I’m Florencia Lujani, and welcome back to Cultural Patterns, a newsletter about culture, creativity and strategy.
Hi, hello! It’s been a while, yes, I needed some time off. And if you subscribed to this newsletter in the past 10 months, or you’re new here, hello for the first time ever. You might not even know who I am, or why you decided to subscribe. Yet, here we are! You can stick around for some thinking on culture, brands, creativity, etc. I feel energised and I might even have a series called “Culture is…” lined up. But, as evident, I never stick to a schedule, so you can also unsubscribe. Both totally valid options.
So, 2022. I can’t and won’t attempt to summarise it, but just like you, I’ve been trying to make sense of everything going on *gestures profusely around her*. Hollywood’s golden boy Timothée Chalamet encapsulated how it feels right now:
“I think it’s tough to be alive now. I think societal collapse is in the air, it smells like it” - Timothee at the Venice Film Festival
If you’ve got a habit of consuming news like me, then you might agree with the sentiment. Kae Kurd, a British-Kurdish comedian, summarised it very well too:
“Can we have one normal day? Somehow everyday seems to be like a life-altering event. Bro, I don’t want to live in history being made. I just want six moths where nothing major happens, where the biggest issue is what happens to a local council’s building.”
We’re craving banal news but they come with several once-in-a-lifetime crisis sprinkled on top, in a not-so-fun, same-day delivery package 🛍 . Reading history books at schools made events made sense, but experimenting those events is far more chaotic, and figuring out the impact of those events in culture is even harder. And I don’t mean figuring out the latest trend, but how shared meaning is changing, and how new values and social norms appear. That’s what I’m interested in and why I’ve found the perspective I’m sharing below so helpful.
History and Culture
I kept going back to this question of what happens to culture during historical events, because those moments have a way of constructing common sense reality. Common sense shapes cultural life in how we act, how we understand things, how we assign value to them, etc.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have it in my 2022 bingo card to find out about Queen Elizabeth II’s death via a meme. That’s just bizarre. Still, it happened, and her death will be one event from this year that might be mentioned in the same sentence with other historical events, such as the war in Ukraine or the cost-of-living crisis.
But how can we make sense of history and its impact on culture? I found some insight in Reading the Popular, a book by John Fiske, one of my favourite writers in the field of cultural studies. He explains that there are two ways in which we can understand current events: we can think of them as history, or as genealogy.
Fiske explains that history aims to tell the origins of events and provides continuities that link events into a unified, coherent story. History is also characterised ‘by its pretense that it is revealing an extra-discursive truth rather than producing a discourse of knowledge and power’ (p.121) Just a fancy way of saying that history is not an innocent, objective truth.
Genealogy, instead, involves the recognition of disparity, of the dispersion of origins and links, of discontinuities and contradictions. He says:
‘Genealogy sees our social past as heterogeneous, fragmented, as multiple patterns of domination replacing each other. If there is any unifying principle, it lies in the hazardous play of dominations’ (p.151)
This is the way culture works, not only in 2022, but always: change coming from all directions, from different groups in society fighting to put forward their view, challenging different values and norms, all happening at the same time.
Cultural change can’t be tied all together in a unified story.
But it is also true that these social, economic and political issues are shaping our daily life, and because of that, new discourses are emerging, new power struggles are appearing, and dominant meanings are being challenged.
The way, and the extent, into which these current issues will be reflected in the cultural production of today will vary. Sometimes, the connection will be clear and literal, but some other times, what we see in culture will be about completely different issues happening somewhere else, because there are multiple events happening, and they are all unique, and the contradictions between these will create new discourses that clash with one another. A bit like the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Cultural production is always chaotic
Genealogy helps us see that maybe the cultural production (television, records, clothes, video games, language, etc) from this time will have something in common, but it might not.
For example, economic inflation is having a very notable influence in culture today. Energy bills are so high that British TV show This Morning unveiled a new prize on their ‘Spin the Wheel’ game, in which the show would cover four months of energy bills for the winner.
Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby before finding out about the backlash and Ofcom complaints.
Another response to inflation came from Moschino’s collection unveiled at Milan Fashion Week: the brand created a blow-up show where all outfits incorporated some sort of inflatable element. Playful, over the top, and literal, but in the most bizarre way. 10 out of 10 in my ranking.
Also related to this is the return of the Y2K aesthetic, which has been reported extensively, but the way British girl band Flo is doing it is very refreshing, unique and nostalgic. (and ofc I already love them because we share the same name)
But so many other interesting things are going on: Gen Z is extremely gay, adults are embracing their inner child, tacky design is all the rage, the debate between degrowth and green growth is putting our economic system under question, and the trend of 5-to-9 routines shows how productivity creeps into our free, unpaid time.
We can try to write a unified story, to construct a grand narrative behind the apparent randomness of events, but it’s not going to be very useful, in the same way that keeping track of everything and everywhere all at once is also not useful or good for our mental health.
At least we know that whatever happens, whatever catchphrase takes hold of our public consciousness, someone will make a cool T-shirt out of it.
This is a real T-shirt by Sad Street, who bring together tacky design, popular culture and memes
See you next time, it won’t be in 10 months. Promise.
Michaela Coel said:
“Do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence”
In the past months, I’ve had really good personal news, suffered from anxiety, made some really cool shit I’m proud of, was on the verge of burn out, escaped from London for a while, swam in the sea a lot, discovered that my new ideas were old, and somehow found myself craving to share my thoughts again. To all of you coming up with inspiring creative ideas on a regular basis, my full admiration. And to you who had words of encouragement for me last week, thank you. If any of what I shared resonated and you want to get in touch, you can reply to this email or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.