I am no Randian, and not much of a fan of of Alan Greenspan. I certainly don't think of either as "conservative." But while reading this I kept thinking that Kropotkin's Mutual Aid was missing from the discussion. Also, I have been following the Tea Party phenomenon since long before it ever got any mention in the media, and I think that those who only know it through the media fail to grasp its peculiarly American roots. It is a centripetal force. (Also, regarding Bernays: Curtis might also want to look into the later career of John Broadus Watson, founder of behaviorism, who ended up working for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he invented subliminal advertising.)
All that said, I would draw everyone's attention to this, which I think is quite right in all its particulars:
The link with Tansley was that the idea of the ecosystem echoed the idea of the global mechanised markets. It also threatened our existence as active, involved individuals by turning us into mere nodes in a network. We would have no power over this network, we would merely have to be its janitors, ensuring its efficient and stability. It is this politically quietist view that leads to the cult of managerialism, the dominant and – Curtis and I agree – probably most pernicious ideology of our time.
Adam Curtis sounds like a reincarnated Dadaist to me.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny. I went for a walk today and I was amusing a friend with my impression of Adam Curtis's narration (British accent): "But what nobody understood was that this these economists in Chicago were to inflict humanity with a movement that would change the course of technological development and usher in a new wave of radical libertarianism."
ReplyDeleteI've seen the first two installments of Adam Curtis's latest documentary, and I liked it quite a bit. It's a big improvement over THE TRAP, in which Curtis's trajectory lacked the coherence of THE CENTURY OF THE SELF and THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES. (I'm excluding IT FELT LIKE A KISS, simply because that was more of a formalistic exercise than a documentary. Perfectly respectable though.) Some of Curtis's links between schools of thought and economic development can be tenuous and a little dicey -- such as the suggestion in ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES that Clinton could not have known anything about economics and that he had little to do as President.
Yet his films are almost always compelling. I think Bryan is right to tease out "I don't use metaphors" from Curtis. Yes, Curtis assembles patchwork quilts with his narration, linking one disparate idea to another. (And why do we have to rely on the British for this?) On the other hand, his footage and music (John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, Clint Mansell's score from MOON) is always so utterly precise -- with the viewer so seduced by a clip of Old Bernays set against pulsing synths from a semi-known cult movie or, in the latest one, a clip of a cold-looking Rand's eyes moving in a Wallace interview every time she's mentioned -- that the experience causes you to become emotionally involved in looking all this shit up yourself.
Where Michael Moore dictates emotion, Curtis has this uncanny method of emotionally engaging your intellect out of its complacency using preexisting footage and new interviews. And it's so effective -- I mean, there are very few people who are this good at it and who can make utter despair this compelling -- that you don't mind some of Curtis's more paranoid conclusions, perhaps because this is the only thing that can exist in place of a metaphor. And what does that say about our relationship as citizens to our governments? If we don't have poetry or metaphors with our reality, then the only thing we have left is remixed context to stare something terrible that we have no control over in the face.
Anyway, sorry to go on. But I'll even cop to sometimes rewatching an Adam Curtis film if I need to reclaim a certain strand in social theory, even if the film itself has no bearing on whatever it is I need to be engaged with.
I hope all is well, Frank. Sorry I've been out of touch, have been busy!
The title of this new documentary is a line from a Richard Brautigan poem: a writer beloved by the hippies. Brautigan's poem was a critique in some ways parallel to Curtis's. I wonder if anybody made THAT connection.
ReplyDeleteRemixed content. Every element chosen from a leveled playing field, with no inherent meaning in any of it. That's the postmodern artistic aesthetic in a nutshell.
And that's why I'm suspicious of it. Not because I have any sympathy for reactionary anti-modernism (I have none), but because it's glib. It's surface-painting. It's Jeff Koons and Julian Hirsch. If there is a deliberate attempt to say it doesn't mean anything, and to avoid interpretation, then it's the same kind of copout that postmodernism takes towards the audience when an artist says art can mean anything you want it to mean, literally anything. In the end, that stance usually ends up with art meaning nothing.
Which connects us back to nihilism and despair.
