{"id":21235,"date":"2013-08-01T08:08:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T12:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21235"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:34:49","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:34:49","slug":"qotd-banksy-and-the-lumpenintelligentsia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/01\/qotd-banksy-and-the-lumpenintelligentsia\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Banksy and the lumpenintelligentsia<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Better still is Banksy\u2019s satirical picture, this one on a wall in London\u2019s Essex Road, of two small children pledging allegiance, with hand on heart, to a Tesco plastic bag on a flagpole \u2014 actually an electric cable \u2014 being run up like a flag by a third child. Tesco is Britain\u2019s largest supermarket chain, and its plastic bags, white with blue stripes and red lettering, litter the countryside, often flapping from trees or disfiguring hedgerows.<\/p>\n

Of course, Banksy, as a spoiled child of a consumer society in which real shortage is unthinkable, has all the unexamined anticapitalist prejudices of the lumpenintelligentsia<\/em> to whom he appeals. But it would be wrong to dismiss the satire of this image out of hand. Tesco, after all, issues a \u201cloyalty card\u201d called a Clubcard; every customer is asked at the checkout, now sometimes by machine, whether he has such a card. The card\u2019s name implies that shopping repeatedly in the stores of one giant corporation rather than in those of another, in the hope of a small price rebate, constitutes membership in a club. You don\u2019t have to be anticapitalist to think that such an idea debases the concept of human clubbability. (In the same way, the word \u201csolidarity\u201d is degraded in France by its association with the payment of high taxes extracted from citizens by force of law.) It is no new thought \u2014 but not therefore a false one \u2014 that at the heart of consumer society is often a spiritual vacuum, at least for many people. They fill the vacuum with meaningless gestures, such as loyalty to brands almost indistinguishable from one another. I have known murder committed over brands of footwear. Banksy\u2019s image captures, both succinctly and wittily, the vacuum and what fills it.<\/p>\n

You also don\u2019t have to be anticapitalist to acknowledge that the power of corporations like Tesco is not altogether benign. The small and beautiful town in which I live when I am in England illustrates this. When my next-door neighbor decided to restore and redecorate his house, which dated from 1709, the local council\u2019s conservation department demanded that the new lead flashing on his roof, invisible from the street, be stamped with a design of bees, presumably because it had been so stamped at some time in history. Certainly conservation is important and cannot be left entirely to individuals. But why was my neighbor bullied in this fashion when Tesco was permitted to open a store not 100 yards away with a frontage completely out of keeping with the town \u2014 an eyesore that affects the town\u2019s aesthetic fabric infinitely more than the absence of bees on my neighbor\u2019s invisible lead does? The great majority of British towns have been ruined aesthetically in a similar way, their main streets becoming dispiritingly uniform and ugly, no doubt through some combination of corporate power, bribery, and administrative incompetence. Bullying people like my neighbor is perhaps the officials\u2019 overcompensation for their cowardice or dishonesty in the face of corporations. Banksy\u2019s image therefore has some satirical depth to it.<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s attitude toward authority and property rights is the standard hostility of the lumpenintelligentsia<\/em>. Here he is particularly hypocritical because, while maintaining that pose of hostility, he employs lawyers, owns private companies, and is reputed to be highly authoritarian in his dealings with his associates. Inside every rebel, goes the saying, there\u2019s a dictator trying to get out.<\/p>\n

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Discriminating Philistine: Banksy\u2019s wit and talent don\u2019t excuse his vandalism and juvenility”, City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2013-06<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Better still is Banksy\u2019s satirical picture, this one on a wall in London\u2019s Essex Road, of two small children pledging allegiance, with hand on heart, to a Tesco plastic bag on a flagpole \u2014 actually an electric cable \u2014 being run up like a flag by a third child. Tesco is Britain\u2019s largest supermarket chain, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,831,28,41],"tags":[102,409,907,1289],"class_list":["post-21235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-business","category-media","category-quotations","tag-art","tag-corporations","tag-snobbery","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5wv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21235"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48434,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21235\/revisions\/48434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}