The Duke of Conceptual Architecture

The moral blind spot that has allowed killers to become kitsch – Opinion – www.smh.com.au

This article, written by Louis Nowra, basically denigrates the pop culture appropriation of the Cuban revolutionary figure, Che Guevara. Louis has obviously seized the opportunity of the opening of the movie The Motorcycle Diaries to push his rather anachronistic and socially conservative message as a pseudo-progressive moral stance vis-a-vis pop culture’s amorality.

To begin with, Louis reduces the whole history of the Communist movement to mass murder, hence, making any support of, let alone, sympathy towards the Communist movement entirely inappropriate on moral grounds. So wearing Che on your t-shirt makes you morally corrupt, because, in the eyes of Mr. Nowra, this equates to supporting mass murdering fascists.

The problem with the article is its one dimensionality – i.e. all Comunists are mass murderers and that’s all there was to it. If only this were true. Communists were present in Haymarket, Chicago when the riots broke out that started a worldwide demand for suitable and appropriate working hours. Maybe as an esteemed author, Louis Nowra does not appreciate this fact. Not only that, but there were internal conflicts between different schools of Communism. Fifty years later, this debate is ongoing. There is no one Communism, nor was there ever. Georg Lukacs, a famous philosopher, academic and Hungarian Communist Party ideologue, was ostracised from the HCP for his “bourgeois” stance. However, he is largely recognised today as one of the greatest Marxist philosophers since Marx himself. Today, many Communists will deny that a Communist country has ever existed. Strictly speaking, according to this argument, history has been marked by Socialist-type regimes because the theory of communism espouses a classless and, therefore, stateless society. The point is that there is more to Communism, whatever, one makes of it, than Louis Nowra is willing to admit. If only it were as simple and coherent as Louis has portrayed it, then we could erase it from history and never have to confront any of its contributions to human culture – good or bad. Louis’ moralising is ahistorical.

Secondly, the pop culture appropriation of any symbol cannot be reduced to one, or even a handful, of related causes. Pop culture is precisely what it is because it is diffuse and fragmented. Symbols, like Che, are sufficiently complex and ambiguous, such that multiple “readings” or “interpretations” can be made of him, his life and actions. And a major contributor to the dissambly, reassembly and propagation of this process of symbol creation are markets. The markets operating according to the logic of capital accumulation are systems that purport to objectivity – the cold, removed and disinterested logic of profit. From this perspective, markets care not for the moral fibre of societies, so long as the profit motive is satisfied. Apart from the large assumptions this makes of the social nature of human relations and individual identity (i.e. that they exist, are coherent and harmonious), markets create culture. We are cultural beings and, even as consumers, we are acting in a cultural context and making micro-moral and social decisions. What markets do, however, is provide and impersonal social space in which to make these decisions. The impersonality of markets allow consumers to remove many of the moral conundrums that might be involved – implicitly or not – through certain purchases. Hence, the young man that buys a Che shirt, even in the knowledge of some of the murders he sponsored, may in fact be doing so as part of a personal stance against neo-liberal dogmatism. The examples could be multiplied a hundred times, however, the point is that what Louis Nowra does is to take a complex set of relations between individuals that seem to implicitly support Che and Communism and reduce them to one particular dimension as a purely individual immoral act. Nothing is a purely individual act, especially buying a Che t-shirt. Morals are not individual but social constructed and reinforced before being internalised in individuals. If Mr. Nowra wants to moralise about the corruptness of a Communist supporters, he may want to question the very social systems, especially capitalist markets, in which they operate, before attempting quasi-personal attacks on the Left.

In the end, the article is a poor one beause of the large conceptual leaps and assumptions between many different entities – individuals and society, consumers and markets, etc, etc. I think Louis has an extremely impoverished model of the world, if this article is anything to go by – it’s anti-social – verging on misanthropic, ahistorical and portrays culture as something which only exists in markets. Moralisers see things in only one way. Louis Nowra has demonstrated his perfection of this socially debilitating trait.