People get very passionate about cultural issues for reasons that are all tied up with their worldview, and therefore with their politics. In the current 'political season' in the US, we've seen the Republicans trying to isolate the Democrats (who have, at least during election season, to be seen reaching out to more conservative voters) by raising deliberately divisive 'culture wars' issues like gay marriage.
Now, although 'culture wars' may be a right wing weapon, it's not a right wing idea. In fact, the idea that everything is dialectical, that everything is ideological, that everything is political, even the personal, comes usually from the left. In fact, one of the 'culture wars' issues is that the right says it's bad to be 'partisan', while naturally continuing to be
extremely partisan themselves. Conservatives are like the guy who thinks that everyone has an accent... except him.
My whole outlook is based on the idea that there is no neutral ground, on questions of politics as on questions of culture. 'Commonsense' is not enough; we have to think things through issue by issue. I'm quite happy for everyone to agree to disagree. I'm ready to fight. A lot of what I write here in my 'journal' is political stuff in a culture wars sense. It's an editorial on a matter of public interest, whether it's the 'politics of authenticity' in what I call 'rockist' attitudes to music-making, or the 'politics' of what it means to dress in a deliberately silly way, or to be naked in public.
What I'm less sure about is this business of clusters. Do cultural attitudes cluster and bunch up the same way political attitudes are supposed to? It's one of the convenient fictions of representative democracy that people have linked, clustered views. For a start, the views linked up in a supposedly consistent political position are often contradictory. For all their apparent
hatred of 'mixed messages', Republicans are supposed to believe 'Thou shalt not kill', and to apply that to unborn babies, but
not to foreigners killed in wars or prisoners on death row. My suspicion is that these attitude clusters are not logical but
magnetic. In other words, someone self-identifies as a Republican because they share a couple of the necessary presuppositions, then sort of gravitates towards the whole stretchwrapped cluster of Republican attitudes as if drawn by a magnetic force. Consistency of identity is more important than consistency of reason. You buy the whole package because you like a couple of things in it, and it's a shrink-wrapped six pack.
Just as it's getting harder and harder to buy just one item in a supermarket (clingfilm or strechwrap around a cluster of products forces me to buy six of them instead), so it's getting harder and harder in politics to have a say on separate issues. You have to buy a cluster of them, often a self-contradictory cluster. You have to buy four years' worth of supplies when you only need something to see you through the week. When you buy a job lot, you don't get to switch brand until you've used it all up.
If choice-reducing clustering is getting bigger in shopping thanks to monopoly and hypertrophism, and in politics because of the failure of democracy to adopt things like proportional representation and continuous referenda, it's also growing popular amongst the market researchers who study the digital trails we leave when we shop. Thanks to computer tracking of our online buying behaviour, we're now often greeted in online stores with an authoritative-sounding recommendation about our own most subjective preferences: 'If you like
x, you'll also like
y!' because 'Customers who bought
x also bought
y'. At least at Amazon x and y don't come clingfilmed. We still have the choice
not to buy y. Which is just as well, because some of this 'clusterfuck' software is fucked. Go to
Musicplasma, for instance, and you'll see that Momus is clustered with Madonna and Beyonce Knowles!
It
is possible to make some predictions about choice
b based on information about choice
a. Yes, if you like the death penalty you'll probably buy pre-emptive war. Customers who bought abortion also bought gay marriage. Some things are bundled together for empirical reasons, some for strategic reasons; John Kerry is currently shrinkwrapping his more liberal instincts with some conservative rhetoric because he needs conservatively-minded voters -- and there are a lot of them in America -- to vote for him. Since we're still in the age of shrinkwrap -- since we don't yet have the kind of mature, flexible democracy where you can vote on every issue, and have the complexity of your personal views on every issue represented proportionally -- I'd ask you to vote for Kerry too.
(For those bored with cultural politics, here's some cultural fun instead:
snaps of my friends Mario and Jason, play rehearsals, and the
Pictoplasma party last night at the Cafe Moskau. Happy Halloween!)
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imomus's journal
