The ultimate postmodern spectacle

Michael Jackson and his trial hold a mirror to modern western civilisation
and its blurring of fact and fiction

Terry Eagleton
Wednesday May 25, 2005
The Guardian

Celebrity trials, like those of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, are
sometimes loosely called postmodern, meaning that they are media
spectaculars thronged with characters who are only doubtfully real. But
they are also postmodern in a more interesting sense. Courtrooms, like
novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction. They are
self-enclosed spheres in which what matters is not so much what actually
took place in the real world, but how it gets presented to the jury. The
jury judge not on the facts, but between rival versions of them. Since
postmodernists believe that there are no facts in any case, just
interpretations, law courts neatly exemplify their view of the world.

Another thing which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction is
Michael Jackson himself. There is a double unreality about staging the
fiction of a criminal trial around a figure who has been assembled by
cosmetic surgeons. Jackson’s freakish body represents the struggle of
fantasy against reality, the pyrrhic victory of culture over biology. Quite
a few young people are not even aware that he is black. If postmodern
theory won’t acknowledge that there is any such thing as raw nature,
neither will this decaying infant.

It is hardly surprising that he has expressed a wish to live forever, given
that death is the final victory of nature over culture. If the US sanitises
death, it is because mortality is incompatible with capitalism. Capital
accumulation goes on forever, in love with a dream of infinity. The myth of
eternal progress is just a horizontalised form of heaven. Socialism, by
contrast, is not about reaching for the stars but returning us to earth. It
is about building a politics on a recognition of human frailty and
finitude. As such, it is a politics which embraces the reality of failure,
suffering and death, as opposed to one for which the word “can’t” is almost
as intolerable as the word “communist”.

If Michael Jackson is a symbol of western civilisation, it is less because
of his materialism than because of his immaterialism. Behind the endless
accumulation of expensive garbage lies a Faustian spirit which no object
could ever satisfy.

Like Jackson’s cosmetic surgeons, postmodernism believes in the infinite
plasticity of the material world. Reality, like Jackson’s over-chiselled
nose, is just meaningless matter for you to carve as you choose. Just as
Jackson has bleached his skin, so postmodernism bleaches the world of
inherent meaning. This means that there is nothing to stop you creating
whatever you fancy; but for the same reason your creations are bound to be
drained of value. For what is the point of imposing your will on a
meaningless reality? The individual is now a self-fashioning creature,
whose supreme achievement is to treat himself as a work of art.

Ethics turns into aesthetics. And just as there are no constraints on the
individual self, so there are no natural limits to promoting freedom and
democracy across the globe. What looks like a generous-hearted tolerance –
you can be whatever you like – thus conceals an imperial will. The tattoo
parlour and George Bush’s foreign policy may seem light years distant, but
both assume that the world is pliable stuff on which to stamp your will.
Both are forms of narcissism for which the idea of reality putting up some
resistance to your predatory designs on it, whether in the form of the
Iraqi opposition or a visit from the local district attorney, is an
intolerable affront.

Postmodern culture rejects the charge that it is superficial. You can only
have surfaces if you also have depths to contrast them with, and depths
went out with DH Lawrence. Nowadays, appearance and reality are one, so
that what you see is what you get. But if reality seems to have dwindled to
an image of itself, we are all the more sorely tempted to peer behind it.
This is the case with Jackson’s Neverland. Is it really the kitschy,
two-dimensional paradise it appears to be, or is there some sinisterly
unspeakable truth lurking beneath it? Is it a spectacle or a screen?

If courtrooms are quintessentially postmodern, it is because they lay bare
the relations between truth and power, which for postmodernism come to much
the same thing. Truth for them, as for the ancient Sophists, is really a
question of who can practise the most persuasive rhetoric. In front of a
jury, he with the smoothest tongue is likely to triumph. On this view, all
truth is partisan: the judge’s summing up is simply an interpretation of
interpretations. What determines what is true for you is your interests,
which in turn are determined by gender, class, ethnicity and the like. The
Simpson trial gave a new twist to the claim that truth is black and white:
whether you thought the defendant guilty or innocent depended to a large
extent on your skin colour. But the other interests in question are
financial ones. Just as the scientist with the fattest research grant is
most likely to produce results, so truth in the Simpson and Jackson trials
is a commodity to be knocked down to whoever has the deepest pockets. In
this sense, a good deal of postmodern theory can be illustrated by a single
time-worn phrase: get yourself a good lawyer.

· Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University