|
18.5.03
I recently had a conversation where
someone denounced the BBC for ideological bias; he referred
to a remark made by George Orwell. I don't like it when
everything is reduced to politics, because I don't believe
it is the defining set of ideas by which to understand
life, the universe and eveything. It's not that I don't
understand this kind of sociological politico-speak -
I studied Marx many years ago and more recently read,
for example, Uncritical
Theory by Christopher Norris. The latter lays into
Baudrillard and his followers for attempting to say, famously,
"the Gulf War never happened" (the first one).
Norris thinks that's a dangerously flawed thing to say,
and proceeds to analyse the war and the media coverage
from a post-Marxist perspective. Academia is often like
that: the ghost of Marx is still rattling around the seminar
rooms, ie his theory of dialectical materialism is often
taken as the basis for critical argument, as a counterpoint
to bourgoise values. In other words, the post-Marxist
trajectory is a right on way to proceed, like you're the
academic equivalent of Ben Elton. Well, in his early days.
Before he started writing novels. And became extremely
wealthy.
The critical position is often construed
as vaguely post-Marxist; Norris's book is a good example.
He believes it is the job of the academic to
offer a critique of society - in which I agree - but he
doesn't seem to realise there are other kinds of critique
beyond the Karl Marx fan club. In his mind, the two things
are the same. It's a remarkable fact that in the above
book, he never once questions this.
Marxist analysis and so called politics
are based on a material comprehension of life (hence the
term dialectical materialism: 'go figure', as they say
in the US). I suggest there's more to life the universe
and everything than a scarce set of resources unequally
distributed, creating the owners and workers in relation
to the means of production. It's often seen as oh-so-sophisticated
to think like this, hence the person's remark about the
BBC and George Orwell.
What kind of bias is the BBC supposed
to have? Well it's not a right-on street level kind of
thing: it is (gasp) m.i.d.d.l.e
.c.l.a.s.s!
And I'm sure the recent programme describing the
100 best loved books will be, at some point, criticised
in that way.
Now, there is such a thing as psychology,
and the reality of interior imaginative life. All culture,
you could say, is a product of and investigation into
the latter. Psychologist DW
Winnicott argued that culture is like a psychological
transitional object. That is, it functions as an intermediary
space between the individual and wider society, and the
reason why it's fun to compile top 100 book lists etc.
is because we are sharing our thoughts and feelings with
other people in a kind of communal psychic space. Gestalt
theorist Fritz
Perls said a similar thing, that culture and creativity
mediate between the person and reality. At the end of
his
book, film maker Martin Scorcese describes movies
as a shared cultural space, and this is the reason for
his lifelong commitment to film. It's communal, and it's
fun. And Freud? Well good old Sigmund liked to reduce
culture to sublimated sexuality. Which, if you think about
it, makes it more interesting, not less. Imagine
the interpretation you could make as you enjoy listening
to cultural critics on TV, maybe Mark
Lawson's programme. Then again if it's Germaine Greer
you're listening to, maybe not.
Finally, good old Abraham Maslow, post-60s
Abe, Esalen-related Abe, proposed his still quoted theory
of the
hierarchy of needs. Cultural and imaginative life
takes place somewhere about halfway up the pyramid. It's
only relevant if you have the leisure and freedom to enjoy
it. If you are subjected to material stricture and you
are mostly occupied with a grim struggle for economic
survival, the late night wittering of Mark Lawson and
co. might not appeal. That's because your life is functioning
at the lower levels of the pyramid, attending to basic
needs, and you simply don't have the energy or inclination
to visit the library, read the latest Nick Hornby or Katherine
Cookson (!), and discuss it with others. If we regard
politics as materially related, then the hierarchy of
needs (which is an enduringly useful model) has political
implications. 'It's all very well talking about self realisation,
but I've got children to feed, the DSS to contend with...'
etc.
But - and this a big
but - the political/material analysis does not mean the
comfortable imaginative and material life is therefore
redundant. George Orwell experienced life as a homeless
person on the streets, and concluded that he had an advantage
because he could spend his time in public libraries and
thus avoid the more harsh and corrosive experience of
the public wayfare. The reverse is equally true, as Dickens
used to say, that imaginative experience is a release
and a source of nourishment, when you have to endure grim
economic (or educational) circumstances. Politics, in
other words, does not obliterate or make redundant the
pleasures of curling up with a good book. That remarkable
poet Wilfred Owen even managed to create literature,
when politics had gone mad and assumed the form of warfare.
Strange
Meeting is a poem that I have returned to periodically,
in my post A-level days. It's an enormously powerful and
haunting testimony to the horrors of warfare, the stupidity
of incompetent politicians, the struggling poetic temperament
in the worst possible conditions (Apocalypse Now,
eat your heart out) and, most importantly, the poem implies
that beyond the incomprehensible raging of international
arguments, we are all - geddit? - the same human beings.
That's what art/literature can do. Wilfred Owen rocks.
Cultural life is important. Poet Robert
Bly described his art as virile rather than feeble or
effeminate - admittedly, in a back-to-the-woods, he-man
kind of way - but look at Wilfred Owen: writing heart-breakingly
powerful words on the front lines of horror. And he's
not someone you could call a pussy. I read somewhere that
there's a Mayan word yacunah which means "suffering:
the inescapable poignancy of existence." Without
getting into angst, Buddhism or depressive gloom, the
equation existence + suffering = life is a profound sentiment,
based on the fact that you're all gonna die! Hehe!
Literature can encapsulate this kind of thing because
it is not so much/necessarily 'emotion recollected in
tranquility' (Wordsworth), as feeling-thought conveyed
or transmitted through literary symbolism. By which I
mean, not the fact that you can use metaphor etc. ie various
literary devices, but the fact that words/literature/language
are themselves symbolic. You've got stuff out there, and
you've got the way we describe it; the two things are
different, and the second of the two filters and expresses
the first and allows us to communicate as people. Literature
has an effect on consciousness; it can change the way
people think and feel. That's why books were banned in
1984, and in Umberto Eco's The Name of the
Rose, religious authority does the same thing.
So, politics and the BBC? Bougoise bias?
I don't agree. Whenever I switch on the TV I see these
5 Go Mad in Ibiza programmes (aka the "uncovered"
drinking and sexual antics of British yoof), and the programmes
about "celebrity get me out of here" or 5 Dumb
People Locked Up In A House....etc.
I enjoy programmes that support cultural
interests. As I've said before, politics
sucks.
|
