The market... and the trap
Mar. 7th, 2007 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm writing a Wired column this morning, so I'm just going to give you a picture of me and Hisae at the local market yesterday, enjoying what really felt like the first day of spring.
Actually, if I were BAFTA award-winning television essayist Adam Curtis, I'd tell you that it only felt like the first day of spring so early in March because of global warming, and that global warming is the direct result of the belief in mobile individualism fostered by Henry Ford. And, do you know, in a slightly paranoid way I actually think I am Adam Curtis. My Wired piece, for instance, will be about how market research software recursively influences the things it purports to study -- how junk mail produces junk space (insert Henri Lefebvre and Rem Koolhaas references) and (through focus groups and super-precise geodemographic software tools) junk politics.
Overdetermined as ideas like these may be, I love people who raise big questions and make semi-convincing, if polemical, accounts of how we've reached the state we're currently in. I love people who point out the inherent absurdity of ideologies we don't even notice we have. (See yesterday's Derrida line about how modern democracy is based on a phallocentric and other-hating idea of brotherhood and needs to relearn hospitality and openness.)
So I'm looking forward immensely to Adam Curtis' new BBC 2 series The Trap: What happened to our dream of freedom?, which starts on Sunday March 11th at 9pm. I don't get BBC 2 here in Berlin, but I'm hoping some kind soul will burn me a DVD, as they did with Curtis's excellent docs Century of the Self (follow that link, all four parts are up on archive.org for you to watch) and The Power of Nightmares.
So what's The Trap about?
"The Trap," says the BBC press release, "explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy... Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom."
Rather wonderfully, Curtis links this to the antipsychiatry of R.D. Laing, a personal hero of mine (one of the greatest dead Scotsmen, and the subject of an excellent art film / documentary by Luke Fowler).
I'll let The Guardian tell you more about The Trap:
"The new series, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, argues that we have unwittingly subscribed to a bleak ideal of liberty that has, ironically, "become our cage", reducing our true freedom and fuelling a dramatic rise in inequality.
"The cold war way of thinking about human nature, mirrored by the work of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, inspired the nascent Thatcherites. They were convinced that civil servants and public-sector workers, while claiming to serve the greater good, were really just self-centred and out for their own gain. As in the nuclear standoff, it was best to be honest about the fact that everyone involved was cold and calculating; the dangerous people were the ones who claimed to serve some higher ideal... Hence the culture of public-sector targets, pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and massively expanded by Tony Blair: give people the right incentives, the theory went, and in pursuit of their own interests they'll end up helping everyone.
"In a typical bit of conceptual long-jumping, The Trap leaps from politics to the radical Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, who saw normal families as hotbeds of strategy and scheming, with husbands and wives manipulating each other as if they, too, were just like the White House and the Kremlin. Psychiatry abetted this nightmare, defining people as mad if they rebelled against the system.
"...If you keep treating people as if they were selfish and calculating, that's how they'll eventually become. "We ... come to believe," as Curtis puts it, "that we really are the strange, isolated beings that the cold war scientists had invented to make their models work."
Actually, if I were BAFTA award-winning television essayist Adam Curtis, I'd tell you that it only felt like the first day of spring so early in March because of global warming, and that global warming is the direct result of the belief in mobile individualism fostered by Henry Ford. And, do you know, in a slightly paranoid way I actually think I am Adam Curtis. My Wired piece, for instance, will be about how market research software recursively influences the things it purports to study -- how junk mail produces junk space (insert Henri Lefebvre and Rem Koolhaas references) and (through focus groups and super-precise geodemographic software tools) junk politics.
Overdetermined as ideas like these may be, I love people who raise big questions and make semi-convincing, if polemical, accounts of how we've reached the state we're currently in. I love people who point out the inherent absurdity of ideologies we don't even notice we have. (See yesterday's Derrida line about how modern democracy is based on a phallocentric and other-hating idea of brotherhood and needs to relearn hospitality and openness.)
So I'm looking forward immensely to Adam Curtis' new BBC 2 series The Trap: What happened to our dream of freedom?, which starts on Sunday March 11th at 9pm. I don't get BBC 2 here in Berlin, but I'm hoping some kind soul will burn me a DVD, as they did with Curtis's excellent docs Century of the Self (follow that link, all four parts are up on archive.org for you to watch) and The Power of Nightmares.
So what's The Trap about?
"The Trap," says the BBC press release, "explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy... Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom."
Rather wonderfully, Curtis links this to the antipsychiatry of R.D. Laing, a personal hero of mine (one of the greatest dead Scotsmen, and the subject of an excellent art film / documentary by Luke Fowler).
I'll let The Guardian tell you more about The Trap:
"The new series, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, argues that we have unwittingly subscribed to a bleak ideal of liberty that has, ironically, "become our cage", reducing our true freedom and fuelling a dramatic rise in inequality.
