Tribal Monday July 25, 2005
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
George Orwell, 1984
Remember when you were a teenager and ‘being individual’ was so desperately important? And what you did was adopt the musical and sartorial tastes of a group. Well maybe you didn’t, but I certainly did. The group contrasts against the values of adults and the general establishment, and I favoured the punk rock tribe. Then a few years later at university I looked at some books investigating youth culture, and felt uncomfortable. On the one hand I was still wearing a black leather jacket, and on the other hand I was an intelligent and enquiring person and recognised that the books made sense. Youth can be understood in predictable sociological terms so I was not as cool as I thought I was, when located in a larger perspective based on knowledge and learning. I recently bought a critical photography book which is typically academic, using the abstracted jargon and rhetorical/citation approach and in a subtle way, it continues the tribal trajectory of youth. It’s not as cool as these academics think it is.
Women in regularly close proximity tend to synchronise menstrual cycles. Two pendulums in the same room will eventually synchronise. London’s beautiful Millennium Bridge had to be closed, just after opening, because walkers synchronised their footsteps, with a dangerously accentuated impact. Tribal marketing begins at a psychological level by establishing an image or idea to which people aspire. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote about the mass unconscious of the general populace and how to manipulate it for marketing purposes. The brand is one of the dominating facts of fashionable life, based on commercial exploitation as discussed by Naomi Klein in her book No Logo. So-called celebrity culture is tied to this facile manipulation, where a personality becomes a desirable and marketable product. Those shiny people are famous for being famous, an artificial situation generated and maintained by the media. And as if that wasn’t enough television is now full of fame this, become a celebrity that nonsense. The Big Brother televisual experiment – quite interesting in the first series – spawned a new genre of cheap, vapid, soap opera TV, and we like to watch pretty boys and pretty girls try to become pop stars by winning selection competitions. Allegedly. I never watched any of those programmes; on the few ocassions my TV was tuned to them, watching the pursuit of success based on character and appearance rather than musical craft, I either switched over or switched off. As Noel Gallagher of Oasis once said, “everything’s choreographed now. It’s fucking rubbish”.
A good example of ‘tribal marketing’ is the current trend for ‘Lomography’, i.e. photographic practice derived from the basic Russian Lomo. Like a cult it has its own operative commandments like “don’t think” and “shoot from the hip”, and also typically as with a cult the underlying economics and power relations are suspect. The Lomo camera used to be a cheap and uninspired Russian product, then two entrepreneurs realised there was a substantial demand for it when it was marketed as a new, fun, and spontaneous aesthetic device. The Lomo is now a relatively expensive camera; when increased demand and economies of production should have lowered the cost, you now pay an entrance fee into the Lomography enterprise. As with many consumer products you pay for marketing, glamour, a trendy brand, imaginary ‘fashion’, and for the executive wages of an inflated managerial hierarchy. This is the epitome of capitalist nonsense, interesting because of its communist origins.
My new photography book – The Art Of Interruption (Roberts 1998) – is characterised by an absence of self-awareness and the cognitive approach whereby everything is reduced to relative and non-committal terms. It begins with a dense introduction, affirming the writer’s allegiance with dialectic criticism, and proceeds in the same way, examining photographic culture in a Marxist framework. The text is peppered with terms like ‘class consciousness’, and sentences like this: “there is a certain political effectivity in disrupting the rule of perspective”. ‘Class consciousness’ here means ‘political statement’ or ‘political action’ in working class, left wing, anti-bourgeois terms. Right on brother, perspective = middle class so disrupt it, yeah! If the writer wasn’t an academic, he would presumably be protesting on the streets against capitalism. Photographically, ‘class consciousness’ in this context simply means the genre of working class scenes, like the images of Bill Brandt and archive photos from communist Russia. The theoretical abstractions of this book are somewhat contrived, and tribal. It’s about identifying with Das Kapitaal and the Revolution, when in reality the working class disrupt Comprehensive school classrooms, wear polyester football shirts, regularly get drunk and obnoxious, and live on housing estates where ASBOs are increasingly necessary. Photographer Martin Parr made famous images of what this life is actually like – typified in a place like Blackpool, or the nearby resorts where he worked. Of course I am generalising unfairly, but I do this to illustrate the ridiculously idealised conception of proletarian culture, as if it is the only noble or authentic strata of society, posited against the nasty middle class who have nice houses, expensive cars, and holidays in Tuscany. Dialectical materialism was/is material, and there is nothing wrong with relatively comfortable living – nothing desirable, superior or politically legitimate about a council estate.
