in bourgeois philosophy is not thought of as human physical needs but as innate corruption that will never change, leading to social corruption and on and on. It is the Christian idea of 'original sin' or the Hindu understanding of karma, which is also in the books.  And Joyce, for all his ex-Catholicism and ‘lewdness’, was imbued with sub-Christianity if these books are any intimation.

HISTORY

History in the books, especially Irish history, soaks the narrative, as if all history is present at all times. Parnell and O'Connell loom large - yet there is no hint of the Easter Rising to come. As Faulkner put it 'the past is never past' but evidently the future is also past.  In a sense this is true, but it’s an archaic idea that ignores change.  Joyce got a classical education at a Jesuit college in 1893 and went on in 1898 to a higher Dublin university studying languages.  He published his first book, Dubliners, in 1914 at the start of World War I, though he'd written it in 1905.  His second, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published during the war in 1916, but written prior to that.  Bloom's day, June 16, 1904, - the day in Ulysses that is pictured - is prior to World War I too, set in the waning days of Victorian colonialism.  The period these focus on is a high point of early capitalist society before the great disruption of the world war, which is the historical event that really led to full modernism.  As that war showed, even war had morphed into something else, something bigger and more destructive, not a mere repetition of the past.

We are taught that the sun rises, the sun sets and the days march in a regular order until the end of time. Humans wake, humans sleep, humans live, humans die.  Humans never change and are on a treadmill – yet they do change constantly.  Even nature changes.  Climate change is the obvious example, as humans have affected the apparent cycles, destabilizing a semi-predictable system.  Nature has been disrupted before of course, as our geologists know. Even solid rocks degrade.  Joyce sought to create a reproduction of the universe in his books, a smaller literary version.  The real universe is not a static, aesthetic 'place' but a dynamic, tumultuous material network of plasma filaments and electro-magnetic energy, an infinite aurora borealis of galaxies, stars, planets, magnetism, dust - ever-changing, not merely repeating.  In a way Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake replicate this dynamism, but swirling in a closed globe.   

WORDS

One of Joyce's foremost interpreters, Stuart Gilbert, agrees on this thesis regarding Ulysses  … it's promotion of aesthetic stasis and philosophic recurrence.   Another stylistic hint in the book is 'the words.'   First there was 'the word,' then a world created by words, then a world filled with words, then the word’s many derivations and tongues, then two books which contain the greatest profusion of English wordiness ever to be done, and probably never overcome or undone by anyone.  The word is actually the endgame here.  This is the method of semiotics, of hidden and mystic signs, delightful as it is.  Its high literature so it counts, but it’s not grounded materialism.  It's word magic.

I later came across a full defense of Joyce in Socialist Revolution about his progressiveness and modernity.  I think the author reads too much of his own ideas into the text, while making the point that Joyce was thoroughly grounded in ‘the ordinary man.’  Many European writers prior to Joyce were also ‘grounded’ like this – witness Balzac, Zola, Dickens or Hardy.  This is standard humanism, divorced from gods and heroes.  SR accurately defends Joyce against the depredations of Radek and some other Marxists, but in doing so go the opposite route.

P.S. - "The CIA published Russian translations of Joyce’s Ulysses in Italy, as part of a program the Agency called “a Marshall Plan for the Mind.” The idea was to distribute Western literature in the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. CIA-backed Bedford Publishing Co. had an office in Rome. At the time, Italy had the largest Communist Party in Europe. (See Hot Books in the Cold War by Alfred Reisch)."

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Irish Literary Trail,” “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “History and Class Consciousness,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “Sean O’Casey,” “James Connolly,” “Jimmy’s Hall,” “The Wonder,” “Black 47,” “Rebellion,” “Dream of the Celt.”

