Even Nice Guys Get Things Wrong

Russell Crowe as Healy and Margaret Qualley as Amelia 

in The Nice Guys (dir. Shane Black, 2016)

 

 

There are many things to like and admire about Shane Black's action-comedy The Nice Guys (2016), set in LA in 1977; the loving recreation of the period with its mixture of cheese and sleaze; the on-screen chemistry between Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling; 15-year-old Angourie Rice's sweet-but-sassy performance as Holly; and, of course, the fact that Margaret Qualley's character Amelia is barefoot throughout the film [1]. 

 

However, whilst the recreation of the period may have been loving, that doesn't mean it was strictly accurate and there are, in fact, a number of anachronisms throughout the movie. 

 

For example, the soundtrack includes numerous songs that were not released in 1977; nor, for that matter was Jaws 2 in the cinemas that year (it arrived on screens in the summer of '78). And if you called 911 in 1977, you would not have got through to the emergency services (unless living in Alabama) [2].  

 

Now, I have to admit, that if I hadn't had these things pointed out to me, I wouldn't have been any the wiser. But one thing I did notice was the punk memorabilia on Holly's bedroom wall ... 

 

I very much doubt a 13-year-old living in LA would have had a Never Mind the Bollocks poster, as the album of that name was only released on 11 November 1977 in the US and the Sex Pistols had not at that date ever played in America.

 

I also doubt Holly would have been a fan of Blondie, as the band was very little known outside of the New York punk scene in 1977 and only became widely popular following the release of 'Heart of Glass' in January 1979. 

 

But what I know to be impossible is for Holly to possess a poster featuring Pennie Smith's photo of Clash bassist Paul Simonon smashing his guitar on stage at the Palladium (NYC), as the picture - which famously features on the sleeve of London Calling - was taken on 20 September, 1979.

 

Do any of these things matter? 

 

Not really - though they might, I suppose, to film buffs who get excited by spotting anachronisms and continuity errors, or by cultural historians who take facts and dates very seriously. For me, they simply serve as nice reminders that one is watching a work of creative fiction (a fantasy) and that the past is never (and can never) be accurately recreated in memory or on film.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Quentin Tarantino - a director who knows a fine pair of female feet when he sees them - would later cast Margaret Qualley as Manson Family member Pussycat in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). In one scene, she stretches out her legs in the front seat of a car driven by Brad Pitt's character (Cliff Booth) and presses her bare feet against the windscreen (or windshield, as our American cousins like to say). 

      Apparently, Qualley was nervous about having to expose her toes on film once more; having trained as a ballet dancer in her youth, her feet had obviously been subject to a fair amount of abuse and she was self-conscious about the way they looked. Fortunately, Tarantino and Pitt persuaded her she had nothing to worry about and the scene was filmed with no regrets: click here.   

[2] Readers who are interested in further anachonisms can visit the IMDb page for The Nice Guys - click here - and then go to the section entitled Goofs. 

To watch the official final trailer for The Nice Guys (2016), click here.  

 

 

The Rich Can Buy Soap: Why I Find Shepard Fairey's Hope Poster Problematic

Shepard Fairey in front of his portrait of Barack Obama before its installation 

at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2009

Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Someone has emailed:

 

'I was intrigued - and, if I'm honest, slightly irritated - by the fact that after praising Shepard Fairey's Hope poster as a work of art and defending his right to have transformed the original photo by Mannie Garcia on the grounds of fair use, you couldn't resist adding a line in a footnote to the effect that, actually, you didn't much care for the piece after all; branding it as an all-too-blatant example of political propaganda. Would you care to elaborate on this remark?' [1]

Well, although I hadn't planned on saying anything further about Fairey's work, I've decided to take this opportunity to do so, since I was asked in a such a sincere spirit of both intrigue and irritation ...

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear from the outset: I'm not suggesting that art should (or could) be pure in some manner or untainted by politics. And lots of great works are explicitly political; Picasso's Guernica (1937) would be an obvious example of such.

 

But I do feel a little uncomfortable when an artist produces a work that is endorsed by a presidential campaign team and which is, in effect, a piece of political advertising that doesn't only promote Barack Obama's candidacy, but attempts to fob us off with the untenable - and treacherous - ideal of hope.

 

One is reminded of something that D. H. Lawrence wrote about advertisements; no matter how clever, how beautiful, or how seductive their use of language and imagery, one can never quite forget they disguise a sharp hook with which to catch the consumer [2]. 

 

I'm not denying, therefore, that Fairey's Obama portrait is a genuine work of art that brings forth a number of powerful reactions, but I don't like feeling that I'm having my reactions pre-determined and manipulated - particularly when Fairey is doing so in a manner that suggests he is attempting to spiritualise politics and sell us not only his version of the American Dream, but inspire mankind with a promise of redemption.  

 

My main problem is not with the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama, heavily stylised by Fairey and displaying many features that belong to his distinctive aesthetic, it's with the slogan HOPE plastered across the bottom in capital letters [3]. 

 

As a pessimistic philosopher, I obviously have problems with this sentimental and morally optimistic ideal of hope. I never expect (nor particularly desire) positive outcomes; I certainly don't pray for such. 

 

Like Schopenhauer, I regard hope as a pernicious delusion or a folly of the heart that undermines the individual's appreciation of probability; like Nietzsche, I suspect the gods enjoy the spectacle of human suffering and so provide hope as a way of prolonging such (it is arguably, therefore, the most evil of all evils). 

I'm glad to see that, by 2015, Shepard Fairey was expressing his disappointment with President Obama and his administration, having lost a good deal of hope as evidence of increased military drone use and domestic surveillance came to light [4].

