Succession and Class

I finally made time to watch Succession. The first season left me wondering what sort of fuss did the show made since I haven’t stumble on any review or analysis. Be that as it may, it feels good to step down from the online echo chambers once in a while. So I went through the search engines and, surprise me not, it was full of philosophical takes. Mostly from Antiquity to Early Modernity. Those informed essays made me think I was the crazy person on the bus. The most repeating claim was that Succession is so intriguing and beloved because it plays out with the Shakespearean grandeur of King Lear, Macbeth, and so forth.

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One can argue — especially if the first year of philosophical education is happening — that the series is reversed Kantian ethics. In other words, a Machiavellian depiction that serves best power, not morality. And, indeed, many did that as well. Thus analyzing it, they propose for us to hold its opposite. The good life is blah-blah. You need to use “people as ends, not as means,” blah-blah. According to them, the show serves a moral lesson, an edification of sorts, that can illuminate our dark ages of extreme individualism and, as a consequence, social atomization.

You know the drill.

The Hollywood Reporter even collected opinions from different “sociologists,” experts, they say, to find out why — despite the viewers’ bitterness — we still “love to hate and hate to love” the show and the repugnance of every character involved. One of the pretentious claims made by a well-versed expert, referring back to the Shakespearean argument above, is that the “narrative is intriguing in its universality (e.g. _King Lear_) and its topicality.” Yeah, back in the savanna was full of multi-billionaires, surrounded by their predatory offsprings, flying around with private jets, and helicopters, buying politicians, journalists, and anyone who can be bought, destroying their competition, monopolizing the entire industry thus ruling the whole media discourse.

I’m pretty sure he talks about the “theme,” not the narrative, but the truth is — it doesn’t matter. ‘Topicality’ is what, I suppose, makes the connection between the universal and the particular in this in-depth analysis. But the question remains as to what is meant by it — all those things specific to our present everyday life: smartphones, social networks, etc., or the power structures themselves and the relations between their different strata? If “sociologists” dare to talk like this, as vague as possible, and, hence, dare to ignore the very foundations of their discipline, the social world in its concreteness, we should afford to ridicule them.

Another of the impeccably schooled in obfuscation claims the following: “The cultural narrative here is that wealth corrupts. When super-wealthy individuals or families suffer as a result of their faulty moral compass, it may open up a space for audiences to identify and ‘forgive’ or absolve the corruption because a price is being paid.” In other words — to each his due. We may die of hunger and poverty, but at least we are honest and decent human beings. We didn’t commit ourselves to false happiness, fake love, incessant lust and inauthenticity, as the pro-Kantian/contra-Machiavellian argument insists. We vindicate you because you get what you deserve.

“Still, there’s the hope, or at least the intriguing chance, that characters like Kendall or Shiv are actually good deep down”, another expert claims. As if there’s some personal core that “the corruption” of the previous claim might not reach. As if human beings come to this world half-finished. Probably if they haven’t been that unlucky with a “father [who] is an asshole [and] who has stunted their emotional development”. Namely, Logan Roy, “who have weathered physical abuse […] and emotional manipulation (they were used as bargaining tools for their mother’s share of the fortune)”, says Nannicelli. Undoubtedly everyone is a victim here, including Logan himself, but of what?

As Henri Lefebvre will announce regarding Soren Kirkegaard,

“He values the very things which are destroying him, because he exists through them alone. He possesses everything it is possible to possess: money, property, leisure, talent, thought. And yet he possesses nothing.”

And one can argue that this is the situation not only of Logan and his offspring but of the very class itself, the class of the extremely rich.

The truth is, they are all — with a probable exception, the patriarch, — incurably bored. By the time of writing this, still at the beginning of season two, we still don’t have any clue about the origins of Logan Roy’s empire. Where did he come from? Is he just a miracle of social mobility myth or just another nepotist scumbag?

Tom and Greg are perhaps the only official parvenus so far. And that’s why they are interesting. In one quite illuminating line from season one, Tom, while giving Greg a decent, highly bourgeois feast, promises the “cousin” that he will teach him “what it is to be rich”. And for me, the ultimate premise of this show is precisely the lesson of class. It’s something that you need to learn. Even if you are born into it, you need to learn how to represent it, and how to gain the image of a bourgeoisie. If a proletarian becomes humanized by an act of deterritorialization, by transcending his or her life as a proletarian, the bourgeoisie dehumanizes himself in the act of learning how to be one. By losing sense of reality, they become what they are born into — successors.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who might succeed Logan Roy.

They already did, even if solely in their heads.