In his provocative 1927 essay, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud outlines his take on the root source of humanity’s seemingly unflagging suffering, finding it in “the sacrifices which civilization expects… in order to make a communal life possible.” These sacrifices consist, for Freud, in a coerced “suppression of the instincts,” foremost among which instincts are sex and aggression, with a nod to death. But a crucial passage, and as I will argue a crucial error, in the opening pages of The Future of an Illusion points us in an entirely different direction from Freud’s theory of civilization as the ground of an inevitable discontent. And, while not a guarantor of unguarded optimism (our earth is far too close to the brink for anything but the most closely guarded forms of optimism), this opposite direction is, or has the potential to be, hopeful.
The passage reads thusly:
“For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”
His near bottomless contributions to our understanding of the human psyche notwithstanding, Freud here has it exactly backwards. Because masses are (quite often individually and without question collectively) so intelligent I would call them wise, and, furthermore, their genius consists precisely in what Freud calls laziness, but what I would describe as the wisdom of leisure.
In short, I am suggesting that the root source of suffering isn’t Freud’s suppression of the instincts (or, for that matter, Buddhism’s desire, or Christianity’s original sin, etc., etc.), but simply the fact that civilization (as we know it) is so much damn work. (There is some irony in the fact that Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” sounds, in the passage quoted above, like a mouthpiece for the God-subscribing, goyish “Protestant work ethic.”)
While exercising caution that we don’t romanticize hunter-gatherer civilizations as some kind of Garden of Eden, it is nevertheless instructive to consider the relative workloads of our ancient forebears. To do so, we turn to Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity: “Ethnographic studies of isolated Stone Age hunter-gatherers and premodern agriculturalists suggest that ‘primitive’ peoples, far from being driven by anxiety, lived lives of relative leisure and affluence.” Eisenstein then describes anthropologist Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, which found that, for the !Kung, “an average workweek consisted of approximately twenty hours spent in subsistence activities,” and that “Moreover, much of the ‘work’ spent on these twenty hours of subsistence activity was by no means strenuous or burdensome.” Compare this to the typical forty hour work week, which forty hours is a paltry sum when one considers the hours clocked by anyone with any real aspirations to climb the career ladder. (America is run by workaholics; we know this because they are emailing the rest of us between midnight and 3:00 AM.) Ask yourself also if some or much of the work you perform in your forty-plus hours isn’t “strenuous or burdensome.”
In sum, “premodern” civilizations worked a lot less than us and were also a lot less anxious. Work less, feel better. A simple formula that we, in all our technological glory, just can’t seem to grasp. But, of course, civilization isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Leaving us stuck with Freud’s “love and work,” when what we really need is “love and play.” But the closest we seem to be able to get to the latter, as reported by The Washington Post, are employers (usually outdoorsy activity gear companies) who encourage us to take a half hour break for a hike, or a five day paid vacation to go camping somewhere really pretty, with a nod to the bottom line. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-company-that-profits-as-it-pampers-workers/2014/10/22/d3321b34-4818-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html?hpid=z5) Happy workers make productive workers. Just so, in our civilization, play is always in the service of work (and profits). We will know the revolution has finally come when we can each devote our lives to working really hard on something out of sheer pleasure, i.e. in a spirit of play. As Terry Eagleton says, socialism is about “leisure, not labor.”
Of course, Eagleton is quick to remind us of Oscar Wilde’s wry observation that “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” Wilde’s insight provides much needed ironic distance from the cruel truth that the source of the never-ending tide of strenuous and burdensome work can only be undone by yet more such work, making the dismantling of labor in favor of leisure something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition. All of which makes going through the automatic motions of showing up for work every day in order to put food on the table a symptom of the paralysis that comes from knowing that the only possible cure for what ails us is more of what ails us. In assessing the depth of this paralysis I would submit that the double bind diagnosed by Wilde has as much if not more to do with the failure of really existing 20th century socialism to displace capitalism than the atrocities propagated by Stalin and his ilk. Whereas the latter marked socialism as a brutal failure in Eastern Europe and Asia, the former made it a non-starter in the west, meaning it was over before it ever even started.
