Neoliberal Culture

Jim McGuigan

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137466464
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Sociologie

Neoliberal Culture presents a critical analysis of the impact of the global free-market - the hegemony of which has been described elsewhere by the author as 'a short counter-revolution' - on the arts, media and everyday life since the 1970s.

Part I

Capitalist Cool

2

Coolness and Precarious Labour

Introduction

Introducing a volume of papers from a conference held at the Free University in Berlin during November 2010 and gathered together under the title of The Cultural Career of Coolness, Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit say:

Cool is an American (English) word that has been integrated into the vocabulary of many languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term ‘cool’? When has coolness come to be associated with contemporary self-fashioning?¹

They proceed to itemise the intrinsic features of ‘coolness’ from their point of view: ‘a metaphorical term for affect control’; signifying ‘individual, ethnic, and national difference’; ‘carries undertones of ambivalence’; ‘a character trait portrayed as personal strength’; ‘semantics and rhetorics of coolness hybridize distinct cultural traditions of affect control’.²

There is nothing wrong with defining coolness as discursive practice and affective code, as these authors do, though there is more to it than discourse. We should go further here by connecting discourse to social practice and, specifically, explore the link between coolness and working life under neoliberal conditions, which may be illuminated by my own cool capitalism thesis, which was stated previously at book length.³ In this chapter, the thesis is presented in summary form.

Signs and dispositions of disaffection are typically incorporated into the mainstream of mass-popular culture today and are thereby rendered neutral in effect, at the very least diminishing their subversive force. This cool capitalism thesis is not just a commentary upon consumerism. The proposition about a typical stance in the social world also applies to the sphere of production and routine experiences of working life, most notably, for our purposes, in everyday patterns of insecure employment in, for instance, the ‘creative’ occupations of the culture industry. As already noted, a cool way of life that is particularly evident in affluent countries is, on the surface, attractive to young people, but, at the same time, it may be an insecure and anxiety-ridden existence.

A key social and political issue now is the precariousness of labour across different occupational levels in diverse places, not only at the lower reaches of, say, stitching together and assembling commodities in pitifully poor conditions but also, and quite possibly more so, higher up the hierarchy of ‘creative’ tasks such as design and marketing commodities in relatively privileged locations. Precariousness or ‘precarity’, after the French word precarite, is a general feature of everyday life in today’s rapidly changing and risky world. In this chapter, however, we focus upon labour conditions in the ‘creative’ employment of the professional-managerial class,⁴ occupations that are concentrated typically, but not exclusively, in wealthier regions such as North America and Western Europe. In the next chapter, the sweated labour conditions endured by a multitude of workers across the globe are also addressed in relation to the cool culture of neoliberal capitalism. Such jobs are concentrated to the greatest extent in still poor, albeit ‘developing’, BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and several smaller countries. In spite of some recent improvements due to public criticism, campaigning and industrial action, labouring for transnational capital in China and India, most notably, is not only poorly rewarded by international standards but often unhealthy and unsafe as well.

Legitimisation

Sociologically, the cool capitalism thesis addresses the problem of legitimisation. For Max Weber, legitimate exercise of power relied on some mode of political authority, whether (mainly in the past) traditional or charismatic, or (typically in modern circumstances) on rational-legal grounds.⁵ Like other classical social theorists, Weber was concerned very broadly with the transition from tradition to modernity. Later, somewhat differently, Antonio Gramsci made a major contribution to our understanding of hegemonic leadership of the nation-state, placing particular emphasis on the argument that political power is, amongst other determining forces, supported by cultural power.⁶ In his native Italy, this was focused upon the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the problem of putting together a counter-hegemonic bid for socialist leadership of the state. For Gramsci, the struggle for leadership in society involved the formation of a power bloc which, in effect, represented a class alliance; so, it was underpinned by the balance of socio-economic relations.