Photography theorist Victor Burgin said
Rhetoric is in sum a repertory of the various ways in which we can be “original”. It is probable then that the creative process could be enriched and made easier if the creator would take account consciously of a system which they use intuitively (Art, Commonsense And Photography: 2).
Academics play rhetorical games of intellectual positioning, in relation to established frameworks. Roberts says (p 138) “the task of the critic is to refuse all blandishments about the spirituality of culture, because such judgements conceal the oppressiveness of bourgeois relations”. This strange remark is based on a logic equivalent to the tiresome Freudian stance, where for example if you disagree with homosexual culture you are thereby a repressed homosexual: you cannot challenge or be irritated by something without displaying its imminent unconscious reverse. Marx and Freud are supreme, apparently, and in this respect are endowed with a status like a religion – which is amenable to intelligent deconstruction. Marx and Freud made a great intellectual contribution to society but their ideas did have flaws. They’re not supreme.
Secondly, the term ‘spirituality’ is used here in an astonishingly naïve way, presumably equating it with religion and emotional feeling, neither of which should be properly regarded, in philosophical or metaphysical terms, as ‘spiritual’.
And thirdly, ‘bourgeois relations’ is effectively a negative idealisation of what in real social terms is comprised of civil, educational and reasonable material values. There’s nothing wrong with the middle class, and its Marxist denunciation is a predictable and tribal project. The current UK Labour government is derided for betraying its working class roots; for the first time ever, I found myself sympathetic to a political party precisely because of this, i.e. Blair’s refusal to follow the old class war nonsense that hangs around the British neck like a wet rope. He respects capital and the economic implications it has for UK society, and is not a Trades Union puppet concerned only with working labour. His position is more balanced than his predecessors, and I am encouraged by his long term in office because it suggests that British people are tired of the old polarised attitudes.
In politics and current affairs, mass opinion is notoriously non-rational and emotive. A government’s future can be swayed with alarming power, on the basis of immediate scandal or errors of judgment that are but one small part of a long-term political presence. We call it ‘spin’ when politicians manipulate this very deliberately, frequently seen in relation to the agendas they know are vote-winning factors: health, education, crime. I don’t believe Labour are worse than any other party for doing this.
The trend towards uniform psychology and communal opinion is very substantial, and evident in many areas of life. Marx coined the elegantly observant phrase that religion is the opium of the people, i.e. that it has a narcotic effect on mass consciousness. I agree with that. Religion is conformist and psychologically hypnotic using ritualised behaviour, conditioning social hierarchies and the exclusion of alternative viewpoints to foster uncritical and obedient attitudes. Religion cannot tolerate or accommodate the educated or enquiring person, because at its centre is a flawed metaphysic based on a questionable notion of ‘belief’ – which is different to fact.
Religion is the opium of the people, and political sociology is the religion of the academic. In anthropological terms, the theorist tries to assert the self by rhetorical strategies, a project similar to my adolescent experience. You think you’re being clever and individual, when from a larger background perspective you clearly are not. You posit yourself against the establishment ‘false consciousness’, and display a tribal rather than creative form of critical exposition. Religious people identify with relative narratives, and so do academics.
Stories make the world go round, passed down through the generations and fostering a collective and communal mind. It irritates me to see people like Richard Dorkins develop his so-called meme theory, and see it become fashionably adopted. It’s not a new idea; Rupert Sheldrake made similar suggestions using the term ‘morphogenetic field’, and the Theosophical writings of Blavatsky and others use the term ‘group mind’. Those writings are themselves part of an esoteric project that is thousands of years old, what Aldous Huxley called the ‘perennial philosophy’. In one of the Alice Bailey books, which succeeded the Theosophical works, she argued that human group consciousness is like an energetic field you have to penetrate and transcend, to discover your true identity. Which is not tribal – it’s individual, in the best, highest, and most subtle sense.
Here’s to the crazy ones,
the misfits,
the rebels,
the troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules
and they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them,
disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do
is ignore them,
because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to
think they can change the world
are the ones who do.
– Apple advertising campaign.Think Different.
