The century of the self is over
Sep. 3rd, 2006 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHere's a snapshot of how the Western psyche looked at the end of the 20th century:
Out: Guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion.
In: Emotion, instinct, self-expression, atomization, immediate gratification, focus groups, marketing, psychoanalysis, the self, the now, extraversion.
It's paradoxical stuff. What else can it be than a paradox when all repression has been repressed, and when self-expression is the thing everyone is forced to do?
I've been watching Century of the Self, a four-part documentary by Adam Curtis aired on the Reithian "elitist" (ie intelligent and principled) minority BBC TV channel BBC 4 back in 2002 (thanks for the burn, Jonathan!). It's a fascinating narrative of the 20th century, and how the insights of Freud into human instinct and emotion were spread through America via his nephew Edward Bernays, the grandfather of modern marketing.
The basic narrative of the documentary is that Freud's message that instinct and society could never be reconciled has mutated into a consumer society in which the two co-exist very well. While Freud believed that guilt, sublimation and repression were all essential to the workings of a healthy society, what we've seen since the mid-20th century is a successful harnessing of the selfish unconscious desires and impulses of the individual by megacorporations and by politicians (Thatcher and Reagan are particularly singled out in the last programme), turning instinct and emotion to their own advantage. What was called, in the 1950s, the "depth psychology" of the "hidden persuaders" became, by the end of the 20th century, government by focus group. Society seen as a place in which groups had loyalties and obligations to each other was replaced by the illusion that lifestyle and politics could be offshoots of individual self-expression.
Of course, the world has changed since 2001, when this series was in production. The neo-fascism of the neo-cons is a far cry from the Me Generation politics of Clinton. And yet often the language used to justify the new imperium is Me Generation language: invaded countries are being empowered, given choices, given freedom, we're told. It's their turn to be "me me me". What the neo-cons didn't seem to anticipate, though, was that the invaded societies would opt to become traditional theocracies. In other words, they would choose a rigid, traditional conservative social structure characterized by all those "out" values I put at the top of this page.
But sympathy for these "out" values is not confined to Islamic republics. Last night at the Venice Film Festival the new Stephen Frears film "The Queen" premiered. "The Queen" stars Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. Watch the trailer and you'll see that the plot very much revolves around the conflict between Tony Blair's marketing-led emotional response to the death of Princess Diana (branded as the "people's princess") and the Queen's desire for reticence. While Blair and the tabloids demand some kind of emotional effusion from the queen ("70% of people believe that your actions have damaged the monarchy," Blair tells the Queen, as though quoting one of the focus groups featured in episode 4 of "Century of the Self"), Her Majesty expresses a traditional mindset more associated with the Britain of the 1950s:
"No member of the royal family will speak publicly about this... This is a private matter... We do things in this country quietly. With dignity... If you imagine that I'm going to drop everything and come down to London before I attend to my grandchildren, then you're mistaken..."
Helen Mirren, interviewed in Saturday's Guardian, describes how her own anti-monarchist feelings had been softened by portraying the Queen in the film. She'd come to experience not so much understanding as love for her. Rather like Aleksandr Sokurov's recent film The Sun, which casts the Emperor Hirohito as some essentially sympathetic combination of Chance the Gardener from "Being There", Prince Myshkin from "The Idiot" and Robert Graves' Emperor Claudius, "The Queen" shows a character caught up in social changes she can't quite fathom.
"Something's happened, there's been a change, some shift in values," Elizabeth is pictured telling her mother. "When you no longer understand your people, maybe it is time to hand it over to the next generation." And to Blair, she confesses: "I prefer to keep my feelings to myself. Foolishly, I believed that was what the people wanted from their queen." Like Hirohito, she seems doomed, yet human.