In place of socialism’s cure, perhaps the best we can hope for at this moment in time is a therapy, with at least one eye always watching for the event that will break open the possibility of playful leisure, which is the possibility of the reemergence of the human. We need new words for socialism anyway, given the tragic emptying of the term via unstaunched 20th century bloodletting, and playful leisure just might do. We need words that can never again lead to the gulag and the show trial, but that are still apposite to the soul crushing age in bloom on both sides of where the old Berlin Wall once stood. If the revolution is to succeed, it has to be funny (i.e. playful).
In the meantime, our therapy takes the axiom for our age, “Work less, feel better,” and translates it into a question that can be applied at every last decision point: How much is enough?
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Making the Unpredictable Inevitable
As I make my daily internet check of the news headlines, of which the outbreak of Ebola and the brutal beheadings by ISIS followed by the subsequent renewal of perpetual American bombing are but the latest typical installments, I am now realizing that I can’t even imagine a potential major news event that would qualify unequivocally as good news. The only recent exception, and an exception exactly because its glad tidings were so unexpected, was the announcement by LeBron James that he would be returning to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers after publicly jilting them four years prior in one of the biggest PR blunders of all time, pursuant to infamously “taking (his) talents to South Beach.” Perhaps there were just enough overtones of the Parable of the Prodigal Son to evoke that quintessential book of good news, the gospels. I would also venture that LeBron’s return to Cleveland qualifies as one of Alain Badiou’s events, which are described by Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins in Religion Politics, and the Earth thusly: “when a singular event occurs, it is an event, because there is something completely unpredictable or unforeseen, and it enables people to invent new ways of thinking and living in response.” Just so, LeBron’s return to Northeast Ohio from South Beach contains the radically new (for us) perspective that the best and most important place in the world is wherever one’s soul happens to be rooted. Before LeBron, moving from Northeast Ohio to South Beach and then, voluntarily, back again to Northeast Ohio was as unthinkable as reversing the flow of time. And while LeBron hasn’t reversed time, the event of LeBron’s return to Cleveland has shifted the flow of this particular river of spacetime that we call home in a slightly, but also noticeably better direction.
But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent Salon article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the Salon readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.
This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, voila, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a fait accompli. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule.
In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is already back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:
If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable.
But outside of LeBron, the daily rundown of news headlines has begun to feel like a countdown to The End, each news item the tick of one more second off the fast expiring clock. When the news media, and the world, is experienced precisely this way, one particular piece of bad news mutates into the exception that proves the rule found in the inverse of “no news is good news,” i.e. all news is bad news. That exception, the bad news which gets translated into good news by the filtering effect of all the other bad news, is, of course, climate change. I know this because when I scan the daily headlines I always click on the articles about climate change in the hopes of hearing the good news that there is more bad news about climate change. And I know this because the people writing these climate change update pieces can barely contain their glee, too. Case in point, a recent Salon article reporting that the oceans are heating up more quickly than previously realized. (http://www.salon.com/2014/10/06/the_oceans_are_heating_up_a_lot_more_quickly_than_we_thought/) The article was subtitled “New data is bad news for anyone who hoped global warming was on hiatus,” but is understood by the Salon readership to actually mean “New data is good news for anyone who feared that global warming was on hiatus.” After explaining how the slowing of global warming is more than offset by a rise in the oceans’ temperatures “about 24 to 58 percent more quickly than models suggested,” the article quotes oceanographers Gregory Johnson and John M. Lyman’s assertion that “One could say that global warming is ocean warming.” (Oceanographers renaming global warming as ocean warming does sound a little bit like a football team’s offensive coordinator exclaiming that “the best defense is a good offense.”) From there, it is short work for article author Lindsay Abrams, whose byline identifies her as “reporting on all things sustainable,” to close by declaring that “In other words it (climate change) isn’t over. It’s just getting started.” Which, like her subtitle, comes off like appropriate handwringing about climate change, if, that is, one ignores the subjective heartbeat thrumming throughout the entire article. Subjectively speaking, Abrams closing thought is, quite simply, ecstatic.
