Review: “Can the Left Learn to Meme? Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things” by Mike Watson

“Despite the majority of voters aged 18-39 resisting the smear campaigns and voting for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Britain’s aging population overwhelmed the voice of its youth to take the landslide victory.”

In the aftermath of the U.K. General Election, the arrival of Can the Left Learn to Meme? Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things (2019) could simply not feel timelier. Through the bluster of Boris and Brexit—and amid the residual desperation and heartache—author Mike Watson finds reprieve and optimism through the incessant cultural production of millennials.

On the morning of December 13th, the Left woke up to find that their filter bubble had been burst and—in spite of their best efforts—the Conservative Party had secured a majority government. With the battleground of social media playing its most prominent role in a U.K. election to date, this victory could not only be considered a win for the Tories’ far-right agenda, but also for Donald Trump, Leave EU, and all the other “mouth-breathers” complicit in the ongoing Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Despite the majority of voters aged 18-39 resisting the smear campaigns and voting for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Britain’s aging population overwhelmed the voice of its youth to take the landslide victory. This “shock” result has subsequently left the millennial generation marginalized and facing another five years of living under a government to which it is fervidly ideologically opposed. In foretelling this result, Watson has conceivably penned this intriguingly hopeful yet realistic call to arms just for them.

In Culture Industry, Adorno proposed that pop culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods (such as radio and tv programs) to be used for top-down manipulation of the masses by inducing passivity.

Through an array of cultural references from the contemporary art world, to Stranger Things (2016-2020) and cat memes, Watson looks to recuperate and reimagine Theodor W. Adorno’s 1974 essay Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception for his contemporary audience. In Culture Industry, Adorno proposed that pop culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods (such as radio and tv programs) to be used for top-down manipulation of the masses by inducing passivity. In modernizing Adorno’s critique, Watson considers how, with the advent of the readymades (à la Marcel Duchamp and later Andy Warhol), high art—the very tool formerly used to critique such bourgeois oppression—has become so heavily commodified that it lacks any real political value. Devoid of this medium as a means of useful protest, Watson considers the power of new media (such as memes, online gaming and social media) as offering boundless opportunity for expression, advocating the utilization and abstraction of it through persistent production in a rally against apathy and cynicism. This evolution of Adorno’s work is deftly condensed in Watson’s anecdote where he no longer considers apathetic media receptacle Homer Simpson as an accurate model of the media consumer. Rather, he upholds Simpson’s daughter Lisa and her free form jazz licks as a more fitting account of the new media audience-producer.