The concept of hegemony became very fashionable in cultural analysis during the 1980s, the highpoint of so-called ‘British’ cultural studies, but, unfortunately, it came to be used widely in a peculiarly superficial manner to make sense of quite trivial matters of meaning and, exaggeratedly, of symbolic resistance and contestation.⁷ And, in this academic tendency, the political economy of hegemony was usually sidelined, thereby losing sight of the complexity of Gramsci’s thinking and the revolutionary purpose of his prison writings at Mussolini’s pleasure. The anti-economism of that excessively culturalist tendency did, however, belatedly come to recognise the kind of economic transformation that neoliberalism was bringing about coincidentally with the collapse of European communism, named by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques ‘New Times’,⁸ the theoretical analysis of which actually proved, in practice, to be a bridge to the ‘Third Way’ politics of New Labour in Britain.

The cool capitalism thesis differs from Weberian political legitimacy theory, and also the Gramscian conception of class struggle over hegemony and social reproduction within a nation-state formation, in that it is concerned with the popular legitimisation of a specific economic system which holds sway across the globe today, to wit, neoliberal capitalism.⁹ It must be acknowledged that capitalism is not just one undifferentiated form of civilisation. It is a variable phenomenon, taking different manifestations over time and even contemporaneously to some extent, as the distinction between, say, German and American capitalism might attest. Still, however, present-day capitalist dynamics in general are excessively market-oriented and predominantly transnational, salient features of globalised neoliberal hegemony.

As a necessary background, it is useful to recall the three broad historical phases of capitalist hegemony over the past two centuries that are germane to the cool capitalism thesis: liberal, organised and neoliberal. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello quite rightly argue, capitalism always needs to be justified.¹⁰ The Weberian justification for the earlier phase of liberal capitalism referred to religion, specifically the Puritan ethic of hard work and deferred gratification. When capitalism got into difficulties, however, as it did in the mid-twentieth century, critique, at that time the socialist critique, became another source of justification and, indeed, renewal. It was not just that socialists had criticisms to make of capitalism and could point with plenty of evidence to the failings of liberal or, as we might say now, unregulated capitalism; some also pointed optimistically to ‘actually existing socialism’, to cite a well-worn phrase, the communist Utopia apparently under construction in the Soviet Union and, subsequently, in satellite states and China. A second phase of this broad scheme of development, the organised phase, gelled in the mid-twentieth century. A notable feature of Western organised capitalism until the late twentieth century turned out to be the incorporation of socialistic elements: economic planning by the state, strong labour representation and rewards, welfare states, national health services and the like – the very supports that have been steadily taken away in recent decades.

The economic crises of the 1970s and the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ from the late 1980s, plus the Chinese turn onto ‘the capitalist road’, to cut a long story short, all contributed to the unravelling of organised capitalism and facilitated the growing hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. It was not only that communism caved in, but also that social democracy was eclipsed once the agencies of capitalist power no longer feared a more serious threat from oppositional politics which had to be fended off with popular concessions to an organised working class.

How does the current phase of neoliberal capitalism, with which we are so familiar that it seems natural rather than socially and historically constructed, justify itself? And, indeed, how did it continue to be justified in the wake of the systemic crisis of global capitalism from 2007 and 2008 resulting from the machinations of high finance and the virtualisation of assets? That is, for the moment at least, to leave aside the greater problem: the urgent ecological crisis also deriving largely from unrestrained capitalism with its irresponsible accumulation strategy and immoderate growth orientation.¹¹

Most evidently, neoliberal capitalism is justified by its apparent capacity to deliver the goods, in more ways than one, conveniently and cheaply to comparatively affluent subjects and to frame the aspirations of the poor. The hegemony of neoliberalism is quite definitely obtained not only, in the Gramscian sense, at the philosophical level, by educated appreciation of the proven truths of neo-classical and ‘free-market’ economics. It is also obtained – and yet more significantly – at the popular level by the seductive symbols and experiences of everyday life, which are capable of absorbing ostensibly rebellious or non-conformist sentiments. The cool capitalism thesis, then, is an attempt to explain the apparent popularity, that is, the popular legitimisation of neoliberal capitalism even amongst those who are disadvantaged by such an exploitative and unequal set-up.

