I’d like to add William Gibson’s “cyberpunk trilogy” [also known as "the Sprawl trilogy"]: Neuromancer [1984], Count Zero [1986], Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988], and his collection of short stories Burning Chrome [1986].

In these writings Gibson postulates a future in which social revolution has not happened and capital has become omnipresent. These are not his terms, but it is the background in which the stories take place. Neither utopian nor dystopian, Gibson’s stance seems more like that of an ambivalent liberal technophile who sees value in the intertwining dynamics of technology proliferation and capital accumulation, while deeply disturbed by their terrible social/economic/cultural costs.

Just as capital in the form of the individual capitalist gave way to the corporation, Gibson speculates on how capital could mutate again through the mediation of technology. The state as we know it is either non-existent, or has its functions recuperated in other forms. Conflict is displaced and dispersed due to ever-fragmenting subjectivity [also mediated by technology] which prevents people from being able to muster totalizing concepts such as “mode of production” or “class struggle”.

The cyberpunk trilogy helped generate much of the symbolism and cultural sensibility of the last couple of decades. More than many other sci-fi novels, they mainly succeed not in predicting the future [though they have provided some prescient insights] but in situating our present as history.

I suspect that there are multiple psycho-cultural correlations between someone’s way of life or approach to life (or ‘reality’) and having an affinity for strict literal narrative forms (whether literary or visual or musical), which one finds to be (comfortingly?) unambiguous and reinforce existing world-views (even if those world views are ‘subaltern’).

It should say: “There are also important questions of context, production and representation that come into play, and they are not always so easily resolved by stuffing them into pre-fabricated ideological boxes.”

This view is just as mechanical as the one you [rightfully] reject.

I happen to be a fan of the original Star Trek series. While there were glimpses of liberal sentiment, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it was fundamentally a narrative of benign colonialism. Let’s not even get into the oblique racial stereotyping [warlike Klingons are pretty dark-skinned, the nearly emotionless Spock has slanted...ears]. What I enjoyed was the character interaction and the adventure.

My point is that our desires are conflicted and this is no cause for shame. It’s just part of the experience of living in class society. Purity is no solution, rather we should take responsibility and be clear about our decisions. Culture should not be reduced to where it falls on some sort of political correctness meter with “reactionary” on one end and “revolutionary” on the other. Some of the best political culture attempts to struggle with ambiguity and complexity, and is often more interesting and thought-provoking than work that is explicitly progressive or radical, but lacking in nuance.

A political read of culture is not about looking for “the message” or “the line”. There are important questions of production and representation that come into play. This doesn’t mean that one can’t just sit back and enjoy the visceral experience of great music or a great movie. Aesthetic expression invokes heightened emotional responses, mainly pleasure, but it would be naive to forget that it also transmits ideology.

I would think a ‘real’ communist would remember that politics is about people, not dogma.

“I’m more interested in the overall quality rather than the ideological content.”

I have to admit a sympathy for this position, but it still fails to understand that aesthetic is a sort of content too. I would rather listen to Radiohead than Rage Against the Machine any day. Even though the latter was explicitly revolutionary, the former is more musically interesting. The music of Radiohead contains intimations of possibility and recombination, whereas the music of RATM is very focused and in a way, closed off from further development. Which then, is truly more radical?

It’s been my experience in general that the more deeply involved in radical politics people are, the more narrow-minded and hyper-critical they tend to be about culture. There’s seemingly a need to be more publicly critical about a cultural piece, a kind of critical one-upmanship. This is often accompanied by considerable joylessness, it seemed to me.

For instance, twice I’ve watched the movie Reds with communist friends who’ve sniffed something like “well, it was OK, but I wish they’d shown more Lenin and the revolution”. It’s a movie about John Reed, about the intersection of the personal and political in his life, fer cripes sakes. It’s not meant to be hagiography about the Bolsheviks.

I’ve met RCP’ers who just didn’t read fiction at all, unless the party recommended/sold it, in which case it’s “what did you think about XXX”? Cultural as political talking points.