And yet this story has an unexpected twist in the tail. As Mary Riddell says in today's Observer, it's now Tony "Focus Group" Blair who is universally hated and seen as out of touch with the public mood, largely because of the disaster of his attempts to impose Me Generation consumerist values on Middle Eastern societies he could understand only as "repressed" or "backward". His pseudo-liberal imperialist actions give Herbert Marcuse's term "repressive desublimation" a whole new dimension. "Repressive desublimation" has become an imperial tool, and in the light of this nightmare development the British Royal Family lines up, weirdly enough, with traditional Islamic culture as a valuable counterbalance; a reminder that society is not just about the "me", but about groups, obligations, duty, restraint, capitulation before central authorities, and so on. There's a parallel with the bushido values praised by Masahiko Fujiwara in "The Dignity of a State", the huge runaway non-fiction bestseller in Japan this year. No doubt Rupert Murdoch would be as down on that philosophy of stoicism as he is on the British royals.
"The Queen's horror, wonderfully conveyed by Mirren, was that she no longer knew her subjects," writes Mary Riddell. "She had believed them stoical, decorous and resilient, only to see them burying west London in Kleenex and carnations while baying for her presence or her blood. Elizabeth II may congratulate herself now on her long game. How lucky, she may think, that she has clung to the days when politicians, of all parties, observed protocol. One would not, for example, have caught Lord Salisbury promoting hoodie-hugging or wearing floral swimming shorts. Had she been swayed by the hysteria of 1997, she could have become a pretty regular kind of queen with a monogrammed coffee mug marked 'Liz'. How shrewd she must think herself to have shunned informality and change.... On the anniversary of Diana's death, few mourners scattered flowers at palace gates. The great, unprecedented, world-shifting surge of proxy grief had evaporated almost without trace."
That's the difference, perhaps, between 1997 and 2006. The century of the self is as dead as Diana. Let's try our list the other way around:
Out: Emotion, instinct, self-expression, atomization, immediate gratification, focus groups, marketing, psychoanalysis, the self, the now, extraversion.
In: Guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion.
Out: Guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion.
In: Emotion, instinct, self-expression, atomization, immediate gratification, focus groups, marketing, psychoanalysis, the self, the now, extraversion.
It's paradoxical stuff. What else can it be than a paradox when all repression has been repressed, and when self-expression is the thing everyone is forced to do?
I've been watching Century of the Self, a four-part documentary by Adam Curtis aired on the Reithian "elitist" (ie intelligent and principled) minority BBC TV channel BBC 4 back in 2002 (thanks for the burn, Jonathan!). It's a fascinating narrative of the 20th century, and how the insights of Freud into human instinct and emotion were spread through America via his nephew Edward Bernays, the grandfather of modern marketing.The basic narrative of the documentary is that Freud's message that instinct and society could never be reconciled has mutated into a consumer society in which the two co-exist very well. While Freud believed that guilt, sublimation and repression were all essential to the workings of a healthy society, what we've seen since the mid-20th century is a successful harnessing of the selfish unconscious desires and impulses of the individual by megacorporations and by politicians (Thatcher and Reagan are particularly singled out in the last programme), turning instinct and emotion to their own advantage. What was called, in the 1950s, the "depth psychology" of the "hidden persuaders" became, by the end of the 20th century, government by focus group. Society seen as a place in which groups had loyalties and obligations to each other was replaced by the illusion that lifestyle and politics could be offshoots of individual self-expression.
Of course, the world has changed since 2001, when this series was in production. The neo-fascism of the neo-cons is a far cry from the Me Generation politics of Clinton. And yet often the language used to justify the new imperium is Me Generation language: invaded countries are being empowered, given choices, given freedom, we're told. It's their turn to be "me me me". What the neo-cons didn't seem to anticipate, though, was that the invaded societies would opt to become traditional theocracies. In other words, they would choose a rigid, traditional conservative social structure characterized by all those "out" values I put at the top of this page.
But sympathy for these "out" values is not confined to Islamic republics. Last night at the Venice Film Festival the new Stephen Frears film "The Queen" premiered. "The Queen" stars Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. Watch the trailer and you'll see that the plot very much revolves around the conflict between Tony Blair's marketing-led emotional response to the death of Princess Diana (branded as the "people's princess") and the Queen's desire for reticence. While Blair and the tabloids demand some kind of emotional effusion from the queen ("70% of people believe that your actions have damaged the monarchy," Blair tells the Queen, as though quoting one of the focus groups featured in episode 4 of "Century of the Self"), Her Majesty expresses a traditional mindset more associated with the Britain of the 1950s:"No member of the royal family will speak publicly about this... This is a private matter... We do things in this country quietly. With dignity... If you imagine that I'm going to drop everything and come down to London before I attend to my grandchildren, then you're mistaken..."