Cool capitalism

As proposed in the earlier book, the basic definition of cool capitalism is the incorporation of disaffection into capitalism itself.¹² It may be viewed, in Goffman’s sense, as a ‘front region’¹³ that is seductively tasteful in its appeal to populations at large, both the affluent and, indeed, the aspirant poor. There is, however, a ‘back region’, rather like an industrialised kitchen with dirty secrets that do not meet health and safety standards. A similar back region may have been experienced directly by customers themselves in their own place of work as well as glimpsed occasionally through the restaurant’s kitchen door when left ajar. In consequence, the fare on offer may be called into question by troubled voices. As in any good restaurant, the maitre d’ must somehow cool out the customers, who might otherwise take their custom elsewhere. Perhaps it is ‘cool’ to have a filthy kitchen, and, in any event, you have to smash eggs in order to make an omelette; and sometimes they spill onto the floor where the rats hang out.

It is almost unnecessary to point out how ubiquitously the word ‘cool’ is used presently around the world, and not only in English; or, just as important, how widely embedded is the sensibility associated with that term, whether the word is actually used or not. It is everywhere. Coolness is not some marginal or dissident trend. It is at the heart of mainstream culture, insofar as we can speak at all of such a phenomenon.

In Cool Capitalism, several examples of present-day coolness are given, particularly in commerce. The genealogy of the word and the discourses through which it has passed are also traced. ‘Cool’ derives from West African itutu, the core meaning of which refers to composure in the heat of battle. Although itutu was closely associated with masculinity in origin, it may not have been exclusively so back in Africa, and, in any case, it is not exclusively so today. The American art historian Robert Farris Thompson has documented the aesthetics of itutu in the West and South of Africa, its passage to the Americas with the slave trade, and the formation of a cool culture of disaffection on the margins of US society.¹⁴ Generally speaking, coolness became a personal stance, mode of deportment and argot, associated with dignity under pressure in oppressive circumstances. It is a distinctive feature of ‘Black Atlantic’¹⁵ culture, and it also became extremely prominent and attractive to others, including whites, especially through mid-twentieth-century jazz culture.¹⁶ As Ted Giola has noted, the trumpeter Miles Davis, nicknamed ‘the Prince of Darkness’, epitomised cool with his abrasive attitude towards the audience, particularly the white audience, and his generally detached and even foreboding presence on stage. The 1954 release of the long-playing record Birth of the Cool was pivotal to the spread of studied disaffection amongst hipsters, both black and white.¹⁷

Although coolness is difficult to pin down – and deliberately so – Pountain and Robins have, nevertheless, sought to identify three essential traits of the cool persona: narcissism, ironic detachment and hedonism.¹⁸ It is easy enough to identify cool subcultures over the years that are either indirectly or directly related to black culture, from, say, Parisian existentialism to hip-hop culture. Very recently, an article in a philosophy magazine that was unusually on sale on the mass market celebrated coolness as a ‘fusion of submission and subversion’. From this point of view, the cool person, albeit perpetually alienated, conducts a creative balancing act. The would-be philosopher in question obviously thinks coolness is still cool. I don’t. Some black American commentators don’t either.

Social psychologists Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson remarked several years ago in their study of black masculinity in urban locales: ‘coolness may be a survival strategy that has cost the black male – and society – an enormous price’.¹⁹ While it represents black identity and pride in the ghetto, such ‘compulsive masculinity’ in that context is also seriously damaging to both women and men, not to mention the druggy lifestyle, disorganised sociality and violent criminality associated with it – which is by no means confined to working-class black males in the USA.

Cool today is not only a...