"The cold war way of thinking about human nature, mirrored by the work of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, inspired the nascent Thatcherites. They were convinced that civil servants and public-sector workers, while claiming to serve the greater good, were really just self-centred and out for their own gain. As in the nuclear standoff, it was best to be honest about the fact that everyone involved was cold and calculating; the dangerous people were the ones who claimed to serve some higher ideal... Hence the culture of public-sector targets, pioneered by Margaret Thatcher and massively expanded by Tony Blair: give people the right incentives, the theory went, and in pursuit of their own interests they'll end up helping everyone."In a typical bit of conceptual long-jumping, The Trap leaps from politics to the radical Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, who saw normal families as hotbeds of strategy and scheming, with husbands and wives manipulating each other as if they, too, were just like the White House and the Kremlin. Psychiatry abetted this nightmare, defining people as mad if they rebelled against the system.
"...If you keep treating people as if they were selfish and calculating, that's how they'll eventually become. "We ... come to believe," as Curtis puts it, "that we really are the strange, isolated beings that the cold war scientists had invented to make their models work."
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time for some adorno!
Date: 2007-03-07 08:17 am (UTC)Re: time for some adorno!
Date: 2007-03-07 12:22 pm (UTC)"Authenticity becomes "authentic" only against the background of reproducibility. That means, however, that authenticity is compromised from the beginning, inauthentic from the start, for its origin lies not in itself, but rather in its opposite, reproduction.
Adorno expands on this position in aphorism 99, "Gold Assay", of Minima Moralia. He sees "genuineness" as filling the vacuum of traditional religious and ethical standards. But while authenticity was the watchword of 19th century bourgeois intellectuals like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and
Ibsen, in the 20th century it has found a home in fascism.
Adorno also draws on Benjamin"s view of mimesis and denies the existence of "a pure subject prior to mimetic behavior." (21) Adorno also has some harsh words for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. As Jay puts it:Because the self is always imbricated in the social, any attempt, like Kierkegaard"s, to retreat into naked existential interiority is
complicitous with the isolation caused by society, not a protest against it. Nietzsche, despite all his insights into the workings of ideology, failed to see through the fallacy of authenticity, which betrayed his Lutheran roots and smacked of the very anti-Semitism he decried in Wagner.
Adorno traces the contemporaneous jargon of authenticity to religious revivalists, dubbed sarcastically as "The Authentic Ones", who pushed Kierkegaard in the 1920s. While the jargon, which Adorno characterizes as "the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness", speaks of higher things
but lacks the substance, it reeks of what Benjamin wrote about the "aura". To sum up, then, Adorno's multifarious charges against authenticity and the jargon around it are as follows: it provides a hollow substitute for lost religious belief in ultimate values; it is based on a mistaken search for
proprietary origins that establish rights of the earliest settlers; it rests on a dubious ideal of self-possession and integrity, which fails to credit the mimetic moment in the creation of selfhood; it entails an ontological fiction of absoluteness that falsely sees itself as the antidote to the leveling equivalence of the exchange principle; it serves
as an anti-intellectual evocation of concreteness and immediacy against the alleged depredations of abstract, intellectual thought; it can be understood as a variant of the cultish notion of aura, which itself is only a function of the reproductive technologies that it pretends to antedate;
and, finally, it paradoxically gives too much power to the subject able to designate something as authentic and to the object after that designation has been made. All attempts to derive authentic meaning from etymological priority thus share with foundational philosophy a vain search for an
Urgeschichte, which is little more than a nostalgic fantasy of primal wholeness before the Fall.
Re: time for some adorno!
Date: 2007-03-07 02:29 pm (UTC)Re: time for some adorno!
Date: 2007-03-07 04:58 pm (UTC)"The desire, through submergence in one's own individuality, instead of social insight into it, to touch something utterly solid, ultimate being, leads to precisely the false infinity which since Kierkegaard the concept of authenticity has been supposed to exorcise. No-one said so more bluntly than Schopenhauer. This peevish ancestor of existential philosophy and malicious heir of the great speculators knew his way among the hollows and crags of individual absolutism like no other. His insight is coupled to the speculative thesis that the individual is only appearance, not the Thing-in-Itself.
"'Every individual is on one hand the subject of cognition, that is to say, the complementary condition of the possibility of the whole objective world, and on the other, a single manifestation of the same Will, which objectifies itself in each thing. But this duplicity of our being is not founded in a unity existing for itself: otherwise we should be able to have consciousness of ourselves through ourselves and independently of the objects of cognition and willing: but of this we are utterly incapable; as soon as we attempt to do so, and, by turning our cognition inwards, strive for once to attain self-reflection, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void, find ourselves resembling the hollow glass ball out of whose emptiness a voice speaks that has no cause within the ball, and in trying to grasp ourselves, we clutch, shuddering, at nothing but an insubstantial ghost.'"