 

But one wonders just what Fairey - a self-confessed sex pistol - was thinking of back in 2008 by pledging his support of Obama so openly and promoting a theological virtue; had he forgotten the great slogan of punk: No Future ...? [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The writer is referring to a post of 4 Feb 2022 entitled 'Notes on Fair Use With Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster' - click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. I comment further on the poetry and politics of modern advertising with reference to this essay by Lawrence (as well as Roland Barthes's take on the subject in Mythologies) in a post that can be accessed by clicking here. 

[3] Originally, the poster featured the word progress, but the Obama campaign team expressed concerns about the connotations of this idea and advised that the key terms that they were promoting were hope and change.  

[4] See the interview with Fairey by Matt Patches in Esquire (May 28, 2015): click here. 

 

[5] No Future was the original title of 'God Save the Queen', by the Sex Pistols, and the phrase is repeated throughout the song. One might also remind Fairey of something that Sartre once said: 'Voting is not a political act. It's an act of resignation.' Thus one should never vote for anyone or anything, only against.   

Notes on Fair Use with Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster

Shepard Fairey: Portrait of Barack Obama / Hope Poster (2008)

Based on the photograph by Mannie Garcia / Associated Press (2006)

 

 

I. Fair Use

 

I am not an American, but I sometimes wish I were. For I admire many aspects of American culture and society, including the legal concept of fair use which permits (limited) use of copyrighted material without having to acquire permission from the copyright holder [1]. 

 

For whilst the interests of the latter should, I suppose, be taken into account, it's vital to balance such with the right of artists, for example, to creatively transform images and recontextualise ideas. Great artists, as Picasso said, have always stolen and made acquired objects uniquely their own (never borrowed or asked for permission) [2]. 

 

 

II. The Case of Shepard Fairey and His Obama Hope Portrait

 

Everyone knows the instantly iconic Barack Obama Hope poster produced by the American graphic artist Shepard Fairey, during the 2008 presidential campaign. But what I didn't know - until I watched the James Moll documentary Obey Giant (2017) on TV a few nights ago - was just how much trouble the work had caused him ...

 

For although the image - widely distributed as a poster, as well as in various other formats - was produced with the approval of the Obama campaign team, Fairey had not sought permission of the photographer Mannie Garcia who snapped the picture the work was based upon for the Associated Press (AP) [3]. 

 

Fairey had simply searched Google Images and taken what he thought best suited his needs, believing his actions to be legitimate under the fair use policy. However, when in January 2009 the original source photo was identified, the AP demanded compensation. And so began a legal nightmare, lasting several years.

 

It was Garcia's contention that he retained copyright to the photo according to his AP contract. And whilst he admired what Fairey had done with his photograph, he didn't 'condone people taking things, just because they can, off the internet'. 

    

Fairey, meanwhile, sought a declaratory judgement that his behavior qualified as fair use and argued that his conduct did not constitute improper appropriation because he had not taken any protected expression from Garcia's photo. 

 

However, after a judge urged a settlement, the two parties came to an out of court agreement (including undisclosed financial terms) in January 2011. Whilst neither party was obliged to surrender its interpretation of the law, in their press release the AP made it pretty clear who they thought had come out on top (and it wasn't the artist) [4].

 

For his part, Fairey maintained that he had never personally profited from sales of the image - a claim disputed by the AP - and put on record that whilst he continued to defend the right of artists to make fair use of photographic images, he respected the work of photographers such as Mannie Garcia.

 

 

III. 

 

My view is this: a photograph - no matter how skilled the photographer - is ultimately a mechanically produced image; whereas an artwork is a magically created image that transforms reality. That's why even the greatest modern photos pale into insignificance alongside paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, for example.  

 

And so, with all due respect to Mannie Garcia, his photograph - as technically excellent as it is - would have been long forgotten about by now - just one lonely thumbnail amongst hundreds of thousands of other Obama pics that can be found online - were it not for what Fairey did with it [5]. 

 

In short: Fairey transformed a good photograph into a great work of art; one that will live in the cultural imagination for a very long time. That's why a version of the work is now in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, alongside other famous portraits of presidents - and why Garcia's photograph isn't [6].

 

To be honest, I wish Fairey had not settled and had, instead, fought the case. For I think he had strong and valid fair use argument and that his heavily stylised image, bearing the hallmarks of his distinctive aesthetic, clearly transforms Garcia's photograph in such a way that it is no longer strictly speaking an accurate representation of Obama - something that the AP lawyers seemed blind to.    

 

The same AP lawyers who spoke of arrogance on the part of artists who cheerfully exploit the work of hardworking photograpers without permission or even a word of thanks, before then dismissing Fairey's Obama poster as little more than a form of digital paint by numbers.     

 

Which is a mildly funny, if outrageously stupid thing to say.  

 

Notes

 

[1] In the UK, we have a similar legal notion termed fair dealing. But fair dealing is more limited in scope than the US doctrine of fair use and the two ideas, if comparable, are certainly not synonymous; many exceptions to copyright in the US would be an infringement under UK law. 

      In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is fair, several factors are considered. These include: (i) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (ii) the nature of the copyrighted work; (iii) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (iv) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. 

      Finally, another key consideration in many fair use cases - including the one to be discussed here - is the extent to which the use is transformative. It is important to understand that facts and ideas are not protected by copyright - only their particular expression.  

      

[2] The irony, of course, is that Picasso probably heard this line elsewhere and is just paraphrasing. 

      (It sounds like the sort of thing Wilde might have said, but the Little Greek is keen to remind me of these lines by Eliot in an essay on Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood (1920), p. 114: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.")

     

[3] Garcia took the (now famous) photograph - along with 250 other shots - on 27 April, 2006, at a media event held at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C., where the actor George Clooney was raising awareness of the war in Darfur, following a trip to Sudan. Clooney was joined by two United States senators; Sam Brownback and Barack Obama. 

