. . . For the present, I'll note simply that while there is something to Zizek's case for Western pessimism as the ultimate self-confidence, it isn't as though Communism was internally coherent; the accursed thing was collapsing of its own dead weight. Moreover, strict egalitarian justice is precisely injustice: never in all the history of the world have standards of living been leveled, inasmuch as this is impossible over the vast diversity of geographic, cultural, economic, etc. regions, spaces, and forms that exist; hence, what this "justice" mandates is compulsory like treatment of unlikes, which is to say, the application of terror against the arbitrarily-defined "exceptions". And, through it all, there is the assumption that the (true) people already incarnate this supercollective will, which can be discerned by the attentive mystagogue; the obverse of this is that expressions of popular will running counter to this ideal are manifestations of false consciousness.
Ah, Critical Theory! So much more interesting than the collected works of Lenin, and yet you end up at the same destination, a longing for the apocalyptic exsanguination of mankind.
More controversial, perhaps, are the author's views on Sex and the City,
a program I have loathed, from its inception, on account of its superficiality, nihilism, moral corruption, and tendency to promote the most insipid banalities as the very apogee of wisdom. On my personal Scale of Detestation, the program probably ranks up there with all things Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that it is a celebration of the Nothing, and that its popularity is a certain harbinger of The End.
How odd. Those are precisely the reasons why I love the show so much.
A more interesting take on the Sex and the City phenomenon comes via Tim Harford's book The Logic of Life, an early chapter of which attempts to explain why there are so many groups of single women congregating in cities and bemoaning the lack of decent unmarried men. To be honest, I don't find his argument in the Times article linked to here all that convincing. Surely it's more likely that women move to the cities not to find rich men but because the opportunities available to them are far fewer in the countryside, and because given the choice between a life of financial independence in the city while having to compete for men and a life of financial dependence but guaranteed companionship, it's rational for women to prefer the latter because of the increased range of choices that financial independence gives them. These are the women depicted in Sex and the City, albeit in a glossier form, and it helps explain why the show has been so popular: It appeals to a particular demographic by reflecting a common experience.
Capturing the zeitgeist and presaging the annihilation of civilization. Or something.
2 comments:
Yes, but what so few dunces realize is that these women who come from the countryside get high-paid professional jobs, and while they are so busy wearing the shoes that they bought for themselves and showing the cut of their jip in the corporate boardroom they literally forget to have children. Which means that the demographic for professionals dips as fewer of the elite are getting born, and soon enough you have the situation where the hordes of wifeless men, good for nothing else but digging coal out of the ground decide they’ve had enough of reading about urban cool in the New York Times Style Supplement and get in their beat-up pickup trucks with pitchforks and take over the cities.
Come on, it happened in Romania - kinda. Why not New York?
Indeed. You could be onto something, Donagh. The next significant demographic shift will see Arthur Scargill in charge of Vanity Fair magazine and the top TV show will be "Trux and the City."
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