On popular culture, state and market

John over at Economics is for donkeys has an interesting article up on the cultural impact of communism on popular culture. In many ways, his approach rings true: the cruelty, crassness, blandness and slovenliness of American popular culture can be attributed more to the appeal to the lowest common denominator common among advertisers and marketers, than it can be to the political attitudes of academics and celebrities.

(A brief side note: among the many reasons I enjoy heavy metal is that it appears to be the one subculture / genre of popular music which has consistently and rigorously upheld and respected its own artists’ visions no matter how weird or subcultural they get, and in a strange, misanthropic way treats them as human beings rather than as mass-market products and slogans. This may be because heavy metal arose largely, as Rob Halford interprets it, as an angry reaction against the societies led by Reagan and Thatcher, which proclaimed their own righteousness while unapologetically steamrolling over the needy. Iron Maiden’s ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’, in which Bruce Dickinson raged against Cold War brinksmanship politics and modern society’s cruelty toward the poor, or Geoff Tate’s angry rants on Operation: Mindcrime against TV preachers and corporate giants with Swiss bank accounts banging secretaries who then go on to pander to Penthouse and Playboy for fame and fortune, very much captured the Zeitgeist. Sadly, both still do.)

However, I think John’s view that ‘social conservatives… miss the fact that it is the business world that creates most of our junk culture, not the government’ – correct in all essentials – might work better for being slightly more nuanced. State and market, though neoliberal ideology places them in opposition to one another, are intertwined and interdependent in all sorts of basic ways; I think it can be argued from a revised Hegelian-Marxist perspective that markets are not ‘spontaneously ordered’ so much as they are institutions which are actively formed in the wake of domination by political actors. So yes, you have teenyboppers, Transformers, Las Vegas (and everything it stands for), Donald Trump, Paris Hilton and Walmart standing as gross examples of our ‘junk culture’ promoted by the business world; but on the other hand, you have a government which has been clearing a space for all of the above, by a.) consistently neglecting or actively cutting its endowments for the fine arts; b.) creating and selectively supporting schooling systems which consistently value ‘business’ education and vocational skills over a more holistic and virtuous civic, artistic and liberal education. In the absence of such an education, corporate marketers will find ways of convincing the public that they want what they do not need, and even what will harm them.

But John’s blog is always worth a thorough read and a thorough think – I find he’s often on the right track.