Helen Mirren, interviewed in Saturday's Guardian, describes how her own anti-monarchist feelings had been softened by portraying the Queen in the film. She'd come to experience not so much understanding as love for her. Rather like Aleksandr Sokurov's recent film The Sun, which casts the Emperor Hirohito as some essentially sympathetic combination of Chance the Gardener from "Being There", Prince Myshkin from "The Idiot" and Robert Graves' Emperor Claudius, "The Queen" shows a character caught up in social changes she can't quite fathom. "Something's happened, there's been a change, some shift in values," Elizabeth is pictured telling her mother. "When you no longer understand your people, maybe it is time to hand it over to the next generation." And to Blair, she confesses: "I prefer to keep my feelings to myself. Foolishly, I believed that was what the people wanted from their queen." Like Hirohito, she seems doomed, yet human.
And yet this story has an unexpected twist in the tail. As Mary Riddell says in today's Observer, it's now Tony "Focus Group" Blair who is universally hated and seen as out of touch with the public mood, largely because of the disaster of his attempts to impose Me Generation consumerist values on Middle Eastern societies he could understand only as "repressed" or "backward". His pseudo-liberal imperialist actions give Herbert Marcuse's term "repressive desublimation" a whole new dimension. "Repressive desublimation" has become an imperial tool, and in the light of this nightmare development the British Royal Family lines up, weirdly enough, with traditional Islamic culture as a valuable counterbalance; a reminder that society is not just about the "me", but about groups, obligations, duty, restraint, capitulation before central authorities, and so on. There's a parallel with the bushido values praised by Masahiko Fujiwara in "The Dignity of a State", the huge runaway non-fiction bestseller in Japan this year. No doubt Rupert Murdoch would be as down on that philosophy of stoicism as he is on the British royals.
"The Queen's horror, wonderfully conveyed by Mirren, was that she no longer knew her subjects," writes Mary Riddell. "She had believed them stoical, decorous and resilient, only to see them burying west London in Kleenex and carnations while baying for her presence or her blood. Elizabeth II may congratulate herself now on her long game. How lucky, she may think, that she has clung to the days when politicians, of all parties, observed protocol. One would not, for example, have caught Lord Salisbury promoting hoodie-hugging or wearing floral swimming shorts. Had she been swayed by the hysteria of 1997, she could have become a pretty regular kind of queen with a monogrammed coffee mug marked 'Liz'. How shrewd she must think herself to have shunned informality and change.... On the anniversary of Diana's death, few mourners scattered flowers at palace gates. The great, unprecedented, world-shifting surge of proxy grief had evaporated almost without trace."That's the difference, perhaps, between 1997 and 2006. The century of the self is as dead as Diana. Let's try our list the other way around:
Out: Emotion, instinct, self-expression, atomization, immediate gratification, focus groups, marketing, psychoanalysis, the self, the now, extraversion.
In: Guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 01:34 pm (UTC)I do however think it's premature to say this century of self is over. Where are the political parties citing alternatives? Is David Cameron in the UK, or Al Gore in the US not also basing policies around focus groups? And do you believe in this new era where the 'self' is supposedly dead, that artistic expression cannot survive?
Artistic expression
Date: 2006-09-03 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 08:09 pm (UTC)Well, that does of course open up the possibility that the "century of the self" actually required some of us to be less selfless!
Actually, I was thinking after posting this that the modern self came into being perhaps with early Romanticism, combined with the imperial project of Western Europe. As if our enlarged and heroic Romantic sense of self came at the cost of the diminution of selves / slaves elsewhere.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 10:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 03:13 pm (UTC)Nice.