     Whilst most of Garcia's photos taken that day were of Clooney (or featured Clooney and one or both of the senators), thirty-nine were just of the charismatic future President.  

      In taking these photos, Garcia obviously made creative choices; just as, afterwards, he reviewed them and made certain editorial decisions before finally submitting a small selection of pictures to the Associated Press. But they still remained press pics, not works of art. 

 

[4] In a press release, the AP announced: 

      "Mr. Fairey has agreed that he will not use another AP photo in his work without obtaining a license from the AP. The two sides have also agreed to work together going forward with the 'Hope' image and share the rights to make the posters and merchandise bearing the 'Hope' image and to collaborate on a series of images that Fairey will create based on AP photographs."

 

[5] Garcia's Obama photograph was published at least once by an AP member newspaper, but, it certainly didn't enter into the cultural imagination or win a Pulitzer Prize. 

      Again, let me be clear: I'm not trying to denigrate the work of photographers. I'm simply saying that, in this case, Fairey magically transforms a factual piece of photojournalism into something fundamentally different; by removing certain elements and adding others, he projects a realistic image into the mythic realm. The genius lies in the many small changes, just as the devil lies in the details. 

      (Having said that, I'm not particularly keen on Fairey's poster which is too much also a piece of blatant political propaganda.)   

 

[6] A fine art version of the poster made by Fairey was acquired in early 2009 by the National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian Institution) and housed in its permanent collection, alongside portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and Richard M. Nixon by Norman Rockwell. 

 

Readers interested in the full facts of the case involving Shepard Fairey should see: William W. Fisher III, Frank Cost, Shepard Fairey, Meir Feder, Edwin Fountain, Geoffrey Stewart, and Marita Sturken, 'Reflections on the Hope Poster Case', Harvard Journal of Law and Technology,  Vol. 25, No. 2, (Spring 2012), pp. 243-338. This detailed text also provides an excellent analysis and many illustrations. Click here for an online pdf. 

To watch the trailer to Obey Giant: The Art and Dissent of Shepard Fairey, (dir. James Moll, 2017), click here.

 

For a follow up post to this one in which I discuss my problems with Fairey's Obama portrait, click here.

On Self-Esteem and Self-Harm; Selfies and Self-Destruction

Keith Negley: Self-Harm (2019)

keithnegley.com

 

 

I. 

 

Self-harm is an interesting phenomenon: one that the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han relates to the terror of authenticity, i.e., a neoliberal imperative that "intensifies narcissistic self-reference".*

 

For Han, there is a healthy (non-pathological) form of self-love, but narcissism is distinct from it. For one thing, the narcissist is blind to the Other: "The narcissistic subject perceives the world only in shadings of itself" [21].     

 

And that's not good: not only does the world soon becomes boring when everything is the Same, but excessive narcissism has a profoundly damaging effect on the individual. Ultimately, we need other people to make us feel good about ourselves. 

 

For the Other is a gratifying authority. Without such a figure to love, praise, acknowledge and appreciate us, bang goes our self-esteem.

 

And that's not good either. For according to Han, lack of self-esteem underlies self-harm and the act - I almost wrote art - of cutting oneself with a knife, razor, or broken bottle "is not only a ritual of self-punishment for one's own feelings of inadequacy [...] but also a cry for love" [23] 

 

I'm not sure of that last claim, but let's hear the good professor out:

 

"The sense of emptiness is a basic symptom of depression and borderline personality disorder. Borderliners are often unable to feel themselves; only when they cut themselves do they feel anything. For the depressive performance subject, the self is a heavy burden. It is tired of itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outside itself, it becomes absorbed in itself, which paradoxically results in an emptying and erosion of the self. Isolated in its mental enclosure, trapped in itself, it loses any connection to the Other." [23-4]

 

If you deny negative thoughts and feelings any form of expression, they eventually come back to bite you. And yet, of course, the elimination of all negativity is "a hallmark of contemporary society" [24] which is designed to be a safe space, free from all forms of hate speech (in case someone is offended) and all types of conflict (in case someone gets hurt). 

 

But just as sometimes people need to express hateful ideas - not because that's what they really think, but so that they don't have to think such thoughts any longer - so too do they need a degree of conflict in their lives: "It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict." [24] 

 

Deny people - particularly young people - the chance to express their anger and release their rage and it's little wonder they end up cutting their arms, for example. 

 

For such an act "quickly releases accumulated destructive tension" [24] - not to mention endorphins - so there's undoubtedly a pleasurable aspect involved (an aspect often overlooked or downplayed by those who are worried that by admitting such they might make self-harm seem attractive).     

   

I think where Byung-Chul Han gets more interesting, is when he attempts to relate self-harm first to the taking of selfies and then, perhaps more controversially, to the practice of suicide bombing ...

 

 

II.  

 

Some readers might recall that I wrote a post on selfies and the rise of the look generation way back in October 2013 [click here], in which I argued against those commentators who greet every development to do with technology, sex, and the play of images with moral hysteria. 

 

And I still have no wish to add my voice to those that suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem - all of which puts me at odds with Byung-Chul Han, who writes:

 

"The addiction to selfies also has little to do with self-love. It is nothing other than the idle motion of the lonely subject. Faced with one's inner emptiness, one vainly attempts to produce oneself. The emptiness merely reproduces itself. Selfies are the self in empty forms; selfie addiction heightens the feeling of emptiness. It results not from self-love, but from narcissistic self-reference. Selfies are pretty, smooth surfaces of an empty, insecure self. To escape this torturous emptiness today, one reaches either for the razorblade or the smarthphone. Selfies are smooth surfaces that hide the empty self for a short while. But if one turns them over one discovers their other side, covered in wounds and bleeding. Wounds are the flipsides of selfies." [24-5]

      

Apart from not sharing Han's horror of the selfie, a further problem I have with this is that, as a sex pistol, I find inner emptiness aesthetically pleasing rather than torturous and vacancy simply isn't something I care about. 

