THE SOUND AND FURY OF HBO’s SUCCESSION
Who else is looking forward to the new season of Succession this fall? To prepare, I’ve been watching the season recaps on HBO’s website. Watching them has reminded me of the joys of the series. Yes, I will be gawking at the inside shots of their apartments (a dream to someone living in a five-story walk-up in Harlem). I’ll be munching on potato chips in my pajamas while the characters are eating caviar at a downtown Gala. But reviewing the recaps has also got me thinking about the family dynamics and the cultural critique that is embedded in the plotline. Those family dynamics and the cultural critique are what I want to explore in this essay.
Succession dramatizes the interpersonal dysfunctions of a family. Not a “normal” family, mind you, but the Roy clan, who owns and operates a global media conglomerate. The plot is driven by the declining health and poisonous narcissism of the family patriarch, Logan Roy, and the conglomerate’s quest for global domination in a changing media climate. The show explores the machinations of Logan’s children to wrest control of that media empire from the grip of their stubborn father.
The Roy empire, Waystar Royco, speaks to the power of a monopolized culture industry. As a private entity, Waystar Royco’s quest for media domination is emblematic of how neoliberal globalization “colonizes” (to borrow a term from Habermas) the public sphere. The penultimate episode in Season One elevates that theme into plain view. It is set in an English castle where Logan’s daughter will marry a sycophantic henchman for Waystar. The daughter is a campaign advisor to a senator with leftist political leanings, reminiscent of Bernie Sanders. The Senator, who is attending the wedding, openly campaigns on the platform that Waystar is a blight on our body politic and a dangerous player on the global stage. In a key scene, the Senator accuses Waystar of “coarsening the public sphere.” Let us unpack the meaning of that critique.
What is the public sphere? The notion of the “public sphere” figures prominently in the work of Jürgen Habermas. At its root, the public sphere serves as an ideal feature of “civil society.” Habermas’ idealized public sphere is the domain of “free and uncoerced communication,” and serves as a mechanism for establishing the universal principles that can govern our lives. As an arena where people can congregate as free and equal participants in debate and dialogue in search of the “common good,” the public sphere is where “public opinion” and “consensus” emerge. This focus on creating the conditions for free and equal participation in democratic dialogue is known in philosophy as “discourse ethics.”
The public sphere is essential for democracy. No democracy can exist without it. In a legitimate public sphere as Habermas idealizes it, politics transcends the sham partisanship and tribalism that mars our current form of democracy. The invocation of an “ideal speech situation” is important to Habermas because he seeks to criticize postmodernism for eschewing the search for ideals (i.e., universal principles) that can serve as vehicles for critical social theorizing: “Only the existence of [a universal] norm…frees us from a political world in which might makes right,” he says. By rendering everything indeterminate, by honoring every miniscule subjective feeling (God forbid someone’s feelings get hurt in a conversation), we postmodernists have undercut our ability to engage in critical theorizing. What we get instead are Twitter mobs.
Now we are in a position to understand the force of the Senator’s lament about Waystar’s role in “coarsening of the public sphere.” The Senator’s critique harkens to Habermas’ overarching concern with the “colonization” of the public sphere by market ideology and Weberian instrumental reasoning. Habermas worries, as does this Senator, that “face-to-face interactions in public spaces are no longer common: they have been replaced by the circulation of ideas and images in the mass media. The centralized and corporate control of the media threatens a free, open, and fully diverse exchange of ideas and information.” The Senator’s comment reflects his Habermasian critique that, in actual operation, the “coarsen[ed] public sphere” has become an arena where public opinion is manufactured, as opposed to a place where it organically emerges.
That Succession centers on a media conglomerate is no surprise; in fact, that’s the point, given the media’s outsized role in shaping the public sphere. The culture industry plays a powerful role in this manufacturing of consent. Critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School insist that the “culture industry” — the Roy empire being the epitome of the “culture industry” — manufactures needs and desires. “[T]he culture industry manages the psyche of its consumers,” observes Horkheimer. Rather than robust and well-informed citizens who participate actively in a healthy public sphere as Habermas idealizes, the culture industry produces consumers. “[The culture industry] transforms . . . people into complacent consumers….” “Consumer” is not just one identity among many in a capitalist society. Rather, it is the all-encompassing, dominating identity in American society. It is the most penetrating feature of American life. The consumer identity infiltrates into the deepest recesses of our psyches. So, when the Senator raises concerns about the coarsening of the public sphere by a media conglomerate, he is raising the most profound concerns about who we are as subjects within our society. His comment reflects his worry that the monopolization of the culture industry (the commercial goal of Waystar) is bringing out the worst in us, defiling our potential to be autonomous agents for change and for our own liberation.
In a democracy, there can be only one identity that has top priority, and that is the identity of citizen. Succession’s backdrop is the death of the “citizen.”
One line in Horkheimer’s piece epitomizes the Senator’s concern: “The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry.” If Waystar is successful in its quest, then that would mean that the whole world passes through the filter of that single corporation.
Consider now Episode Seven in Season One. The family’s dysfunction has reached such a point that it threatens the economic viability of Waystar. The patriarch, Logan Roy, understands that the public’s perception of a deep interpersonal rupture within the family could be catastrophic to his empire and his quest for media domination. That prompts him to orchestrate a public-relations plan: he summons his children to a New Mexico ranch to meet with a therapist whom he has hired. It is safe to say that Logan Roy is not the therapy-seeking type, and so this scheme is no attempt to effectuate any kind of healing or to improve family dynamics. We know this because Logan Roy has done more than hire a therapist; he has also hired a professional photographer to document the family therapy for purposes of allaying public concerns. The “therapy session” is a public-relations stunt. This episode graphically illustrates the sinister nature of Weberian instrumental reasoning and the kind of pathological communication patterns (the family members simply cannot communicate in a heartfelt way) that arise when the public sphere is colonized. Everyone has an agenda, and everything is tainted by the pursuit of competing agendas.
This episode is antithetical to the Habermasian ideal of a robust public sphere; in fact, it is the Habermasian nightmare. This nightmare depicts a world where everything in the public sphere is stage-managed, strategically orchestrated. Life becomes centered around public relations and all interpersonal relationships become forms of manipulation. Commerce is king. What we are seeing in Logan Roy is the quintessential capitalist identity — homo economicus. In this sense, this episode is a critique of the kind of mindset underpinning the consumerist identity that gets produced by rampant neoliberalism.
In Succession, we viewers are horrified at how empty, how vacuous, and yes, how downright absurd, the characters are. The fabulous wealth of the Roy family has produced individuals who know only how to perform their roles as Tom Wolfe-ian “masters of the universe.” The real horror, of course, is the prospect that we postmoderns are no better than Logan Roy and his children, except for the fact that we live our lives on smaller canvases. The show raises the specter that we are all condemned to be mere role-players, mere choosers of whatever identities we happen to “feel like.” The show balks at this bleak picture of identity through a single character, Logan Roy’s brother, who has dissociated himself from the dynasty and lives a reclusive and modest life on a farm in Canada. This character functions as a salve on our own conscience because it suggests that we viewers, if we have the guts, can be authentic human beings, that we need not be condemned to being poor players strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage, all of which signifies nothing.
But as the plot unspools, we’re not fully convinced, and so we keep watching. I know I will be.
