imomus | We're all the weakest link, so... hello!

I had a couple of beers in Mitte last night with a friend visiting from London: a rather well-known design writer I'll call Mr X. There's no reason to be so mysterious, really, except that sometimes social critique can become institutional critique and institutional critique can sour the milk and foul the nest.

Mr X and I are about the same age and share pretty much the same politics, so we spent most of our time agreeing. I want to sketch the substance of that consensus today, without really attributing too closely which of us said what -- another reason not to name him, I suppose.

Mr X is a bit of a champion of my writing, and he started, as we walked through the gusty, mild evening towards ProQM, by asking whether my new album had been reviewed in The Wire. I told him it hadn't -- none of my records ever have -- and that I don't know why, really. Mr X was also curious about why my writing never appears in British newspapers or magazines, and again I couldn't answer other than say that, for some reason, only French and American publishers seem to want to publish me. I suppose this conversation, and the slight sense of perplexed hurt it triggered in me, set the tone for the evening.

Mr X was totally impressed by ProQM, whose selection of design books was much more "weighty", he thought, than the stock you'd see in London shops like Magma. I suppose "weighty" is what you expect from Germany; serious and thorough. Asked his first impressions of the city (this was his fourth visit, and like me he'd first come here before the wall came down), Mr X declared Berlin -- in contrast to London -- gentler, slower, more sophisticated, elegant, soft and European.

We ended up sipping weissbier in the lobby of the Kino Hackescher Hof in Mitte. We talked about how little interest there is, in mainstream British culture, in design per se. Mr X said that a recent exhibition at the V&A about Surrealism had neglected graphic design entirely. A graphic design show at the Barbican hadn't received a single mainstream UK review. Newspapers or TV culture review shows never cover graphic design, and if they cover design at all it's in the Women's or Lifestyle sections of the paper and revolves around fashion, product design and interior decoration. And while thousands of people visit Tate Modern (some of them just to admire St Paul's Cathedral and slide down slides), hardly anyone makes the trip along the river to the Design Museum (currently considering a move Westwards to the vicinity of the Tate, not incidentally).

I ventured that this was partly because of bling culture: a lot of cultural coverage in the UK is really coverage of money, power and class in disguise. The super-rich invest in fine art and fashion, architecture and interior decoration, so those get covered as extensions of celebrity culture and the celebration of extreme concentrations of power and wealth (sometimes inaccurately called "aspirational" journalism). Graphic design has no bling angle, so it simply doesn't get covered. And yet in Italy or Japan (or Berlin, for that matter) things are different: the inherent loveliness of posters, flyers, graffiti, illustrations and so on seems prized, and there's commentary about it.

We agreed that a radical series like John Berger's Ways of Seeing couldn't really be made now in the UK. There isn't the same kind of strong ideology in either programme-makers or the audience for it. Which isn't to say that ideology is dead: far from it. British TV seems to be obsessed with the ideology of Social Darwinism. Shows like Big Brother and The Weakest Link are all about the elimination of losers, and involve their audiences in the choice of those losers. It's all very tally ho, a fox hunt. They're the result of the transformation of Britain from a society that was at least heading towards horizontality (in other words, low-Gini equality) in the 60s and 70s to one that's wedded at every level to inequality, unfairness, high-Gini -- a "winner takes it all" society where income inequality is seen as something natural and even desireable.

Here in Germany you could never have shows as Social Darwinist as that, I ventured, because there really was the elimination of "the weakest link" here, within living memory, in the form of the extermination of gays, gypsies and Jews. In the same way, the surveillance excesses of the East German secret police have made it much harder to survey Germans. Britain's ubiquitous citizen surveillance would be unacceptable here.

And this, for me, is why guilt is good. It's guilt over things like surveillance and eliminating "the weakest link" which keeps the German state more liberal and benign than the UK state. It's lack of guilt that's the biggest current political problem in Israel, the UK and the US, and evidence of the return of guilt the most hopeful thing happening right now. There's Israel unlocking Palestinian funds, Bush changing his mind about Camp Delta and climate change, Blair repenting about -- well, very little, actually, but his closest aides getting arrested over cash-for-honours, and successor Brown saying Gandhi will be his main influence when he takes over!

Mr X thinks that etiquette, decency, fairness and good manners in Britain are in decline. I agree, but point out that anti-racism, for instance, is a new sort of etiquette -- one that, this week, caused a storm when a Bollywood film star accused members of the Celebrity Big Brother house of racism. That's, in a sense, a charge about a "breach of etiquette", even if it isn't quite table manners. But in general, I think, the problem with maintaining etiquette is that racial diversity and income disparity (along with declining social mobility) make it very hard to treat your neighbour as you'd like to be treated yourself. Income disparity is always justified with the carrot of opportunity -- treat the rich as you'd like to be treated if you were as rich -- hell, when you are as rich as them! But that illusion is hardly sustainable in the UK, unless you think you're going to win the lottery. So instead people bitch, and hate, and stick the knife in, and rob.

Of course, I contrast the UK with Japan, which may be heading in the same direction but is still massively more horizontal than the UK, and has avoided the bitching, hating, knifing and robbing stuff so far. But I can't help wondering, as I bid Mr X farewell and head home past the posters for the new Hitler comedy, whether it isn't just that Japan has pre-eliminated its weakest links by never actually admitting anybody poor or racially other into the country in the first place?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

Is this you bitching about the bitchiness of the bitch Brits again?
bitchu62

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Yes, bitch. You can take the bitch out of Britain, but you can't take Britain out of the bitch.

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