Thoughts on Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head

February 26, 2021 ~ Adam Koper ~ Leave a comment

Just some quick notes and initial thoughts having watched Adam Curtis’ latest documentary series for the BBC, Can’t Get You Out of My Head:

The interplay between mainstream culture and counterculture

What Curtis does well in this series is that he shows how easy it is for the counterculture to feed back into the mainstream; opposition to the norms of one’s society is often later incorporated into those norms. To take a couple of examples from the series, Bobby Seale goes from co-founding the Black Panthers to hosting his own cooking show on TV while Eldridge Cleaver winds up designing and selling trousers with something like a sock stuck on the front to ‘liberate’ the male member. Another example Curtis gives is that of the hippies, whose efforts at living outside mainstream society ended up being commercialised as yet another fashion trend one could buy into. To quote that line from end of Withnail And I, “They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man.”

2. The crisis of individualism

I’m not sure if it’s still there now, but there used to be a hair salon on Brick Lane in London, whose slogan was ‘We sell liberation’. I think this ties in with the previous point, but it also highlights one of the main points Curtis is trying to make: that individualism has indeed meant a liberation of sorts (from older paternalistic forms of rule), but that it also leads to a narrow, apolitical version of freedom. ‘Liberation’ is now used to sell commodities and services to consumers, who enjoy their liberation in their own private ways.

When things go wrong at a societal level, as Curtis thinks they have, individualism runs up against its limit. When we are all atomised, and each of us is separated from everyone else, then collective action – and solutions to our shared problems – becomes very difficult indeed. Having a new haircut may be satisfying and fulfilling to a certain extent, but it hardly equates to people’s liberation from discrimination, technocratic misrule, or economic pressures. These things, Curtis suggests, can only be achieved if we find a new story to bind us all together.

3. Capitalist Realism

It turns out that Adam Curtis knew Mark Fisher, which doesn’t surprise me as there is a lot of overlap in the arguments each of them makes (plus they share a love of the dubstep musician Burial, whose music appears frequently in Curtis’ films). On the one hand, Curtis talks about there being no apparent alternative to individualism, while on the other hand Fisher wrote about how there are no competing visions of society to challenge capitalism. Fisher tapped into the dearth of anything new in contemporary pop culture, where movie re-boots and sequels are aplenty and so much of new music seems to be aping some earlier genres or trends. Whether this argument holds up today, I don’t know, but nevertheless both of them are focused on the sense of pessimistic inevitability that afflicts contemporary society.

What’s also interesting is the choice of terminology: for Fisher, the problem was capitalist society; instead, Curtis talks about the age of the individual and rise of bureaucracies and corporations. Perhaps Curtis holds back from blaming capitalism so as not to put off the BBC and its viewers? It just seems to me that while the crisis Curtis has identified is specific to our time, individualism is baked-in to capitalism to an extent, and any attempt at forging a new collective story will need to deal with that underlying problem.

4. Conspiracy theories

I am planning on writing a more detailed analysis of Curtis’ understanding of conspiracy theories in future, so I will try to keep things brief on this point. I think that Curtis’ argument that the isolation of the age of individualism can lead to suspicion and conspiracy theorising is nearly right but needs some tweaking. Individualism, which I should stress cannot be grasped separately from capitalism, facilitates conspiracy theories because the individual is seen as master of their own fate. When that fails to play out in reality, the response is to assume that some other powerful individual was in fact exerting their control over one’s life. So, rather than ditching individualism, the sense of powerlessness is explained with a narrative that still complies with individualism. Conspiracy theories often play this role, providing an explanation for one’s own powerlessness over their life and circumstance. I follow Tim Melley on this point, but while he attributes this sense of powerlessness (which he calls ‘agency panic’) to the rise of complex bureaucracies in the post-war years, I think the cause runs much deeper – after all, Melley’s theory still leaves us unable to explain why conspiracy theorising was going on decades prior to that period.

I also think there’s something interesting about how he describes the JFK conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison’s view of society. From Curtis’ description, Garrison believed that seemingly coincidental or unrelated events could be explained by ‘connecting the dots’, and that there was a hidden level of society where secret actors exercised the real power. It reminds me of two of my favourite Adorno quotes, the first of which comes from his Theses Against Occultism:

“The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in the walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within.”