This ecstasy is grounded in the political left’s understanding of climate change as the guarantor of the left’s belief that the future belongs to us. It is a vision grounded in the mythological narrative that the left has conflated with the brute facts of climate change. This mythology pictures climate change as the flames of late capitalism burning itself down, and then, rising from the ashes like a phoenix, voila, a new democratic socialism. Or anarcho-syndicalism, which is fine because it isn’t capitalism. As someone who traffics in this teleological fantasy as often as I scan the news headlines, “It’s just getting started” sounds like a battle cry of freedom. The fantasy hinges on the seemingly commonsensical logic that since it is abundantly obvious that globalized capitalism caused climate change, and since climate change is horrifically bad, then capitalism will at last be seen for the malignant cancer that it is and, at long last, be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The problem with this is that it ignores the first axiom of commonsense, which is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Which makes it highly probable that capitalism will be able to succeed in turning climate change into yet another business opportunity, e.g. by commodifying “sustainability” via a “green economy.” This process is already in full swing at your local Whole Foods and Toyota Prius dealership. Which is not to say that eating organic or conserving energy are bad in and of themselves, but that, like recycling, they not only won’t save us, but will also pave the road to hell with good intentions. (That intention, of course, is a “free market economy” that works for all of us, which is akin to running on a platform of “Elitism for everyone!”, making us the gullible fools who really believe the carnival barker when he says of capitalism, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner!”) This is not to say that climate change won’t ultimately render the earth uninhabitable, but to say that climate change may not present a “limit to growth” until that rendering is a fait accompli. Two metaphors may help. The first is of a giant balloon that keeps expanding right up until the moment it has sucked in the very last drop of air. Or, if you prefer, the Blob, which continues expanding until it has consumed every last molecule.
In short, we should be seeking our own liberation, and hope that in the process we save the earth, as opposed to counting on the death of the earth to save and liberate us. The problem is that just as I can’t imagine any good news other than more climate change, we can’t think of anything we can do to liberate ourselves. Our challenge, then, in imagining our liberation is in thinking the inconceivable. We should ask ourselves, “What is an impossible future?”, and start there. And if we lose our nerve, recall that LeBron is already back in Cleveland. So, because it would only be appropriate to close by putting a paradoxical spin on Badiou’s events with a line inspired by a sports movie, Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come,” I would say this:
If we can think it, the completely unpredictable and unforeseen event is inevitable.
Sunday, October 05, 2014
Definitely Maybe
You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. Case in point: the Baltimore Sun recently reported on a City Council bill to outfit all 3,000 BCPD officers with body cameras. (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-22/news/bs-md-ci-police-cameras-20140922_1_body-cameras-police-brutality-baltimore-police-officer) The bill comes on the heels of several instances of alleged police brutality, including the death of “44-year-old Tyrone West, who died while he was in police custody,” (ibid) and an incident in September in response to which “Baltimore police officials suspended an officer shown on camera beating a man at a North Avenue bus stop.” (ibid)
To get a sense of how the proposed body cameras fit into the ideology of total surveillance, one must first situate the police within the structure of the surveillance state. Police officers contribute very little to the actual surveillance of the American citizenry; that function is filled quite capably by a slew of other actors, most notably the NSA by way of its monitoring of our email and cell phone accounts, but also by corporate America through the monitoring of its employees’ and consumers’ behavior. Regarding the former, if your job involves a computer your boss essentially knows your every move. And as to the latter, cameras are ubiquitous in brick and mortar stores, and every click on the internet is reduced to raw data. So, whether one is on-line, at work, or in the (“virtual” or “real”) marketplace, or even just in range of a cell phone camera, one is essentially in Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon, where a “single watchman (can) observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) But if the police aren’t the panopticon’s “single watchman,” what, then, is their role? Which is where police violence, exponentially increased by police militarization, comes into play. Because if surveillance is the brains of the operation, police are the muscle.