 

Many young punks - including most famously Sid Vicious - engaged in self-harm as an act of provocation; they stuck safety pins through their lips and burnt their arms with cigarettes to outrage and signal their nonconformity, not because they wished to deal with negative emotions, communicate distress, or cry out for love. It also facilitated bonding with other like-minded individuals (i.e. enforced group identity).   

 

Anyhoo, returning to Han's text, he now asks a series of questions:

"Could suicide attacks be perverse attempts to feel oneself, to restore a destroyed self-esteem, to bomb or shoot away the burden of emptiness? Could one compare the psychology of terror to that of the selfie and self-harm, which also act against the empty ego? Might terrorists have the same psychological profile as the adolescents profile as the adolescents who harm themselves, who turn their aggression towards themselves?" [25]

 

I suppose they could; I suppose they might. But I don't think so. But, again, let's allow Han to speak for himself (starting with a dubious gender claim):

 

"Unlike girls, boys are known to direct their aggression outwards, against others. The suicide attack would then be a paradoxical act in which auto-aggression and aggression towards others, self-production and self-destruction, become one: a higher-order aggression that is simultaneously imagined as the ultimate selfie. The push of the button that sets off the bomb is like the push of the camera button. Terrorists inhabit the imaginary because reality [...] denies them any gratification. Thus they invoke God as an imaginary gratifying authority, and can also be sure that their photograph will be all over the media like a form of selfie directly after the deed. The terrorist is a narcissist with an explosive belt that makes those who wear it especially authentic." [25-6]  

 

Again, I find this problematic in parts, but that's an important last line that reminds one not only of the need to curb enthusiasm, but be wary also of those who pride themselves on their authenticity and the truthfulness of their values.   

 

  

* Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 19. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul Han 2: Is There an Alternative to Tourism?

(Polity Press, 2022)

 

 

I. 

I closed part one of this post with a question that Byung-Chul Han puts to his readers: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later, will we have gained something or lost something?" [a] 

 

To put this slightly differently: should we celebrate becoming hypercultural tourists, or should we discard our Hawaiian shirts and seek out an alternative way of being in the world? Might we, for example, endeavour to become pilgrims - walking the earth and giving form to the formless, making the fragmentary whole, as Zygmunt Bauman [b] would have it? 

Well we might: but probably this would be futile. For hyperculturality is an evironment that produces (and allows for) a particular type of tourist - not pilgrims. Bauman, says Han, remains a romantic thinker who fails to recognise what is so unique about the hypercultural tourist; one who "knows neither longing nor fear" [41]. 

 

Unlike pilgrims, for example, hypercultural tourists always remains in the here and now; they are not "on their way to a counter-world, to a There" [40]. 

 

Having said that, I still wonder if there is an alternative to tourism ... Or must we all learn to laugh like Odradek [c] and accept ourselves as patchwork individuals with multicoloured natures? 

 

 

II.

 

It's obviously important to get terms straight: to understand that hyperculturality is a contemporary phenomenon that is uniquely different to interculturality, multiculturality, and transculturality ...

 

According to Byung-Chul Han, the first two of these things are historically "connected  with nationalism and colonialism" [53] and, philosophically, they "presuppose the introduction of an essentialist notion of culture" [53]. 

 

As for transculturality, which is all about transgression and the crossing of borders, that also has nothing to do with hyperculturality, wherein different cultural forms are simply placed side by side in a "borderless hyperspace" [56] and one is afforded the opportunity (as a tourist) to browse. 

 

Hyperculture also differs from multiculture "insofar as it involves little remembrance of origin, descent, ethnicity or site" [56-7].    

In sum: 

 

"Contemporary culture is marked not by the trans, the multi or the inter but by the hyper. The cultures between which an inter or a trans would take place are un-bounded, de-sited, and de-distanced: they have been turned into hyper-culture." [56]

 

Hyperculturality also "presupposes certain historical, sociocultural, technical and media processes" [57] and is linked to "a novel experience of space and time, a type of identity formation and a form of perception" [57]. 

 

 

III.

 

One of the things I like about hyperculture is that it doesn't regard appropriation as something sinful. 

 

Indeed, hyperculture desires and requires an intense level of appropriation in order to effect a dynamic process of transformation and engineer difference. Nothing is seen as alien and off-limits or has protected status; nothing belongs to anyone. Everything exists for consumption ...

 

One might ask at this point how hyperculture differs then from late capitalism; is it not just the cultural logic of the latter in much the same way as postmodernity was formerly described by its critics [d]? 

 

I'm not sure Han addresses this question. Though he does say that supermodernity - unlike postmodernity - is not ironic; it contains "an affirmation that the ironic mode cannot grasp" [68]. It's also friendlier, says Han. Which is nice, I suppose, as friendliness promises "maximum cohesion with minimum connectedness" [69].   

 

 

IV.

 

Perhaps, in the end, the tourist is simply another kind of wanderer; a figure that Nietzsche praised in Human, All Too Human (1878-80) [e]. Both wanderer and tourist move in a de-sited world and lack any final destination. However, whilst acknowledging the similarities, Han ultimately rejects this comparison:

 

"The wanderer's form of existence [...] does not resemble that of the hypercultural tourist. His way of walking still lacks the leisureliness that characterizes the tourist. And the world of the 'wanderer' is still peppered with deserts and abysses." [75]

 

Despite everything, says Han, Nietzsche "remained a pilgrim" [76] at heart and his wanderer remained on the path of struggle and suffering (a via dolorosa). 