The second comes from lecture 8 of his Lectures on Negative Dialectics:

“It is as if philosophers wished to stuff an infinite cosmos into a tiny, cottage in which they could oversee every detail.”

By the sounds of it, Garrison is guilty of both of these (I haven’t read anything of his yet, but am planning on doing so for my PhD). Firstly, there’s the attempt to critique society while holding on to its ideology; secondly there’s the assumption that reality can be grasped and known as one coherent system.

5. The feeling of now

I listened to an interview Curtis did with Blindboy, in which he said his aim with this series was to capture the way things feel now, at this historical moment. He certainly succeeds in this regard. Not only is he telling the story of individualism’s crisis, but he is also doing it in a very individualist way – the story is told by focusing on a handful of individuals (such as Jiang Qing, Michael X, Afeni Shakur, Eduard Limonov) and how they themselves made use of individualism in different ways. There is little room for the impersonal in Curtis’ tale – everything happens as a result of somebody’s actions, even if the outcome was not what they had in mind (the classic ‘But this was a fantasy’ and ‘What the scientists/politicians didn’t realise, was that…’). Everyone has a clear motivation and acts on whatever information they possess to achieve their desired goals. For instance, Jiang Qing wants to do away with the old persisting forms of power in China, as well as have her revenge on all the people who held her back, and so instigates the Cultural Revolution. However, in the end she finds that Mao was using her all along, and that the whole thing had been part of his effort to root out his political rivals.

But this sort of narrative will be unable to fulfil Curtis’ call for a new collective story. It depicts historical events as being orchestrated by individuals, and the result is a story that comes close to conspiracy theory itself – and only avoids crossing into conspiracist territory by showing that people don’t always get their way. Curtis’ critique of individualism is still stuck with an individualist perspective. This then raises the question of how stories can be told that don’t succumb to the pitfalls of individualism.

As I said above, I’m thinking of writing something more in-depth on Curtis’ treatment of conspiracy theories. I would highly recommend watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, not because of Curtis’ central argument but because it’s so refreshing to hear a serious, detailed analysis of our society on the BBC.

Hiraeth

February 2, 2021 ~ Adam Koper ~ Leave a comment

The Welsh word hiraeth has become our equivalent of the Danish hygge; not because of a similarity in meaning, but because of the way in which both are promoted as words without any equivalent in English. Just as there is no exact word like hygge in English, so too is there no exact translation for hiraeth. The closest you can get is something like – a longing or nostalgic feelings for a home that cannot be returned to, or that may not have existed at all.

When you search for the term online, what you get are countless images of the sort that are shared frequently on social media: a dreamy photograph of some hills, mountain, or coastline (presumably Welsh, though who knows), overlayed with the term in big white lettering and its definition underneath. They crop up in my Facebook feed occasionally, usually accompanied with a message about how much someone is missing Wales.

There will always be some words that do not translate perfectly into others – for instance, the German word Wissenschaft is somewhere between science and knowledge, but so far no one has built an industry out of it as has happened with hygge. It has not happened to hiraeth yet either, but it has still become a way of expressing the cultural difference between Wales and English-speaking nations.

What hiraeth’s popular usage implies is that Welsh is a more emotional, maybe even spiritual language than English – that every Welsh person will sometimes look off into the distance wistfully, and a tear will roll down their cheek as they recall the splendour of the mountains of Snowdonia, the galloping waves lapping at the shore of Cardigan Bay, or the ominous slag heaps of Blaenau Ffestiniog. But this usage misses out an important dimension of hiraeth – namely, that the longing is for a home that one cannot return to, and that might not have ever existed in the first place. To be precise, hiraeth is more like that feeling you may have experienced on holiday, where you suddenly realise how wonderful home was after all – its familiarity is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, even though you know that home is not really that superb and that you should really be appreciating the holiday a lot more. Or hiraeth is what you get when you pass by your old childhood home and recall the joys of your upbringing only to realise that a new family lives there now, and that it is no longer your home but someone else’s.

The more straightforward version of hiraeth, where it is used to mean a longing for home, leans into a parochial attitude where each person belongs to one particular place. The message here is simultaneously positive and negative: you will always have a home where you will be welcomed, no matter how long you are away for, but you will be tied to it for your whole life. The nation presents itself as something no one can escape from – roots bind each person to their homeland, the only place they will ever truly belong. The ghosts of your ancestors drag you back to the land of your fathers to share their fate. Their song is Yma O Hyd (here forever), in which the nation is framed as though it exists outside of time itself. Whatever you accomplish in your own life, wherever you go, you know that you must return to Wales one day.