Foucault was perhaps most famous for Discipline and Punish, a work exploring our panopticon culture. Playing off the title of that work, I would say that if we are disciplined by surveillance, then we are (corporally) punished by the police. Violence always carries a message. Where domestic violence says “This is our little secret,” and where terrorism of all stripes (i.e. including State terror) says “This could be you,” police violence now says, to borrow a famous phrase from George Orwell, “Big Brother is watching.” Police violence must needs only explode intermittently to serve its purpose; like the watchman’s gaze in the panopticon, just the fact that it might happen upon you is enough. Because, as Orwell explains in his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… you had to live… in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” The NSA might be watching, and the police might decide to treat me like Abner Louima. The whole point of which “mights” is that it is, as Orwell astutely points out, safer to live in the assumption that maybe is, paradoxically, definitive.
You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. This is just a fancy way of saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. By pinning our hopes for relief from police brutality on police body cameras, we are endorsing the very surveillance that police brutality announces. In doing so we are continuing to follow Orwell’s script, retreating from the rushing darkness by escaping into an enveloping darkness.
The old question, “Where are the police when you really need them?”, has taken on new meaning in our surveillance state cum militarized police. Once a rhetorical question, it now has an answer. They are on camera. And if you’re wondering whether this means you should be preparing for your big close up, check out the title of Oasis’ (bitchin’) first album, Definitely Maybe.
To get a sense of how the proposed body cameras fit into the ideology of total surveillance, one must first situate the police within the structure of the surveillance state. Police officers contribute very little to the actual surveillance of the American citizenry; that function is filled quite capably by a slew of other actors, most notably the NSA by way of its monitoring of our email and cell phone accounts, but also by corporate America through the monitoring of its employees’ and consumers’ behavior. Regarding the former, if your job involves a computer your boss essentially knows your every move. And as to the latter, cameras are ubiquitous in brick and mortar stores, and every click on the internet is reduced to raw data. So, whether one is on-line, at work, or in the (“virtual” or “real”) marketplace, or even just in range of a cell phone camera, one is essentially in Bentham and Foucault’s panopticon, where a “single watchman (can) observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) But if the police aren’t the panopticon’s “single watchman,” what, then, is their role? Which is where police violence, exponentially increased by police militarization, comes into play. Because if surveillance is the brains of the operation, police are the muscle.
Foucault was perhaps most famous for Discipline and Punish, a work exploring our panopticon culture. Playing off the title of that work, I would say that if we are disciplined by surveillance, then we are (corporally) punished by the police. Violence always carries a message. Where domestic violence says “This is our little secret,” and where terrorism of all stripes (i.e. including State terror) says “This could be you,” police violence now says, to borrow a famous phrase from George Orwell, “Big Brother is watching.” Police violence must needs only explode intermittently to serve its purpose; like the watchman’s gaze in the panopticon, just the fact that it might happen upon you is enough. Because, as Orwell explains in his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… you had to live… in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” The NSA might be watching, and the police might decide to treat me like Abner Louima. The whole point of which “mights” is that it is, as Orwell astutely points out, safer to live in the assumption that maybe is, paradoxically, definitive.
You know an ideology is totalizing when the only conceivable resistance is more of the very same ideology. This is just a fancy way of saying if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. By pinning our hopes for relief from police brutality on police body cameras, we are endorsing the very surveillance that police brutality announces. In doing so we are continuing to follow Orwell’s script, retreating from the rushing darkness by escaping into an enveloping darkness.
The old question, “Where are the police when you really need them?”, has taken on new meaning in our surveillance state cum militarized police. Once a rhetorical question, it now has an answer. They are on camera. And if you’re wondering whether this means you should be preparing for your big close up, check out the title of Oasis’ (bitchin’) first album, Definitely Maybe.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)