 

And despite Nietzsche's remarkable far-sightedness, "he could not yet have suspected what kind of culture would emerge [...] He did not develop the idea of a hyperculture." [65]

V.

 

Han closes his study with a section entitled 'Threshold'. In it, he makes yet another return to Heidegger; if Nietzsche didn't quite see what was coming, Heidegger saw it emerging and rejected it outright:

 

"For him, hyperculture would be the end of culture as such. He repeatedly laments the loss of the homeland [Heimat]. The media, too, are blamed for the disappearance of the homeland, and ultimately also for the disappearance of the world." [77]

 

It's mass media - and now social media - which has carried people away into illusionary worlds that are not worlds, turning them into tourists. There's nothing primordial (from the perspective of Being) about surfing the internet. 

 

For Heidegger, the world has material reality - its a place of rocks and trees and meadows in bloom, as well as jugs and bridges and things made by hand - it's not a simulation made up from signs and images which we stare at on a screen, rather than dwell within. 

 

As a Lawrentian, of course, I'm naturally sympathetic to Heidegger's construction of a simplistic and romantic counter-world, as Han calls it; it might lack plurality and diversity, but at least it includes books, animals, and silence. 

 

Ultimately, one has to choose: to be a pilgrim-wanderer who crosses thresholds in silence but with a face "contorted in pain" [83]; or a hypercultural tourist "smiling serenely" [83] and chatting endlessly. Homo dolores, or Homo liber - I'll let you decide ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. 37. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han refers us to Bauman's text Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, (Blackwell, 1995). As we will see, Han doesn't seem convinced by Bauman's attempt to resurrect the pre-modern figure of the pilgrim; one that re-theologizing thinkers and those looking for a fixed abode or home in the traditional sense often fall back on  

[c] Odradek is the strange creature in Kafka's short story 'The Cares of a Family Man' (see Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman's Library, 1993), pp. 183-85. 

      Like many other critics and thinkers, Han is fascinated by Odradek's hybrid identity and the fact he has no attachment to any site, or home. He writes: "Odradek's identity is not controlled by any teleology [...] he is not part of any purposive horizon [...] it is an identity that is cobbled together from various parts" and his laugh "has something ironic, mocking or uncanny about it" [48]. 

      However, although Odradek's nature "does somewhat resemble the patchwork structure of hypercultural identity" [49], he is not, concludes Han, a hypercultural tourist in the full sense.   

[d] I'm thinking here of the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson and his 1991 study Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press). For Jameson, postmodernism is a form of mass-popular culture driven by capitalism that also obliges us to consume.

 

[e] See aphorism 638, in Section 9 of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. 

Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul-Han 1: We Are All Tourists Now

 

In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est

 

 

I.

 

As Jarvis Cocker correctly observed back in 1995: Everybody hates a tourist [a]. 

 

However, according to German philosopher Byung Chul-Han, writing ten years later in his 2005 study Hyperkulturalität [b] - and in agreement with the British ethnologist Nigel Barley - we are all more or less tourists dressed in Hawaiian shirts today; not because of a universal desire to explore faraway lands and experience foreign cultures, but because there are now no faraway lands or foreign cultures in a globalised world [c].

All that remains post-globalisation is hyperculture, or what some refer to as supermodernity; an era of accelerated technological change that results in a transformation of time and space - and, indeed, our very humanity. 

 

Hyperculture goes way beyond anything foreseen by Zarathustra, though perhaps he glimpsed something of it when he flew into the future [d]. To understand it a little better, let's take a closer look at Byung Chul-Han's study ...  

 

 

II.

  

The Greeks, of course, had a profound understanding of culture in terms of harmonious manifoldness; that is to say, unity in diversity cultivated on the very soil of discord and difference. Culture, for the Greeks, is what Nietzsche regards as the giving of style to various forms of life (whereas barbarism - the very opposite of culture - is precisely a "lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles" [e]).  

 

Byung Chul-Han also returns to the ancient Greeks on the question of culture. His reading, however, is informed by Hegel rather than Nietzsche, although in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), the former also speaks of the genesis of Greek culture in terms of heterogeneity and otherness in need of being overcome. 

 

In other words, whilst Greece was born of an original chaos of peoples, it was only via a long process of discipline and breeding that the true spirit of Greece could unfold. 

 

But whilst Hegel "tries to do justice to the fact" [3] that heterogeneity is an elementary aspect of the Greek character, once they have forged a European identity he stresses the importance of belonging to a happy home in which there is no longer any desire for that which is outside or alien; the foreign is now dismissed and it's all about family and fatherland.

 

This might have some negative consequences - such as being unable to see beyond one's own position or hear strange sounds - but, as Herder argues, it is precisely this myopia and deafness that allows for a state of cheerful self-contentment: "'National happiness' emerges because the 'soul' forgets the 'manifold dispositions' that dwell within it and elevates a part of itself to the status of the whole" [5].   

 

This type of happiness is unknown or of little interest to tourists in Hawaiian shirts. For they lack style, that is to say, lack the self-discipline needed for culture in the old sense characterised by closing one's eyes and one's ears to certain sights and sounds in order to see what is near to hand and hear the song of one's own soul. 

 

Han writes:

 

"Their happiness is of an altogether different kind; it is a happiness that emerges from an abolition of facticity, a removal of the attachment to the 'here', the site. In their case, the foreign is not 'sickness'. It is something new to be appropriated. The tourists in Hawaiian shirts inhabit a world that unbounds itself, a hypermarket of culture, a hyperspace of possibilities." [5-6]

 

Thus, these tourists in a hypercultural reality - which some, like Ted Nelson, term Xanadu - are just as content as natives living in a spiritual homeland bound by borders and rooted in bio-terrestrial reality (blood and soil), and they are certainly freer in many regards.  