Hence my lack of sympathy for this viewpoint. If anything needs to be fought against in this age of the machines of loving grace, it's the tendency to give in to entropy, to despair, to meaninglessness. Call me an unreconstructed existentialist, but the point was that if you couldn't find meaning to life then you had to create meaning. Giving in to nausea was Sartre's stance of despair. Refusing to give in to meaninglessness was Camus' stance of hope.
Art: Curtis's latest film actually does include an audio clip of Brautigan reading a paean to cybernetics. The connection is clear. If you're going to have an opinion on this, then why not go straight to the source? Your ignorance is especially troubling, especially because Curtis's films are easily findable on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteYou are commenting without knowledge. Curtis's films are not about postmodernism. Discussing context is not necessarily a postmodernist position. If it were, then you could call any kid discussing his playlist a postmodernist. The point is that a large chunk of humanity is living this way, and Curtis, on a formalist level, is very much interested in investigating this. But the decision to probe further, without poetry and metaphor, is the viewer's. It appears that you aren't man enough to do this.
As I described above and as elucidated by Curtis in Bryan's interview, Curtis's films are about attempting to find an intellectual connection with the world as you are presented with an admittedly semi-reductionist take of a complex issue. If you aren't brave enough to find optimism in your life AFTER you have embraced nihilism and despair, then that is YOUR fault, not Curtis's. Thus, Curtis's work falls into a great anarchist tradition. You assume that one cannot live a perfectly happy life while understanding and confronting terrible realities. That's YOUR failing, Art. And not Curtis's.
Hey, Ed.
ReplyDeleteI'm neither as ignorant or idiotic as you imply. In fact, I have watched some Curtis before, so I'm not unfamiliar with his work. I stand by my responses, as they're just as authentic as anyone else's responses to his work, including yours. Disagreement on interpretation is fine, even welcome, but not presumption of ignorance. :)
I DO see Curtis as postmodernist, precisely because of his remix tactics. That is essentially video and soundtrack sampling that he does, which is a fundamentally postmodern form of art-making. That doesn't diminish the results. The issue of despair or not-despair remains open.
I find Curtis's view of things, remarkable intellectual connections notwithstanding, to be pretty negative overall. If indeed he's making links and connections to tell us what's wrong with the world, even if he's right on every point (which is frankly debatable) and even if he is artistic and admirable in his way of doing so, it does seem to me that his conclusions are fairly pessimistic. Not that big a step to despair from there.
Anarchist tradition. In contrast I turn to John Cage's anarchism, including his book of mesostic text called "Anarchy," and find Cage altogether more fun and positive. Of course, that can also just be a difference between your personal taste and mine. And I do agree with Frank about Kropotkin being missing from the discussion.
Go back and watch jacob Bronowski's series, in which he makes similar kinds of intellectual connections between ideas, causes and effects, and the tone as well as the style is totally different. More linear, to be sure, but not fundamentally different in intent.
About YOUR assumptions about MY presumed assumption "that one cannot live a perfectly happy life while understanding and confronting terrible realities," I can't even begin to start to say where you're wrong, because I'm laughing too hard. Having confronted terrible realities for most of my life, including when I lived in the poorest parts of Asia, and being pretty happy despite illness, death, loss, and more, well, I can only shake my head and smile at the audacity. The irony of course is that I am more optimistic than Curtis, yet here I am being called its optimist. ROFLMAO
Your assumptions about me, my level of knowledge, and the de facto name-calling are beneath you. One expects better.
Have a nice day.
Art: It is very clear that you run a more vanilla course in your artistic tastes. That's perfectly fine. You seek fairly straightforward answers, trying as you are here to cement Curtis's pessimism. I'm more interested in how he's trying to confront the spectator with context, and why Curtis's theories and linkage (which we both agree are problematic yet compelling) remain so compelling for many despite their professed nihilism and despair. But I have to laugh at your suggestion that all the cutters and scratchers of the last few decades (and, for that matter, all practitioners of collage) are postmodernist. One expects less rigidity, less labels, and more fluidity from a professed man of the world.
ReplyDelete