On the 'Deep Clean' of a City's Conscience

It is just after sun-down outside St Paul's Cathedral and an articulate young Scot is stood addressing city-workers from a megaphone. His tone is certainly not aggressive, rather satirical; that last recourse of reason when faced with the triumph of raw, brute power. The bearers of that power themselves are scattered about, MET officers bearing the shiny symbols of state power. They watch the young man carefully, so too the response of those passing by. Though they've really nothing very much to fear, with most of the passers by treating him with indifference, perhaps at most with a little derision. And well they might with the fate of the cause he represents so blatantly apparent. All those tents, together with the last of the the men and women who'd camped out outside the cathedral, having during the night felt the full might of the state being brought down upon their heads by the Corporation of London. After midnight they were cleared out by force, their camp torn down, and barriers set up against their return, defended by those police stood about there now. Nothing remains there now but a residual debris, together with the inevitable stench of a months-long human habitation; something that the Corporation of London promises us will be effaced from the city within what they call a three-day-long 'deep clean'....

.....But what exactly is it they are effacing during that 'deep clean'? What was it that exploded in that place from the otherwise orderly daily functioning of this sprawling city? Sure, we all know even in 'normal' times that the city has its problems. We see the homeless, the neglected sink estates from our our trains windows- some of us even live within them. We read of crime, of corporate and political corruption. We know that all is not so well within our city, but we know too that such problems- though real- can be micro-managed. That they are perhaps just a mild bit of indigestion within the bowels of the otherwise healthy organism of the city. That the disorderly elements can be managed by a few more police on the streets. That the plight of the homeless can be a little eased with a subscription to Shelter, along too with our consciences; allowing us to go on with our lives otherwise unabashed.

But then came the deluge. The world's financial melt-down meant that the problems of this most finance-led of cities didn't look like they could be solved with just a few indigestion pills. That joblessness- especially among the young- soared. That prospects lowered, though rent bills did not. For more and more people the threat of joblessness and subsequent homelessness became not so much a distant threat as their daily reality. People were left to look on as the former masters of the financial universe squirrelled away profits gained from turbo-heating an economy that had brought so many to ruin. People looked to their politicians for help... Only.... they too had been caught with their fingers in the till of the turbo-charged economy. And even the most virtuous among them felt themselves little option but save the corporate beast as a whole, whilst simultaneously being unable to bring any of the agents of that destruction to justice- which included, of course, the politicians who'd led the deregulatory charge. It was therefore we who were left to pick up the tab. And it was this glaring injustice that drove people to try and occupy the London Stock exchange. Those men and women who not only no longer believed in the usual supplicants to the ills of our city, but felt that such supplements could only lead to further misery and impoverishment. Who believed that the hallowed political-consensus over deficit-reduction could only secure a continued immiseration for the already immiserated. For those whose jobs were already lost, or now threatened. For those who relied on the welfare state. Not to mention a whole younger generation who were greeted with nothing but closed doors where once they'd been promised a livelihood.

It was from this tinder-box of injustice that there exploded a conscience that sought to make its voice heard. Just as consciousness generally has its birth in the disharmony of the organism that is our body, so too did this social consciousness explode out of the disharmony within our social body. People were no longer content to be micro-managed into accepting the perilous existence that had been allotted them, that had been allotted their children. They wanted to make their voices heard- wanted a space where others could enter into a dialogue for transforming that society. That was what St Paul's was to be.