The Cultural Marxist / September 2, 2023

An Almost Unreadable Book

 “Uncomfortable Television” by Hunter Hargraves, 2023

This is a turgid, jargon-filled academic work on how neo-liberal television after 2000 is acculturating people to a declining and more brutal society.  At least that is my take. The writing style in the book puts one off, and yes, the first quote is from Foucault. If anyone ever teaches academics and lawyers how to write – and that is probably impossible – they should take hints from David Foster Wallace and George Orwell.  That is not happening here, as Hargraves is a professor of Cinema and Television Arts at UC Fullerton.  Clearly, he’s not trying to be a public intellectual.

“I regard academic English not as a dialectal variant of Standard Written English, but as a gross debasement.,,” - David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage.
          Academic English is “a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is common to come across long passages which are almost completely devoid of meaning.” - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
           Wallace again: “…the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed … by opaque abstraction” - Wallace, Authority and American Usage.

That said, let’s get to the heart of the matter, if we can.  You see, the ‘heart’ is so elusive it might not even be there, as the style is so elliptical and murky its hard to decipher. Hargraves uses specific examples of comedy, reality TV, fan remixes, detective series and ‘woke’ television after 2000 to make his points.  His introduction dwells on Louis CK, seeming surprised that a series centered around an obnoxious male comic might be problematic.  Anyone who has watched enough comedy acts or shows basically knows when to turn them off, as the tight, drunken world of intimate and adult comedy clubs has been mainstreamed onto Netflix.  A Marxist might put it this way, that the commodification of ‘transgressive’ jokes is fake dissent, or as Orwell put it, just an exciting “escape into wickedness.”  Some of these comics are cheap and lazy ‘boat-rockers,’ if not outright reactionaries.  Some are not.  It’s the difference between liberal 1^st Amendment absolutism and actual liberation.

‘Discomfort’ in Hargraves analysis is the feeling that something is not quite right with the images, plot, characters, language or point of a TV show.  He thinks this is a symptom of “the television industry that late capitalism depends on in order to maintain its ideological hegemony.”  This means depicting ‘unlikeable protagonists, profanity, graphic violence, explicit sex and abuse of cultural minorities, women and children.’  Drug dealers, assassins, hit men, Mafia and serial killers are prominent.  Or “cringeworthy interactions between co-workers, friends and potential romantic partners” and “irritating or mentally unstable” characters.  No shit.  It is actually hard to find normal, grounded people in movies or on TV anymore.

Hargraves does not discuss class, seemingly oblivious to the sea of class references found on television.  The military, CIA or FBI are also invisible in his analysis. He seems to think that ‘woke’ TV will somehow be liberating.  His comedy section focuses on Lena Dunham’s Girls. The reality TV section is on the recovery series Intervention.  The fan ‘remix’ is an adultified, lumpen version of Jem & the Holograms.  The cop series covered are The Wire, CSI and Law & Order. The ‘woke’ TV section is about 30 Rock and Atlanta.  His selections seem mostly frothy. He omits the biggest streaming blockbuster of all, Game of Thrones. Since I’ve not watched most of this, I’ll focus on the detective series section and his conclusion. 

In the 'Lab' at CSI Las Vegas

The Cop Shows

If it’s not obvious by now, CSI and Law & Order SVU are both very pro-police procedurals.  They are the heroes and techie geniuses in ‘our’ fight against crime, with the viewer getting the serial satisfaction of nailing the bad guy, an actual rarity.  Dick Wolf, the producer of L&O: SVU, is openly pro-cop and close to the NYPD.  Anthony Zuicker, who created the CSIs, promoted surveillance, almost laughably-accurate tech science gimmicks and lax civil rights. 

The Wire first focused on an efficient police surveillance unit dealing with black ghetto crime and violence in Baltimore, though surrounded by corrupt or incompetent cops and brass.  In additional seasons it extended to corrupt politicians, schools, unions and newspapers, so it’s not a typical take, but it still carried over the eternal ghetto theme in each season. The showrunner David Simon – a semi-Marxist – is still semi.  This is why he had to make the great Treme series set in New Orleans as a mea culpa.  Hargraves finally makes the point about the show’s focus on black crime, along with another obvious point about the violence in the show.  Is the violence real or imagined is a question he does not address.  Nor does he mention class in regards to The Wire.

