Industry, Crisis, Prurience

On Season 3 of Industry

Industry is surrounded by a prurience that has been building since the 2008 crash. In fact it even feels like a period piece in that so little seems to have changed; a clarifying manifestation we are living in the long after-life of that rupture. Itself an animation of crisis the Marxist would say is inherent to capitalism – an interminable cycle that guides our subjectivity in all its economic determinacy. The glossy, edge-of-your seat drama framed by steel and glass is a masterclass in exemplifying the prevalent politics of diversity manifest in the centre of neocolonial capitalism. But the jeopardy on show is intoxicating. The transgressive forms of sociality, as they move within, through and against any stable or healthy relationship to work is both incredibly revealing and repulsive. Of course, this isn’t ordinary work, nor is it typical of elite representations. There are markets at play here. Invisible hands and technocratic waffle. A clipped Anglo-American English redolent of the British military cantonments that riddled the world. All swerve and power. A subordinating force. 

This is our market liberalism. And crisis is the name of the game. Swinging from one to the next, providing rushes of adrenaline in between the white-powdered snorts. And this pace gets played out in the personal lives of all the protagonists. From Rishi's wannabe wide-boy angling, Yasmin’s father issues, Harper’s imagined self-sufficiency, to Robert's self-effacement, Eric's diehard manipulations; we are made to relate and recognise their struggle. A struggle of individual personality within a time-compressed corner of workplace dynamics. 

This is the recogniseable heart of London. An authentic piece of transnational capitalism swallowing its actors. The mercurial animal spirits, the soapiness, the existential ruminations all doused in the romanticism of a high-stakes environment. This is identifiable, and perhaps even aspirational, for many an over-worked resident of the metropolis. Libidinality underwrites the whole lot–forget instrumentalised rationality–here the drive appears more opaque, more human. Messier. More personable than the high-vaunted world of Succession, and the placeless seediness of Euphoria.

Its speed and choice-dialogue also requires an immersion and concentration that cuts through the digital saturation of contemporary screen culture. This is anti-casual streaming. This is prestige episodic television that twists and arcs towards a nihilistic sentimentality. A classic HBO production in many ways. Yet the instantaneous nature of the action creates this fantasy of the spontaneous; where planning does not exist, and calculation happens in a split-second, not months ahead like so many of us are forced to ascribe to. Of course, in reality this is a deeply calculated environment carefully fine-tuned over the centuries-course of the development of financialised capitalist institutions. But the immateriality of it, versus say a more standard commercial market, speaks to a service-oriented listlessness that plagues modern societies. If we can find drama in it, we will find meaning also. So the thinking goes. 

I say this reminds one of 2008, but of course there is no resistance here. There are no street protests, no kickback per se, just hints at diversifying portfolios, the workforce being one such variable capital asset. It's post-ideological in that sense. Everyone is, on one level, socially dead in the programme. Their relatable libidinality occludes a deeper nihilism, something which–without giving spoilers–plays out in a series of high-velocity moves in the final episode of the third series. We are being toyed with. 

Of course the emergence of our golden era of TV, sparking off from The Sopranos (though airing after the much underrated Oz – more on that soon) through to The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and aforementioned Succession, all centre around masculinity and middle-aged crisis. They are typified by the aesthetics of violence and patriarchy, shot through with moral ambivalence and societal nihilism (Six Feet Under doesn't quite fit this mold, interestingly). It’s television taken to a literary level, but one in hock with more learned genre fictions, rather than the philosophical modernism that underpins the auteur cinema. David Lynch with Twin Peaks should be read as pivotal lynchpin. We could say this nihilism, produced under the conditions of cable subscription TV, reflects a neoliberal hegemonic consolidation in true End-of-History fashion. Much has been written about this. Since then, streaming has taken off with its visual dirge of derivative tripe, though the sitcom and mockumentary have innovated considerably across both sides of the Anglo-Atlantic, paralleling developments on the continent in the noir-procedural show.

All this to say, Industry works upon certain established motifs in prestige television, while making interesting innovations based on a relatively decent representation of London. It being an HBO-BBC co-production should not go unnoticed. This geographically-expanded realism, at least for an American-dominated genre, speaks to the continual expanding of capital for new content, new stories, new stages. The fact that it works through a financial firm is quite telling, and one has to balance where fantasy and identification meet and part, where the real violence of neocolonial capital is obfuscated by capricious protagonist arcs. This is the conundrum of realist representation and the modern subject.

What does critique or disindentification look like here? To look away in moralistic disdain doesn't quite ring true. To watch from a prurient distance is perhaps the more authentic position in many cases, embracing the romanticised image while moving with an arrhythmic gait unrecognisable to the market statisticians and culture industrialists. We continue to accrue the conviviality of the bazaar subject in exchanging myths and stories beneath the train of capital and calculating logistics; all hot gossip, rumour and impropriate folklore—at least that's the impudent hope.