The more precise meaning of hiraeth, by contrast, implies a much more promising view. The power of one’s roots is recognised as illusionary, and that the dream of the nation as a pure and unchanging was just that – a dream – lays the groundwork for building something better, rooted in our experience of the world as it is. Instead of being dictated to by tradition or ancestry, we instead get to forge a new path for ourselves. Home no longer needs to be the place we were born and grew up, nor where our parents or grandparents are from, but can be someplace of our own choosing – somewhere where we can build a new meaning for ourselves. Hiraethu can thus be a prelude to building something better in the here and now, rather than hoping for the return of the (illusionary) good old days.

Furthermore, recognising that the notion of a Wales based on ancestry and permanence is a myth enables the boundaries of the nation to be opened up too, to allow for an acceptance of the plurality that was previous overlooked. As real as the nation is, at its root is an untruth. No nation is a monolith, dominated by a single way of life, a single language, and a single culture – but nations can stamp out difference. Today, Wales is a bilingual country whose inhabitants have friends, relatives and ancestors spread all over the world – and this should be accepted, even celebrated, instead of being seen as an potential threat or problem. There is no need to measure everyone from Holyhead to Cardiff by the yardstick of an old-fashioned, unchanging notion of Welshness.

Taking the more precise meaning of hiraeth enables us to move beyond static, archaic ideas of what it means to be Welsh, and wake up to the world as it is today. Thus, a term that is often used to reinforce the notion that Wales is essentially different from every other nation can in fact yield a new angle for the critique of an outmoded form of Welsh nationalism.

Thinking about politics, with the music of CSN and Jackson Browne

January 11, 2021January 11, 2021 ~ Adam Koper ~ Leave a comment

What does it mean to be political? Is politics about adhering to certain principles in public life, like liberty, democracy, or equality? Perhaps the consequences of our politics matter more than any principles we hold dear? Or is politics just about competing with others to get what you want, and implementing policies that serve your self-interest? I think some competing answers to these questions can be found in an unlikely source, namely two rock songs from the late 60s/early 70s: firstly, Wooden Ships, by Crosby, Stills & Nash; secondly, For Everyman by Jackson Browne.

Both of these songs have apocalyptic themes, having been written against the backdrop of the Cold War and the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction – or M.A.D for short. Wooden Ships, which features on CSN’s eponymous debut album from 1969, was written by David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane fame) while the three of them were having a good time aboard Crosby’s boat, the Mayan. The song details a confused vision of the aftermath of a future war, in which civilization has been reduced to a radioactive husk. The initial protagonist encounters another survivor; someone who served on the opposing side in the war, though the old distinctions between friend and foe no longer apply. The protagonist simply asks this old-world enemy, ‘Can you tell me please, who won?’

They then exchange ‘purple berries’ – I’ve read that these are meant to be iodine pills, to prevent radiation sickness – and ask the ‘silver people on the shoreline’ (people clad in protective suits against the radiation) to leave them be. Out of the wreckage of the destroyed civilization, the protagonists decide to use their wooden ships (described as ‘very free and easy’) to sail off in search of a new land, where they can establish their own society, one that won’t make the mistake of blowing itself up:

“Go, take your sister then by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away, where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don’t need us”

The song ends as they depart, leaving the horror behind them:

“And it’s a fair wind
Blowing warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I’ll set a course and go”

One could point out that there would be no escape from the nuclear devastation in reality – wherever these stragglers wind up, the fallout will catch up with them sooner or later. But debating the feasibility of their plan isn’t my aim here; I’m more interested in what this song tells us about politics. If war is, as Carl von Clausewitz said, “not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means”, then the Cold War existed at the threshold where politics becomes war.[1] It’s debateable whether the division between the USSR and USA was first and foremost ideological, or whether it was simply a contest for power that any states of such size would have ended up in; regardless of how you view the Cold War, one cannot deny that politics was at its heart, as what is more political than the struggle between states to mass resources and power?

