Culture as Metastasis

Even The Lord Of The Rings is a tumour cell now

Back in the late noughties, after my startup fell apart, I spent a few months working with a very avant-garde creator of the web 2.0 era, on a project spun out of an iconic and famous sci-fi movie. The movie’s director didn’t have the rights to his IP but wanted to continue developing projects in its fictional world; the business plan was to create a platform for decentralised, online fan creation of new storylines, within this existing fictional world. The best storylines would be added to canon and turned into video IP associated with the director. All was to be funded by paid-for product placement, in a convergence of decentralised story-recycling, fan culture and marketing.

The project never got off the ground, perhaps because of its murky legality, and I can’t name names: the creator was also a nightmare to work with, treated me less than well, was later trolled off the internet after a complicated run-in with a TV star since which time he hasn’t been seen. But I’ve been thinking recently about the vision behind the project, and how prescient it was: for some 15 years later, the vision of a dialogic relationship between a fictional ‘IP’ and decentralised, extremely online ‘fandoms’ isn’t a million miles from the model that’s consumed most of popular culture, in an increasingly total convergence of commodification and decnetralisation.

The result has been what I recently called ‘Human Centipede culture’: a model in which existing “IP”is endlessly recycled, producing (as Ewan Morrison recently noted) a kind of exhausting, empty, unmoored eternal cultural present. This all came back to mind with news this week that further ‘reboots’ are in the works for The Lord Of The Rings. The announcement elicited the usual mix of cheers and groans. But for me it coincided with discovery, thanks to a Twitter mutual, of a book even more prescient still than that failed sci-fi project back in the noughties: Baudrillard’s extraordinary The Transparency of Evil.

All the way back in 1994, Baudrillard could see that the emerging culture after the revolutionary “orgy” of the 1960s was one increasingly free of any grounding in material causality, constraint, or telos. He characterises art, sexuality and finance alike in these terms, sketching how each of these domains has become a kind of metastasising domain that refers only to itself:

Ours is a society founded on proliferation, on growth which continues even though it cannot be measured against any clear goals […] There is no better analogy here than the metastatic process in cancer: a loss of the body’s organic ground rules such that a given group of cells is able to deploy its incoercible and murderous vitality, to defy genetic programming and to proliferate endlessly.

In Baudrillard’s view, stagnation is also endless, directionless self-replication: “where there is stasis, there is metastasis”. He could be writing today, about the endless recycling that now dominates the culture industries - a model of production that realises, at scale, what that since-vanished visionary of fandom-first culture recycling envisaged back in my noughties wilderness years. He could be writing, too, about a proposed futuristic solution to another contemporary problem: the rising planetary demand for protein, and the collision course between this demand and the cruelty and environmental pollution caused by intensive livestock farming.

Many now herald “lab-grown meat” - that is, animal protein unmoored from the living form and telos of an actual animal - as the way out of this bind. But it felt stomach-churningly apt to discover recently that this product is produced in laboratory conditions thanks to the use of ‘immortal cells’: that is, cells that don’t stop growing when they’ve done their job, which is usually to grow some part of an animal body. And the other word for cells that don’t know when to stop proliferating is “cancer”. To put it another way: “lab-grown meat” is a polite way of saying “edible vat-grown tumours”. No one knows if there are any health implications to eating vat-grown tumours, but this product is nonetheless increasingly touted as one possible future of food.

And perhaps a physical diet of blindly metastasising tumour-protein is a fitting accompaniment to an equally blindly metastasising cultural diet of reboots. But if there’s one thing that, to my eye, is downplayed (so far at least) in Baudrillard’s remarkably prophetic 1994 picture, it’s that this spiralling into metastasis isn’t the whole cultural and political picture today. The reality principle hasn’t gone away.

Today, everything that’s most lively in contemporary politics concerns the slippage between culture-as-metastasis and the obdurate demands of reality. For example even as digital self-transformation encourages people to believe it possible to remodel themselves in line with an inner vision, the gap between digital promise and bleeding, sutured reality is driving a new wave of lawsuits.

There are countless other examples of the tension between protean vision and grim, contested reality. I expect politics to become increasingly attuned to these gaps as the 20s go on, as those groups least able to avoid dealing with materiality grow more restive, and more organised, pushing back. And this is bearing fruit on the cultural front too. For if at scale the culture is spinning out on endless reboots, where creators are able and willing to re-ground their work in reality (rather than just recycling the memeplex) I see a great many green shoots.

This is a very qualified optimism. When you’ve been in orbit, landing is (to say the least) a dangerous business, and we’re in for a bumpy ride. But it is optimism nonetheless: Baudrillard’s nightmare utopia of culture-as-metastasis is not the end of the line.

In personal news: next week is UK book publication week for Feminism Against Progress. What a strange feeling! It’s exactly as though I’ve invited people to a party, got everything ready, and am now just waiting for the doorbell to ring. I have some in-person events coming up in London over the next few weeks, and will share details of these as they’re firmed up. For now, cross your fingers for a good launch!