And to a degree they succeeded in universalising their message. Sure, the organism carried on functioning in spite of the Occupy protest at its heart for so many months. The trains still went in and out of London from first light. The flows of pedestrians and traffic kept flowing from the transport hubs to offices. The orderly queues for lunch at Pret remained. The reverse flows out of the city after dark kept on unabated. Most people got used to the camp, ignored it, channelling their energies down the well worn trajectories of work and home life, of pub and gym. But still some heard the message- whether their reply was of good or ill will towards the protesters. Even those of the sleepy Church of England were forced by their uninvited guests to choose between the money-lenders or those who, like Jesus, wanted them thrown out of the temple. And indeed, more and more people rallied to the universal message, to this collective expression of social conscience- including people not yet faced with the prospect of unemployment and immiseration. However, it was just these people, these signs of a universalising of the discontent, that the would-be repressers of social conscience fixed upon. So the right-wing rags hollered: they don't even sleep in the tents at night! With their infra-red images to back it up; seemingly thinking that the fact that not all the protesters had lost their homes was a reason to scorn the authenticity of the protest. And then, most recently, as well as most grotesquely, there was the Tory politician- Louise Mensch- who on discussing the protesters, did nothing but sneer at the fact that some of the protesters could afford to drink in Starbucks. Implying that everyone ought to be like her, who in having their own little bellies filled, ought to see no reason to look up from their own feeding trough; irrespective of the fate of their society as a whole. In short, she was a narrow-minded moron, but her scorn was symptomatic of a media and political class whose very vitriol was a sign that the protest was a genuine expression of social conscience that could not be micro-managed. For how many of us ever attack something so violently that we are not ourselves troubled in our conscience by? Their very vitriol told that this emergence of a social conscience in fact gnawed at us all, and that this visible sign of it meant it was a fact we could not just forget about it, micro-manage it, repress it....

....But yet, in spite of all that, it still ended in failure. The camp is gone. That megaphone-wielding Scot is the last dying trace of the social conscience that exploded onto the scene outside St Paul's. Why did it fail? Because the battle was, for the time being, won by those who fought so hard to repress that conscience- to make us see it as a cry of a lawless, trouble-making rabble who know nothing of 'the way of the world'. The discourse was won by those who wanted so badly to make us believe that things could go on as they were before, that each of us could just go on contentedly gorging in our own feeding trough just so long as we still had one. It was won by those who argued that our social ills could be solved with the masochistic logic of deficit reduction- that social unrest could be bludgeoned by police batons, that the homeless could be moved on, that though there were no jobs, the unemployed could be farmed out to corporations for free. That youth could spend the meantime racking up astronomical debt in the expectation of jobs unlikely ever to come. In short, it was won by those who offered a pseudo-solution to the very real rumblings of a corrupt, discredited order. And how many of us swallowed it?! All in the dear wish that we could re-immerse ourselves back in our narrow, well-worn furrows- whether it be in work or family, culture or the latest shiny electronica. We all have a tendency to do it. And as time went on, more and more people lucky enough to have other prospects left the camp- leaving behind only those who had no such option, together with a few hard-core activists, to be easily dissipated by a malevolent state bent on dispelling this violent intrusion of a social conscience into the very heart of the discredited monster of the City.

And what of those dissipated elements? They do not go away. And in our abandoning their cause- our real cause- all we have done is to make them lose any hope that society can face up to its own discontents; that they have seen the space opened for a collective social conscience ultimately rejected in favour of a collective social repression. That the growing numbers of those whose futures have been sold-out will have little else to do now but to either accept the appalling fate they've been left to, or to resort to the kind of immediate, apolitical violence we've seen before.... Such that it is a sure bet that London will burn again..... And when it does, those of us who have chosen repression over conscience will have no-one but ourselves to blame....

Whitney Houston and American Psycho

- a marriage made in the 80s

It might seem today that there are people born to war-torn, aids-ravaged nations with a higher life expectancy than the mega-stars of the music industry. Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and now Whitney Houston, is to name but a few of those who've recently come to a self-destructive, premature demise. And with each death there of course follows the predictable, violently-opposed responses. On the one hand, there are those who hold dear the achievements of their star, looking upon the self-destructive addictions and chaotic relationships as tragic mistakes. And on the other, opposing such sentimental remembrances, is the druggy-bitch-had-it-coming brigade, ghoulishly revelling in the star's 'deserved' fall from grace; their tweeters and yellow-top columnists alike expressing much the same puerile sentiments.

Though of course, far more interesting than such moral and aesthetic wranglings is the question as to why we've such heavy investment in our mega-stars to begin with. And not just as to the question as to why we've the the need of such mega-stars generally, but also as to what the rise and fall of each particular celebrity tells us about the specific cultural needs of the world that elevated them to stardom. And with Whitney, the most recent mega-star to have fallen from grace, the culture in question is of course that of the 1980s. And it is the gambit of this article that the function of Whitney in Brett Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho' gives us the vital clue as to understanding that social world's investment in her.

