The most significant political event of the weekend was, of course, Leona Lewis’s cover version of “Hurt” on the X Factor. This perfectly demonstrated Frederic Jameson’s point that the dominant cultural form of late capitalism is pastiche - the soulless imitation of past achievements, devoid of conviction*. “Speech in a dead language” as he called it (pdf).
This pastiche arises from what we might call a contradiction of capitalism. On the one hand, growth and profitability requires that culture be commodified. For capitalists, it is useless if we merely contemplate past artistic accomplishments. We must instead buy new ones. On the other hand, though, capitalism is unable or unwilling to innovate, as the benefits of such innovation cannot be reliably captured**. This tension leads capitalists to regard the past not as part of a living tradition or of a union between past and present, but as a dressing up box from which one picks garments in the expectation they’ll please some passing whim of the market.
There’s also an ideological trick being played here. In downgrading tradition, capitalists reinforce their own power. The question: “Is this good work by the standards of a musical tradition?” becomes unaskable, and is replaced by “does this work please record company bosses?”
It’s from this perspective that Ms Lewis is so significant. What we saw from her was a microcosm of what Harry Braverman described in Labour and Monopoly Capital - a destruction of craft traditions and standards which paves the way for an increased power of bosses.
Which brings me to Libby Purves in the Times today. She bemoans the “exam scandal”, in which kids are drilled in “bite-sized, tick box knowledge” so they can “pick out the four official facts about, say, Macbeth”.
What we see here is exactly what we saw with Ms Lewis. Just as she - or more accurately her corporate bosses - rip music from its tradition and present it in sanitized, approved form, so examiners do the same to literature.
In this way, state education serves the interests of capital, in a two-fold sense. In making education a “joyless obstacle course”, it prepares children for the mindless drudgery of work. And in effacing tradition, it prepares them for decontextualized consumption. Schools, then, are - as Althusser said - ideological state apparatuses.
* Yes, I know Johnny Cash’s version was a cover. The difference is that he put meaning into the song, whereas Ms Lewis took it out.
** Yes, in practice capitalism has produced innovations. But I suspect that many of these have been the result of an overconfident expectation of profit. If people were entirely rational, we’d have much less innovation.