In the meantime, the crisis produces its own aesthetics and takes possession of capitalist cultural production. Crisis of capitalism – part 8
My home is my castle, my car is my tank: to this denominator can be reduced the asthetic change that gives many new vehicle models of the car industry their downright vicious, predatory pragmatism – especially in the middle class and upper class segment. The new carts of middle class people, who could still get a fenced-in row house with a few square meters of lawn, visualize the increasing bashing and stabbing that will be necessary for this purpose. Nearly every new midsize sedan looks like it came out of a Batman movie. Black – formerly reserved for the cars of power mongers such as corporate executives, politicians or mafiosos – has become the most popular color of the middle class.
Part 7: Crisis global. An overview of crisis-related global dependencies and imbalances.
Luxury SUV Lincoln MKX. Image: Bull-Doser/general public domain
It is no coincidence that car design is giving aesthetic expression to these crisis-induced changes, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of all people, points out in the article "Life, conceived from death" aptly executed. In the automotive industry, as nowhere else "Nowhere else do so many market researchers, psychologists and designers work on recognizing the smallest shifts in the psychosocial fabric in good time; no other industry makes such an effort to sell a product that does not necessarily have to be replaced every three years".
The aesthetics of a car should therefore appeal to the inner driving forces of a potential buyer, of which he is usually not even aware. This design already targets the culturally sedimented preconscious or unconscious of consumers. Because of the competitive preres in the industry, car design is a "sensitive indicator of social changes".
When the cars were the "bose view" got
There are two "Form genres", that currently dominate car design, explained FAZ author Niklas Maak: "Nostalgia and Hysteria". On the one hand, vehicle aesthetics flees into the past, into the nostalgically blurred ara of the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, which is exalting itself in a veritable retro wave. Here not only old models are revived, but also individual aesthetic features of old vehicles are used again in newer models. This demonstrates the reactionary longing for a "good old times" This seems to be a time that never existed in this way, and in which the contradictions and the current social disintegration phenomena did not seem to exist.
The social tendency to hysterization – that is, the panic seizing society – finds expression in the front sections of current vehicle models, which, according to Maak "Fear-distorted, panic-stricken grimaces, wide-open, screaming cow mouths, spotlights in the form of glowing frown lines, barred metal mouths" . The vehicle forms already print in an ostentatiously to auben directed safety aesthetics the "Preparing for a collision" from. In this panic, cast in forms, comes the unconscious and openly under the curse of the unspeakable inkling that it can not go on like this, that society is pushing to its limits of development and we will all experience a violent impact.
Ultimately, the car design takes over the look of the vehicle "classic military", according to Maak. The new car has a "with luminous and chrome teeth, the new car has a classic" on, to "Sliding embrasures" narrowed window, the "tin castle" only the "vital mab an overview" and headlights that "bose look" so that the vehicle sells well," says Maak. Such vehicles signaled that public space was perceived as a place "where it is a matter of eating and being eaten". This design expresses a tendency towards isolation from the outside world. The author, on the other hand, is mistaken when he identifies the causes of this asthetic change in a "only psychologically explainable symptom" wants to locate. The human psyche can only develop in interaction with its environment.
The new cars reflect the increasing aggressiveness and harshness of the working day for those who can still afford them. The increasing intensity of the crisis competition of the melting middle class, which wants its assertiveness in the professional rat race to be articulated in car aesthetics as a kind of warning to the environment, leads to the brutalization of car design. The market competition, gaining in brutality, in which a legally regulated war "All against all" The way in which the SMS system is used is thus reflected in the "military optics", which Maak states. The hysterically increased need for safety, which the owners of SUVs, for example, want to see satisfied, results from the precariousness of their everyday working lives. If working life is already dominated by the fear of falling under the radar in the crisis competition and slipping into the ever-growing underclass, then at least the appearance of a car that has mutated into a tank is supposed to give the impression of some security.
The Return of the Same Old
Of course, the retro waves that come over us at ever shorter intervals are not limited to vehicle aesthetics. In the meantime, pretty much all branches of the culture industry have been infected by the retrovirus, which has already cured almost all decades. In music, film, fashion, computer games or mass media spectacles, the effusions of the 70s, 60s or 50s have been rehashed again and again and thrown onto the market in a modernized form.