Date: 2006-09-03 03:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 03:33 pm (UTC)You first
Date: 2006-09-03 03:50 pm (UTC)Modern life is a blend of both old and new values. Every day I see people defer pleasure and even health with seventy-hour work weeks and making sacrifices for their kids, but I also see them act like selfish children on the weekends. It's the awkward cohabitation of the old and new values that needs to be reconciled; a frantic swing of the pendulum will just cause more misery.
Re: You first
Date: 2006-09-03 03:57 pm (UTC)Spot on.
Re: You first
Date: 2006-09-03 04:18 pm (UTC)Re: You first
Date: 2006-09-03 07:16 pm (UTC)Re: You first
Date: 2006-09-06 07:15 pm (UTC)Of course, it's all well and good citing Blair as an example, but Bush is surely the harbinger of 'decent' traditional values.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 04:01 pm (UTC)When we see an article, for example, on the Parents Television Council complaining about suggestive and vulgar language on primetime TV, we can either choose to interpret it as "just another example of how prudish the people in [this country] are" or we can see the larger trend, which is that, as the years go by, television is incorporating more and more suggestive language and situations. The PTC is hopelessly fighting the current.
The internet, and particularly all of this Web2.0 business, has fostered to a great extent an increase in atomization, self-expression and immediate gratification. Come read my bog: read all these surveys I filled out, read about how it's been eight months now since Justin and I broke up and how Karen is such a bitch and I'm really worried about my finals.
There is no self-restraint. If anything, my friends and I drink more and do more drugs post-9/11 than before.
-henryperri
"come read my bog"...
Date: 2006-09-03 11:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 12:33 am (UTC)I know it's 2006 and you can't really go back to the old essay format, but it afforded you more time to work out your ideas, and your thoughts weren't up for immediate knee-jerk criticism from people like me. Just a thought.
-henryperri
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 04:26 pm (UTC)"the British Royal Family lines up, weirdly enough, with traditional Islamic culture as a valuable counterbalance; a reminder that society is not just about the "me", but about groups, obligations, duty, restraint, capitulation before central authorities, and so on." - while I found your comments about the Queen both appealing and, in some ways, quite moving (I speak as a staunch republican here), but don't think that she represents the Royal Family as a whole. Prince Charles - along with all the others I can think of - is, for all his talk of 'faith' and traditional values, a representative of 'me' culture. He, like Blair, is a sixties throwback - all vague generalising about religion, selfish abandonment of personal duties in pursuit of personal gratification, a solipsistic approach to life etc. He's even got an authoritarian, repressive spine, just like Blair.
I'd love to think that stoicism, restraint, duty, deferred gratification and decorum were coming back. The images of Hillsborough-style displays of grief the British now wallow in are a huge embarrassment to me, marking the triumph of media-led sentimentality over deep-felt personal emotion. I don't see any manifestation of positive change happening though. The politics of the world seems marked by a more and more hysterical and juvenile approach to issues, not one rooted in the kind of structures and strictures you list in your Out column. The invasion of Iraq, the horror spectaculars of Al-Quaida, and the hysterical emotion laden rhetoric and actions of adherents to the various arguments about climate change all seem marked by a desire for 'immediate gratification' and an avoidance of long-term thinking.
What I also see is a more repressive streak coming back in societies across the world. A desire for more control. I don't see this captured in your lists above though. As it encompasses the characteristics of both lists. Tony Blair is, I think, both our past and our future.
What we are likely to have is a horrible mixture of both lists in the future. Government that in public obsesses about personal 'freedoms' whilst stripping them away in the guise of doing the best for us, keeping us safe/healthy etc. The rhetoric will be all we are left with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 04:31 pm (UTC)Could you define them please? The best you can? Since you started all this? Or do you want us to fight over all this into an unresolved mess? I guess we can do that... brb.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 07:28 pm (UTC)re-jiggered list
Date: 2006-09-03 05:21 pm (UTC)I think there are currently two groups that are in:
IN (the 21st century):
- introversion AND self & self-expression (blogs!),
- the long view and international community
- community AND atomization (web2.0, long tail),
- elitism AND immediate gratification (why work at meeting somebody who has different interests from you?)
- emotion AND guilt (guilt is an emotion, right?)