Or when “The Lord of the Rings” movie came out, there were all kinds of people online debating whether Tolkien was a fascist or merely reactionary. No one wants to hear that Tolkien himself argued that the root of the tragedy in his story is the elves’ unwillingness to accept change, and hence create the magic rings that were their undoing.

As a kid I read and enjoyed all kinds of semi-reactionary stuff that I got something positive from; e.g. from Tolkien, a deeper appreciation for languages, history, geography, etc. I would never tell a kid, “oh, don’t read that, he’s against progress and spokesman for the decaying English middle-class”.

The Michael Moorcock essay I linked to above is a brilliant bit of criticism of the reactionary character of much of science fiction, although he seems to grudgingly admit that he enjoyed some stuff more than he ought to. While I enjoyed the essay and agree with much of it, I’ve reached the point where I enjoy culture largely for escapist reasons, where I basically want to turn off my critical side and enjoy the ride. If there’s progressive content (e.g. LeGuin) great. If not, oh well. I’m more interested in the overall quality rather than the ideological content.

So basically when I work with communist and radical people, I avoid talking about culture and stick to politics. This is a very un-Marxist position, a reject of ruthless criticism of all that is, but there it is. I know every cultural work has all kinds of explicit and implicit politics, but I’ll probably enjoy it more if I let the politics slide, and focus on what I find interesting about the work. This is the opposite of putting politics in command, which is why I said I would probably never be a ‘real’ communist.

“Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

How very radical of Le Guin.

The Old beat vs. the New beat, indeed.

In fact, there is much to learn broadly from artists and writers — from their work (and innovations) in culture, and from their work AS culture — quite apart from their short-term “usefulness” (as agitation, i.e. as “message delivery devices”).

And it is hard to distill what there is to learn, because it has so many dimensions: Sometimes it is the insights of the artist into people or events, sometimes it is questions raised that the people (or the communists) should be considering, sometimes it is criticisms of existing (or potential) communist movements that deserve to be explored, sometimes it is issues of form. Sometimes a work just gives insights into the thinking and inclination of the many people who are enthusiastic about it — whether or not, we embrace the work itself. (Fountainhead anyone?)

And, of course, the point of culture is not simply that we “learn” something.

I have tried to evaluate cultural work in terms of three things:
1) what is the intention of the artist
2) what is the actual content of the piece — textually speaking.
3) what is the objective impact of the piece on society (and on different groups of people)

These things are rather different. (For example: the film Apocalypse Now is the work of progressive artists who clearly intended to make a major anti war statement. The actual content of the film (the lessons drawn from Kurtz etc. the borrowing from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of darkness) goes far from progressive thought into philosophies and views that are often quite reactionary. As for the impact of this film socially, I won’t even attempt to sum that up.

When the film came out in early 1980s, there was in the Maoist press of that time (the Revolutionary Worker) an important break-through article that (for once) tried to deal with this major work with nuance and complexity — and actually grapple with the content of the “Heart of Darkness” etc.) For example, in the film there is a passing reference to the Vietcong in the film that stressed their iron will, but suggests that they willingly and cynically did atrocities — it illustrated the philosophy of this film (as intended), but injected a false picture of the politics of the liberation forces.

In discussions and debate among artists, the intention of the artists matters a lot — since part of what they are struggling for is to have progressive intentions correctly realized. And (i believe) in evaluating and making works overall, the objective impact of artistic works on society is the most important thing. And in dogmatic forms of communism, the textual read is often made the most important thing (i.e. works are evaluated by what they literally say, not how they are moving society….)

* * * * * *

In regard to “typical communist” politics…. there has long been a real pull toward narrowness.

Someone summed up some of the practice in the last decades this way:
1) If the artist was big-time, there was flattery, eagerness for endorsement and a lot of interest in gathering funds
2) If the artist was not known, there was a tendency to treat them mainly as potential organizers.
3) If the artist was a communist, they were often told to stop doing their art, and focus on the party’s needs of the moment.
4) Very little attention was given to the creation of high-quality creative art that served the people — very little literary criticism, little focus on films and film-making, no journals of radical art and debates, no new communist theoretical work on art (or critiques of the approaches of the past).

Obviously this is over-generalized (i.e. there are exceptions etc.) but it does point to some real problems.