 

 

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that we were promised by the globalists that new modes of transport and new communications technology would open up the world and expand our horizons. But globalisation has shrunk cultural space and condensed everything:

 

"Heterogeneous cultural contents are pushed together side by side. Cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other. This unbounding also applies to time. Not only different sites but also different time frames are de-distanced [...] Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture." [9]

 

Again, some seem perfectly okay with this (although their happiness is reminiscent of that experienced by Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, which he describes as the happiness of a flea). Others, however, are not so pleased and feel obliged to offer resistance:

"There are many for whom [hyperculture] means the trauma of loss. Re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world. Thus, hypercultural de-siting will have to confront a fundamentalism of sites." [10]

That doesn't sound great. Deleuze and Guattari, who famously discuss all this in terms of de- and reterritorialization, warn of the dangers of attempting to recodify the world and form neo-territorialities based upon past ideals and the invention of new falsehoods. Ultimately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, "artificial, residual, archaic" [f] and, at worst, prone to quickly becoming fascistic.   

But I'm not sure how much we need to worry: mythical time (in which everything and everyone has a fixed place) is surely over. And so too is (linear) historical time. We are left, then, like it or not, living in this time; the time characterised by Vilém Flusser as that of the bit (rather than the image or the book):

 

"It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an 'atom-like' 'universe of bits', a 'mosaic universe' in which possibilities 'buzz' like points, or 'sprinkle' like 'grains', as 'discrete sensations' [...] 

      In this 'universe of points' [...] Dasein is surrounded by freely hovering possibilities. In this way, the 'universe of points' promises greater freedom. After all, the future is 'everywhere' that I 'turn to'." [12]

 

Heidegger might not like it - may think it compromises authenticity, dis-inherits Dasein, and produces a dictatorship of the They - but  I have to admit, I rather like the sound of this space-time that is more vortex than void, particularly as it allows also for increasing interconnectedness (with others and with things), expanding the future by creating an abundance of relations and possibilities. 

 

Whether this is driven by Eros, or a more perverse inclination, is debatable. But it's certain that even though hyperculture may help to bring about new forms and possibilities of being, Heidegger would not be persuaded to consider the upside of life today: "Faced with a colourful patchwork society, he would invoke the 'we' of a community of fate." [14]       

 

Ultimately, Heidegger is interested in dwelling, not travel and tourism. And he would fail to see that hyperculture is not merely universal monoculture. Sure, you can buy a Big Mac anywhere in the world - but it's fusion food that really defines what's going on today: 

 

"This hypercuisine does not level the diversity of eating cultures. It does not just blindly throw everything into one pot. Rather, it thrives on the differences. This allows it to create a diversity that would not be possible on the basis of preserving the purity of local food cultures. Globalization and diversity are not mutually exclusive." [16] [g]

 

 

IV.

 

As might be clear, devising a (non-essentialist) model of contemporary culture that is able to capture the dynamism of what's unfolding today isn't easy. And to be fair, Byung-Chul Han does a pretty good job. 

 

One understands from reading his essay how hyperculture is detached from any origin and brings heterogeneous elements together in such a manner that ideas of near and far, indigenous and foreign, become untenable; how culture is now boundless and unrestricted and we are all tourists within it. Not so much nowhere, as prepared to bid farewell to a here "that used to give Being its auratic depth, or rather the semblance of an aura" [34].           

 

We might also describe this culture as rhizomatic in nature - and Han credits Deleuze and Guattari for developing a concept in their work which "proves suitable for the description of certain aspects of hyperculture" [27]. He also summarises it for readers unfamiliar with the idea:

 

"The 'rhizome' denotes a non-centred plurality that cannot be subjected to any comprehensive order [...] Thus, a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogeneous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of constant 'becoming'. The rhizomatic space is a space not of 'negotiation' but of transformation [...] Rhizomatic distribution, even dispersal, de-substantializes and de-internalizes culture and thereby turns it into hyperculture." [27-28]    

 

We can contrast this with an arboreal model of culture with its deep roots and branches. Further - and finally - rhizomatic hyperculture is not one of inwardness or remembrance. It has, if you like, no soul; or, to use Benjamin's favoured term, no aura - "the resplendence and radiance of a specific 'here and now' that cannot be repeated there [34]. 

           

Still, as Han notes, there's no need to lament de-auratization in terms exclusively of loss (such as loss of origin, loss of essence, loss of authenticity, or even loss of Being as Heidegger would have it). Maybe - just maybe - something good will come of all this; "another reality, which shines in the absence of the auratic" [36].

 

The question is: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later" [37], will we have gained more than we lose? 

 

To find out how Byung-Chul Han answers, readers are invited to click here for part two of this post.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Pulp, 'Common People', single release from the album Different Class (Island, 1995). 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, (Merve Verlag, 2005) This text has now been pulished in an English translation by Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022) and page references given above refer to this edition of the work, rather than the German original. 

[c] Just to clarify at the outset: when Byung-Chul Han speaks of a hypercultural tourist, he does not necessarily mean someone who is always jet-setting or globetrotting: such a person is already a tourist when at home; there is no here or there or any final destination to arrive at. 

[d] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Land of Culture'. 

      Han credits Nietzsche with being "one of the few thinkers capable of looking far ahead, of resonating with vibrations that came from the future" [31]. Indeed, I might be being unfair to Zarathustra in suggesting that the idea of hyperculture was beyond his ability to conceive. Perhaps the thing that ultimately lets Nietzsche down is his insistent aestheticism, which "tends towards a re-teleologization, a re-theologization, of culture" [33].  

[e] Nietzsche, 'David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). p. 6. 

[f] Gilles Deleuze and Félix, Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257. 