CSN (or CSNY as they’re known when Neil Young turns up) are a thoroughly political band – their music spoke to the counterculture at a period when the USA’s political leaders seemed adamant about the need to send young men to fight and die in Vietnam, all in order to prevent the spread of communism and protect the country’s position as a world superpower. Other songs they’ve written, such as Long Time Gone, express a clear rejection of the way politics is usually carried out:

“Speak out you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind if you dare
But don’t, no don’t, no, try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair”

Such lyrics suggest that CSN favour rejecting conventional politics, which they see as requiring the surrender of a person’s individuality. Here is where I think the problem lies in the vision of politics we get from their music – not to suggest that this is necessarily what the band members themselves believe, but more what their music conveys to a listener. A person’s individuality is treated as inviolable, while politics is depicted as corrupting the individual. To protect your sense of self, it seems the best thing you can do is stay clear of politics. Similarly, for the protagonists of Wooden Ships, the solution to their problems is a withdrawal from the remnants of civilization and the formation of an entirely new society, one that isn’t tainted by history. The protagonists choose to save themselves, rather than going back to deal with the mess left behind by the catastrophe. At times over the past few years, I myself have found this idea appealing, because of how disheartening contemporary politics has become – although I’ve never got much further than a quick internet search for ‘communes in the UK’ before deciding that that sort of lifestyle is not for me.

This depiction of politics as threatening to corrupt or compromise the individual, along with the idea that we need to withdraw or escape from existing society in order to build a better one, misses what politics should be about. At its best, politics is about engaging with others in the public realm, doing what one can to improve or transform society as it is today, rather than planning for a utopia devoid of any of the messiness of the real world. It is indeed about compromise, but a form of compromise that aims at achieving goals that benefit the community as a whole, rather than any one individual. Engaging in politics should be about recognising differences of opinion between people, but then finding the common ground needed to make collective decisions.

This is where Jackson Browne’s For Everyman comes in. For Everyman was written in response to Wooden Ships (Browne and Crosby are friends, and Crosby even does backing vocals on the track!), and features on Browne’s 1973 album, also called For Everyman. The song simply asks about all the people that would be left behind by those sea-faring hippies in Wooden Ships:

“Everybody I talk to is ready to leave
With the light of the morning
They’ve seen the end coming down long enough to believe
That they’ve heard their last warning
Standing alone
Each has his own ticket in his hand
And as the evening descends
I sit thinking ’bout Everyman”

While the protagonists of Wooden Ships sail off to their new society beyond the horizon, Browne is more concerned about the world they are leaving behind. After the bomb drops, what will happen to all the people who aren’t immediately killed? How will surviving communities cope – or for that matter, will they cope at all? Browne rightly sees the need to stick together, rather than escaping from the situation. Besides, not everyone has the luxury of being able escaping the apocalypse:

“Waiting here for Everyman,
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go, I understand.”

Here, I’m reminded of something that Hannah Arendt writes early on in her book, The Human Condition. While outlining her understanding of action, which she sees as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter,” Arendt mentions that “the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) or “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.”[2] From this perspective, it is the protagonists of Wooden Ships who are sailing off to their deaths, while Browne recognises the importance of living among other people for survival.[3] Put differently, a human is not a solitary animal, able to thrive on its own. Instead, humans must engage in cooperation, discussion, compromise, and decision-making in order to survive. In times of crisis, we should be turning to each other for support, rather than turning away and sailing off into the sunset.

To me, For Everyman is a warning against utopianism, and a kind of political vision that situates itself outside of society. It suggests that we need to engage with politics as we find it today, rather than turn away from it to protect ourselves from being corrupted. It reminds us to live in our world, and to work with what we have to improve things, rather than dreaming up plans for the perfect society that we know will never be implemented. Perhaps most importantly, Browne shows that we should place greater value on the people around us and acknowledges that our lives would mean very little without them. While Wooden Ships dreams of escaping to a better world, For Everyman suggests that we shouldn’t turn away from politics at all, but instead get engaged to change things for the better.

[1] Carl von Clausewitz, 1918, On War, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., Ltd, p. 23.

[2] Hannah Arendt, 1958, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 7-8.

[3 ] The protagonists of Wooden Ships are in this sense comparable to those wealthy survivalists who own bunkers out in the woods, kitted out with enough resources to see them through the end of the world. I have little doubt that in an apocalyptic scenario they would be much safer and healthier than anyone on the outside, but I don’t think a stockpile of Twinkies, Spam, and powdered milk would be enough to re-build society.