Horner's Corner

Paternalism?

by on Feb.13, 2010, under culture, media

The non paternalist elite hobnobbing at the ICA

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, “elitist”, whereas treating them as if they are stupid is “democratic”. It should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.

Parkes touches here on the right way to think about paternalism – not (just) as something prescriptive, but in terms of the gift and the surprise. The best gifts are those we wouldn’t have choosen for ourselves – not because we would have overlooked or rejected them, but because we simply wouldn’t have thought of them. Neoliberal “choice” traps you in yourself, allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different “you”, a you that does not yet exist. (All of which resonates with J J Charlesworth’s illuminating piece on the management of the ICA in Mute, with its attack on the assumption that “what the audience wants is merely what the institution should do.”)

Neoliberalism may have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk economics of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have played their part in propagating, but the kind of “entrepreneurs” that dominate our culture – whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne – have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money. Good for them, no doubt, but hardly something that the rest of us should be grateful for. (The genius of Cowell was to have plugged a very old cultural form into new machineries of interpassivity.) And for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism’s culture is – there has never been a culture more homogenous and standardized, more repetitive and fear-driven.


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