The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
– Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future https://youtu.be/aCgkLICTskQ
- Ted Gioia: Society Without a Counterculture https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
I don't know whose, if anyone's, explanation, I believe. The phenomenon (of cultural stagnation) is real, though.
This Gucci 'homage' to Stanley Kubrick struck me as an excellent example of the problem: https://youtu.be/pk1oThKRxdo
It's not just that it cribs from the past, but the cynicism: an ad that inserts some giddy fashion model into Clockwork Orange, and saps the scene of its irony. Kubrick pulled that film from the UK market after release for fear it had inspired a rape and a murder. An 'homage' doesn't turn a cautionary tale into an aspirational commercial.
How about the TV series Squid Game?
Another series, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, provoked considerable debate in South Korea, apparently.
We're good at signs & symbols today; we've gotten incredibly good at their production in the attention economy, incidentally often building compelling hyperreal situations that we feel immersed in. We're more aware than ever, have high-bandwidth signals to the widest of the real, jammed at us to hyperreal levels, potentially dropping us into simulacra.
But the real (the real real) has become further off. I don't think it's a mental poison from the internet or social media or whatever boogie man. I just think there's less opportunity to engage the real, to find active engaging pursuits that we can feel meaningfully connected to.
Our supply of time, freedom, & money to power pursuits is more limited by the increasingly strenuous demands of earning food/shelter/healthcare/retirement, and there are less available surface of deep interests that might demand our obsessions, that we might go live & become-into. It takes some kind of surplus to make culture, to have bohemias where culture might spring from, and that has broadly become economically unviable. We've gotten worse at JFK's challenge:
> This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spirtually poor. / To further the appreciation of culture among all people, to increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all in the process and fulfillment of art - this is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.
And second, what is worthy to demand our attention, that we can genuinely go deep on? We are a much more advanced world, the standards are so much higher. Fashion styles, photography, writing, thinking, making, athletics: we can find personal reward in these things, get started & enjoy them & and make connections to others around us about them, but these real & local meanings can feel smaller & less significant when there's a visible abundance of people doing the same at much higher levels. Culture stems from deep engagement, and we're just so aware that we're in a post-modern world, where modernity has already been done. (Summed up as: "Aesthetically, thanks to the internet, it’s all quite dull.") And so much is more complex than it used to be; it's not enough to build a simple ham radio in your garage; we're both hyper-empowered by having fantastic options available to us in all realms, but we also are more along for the ride, are less figuring things out/making our own way than we would have been in a younger newer world.
The stagnation isn't about society's ability to make signs and symbols, about their popularity. Culture starts earlier. And it's created when there is surplus, when people have the surplus time energy & freedom to engage the world in meaningful ways. Finding topics to go deep on, to wonk out on, finding lifestyles that we have time & means to practice somehow... culture needs surplus to thrive, to turn into sign values, upon which society might begin to gel & form. Another comment points to Squid Game: I haven't watched it yet, but is this not piece that hits so hard because it's about a society with no surplus left, about what happens when there is no room & opportunity & support to flourish?