For example, the flood of mid-market remakes of old movie classics hitting the cinemas is almost unmanageable. The "Retro-gaming" has long been an established branch of the games industry, to which special exhibitions are dedicated. The trend toward retro design has thus long since differentiated and solidified, so that instead of the earlier waves that loved to revisit certain bygone eras, individual products or product groups now display design features of earlier eras.
These trends of retro-wave and retro-design are not only carried by nostalgic or infantile impulses in the visibly crisis-ridden population, which thus projects the illusion of an intact capitalist world onto the past or briefly revives the carefree youthful years with a few old movies or computer games. The recourse to the cultural idiosyncrasies and aesthetics of past decades results from the exhaustion of the culture-industrial potential of capitalism, which unfolds in parallel with its systemic crisis.
The basic movement of the culture industry has always consisted in the perpetual "Recurrence of the Same", in the thousandfold reflection of the surface of reality by the mass media, which has been dressed in ever new forms. The culture industry thus resembles a media machine that revolves unceasingly on its own axis, always coming up with new asthetic "Fuel" for the incessant repetition of its oden mantra, which has long since killed off all resistance, any historical consciousness, any thought of an alternative to capitalism: "It is what it is."
The unceasing reflection of the surface of reality in the products of the culture industry, carried out in thousands of variations, makes the difference between the essence and the appearance of social phenomena and developments disappear. The audience of the culture industry is subject to a process of a "inverted psychoanalysis" (Leo Lowenthal), in which resistance and defensive reflexes against thinking of alternatives to the present social disorder are erected. The surface is imagined as the essence of the system. In this ideological process, the superficial, publicly perceptible phenomena are hallucinated as their causes. There is no public distinction between social processes and the causes that led to these developments. The mass media’s constant bombardment of the culture industry thus gives rise to a false sense of reality, which exhausts itself in seeing the given state of the world as a natural one "Factual constraint" to which it is necessary to adapt. The situation is the way it is, we had to adapt to these constraints, this is the constant apology of even the roughest programs of clear-cutting, which are currently being whipped through in Europe. However, this ideology completely ignores the fact that society is not a static state of nature, but the work of human beings, even if the process of social production in capitalism is unconsciously "behind the backs of producers" (Marx) plays.
The fuel of usable forms is thus running out of the cultural system, because everything that was given in terms of material and possibilities was instrumentalized in order to impress upon us again and again that this is the way it is: the representations of the past and above all of the future (science fiction) – under the costumed surface they reflect in their depressing odnis only the present. Science fiction, in particular, has long ceased to be a medium in which possibilities are conceived. All cultural impulses, subcultures and also forms of the aesthetics of resistance (from the clenched worker’s fist, which now draws attention to special offers in the supermarket, to punk rock) have been taken over by the culture industry in its perpetual hunger for new forms of expression, devoured and stripped of their meaning, degraded to mere moderequisite, in order to mirror the surface of reality in a thousandfold variation. The system has no future, therefore it can no longer develop an aesthetic of the future. Therefore, the culture industry must also asthetically exploit its own capitalist past at ever shorter intervals.
This conquest of all cultural spaces by the culture industry has also brought about the death of the subculture, which has long ceased to be the niche in which radical critique can be formulated and alternatives conceived. For quite some time now, trend junkies have been scouting out the latest trends and feeding them into the culture industry. This closeness between subculture and the culture industry is evident in the diverse "Scenes" and influences their cultural production accordingly. Many emerging artists and members of the scene therefore already take into account – albeit mostly unconsciously – the possible exploitability of their creative products. The subculturally new, which now also marks the return of the everlasting, is no longer dangerous, as it must have been clear at least since the emergence of techno. Nowadays, the subculture is considered the first step on the career ladder of future stars of the culture industry.
Apocalypse Now
The culture industry will no longer be able to devour anything new in the same way, which is why the old has to be regurgitated at ever shorter intervals. But within the well-known genres of cultural production, crisis-related shifts are taking place in which apocalypticism, which previously played a subordinate role, is becoming the dominant factor. Apocalyptic thinking has long since entered the cultural mainstream. It is expressed in a multitude of products of the culture industry, which put an imagined end to the world as we know it in many different ways.
