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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Aha!
Date: 2007-03-07 12:20 am (UTC)Honestly, I do admire your fashion-sense. I have recently been looking for a wig to complement my alter-ego.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 12:24 am (UTC)It's just amazing how people are so dogmatically passionate about individual, personal indulgence regardless of how much it may harm others or society at large, thus hurting everyone in the end. There must be a balance between that and full-fledged dependence on bureaucracy. There's no way the US, the #1 producer of CO2 emissions, will ever change - if we ever mention the argument, we're "city-dwelling lefty fags". Pretty sad.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:27 am (UTC)isn't 4.5 euros quite expensive for a quarter of a pumpkin?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:05 am (UTC)When all is said and done, I'd probably prefer a Thatcher/Hayek trying to make use of human nature than someone more overbearing trying to force people to adopt "higher" values.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 04:11 am (UTC)Unblocked
Date: 2007-03-07 04:45 am (UTC)Sartrean, no? I tried to read Being and Nothingness and mostly remember the teacher saying "Sartre wants you to reinvent yerself at each corner, he blieves humans get stale by relying to heavily on what they've seen in the past."
I read Nausea and got the same from that, the inpenetrable doorknob. What does the knob mean to a man who can't eat without getting sick?
In other news, had my chakra read today. Introduced myself as Skeptic Number 1. He's like "I like skeptics I am not going to make you vomit." vomited. he said you have much in your past that you cannot access because it's blocked by your body and the selfish spirits that inhabit it. They love your bod because you don't care if you die so they party there. I vomited again. He's like you have so much knowledge, you will be able to access it by this time next week. I'm like you mean every face I see looks like soomeone I've seen before? I can only cookie-cut faces? He's like sorta. Come back with more questions, we'll get you unblocked, we'll get you access to the colleective unconcsious.
Re: Unblocked
Date: 2007-03-07 04:51 am (UTC)When you burp and post fifteen times in a row, they are right when they say in vino verirats and they are right that yo umight, for your own health and mental well being, have a breathalyser installed on your keyboard, but there's no need. Just keep posting, whoever needs to hear will hear, whoever doesn't need to hear may complain your monopoloziing the conversations, and they may be right, but you are still a teacher.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 04:54 am (UTC)i'm glad Momus doesn't have to spend that much on pumpkins.
i *have* seen that before, but if anyone did it around here it would be incomprehensible! the "1" selling socks is a bit for familiar, but the same form...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 05:20 am (UTC)This basic phenomenon does not require Yes, Minister cynicism, although that does float around the corridors of power a lot. It is actually very easy to bring about with very non-cynical bureaucrats, too - as long as they feel that the thing they are currently doing always and perpetually deserves more funding and resources and importance (because it's clearly socially important, whatever it is).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 05:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 08:04 am (UTC)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.
mayfair set
Date: 2007-03-07 01:09 pm (UTC)The most frightening part of Adam Curtis's output is that he portrays the political elite as being hopelessly-out-of-their-depth fools, readily manipulated by special interest groups with often rather bizarre ideas. The present PM certainly springs to mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:41 pm (UTC)straw man alert!
i'm tired of this anti-anti-intellectual crap. it just fosters tensions between folks. people in rural areas care about sustainable agriculture and climate change as much as people in the cities. if they drive pickup trucks it's very often that they actually have use for them, and/or, if they like them, that's fine. let's scream about making ones that pollute less, instead of screaming at people who "choose" to drive. if we're really going to abandon the idea of personal freedom, then obviously let's save our anger for the auto and oil firms, and leave the beautiful people of the fields (the straw men) alone.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 01:49 pm (UTC)Other societies manage to be perfectly fine and society-oriented, which is evidence that it's perfectly possible to do. It's the typical right wing extreme-capitalist argument to say that "since humans are selfish, there's nothing society can do!" Yet, the whole point of society is redirecting the dark parts of our nature to at least keep us from destroying ourselves, which is exactly what we're doing now.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:06 pm (UTC)I'm talking more the nightmarish congestion and waste I see everyday (the NYC metro area), and the rhetoric and posturing that's used in our society that easily gets people elected and reelected. The worst is from the yuppie Whole Foods upper middle-class who can easily use public transit, but insist on driving their gas-guzzling "hybrid" SUVs while preaching about the evils of Republicanism.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:20 pm (UTC)it's funny you think they're ugly and ignorant, because my experience shows that the reverse is true: they are beautiful and charmingly inquisitive!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 02:26 pm (UTC)By the way, two BBC plugs for the series contain clips and discussion of The Trap:
This is Paul Morley liking The Trap (http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4680000/newsid_4686600/4686677.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm) on Newsnight Review.
This is Isobel Hilton giving Curtis a hard time (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?radio3/nightwaves) on Night Waves, Radio 3.
Re: time for some adorno!
Date: 2007-03-07 02:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 03:55 pm (UTC)