[g] Interestingly, it's not just Heidegger who has an issue here. As Han reminds us: "Out of a fear of diversity, Plato already condemned the use of spices and the manifold dishes of Sicilian cuisine." [17] Amusingly, the attempt to maintain cultural purity and defend national cuisine always leaves one with egg on face. 

The First Rule of Chinese Fight Club: the Authorities Always Win!

Trust me. Everything's gonna be fine.

Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999) 

 

 

I. 

 

One has many good reasons to despise the Chinese Communist Party: for what they did to sparrows, for example, during the Four Pests campaign; for the mindless destruction of the four olds during the Cultural Revolution; and for the misery they have inflicted on the entire world thanks to the Wuhan coronavirus.

 

But now there's a new reason to hate the CCP: for what they have done to the ending of David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), one of my favourite films ...

 

 

II. 

 

Although recently authorising the movie's availability on the streaming platform Tencent Video, the censor-morons of the CCP just couldn't allow it to pass without imposing their own brutal edit.

 

Thus, whilst the original film closes with a strangely touching scene in which the unnamed narrator-protagonist (played by Edward Norton) holds hands with Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) and watches as the world of financial services comes tumbling down in an explosive finale courtesy of Project Mayhem, the new Chinese version cuts this scene entirely and replaces it with a black screen upon which a caption reads:

 

The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding. 

 

It is also revealed that Norton's schizophrenic character was sent to a lunatic asylum for psychological treatment. 

 

This is so ridiculous: we are now living in a world in which the defenders of the banks and credit card companies are the Chinese Communist Party ...! One is tempted to remind them of Chairman Mao's famous line oft-repeated by members of the revolutionary Red Guard:

 

Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: It is right to rebel.

Anyway, for those who would like to be reminded of - or perhaps watch for the first time - the original ending of Fight Club in all its terrible beauty and dark humour, click here.  

This post is in memory of Robert Paulson. 

 

 

Update: 07-02-22: It seems that the original ending to Fight Club has been restored in China. I doubt this was due to the above post, but as a friend of mine joked: TTA 1 CCP 0.

The Best Things in Life Are Dirty: Reflections on Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgie de la boue

Malcolm McLaren and friends in a photo taken outside 

Nostalgia of Mud by Neil MacKenzie Matthews (1982)

 

 

 

I. 

 

The phrase nostalgie de la boue was coined in 1855 by the French playwright Émile Augier [1]. 

 

It refers to a decadent attraction to primitive culture or a yearning for some form of debased experience outside of what is regarded as socially and morally acceptable according to the bourgeois norms and conventions of European civilisation [2].     

 

One might even think of it in terms of Freud's death drive; i.e., as a desire on the part of complex life to revert to an earlier stage of evolution that allows one to contentedly wallow in a primordial mud pool (though when Augier used the phase he was thinking of the desire to return to humble social origins, rather than the origins of life [3]). 

 

For me, the phrase nostalgie de la boue has a further resonance, however; one that is rooted in the music and fashion of the early-mid 1980s - a time of buffalo gals, b-boys, hobo-punks, and Zulus on a time bomb ...

 

 

II.

 

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their new (short-lived) West End shop in March 1982. Located at 5, St. Christopher's Place, it was spitting distance from Selfridges (but a long way from King's Road). 

 

Ben Westwood recalls:

 

"The shop front was covered by a 3-D relief of the map of the world made out of plaster and coloured mud brown. The interior featured the cave-like look of an archaeological dig. Scaffolding surrounded the walls, brown tarpaulin was stretched across the ceiling and a central pillar (or stalagmite) rose out of a bubbling pool of oily liquid." [4]

 

What Ben doesn't offer is an explanation for the name of the shop - Nostalgia of Mud - except to say that this was also the name of Vivienne and Malcolm's inspired Worlds End collection for A/W 1983 [5]. 

 

Keen-eyed readers will immediately notice the unusual translation of the original French phrase discussed above; nostalgia of mud, rather than the more standard nostalgia for mud. 

 

I don't know why this was so: I doubt that Malcolm wished to assign agency to the mud, as if it were the earth itself yearning for something. Probably he just mistranslated or misremembered the phrase. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - and, to be honest, I rather like the idiosyncratic reworking of nostalgie de la boue. 

 

As to when McLaren first heard the phrase, or from where he took it, again, I don't know ... 

 

Paul Gorman reminds us in his biography of McLaren, that it can be found in Tom Wolfe's famous essay 'Radical Chic' (1970), where it is used to mock those rich white liberals who host fundraising parties for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and thus seemingly endorse a brand of militant radicalism that would violently drag them from their own elevated social position [6].  

 

But I'm not convinced that McLaren took the phrase from Wolfe. And even if he did, he means something very different from what the American author means by it, giving the term mud a wholly positive new interpretation [7]. 

 

Anyway, let's close by giving the last word to Malcolm himself: 

 

"I wanted the shop to look permanently closed down, making it appear as if we were digging up the place to find the London that lay under the pavements and eventually I found that all that lay under there was mud." [8]

 

        

viviennewestwood.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Émile Augier, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Act I, Scene I. 

      Interestingly, however, as Rosalind Krauss points out, the expression nostalgie de la boue "is not in fact idiomatic French; indeed, it is not part of spoken French usage at all, being instead a purely Anglophonic invocation of the English notion of slumming transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase". See her essay 'Nostalgie de la Boue', in October, Vol. 56, (The MIT Press, Spring, 1991), pp. 111-120. The line quoted is on p. 112.

 

[2] Sir Clifford Chatterley famously accuses his wife of being "'one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue'" after she confesses her affair with the gamekeeper. Suddenly seeing himself as the embodiment of moral goodness, Clifford regards Connie and Mellors as "the incarnation of mud, of evil". 

      See Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 296.

