Choice for All? No Thanks; Re-Mapping and De-Canonizing

Rotating through the tattered remnants of something that used to stand here in resolute defiance, you stand in the back alley, staring at the arc of detritus, spewing out from some torn bin liner around the corner. Consult the legend, the signals, figure out what’s supposed to be here. Up until this point, you had the rhythmic choreography down to a tee, had been following the cues perfectly, until you followed them off the map, the paradox that rises from mistaking the abstract for the ground beneath your feet. Here you are in unfamiliar territory, some alien ship or unexplored piece of turf somewhere in the wilds. It’s right there on the piece of paper, on the satellite image; it didn’t say it was going to be like this.

The Urban is full of folds and cracks, that much is clear; the classic distinction of town and country, like that between state and civil society in Hegel, is something that precipitates closure even as the global flows of exchange, the “market” precipitates fracture and atomization. The core problematic of contemporary “neocapitalism” lies in this paradoxical movement, one replicated down to the individual objects and experiences of the every day. What is this wistful emptiness of culture that accompanies us, the flat PoMo anything-will-do landscape in which nothing can be expressed without quotation marks, phrased in the form of a question, in which the constant self-reflexive questioning has taken the place of all conviction, where popular music is simply reduced to an aesthetic consumerist qualifier and any statement of taste has to be made in the constant fear of breaking rank, than an ongoing symptom of such contradictions? Even as Spotify and Netflix present us with a supposed cornucopia, a vast array of choice before our eyes; is this what it comes to, choice?

For even as streaming encapsulates this ubiquitous, global similitude, the effects to move towards a unified cultural reality in which anything goes, the meaning of such cultural experience is reduced to just this dynamic, where choice = freedom. The choice/freedom mythology is a distinctly liberal one, something rooted in the traditions of the enlightenment, wherein freedom consists of a kind of non-intervention, you-do-you and all that good stuff where the speculative political imaginary lays out a world in which we can proceed unhindered, where we can be ourselves. I’m sure I don’t have to lay out in too much detail what’s suspect here, namely the idea that if we strip back the layers, behind the surface we find some kind of pure self, and that from this basis it is possible to act authentically; from this premise we enter an entire discourse of authenticity and realness, of soul. Herein lies the problem with you-do-you, the dream of the libertarian, those who wish to go about their vital work without intervention, that there is no freedom in being a slave to false authenticity, that authenticity stems from the very feedback loops of capitals central libidinal machinery. This is of course where the dream of neoliberalism itself falls apart, wherein it is revealed not to be the unhindered freedom of markets, the ability for each to make their own fortune, but an enforced politico-economic paradigm of privatized authenticity. Behind the frontier-vision of capital lies the assumption of the traditional rugged survivalist and their family, the safety and comfort of the homestead or the British bourgeois estate, the consignment of our being to a script, a repeated daily routine of reinforcement in which authenticity, the stripping back of aestheticization, merely translates into the most depressing of cyclical reiterations.

Choice = freedom is a limitation, it implies not that we can shift the meaning, the nature of social relations, but that we can choose between them at leisure, defining the emancipated future as one of choice merely bows down to the order of consumer production. There is a certain worldview which seems to echo the incurable optimist, the Whig conceit of teleological progress transformed into confidence that in the end nothing is better than anything else, that no time is better than any other time, that nothing ever changes; before you know it the end of history is here, the sheering away of historicity, the onset of the eternal present suspended in non-time and non-place. Against this, the injunction that culture, that art, music, might mean anything becomes practically unthinkable.

This is an injunction away from choice as predominant motor of autonomy and towards a shift in the mapping of culture itself. Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space of the deceptiveness of maps. The important thing to note, for him, is that maps don’t simply deliver a straightforward reading or empirical datum on the places they represent, but rather they play a part, as representations, in producing them. The same is true in this sense of the ways in which we map between points of cultural interest on a timeline, producing a canon. The process of de-canonising and reinvention is then the process of re-organising the map, and through this the ways in which we navigate it. It similarly, through re-configuring space, excavates new potentials in bringing together and undermining boundaries between separate points. It re-aligns the focus from the non-interventionist liberal ideal towards a new space where these choices are revealed to be predicated on a lie.

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