I've come down to Victor Harbor for a break this weekend. It is mid-winter on the mid-southern coast of Australia.
Since I found the previous post on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others difficult to write. I struggled with it and I had a couple of goes rewriting it. This post is more personal and easier.
I wanted a break from being caught up in a free-floating postmodern world of urban life. It's a change. Down here on the edge of the southern ocean it is all wind, surf and sunshine; walking the dogs along the clifftops and being woken up at 5-6am by the standard poodles to go and hunt rabbits before the sun is up.
Yesterday was a delightful winters day; so still and sunny. Today it is bitterly cold. The wind is from the south and it has an Antarctic chill that cuts into, and freezes, the body. There is very little sun. So a holiday shack that is warm in winter, due to the winter sun warming up the rooms, is now very cold.
Such a physical experience gives a different perspective on, and a space away from, aconsumer capitalism that is re-shaping the fabric of what some still call our private life----identity, gender, sexuality and family life--through digital communications, market institutions and mass media. It is re-shaping that is creating a new subjectivity ----one of instrumental detachment based on the emotional contours of isolation, a sense of being adrift, being anxious and feeling empty.
I do not like that urban experience. I experience it as a form of damaged life. Hence my going and standing on the cliffs tops, feeling the wind and surf on my face, and then the chilling of the body. That touchstone experience is so different from the global images about modern identity on the television:----I'm thinking about the damaged postmodern life in New York as represented by the culturally cool Sex in the City.
A damaged everyday life because it is a life divorced from tradition; is freefloating, perfectly packaged gloss, narcissitic and structured around spiralling insecurities and endless self creating. It's pretty much a stylish life of unhappiness in a world of transient relationships with undecent men, that is presented as cutesy and loveable glam characters who consume fashionable luxury goods on credit.
This is the new global postmodern culture of individualism structured aroung being a celebrity. It is packaged to us as what we should desire; no, as what we are since it is a self-driven emergent culture of self-designed narratives and do it yourself identities. It is who we (well, mostly middle class women living in a global city) should become. What is being packaged here is the postmodern good life of the liberal market order.
juk. I'm no longer a fan of the show. Suzanne has guilty pleasures.
Michael over at Two Blowhards is no fan either. He says that he doesn't enjoy watching the Sex in the City show:
"I've watched a few episodes of Absolutely Fabulous and a few episodes of Sex in the City. Good stuff! Clever, funny, well-turned, exuberantly performed. Yet I didn't enjoy them and will probably never watch them again simply because the women portrayed in the shows are too much like many of the women I work with in my mediabiz job."
He says:
"I have an easier time watching "Ab Fab" than "Sex in the City" because the Ab-Fab gals are portrayed unapologetically as raging, unhappy, self-centered monsters, while the "Sex in the City" gals are presented as high-strung, maybe, but also cute and lovable. (Ah, American audiences and their difficulties with satire.) I watch the show thinking, "Cute? Lovable? How about selfish, hysterical and vain????!!!" (Then I pull myself together and change the channel.)"
I'm uneasy because of the unhappiness underneath the froth and bubble of the glamourous surfaces of this mode of individuality;and off side to the way the media package of the beautiful lives secrets an utopianism of the future good life in a global world. This may be the global texture of everyday life in the West but it ain't for me.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 10, 2003 02:56 PM | TrackBack