This fascination for the collapse is expressed above all in the film. The current cinema, for example, is dominated by a veritable "Wave of apocalyptic films" The world has been swamped by the "doomsday epic" of Emmerich, in which the "Earth over and over again" goes down. In the last few months alone, the films Melancholia, Contagion, 4:44 – Last Day on Earth or the US flick Take Shelter can be counted among them. Apocalypticism is even more pronounced in computer games, the youngest branch of the culture industry. Here the post-apocalyptic setting is almost a standard, which already shows first signs of wear and tear. Many of the most successful games – such as the Fallout series – unfold a malevolent, post-apocalyptic or dystopian world through which the player must muddle through, disregarding the most elementary human emotions. In the game "I am alive" the player has to fight his way through a devastated metropolis – in competition with all other survivors, who are transported to the digital afterlife just because of a bottle of water. The title offers a similar setting "The Last of Us", which is being developed by Naughty Dog.
Perhaps it is these post-apocalyptic computer games, in which monotonous repetition of the same theme is repeated over and over again, that are the most important factor "survival of the fittest" has become the most important factor influencing the public’s awareness of the crisis. The computer games industry now reaches more people than Hollywood. And we should never forget what a game really is: it is ultimately the training of skills to be applied in real life. The fixation of the computer game industry on competition, struggle for survival and orgies of slaughter reflects to gamers only the aforementioned surface of a social reality, which in the centers of the capitalist system is marked by increasing competition, while in the periphery the slaughters we can already rehearse on screens have been going on for a long time. The kids in the "First World" and thus reenact the orgies of butchery, which their peers in the hopeless militias of the "Third World" or the Arab region are already being practiced.
This ubiquitous obsession with the apocalypse, with the end of the world, in cultural production thus reflects the actual systemic crisis in which the capitalist world system finds itself. The capitalism pushes because of the in the inharent utilization and growth compulsion to internal and outer barriers. We are indeed in a "Phase of transition from our existing world system, the capitalist economy, to another system or systems", as the US sociologist and world system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein dryly and correctly put it. A world-historical systemic change is in the offing, which will take place in a stormy transitional phase.
But since the system as such cannot be questioned in the published opinion, this emerging insight breaks its way into the imaginations of the culture industry. This dull suspicion that capitalism is reaching its developmental limits is thus sweated by the culture industry in the superstructure of the system, distorted into thousands of apocalyptic "Entertainment products" from.
Yet it is precisely the total ideological victory of capitalism that now allows its systemic crisis to be reflected in the form of an all-devouring apocalypse. In the meantime, because of the drumbeat of the culture industry, the categories, structures, subject forms and levels of mediation of the capitalist system have coagulated in the mass consciousness into a kind of independent human nature. The total victory of capitalist cultural production takes place in the historical moment of the total crisis of capitalism. This absurd ruling ideology has declared the existing system – which has only been fully established in the European core countries for about two centuries – to be an eternal, natural condition of existence of mankind. A life beyond market, state, money and competition seems to be unthinkable for many people, although the major part of human history took place beyond these forms of socialization.
With the crisis of capital, it seems that nature is coming apart at the seams, and the world is coming to its end – to deluded people it seems as if the eternal "Laws of nature" of capitalism have been overridden and conspired against humanity. That’s why in many culture-industrial products there are also natural phenomena, which cause the end of the world (meteors, epidemics, etc.).). The crisis of capitalism, hallucinated as human nature, becomes in modern apocalypticism the crisis of nature par excellence. According to the prevailing ideology – which celebrates the end of the world in ever new works – only nothingness can come after capitalism.
End of the line panic
When the unthinkable threatens to occur and the systemic crisis of capitalism becomes ever more apparent, its most obdurate apologists in particular go into open panic mode. Capitalism is defended as the only possible social system, until suddenly even its most loyal followers start hoarding supplies, arming themselves and turning their homes into bunkers. The conservative right-wing populist daily newspaper "Die Welt" provided an excellent example of the crisis-induced flight into naked panic, into the tendency to cut all social ties (which in capitalism are in any case only established in a purely negative way by means of the market) "Die Welt" from the Springer publishing house during an escalation of the euro crisis at the end of 2011. Die Welt, whose authors are usually among the most narrow-minded defenders of the capitalist system, loved to give readers tips on post-apocalyptic crisis prevention at the height of the euro crisis at the time. In the article the Springerblatt loves to go through all the options available to its readers in the event of a catastrophic collapse of the eurozone: from trading a "cigarette currency" over the popular "Bunkering" up to the obligatory question of arming.
This is a typical break in capitalist ideology: there is a permanent negation of alternatives, until the impending collapse is suddenly met with open and militant cultural pessimism, with self-preservation and the affirmation of war "All against all" is reacted. The capitalist belief system then turns to panic and amok.