Video link to Patrick Bateman on Whitney Houston

The scene posted is one of the most brilliantly comic of the film, and points too to the greatness of the film adaptation of the novel; the Whitney Houston speech being an interior monologue in the book, but is here brilliantly scripted into a scene with Bateman and two of his victims. Why then is the scene so comic? Why does the intoxicated Elizabeth laugh as Bateman delivers a treatise on the greatness of Whitney's top hit, The Greatest Love of All? It is because she knows, as we do, that by day he lives within the ruthless 1980s world of Wall Street, in Mergers and Acquisitions- or, Murders and Executions as Bateman brazenly tells a barmaid in another scene. Bateman's world is that of a poisonously competitive world where rampant, top-end consumerism is the badge of success; a world away from the love of Whitney's theme. So too are the cold electronic beats that were the back-track to Bateman's world of greed in flagrant incongruity with his giving a tender treatise on a singer from the tradition of gospel, soul and jazz. But there is another, yet darker side to the comic effect. We know too that he has surely brought the girls back to his apartment so as to sexually assault and murder them. Indeed, the hooker Christie, who looks peculiarly on at him as he affirms his passion for Whitney, is only there because Bateman has promised her money for plastic surgery so as to cover up the damage caused by his last orgy having ended with her being cut with the sharpened end of a steel coat-hanger. With Christie and our own knowledge then, the speech takes on a rather blacker comic hue.

Why then does Bateman identify with The greatest love of all. In his reply to Elisabeth's puzzlement the reason ought to be clear- that it is just because 'it is impossible in this world we live in to empathise with others'- that he identifies with the message of Whitney's song. That in spite of such impossibility of empathising with others, 'we can always empathise with ourselves'. That is where we find 'the greatest love of all' is, according to Whitney, 'inside of me'. So though Bateman exists within the vicious world of 1980s Wall Street by day, supplemented by the excesses of his orgies of sex and violence by night, he still hopes to find some love- some transcendence- there inside himself. That in spite of all else, he hopes that the love he finds in himself might mean that 'it is not too late to better ourselves', 'to act kinder'. Or in the context of the scene, a hope that might perhaps allow him to spare the lives of the already intoxicated girls upon the sofa....

....But yet Whitney's 'greatest love' doesn't save the girls from Bateman. Why? Well, whilst we might agree with Bateman that Whitney promises a certain transcendence from a world that robs him of all empathy, of all love, of his fellow man. But yet that song must come to an end. He must return to the world where such transcendence can only ever be a fragmentary escape- something bought as a mere commodity within that world like any other. That in fact, loving himself is made impossible by the same mechanism that makes loving his fellow man impossible. An impossibility owing to the fact that his world only runs in so far as he and his colleagues are in brutal competition with one another. In so far as they hate each other. Each must hate the successful for the success that transforms their own lives into failures. And each must in turn hate the failures because to empathise with them could only weaken their will to the top- empathy as such is ideologically impossible in that world. But why does this imply that such a man cannot love himself through Whitney's transcendence from that world devoid of empathy and love for others? It is because the only traits that seem to distinguish people from their more successful colleagues are the barely perceptible upgrades in the things that they themselves identify with. In the world of American Psycho, people are always confusing one executive with another, but yet at the same time they are always squabbling over the small differences between their status symbols. Hence Bateman is horrified that his more successful rival, Paul Allen, has much the same apartment as he himself has, only with a better view of the park. Or in another iconic scene of the film, Bateman becomes feverish at the slightly better quality of Allen's business card, otherwise identical to his own.

In short, Brett Easton Ellis makes us see why the very cause of the need for Whitney's self-love in its transcendence from the cut-throat 1980s world, is the very thing that makes it an impossibility. Self-love is not an option in a world where we must hate a fellow man who is all but indiscernible from us but for small advantages in things that we ourselves aspire to. It is thereby a world whose hatred of others implies self-hatred- a realisation that can be stayed only by hating those others and the world in general in a yet more energetic, violent form. Patrick's self-hatred implied in the hatred of his colleagues is the motor that leads him to lurch between outward destructive violence and inward self-annihilation- this is the dynamic at the heat of Easton Ellis's masterpiece.

And returning to Whitney, we might note that she herself always admitted to suffering from the cut-throat world of the music industry. So perhaps a depressing implication of her own demise suggests that even the most talented preachers of transcending the hatred of the world through self-love, struggle to live by their own preaching within such a world....