What else does Hargraves have to say?  Well, he thinks it’s all about ‘white guilt.’ At least that is his chapter title but I could not find it in the text.  Watching cops abuse process and suspects, or omnipresent swat team raids is not ‘uncomfortable’ television?  This is unmentioned.  He contends that the ‘high-quality’ series loved by critics like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire and Deadwood are all full of conflicted male anti-heroes.  Yet not everyone in the Wire police unit are ‘anti-heroes.’ I’ve seen Deadwood and there are some – like Swearengen – who ‘might’ be - and there are others – like Seth Bullock and Sol Star – who are not.  Swearengen is no kind of ‘hero,’ he’s an interesting shit, one of those unlikable protagonists.  Anti-hero seems to be an outdated way of phrasing it. 

Hargraves whines about how these series are called ‘quality’ without explaining why they are not the same as CSI/L&O SVU, which he says is ‘middle-brow.’  Perhaps it’s the money invested and the audience aimed at?!  Instead he claims they are ‘intermedial’ and ‘televisual.’  This is in line with the frequent resort to a ‘lit review’ of other academics opinions that overly clutter the book like its a Ph.D thesis. 

In CSI, the episode he cites about a “Las Vegas real estate magnate’ being murdered misses the fact that the man’s infantile perversities – and they are gross – blackens the image of the rich.  Again, missing class.  In L&O, he pokes at the alleged feminism of the series and actually quotes people who buy the fact that the male cop Stabler is some kind of feminist hero.  Stabler is a disturbed thug playing the ‘protector’ role for his ever-in-danger and stupid teenage daughter, another trope.  This shows’ focus on sex crimes makes it one of the more lurid, which is uncomfortable. After all, how many dead female bodies do we see, not just here, but constantly? Or imprisoned or kidnapped girls?  Talk about getting us used to crumbling, late capitalism in the U.S.!  At least Olivia Benson / Mariska Hargitay has played a real role in getting incompetent and sexist police departments to actually investigate rape with their unused rape kits. 

Another side of these two shows which he ignores is that the ‘ripped from the headlines’ style used which is frequently focused on rich or powerful people committing crimes. Hargraves misses that, as he’s an identity academic under all the verbiage, abstractions and bow-ties.    

The Wire

Solutions?

The change from ‘family friendly’ TV to uncomfortable ‘realistic’ TV after 2000 is Hargraves’ theme.  This corresponds to the technical changes from 4 TV networks to a sprawling geography of hundreds of media outlets.  That parallels a corresponding decay in U.S. capitalism, which is reflected in the culture industry, normalized by it as ‘just the way things are.’  Hargraves thinks that the new media landscape has also allowed ‘cultural minorities’ to gain access for ‘woke TV’ - which is also ‘uncomfortable.’ His understanding of who are involved in this opening are color castes, women, queer folks and disabled people, but it will only go to the ‘awareness’ level and not that of actual action.  He knows these efforts can be and are commodified and co-opted by media.  

Hargraves points to a ridiculous glut of content and uses 30 Rock and Atlanta for his point about woke TV – shows I have not watched – while ignoring the profusion of muck-raking documentaries.  He does note the handmaid cloaks in The Handmaid’s Tale were used in protests against Bible thumpers and Trump’s sexism, just as the hand signal in the Hunger Games was used in Thai protests against the dictatorship there.  Both to no avail.

This book is for the TV academic or TV geeks.  But it’s all weak tea for anyone else.  No mention of 6 capitalist combines owning nearly all the media in the U.S. No mention of socialization of these sources.  No discussion of public television or collaborative efforts by workers in media – many of whom are currently on strike. Seemingly ‘late capitalism’ still has things in the bag.

P.S. - I've been told by current college students that it is common for cultural studies writing to be incomprehensible and bloated.  Here are the so-called top 100 series:  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops – What Ya Gonna Do,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,”  “Handmaid’s Tale," "Treme" or the word ‘streaming.’

The Kultur Kommissar / August 29, 2023