No levelling-out happens spontaneously. Walls of division can only be chipped away – a long process arduous and replete with contention. The natural human inclination to classify has to be fought, or rather remoulded. What needs reconfiguration are the labels, the terms that create the illusion of guaranteed quality. Time at a premium leaves us powerless in the face of a vast field of culture, body shaking in insignificance, an overwhelmed nose leaking blood, pus and snot. The words dropping in the rain dance of indecision come ideologically invested, they are products of their sociocultural domain – inscribed upon each are signifiers signifying the superiority of Dostoevsky over Bukowski. Let us advance to each undeterred by external pressure and deal death to assumption by capturing the ideas of egalitarian politics. A freedom born of equality, an equality born of eroded distinctions. Feed education by breadth of experience. Eat the fruits of niche and mainstream, high and low. Disregard in turn the nagging obligation to unthinkingly place one above the other.
Transcultural coupling is one route to undermining the hegemony of cultural labels. Yet the route is laced with troubles. Annoyingly we are reminded that such amalgams are rarely undertaken on equal terms. A victim meekly murmurs disenchantment all too often, the loser in a game devoid of balance. A dramatisation of Marx’s Capital, for example, starring Steve Guttenberg as linen, an important part in the early chapters on exchange value. Initially one assumes that this pokes fun at Guttenberg, it revels in his position as someone once famous, now languishing in TV Movie hell. But does it not also mock the dry rigor of Marx, the hoity-toity intellectualism of his treatise?
Perhaps the emphasis ought to be shifted. Rather than posit as the subjects of attack Marx and Guttenberg, the real subjects could be the consumers of Marx and Guttenberg. The empty leftist posturing of those first flicked pages of Capital from people in love with the image of revolt and marginality is surely worthy of attack. Here Guttenberg is the site of criticism, a reminder of another culture, acting as a grand decimator of pretension. The interstice between Marx and Guttenberg is a place where the very definition of high and low is mocked, a Golgotha where the carriers of hierarchism are showily crucified.
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