25 Hour Watch

“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”

– Hassan i Sabbah, through the pen of William S. Burroughs.

To begin, a story:

Two 20-somethings walked up to the customer service desk at work a few days ago. They were both dressed all in black, the guy in what I’d call ‘casual gothic’, black jeans and a loose unbuttoned black button-down shirt over a black t-shirt with a subtle graphic, the girl in ‘look-at-me gothic’, painted-on black eyebrows and tight pants and a tight shirt on her very thin body, at least three piercing in her face alone, two on her lips, one in her nose.

“What can I help you find?”

“Paint It Black.”

I looked. We didn’t have it, but two of our other stores in the area — one of the more conservative in the country, the Red part of the Purple state that is Colorado politically — did. “Or I can just order it for you, and it’ll be here in a week or so.”

“No thanks.” And that was that. They wandered over to buy some coffee.

Why did I tell you this story? And what does this have to do with “monoculture”, the big, ugly, kludge-y word that titles this piece?

The point is that we now live in a culture where it is not only accepted that someone can walk around in public with metal hanging off their face and wearing nothing but black and ask for a book on ‘gothic homemaking’ but even praised as “being themselves” or simply “another type of normal.” In fact, short of barging into the store naked or brandishing a weapon, I can’t think of anyone, dressed in any fashion, or acting in any way, that I would consider outside the limits of ‘normality.’ The counter-culture has become culture without a new counter-culture springing up to take its place.

At some point in the last two decades, then, Hegel’s dialectic broke. (Hegelian Dialectic, for those of you who don’t know– aww, just go read about it!) Early forms of counter-culture existed in such movements as Romanticism, Bohemianism, The modern era has had a major form of counter-culture since, I suppose, the end of World War I and the death of the large-scale consensus. Starting with the Lost Generation of writers, such as Hemingway between the wars, into the Beats in the ’50s and early ’60s, the student protests of 1968, the growth of the gay counter-culture in America after 1969, punk in the late ’70s and ’80s, and so on.

These counter-cultures would challenge the existing status quo directly as the antithesis to the broader culture’s thesis, which then merges (using crunchy German words like “Aufhebung” and “aufgehoben”) with the antithesis, producing the synthesis, which in turn becomes the new thesis for an antithesis to arise against and so on ad infinitum.

But in the late ’90s, I believe, suddenly decades of conflict between mainstream culture and counter-culture ended when, through the rapid democratization of the means of cultural production by the growth of cable television, the internet, blogs, twitter, social networks, etc etc etc, the counter-culture suddenly found itself in charge of everything. A Hot Topic in every mall, a tattoo shop on the main drag of every city in America. And what did the counter-culture do when it found itself in charge? Well, look for yourself: Jay Leno is still on late night. We still love pop singers and celebrity spectacle. “Culture” doesn’t seem all that different for having been altered by the counter-culture’s entrance into respectability, even if marijuana is about to be legalized in California and lesbians can make out on a street-corner in any big city in America and not get beaten to a pulp.

We live in the Monoculture. (Monoculture is a word taken from agriculture, where it referred to a system of planting a single species of crop over a wide area. “Polycultures” and “heirloom gardening” are considered reactions against the practice, which is associated with agri-business and corporate farming.)

Walk to a street corner in any major city in the world today. Go ahead, close your eyes, imagine it. Whatever city strikes your fancy. One you’ve been to would be best, but whatever. If you’ve seen pictures of a major city you’d like to visit in your mind for 30 seconds, go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Got it?

Alright.

What do you see around you? Likely, unless you have a very good memory for places, it’s something of an amalgamation of famous buildings and things you ‘expect’ in the place you’re imagining. A cafe in Paris next to the Arc de Triumphe. Big Ben towering over the river Thames. The hyper-crowded streets of downtown Tokyo. The Statue of Liberty brushing up against the Empire State Building.

McDonald’s.

An anonymous model wearing clothing you can’t afford. Maybe a cigarette ad, if you’re imagining somewhere outside America, where those are still allowed in public. Toyota and Ford cars on the street.

This is the monoculture.

200 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, you traveled halfway around the world, and things were different. The people who lived there had their own culture, completely separate from yours, and the counter-culture in other cultures could pull from that to challenge its own culture. Think Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets carrying around the Tao De Ching and the Lotus Sutra, or Hemingway drinking in Parisian salons, the punks importing German stoicism and nihilism.

Now, however, through the magic of the internet, television, and globalization, that variety has been conglomerated into the vast networks of knowledge that we use as our backup brains. There’s no such thing as the “other” anymore. We imported it, examined it, dusted it off, and stashed it on the bookshelf alongside everything else. Mozart and the Ramones, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon and How To Make Love Like A Porn Star, Saw and Audition. Everything is hip, everything is part of the culture. (I mean, when they can make jokes about BDSM in prime-time — Barney on How I Met Your Mother has a ‘whip guy’ — they can do anything.)

Next: Subculture Killed The Counter-Culture Star