- emotions AND self AND duty (feelings fuel convictions)
IN (brought in from the 20th century):
- extroversion AND class consciousness (who’re the ones getting the MBAs?),
- the now, instinct (family values)
- emotion AND bottling things up (Xanax, Prozac),
- elitism AND immediate gratification (why work at meeting somebody who has different interests from you?)
- traditional society AND focus group marketing (popular mainstream MTV culture – the same screaming fans grow up to become the most traditional ones, anyway, exposed boob or no),
- deferred gratification AND immediate gratification (pointless vacation now, while putting away for retirement fund)
- restraint, repression, decorum, elitism (let’s all sign up for the fashion modelling show at the mall, and forget we’re fifty-years old)
- marketing AND repression (a loose, unpsychoanalytic idea of repression, but the championing of one hot product means the repression of everything else)
OUT:
- psychoanalysis (Freud who?)
Re: re-jiggered list
Date: 2006-09-03 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 05:52 pm (UTC)Oh, and I have to say, "neo-fascism of the neo-cons"? Come on. If we're gonna agree that Islamic radicalism isn't fascism in the strict sense of the word (which it isn't), then we have to say the same for Bush Administration politics. Fascism occurs under a distinct set of circumstances; it is always reactionary, it does not plan itself for forty years like the neo-cons have; it involves armed suppression of dissent at home; it relies on the unerring devotion of the greater majority of its people; &c. You can find examples of these in the Bush group, but not on the widespread scale of a Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Franco, or Stalin. Let's go back to our Trotsky: fascism is "a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file." (from Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It). (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm)Spontaneous. Yes, the Bush Administration - who's power, incidentally, is a-ever waning - has bourgeois totalitarian aims, but they are not fascist. We have to be careful with our definitions; calling everything you dislike or find unethical "fascist" is a sure-fire way of losing an argument. I have to keep myself from doing it all the time. Thank God for Trotsky and the material dialectic, huh? ;)
I apologize for the length of this response, but it's been bugging me for a bit!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 08:58 am (UTC)Bush and companies ability to spread fear is vastly pathedic, the only thing they ever had is september 11th. It would be another issue if they could actully come up with something, the reality is that they're just ineffective at about everything they do.
Though i think bush thinks he's in a fascist country.
That and there's this things like this to keep america nonfascist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrXaFluPY4A
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-03 07:17 pm (UTC)Traditional theocracies are in, liberal democracy is out
Date: 2006-09-03 09:53 pm (UTC)Catching up
Date: 2006-09-03 10:43 pm (UTC)It's tough for me to read commentary from Helen Mirren about the "Queen's horror" because, as a citizen of the US, I don't really understand her allegiance/confusion. In America, celebrities earn their marks, whereas in the UK, celebrities seem to get born into the spotlight. Which is fairer?
<< In: Guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion. >>
Stupid lists. Who gives a shit what is in and out? And why do you, momus, care so much about summarizing a decade? Who cares if it's a noughty or a zero?
These distinctions are distinctly non-Sartrean. Why do you seek these tidy summaries so devotely?
(am just happy to be back from the desert to supervise anything that might go wrong on the interweb)
Re: Catching up
Date: 2006-09-04 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 01:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 02:42 am (UTC)uh, take a look at Caligula and think again...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 07:55 am (UTC)Yeah, right. I'm not quite sure where these things are "in", but it certainly isn't Britain!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 08:50 am (UTC)Bosnia in the early 1990s was the issue which first galvanized the the modern liberal interventionist wave which led ultimately to the Iraq invasion. Douglas Hurd's opposition to a "level killing field" in Bosnia was anathema to both Blair and Clinton. People who portray Blair as merely Bush's poodle ignore the fact that his Iraq war policy is absolutely consistent with his Kosovo war policy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 10:15 am (UTC)I don't think Sailsbury was expounding 'Slow Life' so much as excusing the legislative inertia that typifies old-school conservative governments. Surely government operates slowly so that business can continue denying people a 'slow life'?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-04 11:13 am (UTC)Jump
Date: 2006-09-06 01:37 am (UTC)