 

[3] In Act I, Scene I of Le Mariage d'Olympe, Augier wrote: "Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu’il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner." We might trans-paraphrase this as: Put a duck rocker amongst clean-cut new romantics, and you'll see that he soon longs for a muddy hole that he can retreat to. 

 

[4] Ben Westwood writing in a post entitled 'Nostalgia of Mud' on the World's End blog (20 Feb 2014): click here. Note I have very slightly modified the text. 

      

[5] Rather than try to describe this collection, I encourage readers to watch a ten minute video posted by Ben Westwood on YouTube, which affords a glimpse of the magical scenes that unfolded on the catwalk in the Pillar Hall (Olympia), on 24 March, 1982: click here. 

 

[6] Tom Wolfe's essay, 'Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's', originally appeared in New York magazine (June 8, 1970): click here to read online. Paul Gorman mentions it in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 496. 

      For my take on the question of radical chic - with reference to the case of AOC - click here.  

 

[7] As I wrote in an earlier post, for McLaren, the term mud implied more than merely low-life experience or primitive culture. It was a glorious synonym for authenticity, something that he has always striven for in his work; the true look of music and the real sound of fashion (even though he surely knew, as a reader of Wilde, that realism is just a pose and authenticity merely another form of fabricated reality or myth).  

      Critics of McLaren will doubtless argue at this point that he is another prime example of the sort of person Wolfe is satirising; someone who exploits the experiences and appropriates the cultural cachet of those he liked to call the dispossessed; someone claiming to be nostalgic for mud, whilst rarely getting their own hands dirty in the process of making cash from chaos. For me, however, there's a big difference between Malcolm and someone like Leonard Bernstein.     

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 497.

 

        

I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know About Her: She Sherriff (the First Buffalo Gal)

Pip Gillard - aka She Sherriff (1981)

Photo by Janette Beckman / Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals - a track which was as seminal for a generation of duck rockers and hip hoppers as Anarchy in the UK had been for the generation of punk rockers who preceded them.  

 

However, I'd like to speak here of someone who anticipates the era of scratchin' and square dancing and can justifiably lay claim to being the first buffalo gal: Pip Gillard, who some readers may vaguely (perhaps fondly) remember as She Sherriff ...

 

 

II. 

 

By the beginning of 1982, Malcolm was bored to death managing Bow Wow Wow: we might say that he didn't want Candy, but was, rather, nostalgic for mud; i.e. interested in down and dirty characters, rather than those who are so fine they can't be beat; hobos and hillbillies, rather than heroes and hearthrobs ...  

 

For McLaren, the term mud implied more than merely low-life experience or primitive culture. It was a glorious synonym for authenticity, something that he has always striven for in his work; the true look of music and the real sound of fashion. 

 

McLaren now located this authenticity in the folk music and folk dance of peoples around the word - particularly the sounds and rhythms that came out of Africa, a continent which he romanticised like many European artists before him, as a place of magical paganism and noble savagery. 

 

He identified something of the same jungle spirit in rock 'n' roll; at least in the very early days, before Elvis joined the US Army. And, more surprisingly perhaps, he was excited by what he discovered in them thar hills of the Appalachian Mountains, where people still danced barefoot to the sound of a fiddle and swigged moonshine straight from the jug.

 

If only, mused McLaren, he could find a new Skeeter Davis capable of singing country style with a pop sensibility ... And so, step forward Pip Gillard, who would be signed to Charisma Records [1] under the name of She Sherriff and release her first (and last) single on the label in 1982: a cover version of the country classic I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know (About Him).           

 

Unfortunately, McLaren's first attempt to produce a more authentic sound by reinventing "the big-selling but middle-aged country-and-western genre for a young audience" [2], was not a huge success. For despite "a great deal of media interest, promo photos by The Face photographer Janette Beckman and a Charisma-funded video, She Sherriff failed to deliver on the promise" [3].

 

The single didn't chart and She Sherriff was swiftly dropped by Charisma. If not exactly run out of town, then she was also relegated to that dark corner of popular music history reserved for those who don't even become one hit wonders [4].    

 

 

III. 

 

I suppose, looking back, the problem was not only a poor choice of song, but the fact that for all the stylishness of her proto-buffalo gal image and the mud applied to her limbs, Pip Gillard just didn't convince or really look the part; she was just too fresh-faced - or too pale-faced, if you like. 

 

And posing her with a rocking horse on the record sleeve - was that your idea Nick? - served only to reinforce the idea that this pretty young thing with a red ribbon in her hair would never be able to wrestle a steer, or ride a bucking bronco.     

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Tony Stratton-Smith's small independent record label, Charisma, was founded in 1969 and became home to Genesis and other prog-rock favourites. In 1981, the managing director, Steve Weltman, newly arrived from RCA, was keen to shake things up and so signed McLaren to make his own album (for which he was given an initial advance of £45,000) and advise on new acts and musical trends in an unofficial capacity.

  

[2] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 503. 

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Note that Pip Gillard did release another single - 'Why Can't You Love Me?' - under her own name, in 1984 on +1 Records. She has also released a track in Japan, as Pippa Gee, called 'Every Time You Touch Me' (Sony, 1983): click here. The Japanese version of this song - 'Suteki My Boy' - was used in a drink commercial.  

 

Play: She Sherriff, 'I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know About Him', (Charisma Records, 1982): click here. 

Play: Skeeter Davis, performing 'I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know' on the Pet Milk Grand Ole Opry Show in 1961: click here. This song, written by Cecil Null, had been a number 1 country hit for Skeeter and Betty Jack Davis (known as the Davis Sisters) in 1953.

For a related post to this one on Buffalo Gals, click here. 

 

And, finally, for a post in which I discuss another track from McLaren's Duck Rock album - 'Double Dutch' - from the inside perspective of someone who worked in the press office at Charisma Records at the time, click here.