Aborted Lefty Morosity

OK, so my whole plan to write that long piece on left-wing morosity has come to a shuddering halt. Never make promises you can't keep. But, in order to partly fulfil it, here's what I got down, which is what I wrote the five minutes after I had the idea...

The most remarkable thing about Chris Petit's Content (still available on 4oD for a couple of days. NB: Not anymore) was how easily it fell into the familiar pattern of morose decrying of contemporary society. It seems, nowadays, that to criticise the neoliberal, globalising mission of Western (and increasingly Eastern) governments, is to affect the pose of a sleep-walker at a funeral, leaden-footed and mono-toned.

It is to buy - without reflection - into a narrative already set in motion, a narrative which passively lists what is wrong without appearing to actually have any belief in its power as critique, without having any of the required positivity involved in actively positing something different and laying out how it can work.

The important thing - for the weavers of this narrative - is not to question the narrative itself, but to critique simply the society that sets itself up to be critiqued. Whatever you do, don't question the narrative itself, the increasingly repetitious narrative of the disjointed, morose left. The key thing is not to question this, but to posit your originality within it, to find your niche so that your voice can be heard, and hopefully heralded as "long overdue" and "important".

This pose also is increasingly technophobic. It both amazes and frustrates me that we (both as a society and more specfically as left-wingers) allow generalised, lazy thinking about the internet and technology when we decry precisely that in politics, culture, urban planning, and pretty much everything else. As the monotone voice-over of the film intones, "for all the excitement of the internet, for which read: online gambling, conspiracy theories, and internet porn, most of it remains as flat as the plains of the American west, blighted by tumble-weed and inhabited by the redundant, the forlorn, and the unvisited in search of belonging." No mention of the use of the internet by dispersed resistance groups, by local communities, by freedom-of-information advocates, by Obama; or by small presses to distribute avant-garde and experimental literature around the world, or musicians and film-makers to find audiences for their work, or by artists to share work, or simply by people from different backgrounds to come into contact with each other. Clearly there is a lot of utopianism about the internet, but the way to correct that is not by lazy, uninformed diatribes against the sorts of things one finds in the "real" world beyond the internet as much as on it: physical casinos appearing in city centres, BNP and EDL marches in English cities, the sex-shops of Soho.

I find myself frustrated with a left that refuses to feel confident and positive about itself. It's a left that has no chance of appealing to those beyong the converted if it carries on like it.