ELCS0090: Isolation, Society and Dystopia: Mortal Thoughts 2021/22 Class Blog

Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation (2016) begins by declaring that ‘no one has a vision of a different or better kind of future.” Curtis portrays the world as a complex, interconnected web, wherein neoliberalism, social media, technocratic power, artistic complacency, ideology and distortions of truth have all played a part in driving us towards a directionless era of instability. Hypernormalisation tells the story of how we got to this strange place.

Curtis weaves this narrative together by drawing causal links between seemingly disparate moments in history. The world, as he views it, is deeply connected and governed by chains of causality that can be traced. Curtis uses a montage of archival footage from the last five decades to help elucidate this interconnected web. It is through this cloud of news reports, pre-takes and home-footage that we see the narrative slowly thicken into a complex account of how the world ended up as it is now. The narrative begins with two of these moments, occurring in 1975 on different sides of the world: the fiscal crisis in New York City and the tension between the US’ Henry Kissinger and Syria’s President Hafez al-Asad over the future of the Arab world. At first, the two events may not  appear to be significantly linked. However, Curtis’ narrative unravels in such a way that they appear to directly interact, forging a new reality in their wake. 

Throughout Hypernormalisation, Curtis continues to place events across the globe  in a direct causal chain with each other. This method for developing a historical narrative shares some similarity with German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectical model. Hegel developed the notion of a dialectical model to explain the way contrasting sides progress and develop. It may be applied to many subjects that contain opposing sides, for instance, philosophical concepts, dialogues  or  accounts of history.  Hegel’s dialectical method comprises three stages: a thesis; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two, which is resolved through their synthesis. This system then repeats, with the synthesis becoming a new thesis itself. 

Hegel’s dialectic can supposedly be applied to any system that progresses through stages of contradiction and revision. In particular, Hegel viewed history as a one enormous dialectic, operating with the forces of alienation, liberty, corruption and rationality among others. Karl Marx adopted this view with his Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism. Together, the two notions argue that historical events result from conflicts of economic and social forces, which find resolve through a process of contradiction and solution (Marx gives particular weight to the material and economic forces driving change  throughout history). An example of this Marxian dialectic in history is the overthrow of feudalism: as the merchant class (thesis) grew larger, the feudal system’s ‘use production’ (antithesis), fell under threat due to the demand for a greater ‘commodity production’ – this conflict resolved in the overthrow of the feudal system and adoption of a capitalist mode of production (synthesis). 

Returning to Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation, we can observe how  the events presented advance in a dialectical fashion. For instance, President Asad and the New York fiscal crisis are thesis and antithesis respectively, with the shaken world after 1975 emerging as the synthesis. In some casest, single events appear to be part of multiple dialectical chains at once: President Asad is also in conflict with Henry Kissenger and Neo-imperialist forces, and in this case their synthesis is the emergence of suicide bombings in an unstable middle east. Countless examples present in Hypernormalisation can be cited: cyberspace utopianism and social media synthesising with echo chambers; the Arab spring, social media and youth disillusion; New York real estate, the collapse  of the radical left and the rise of neoliberal populism; artificial intelligence, future predictions and the political obsession with stability; etc. The vast web of causality in Hypernormalisation can certainly be viewed as a multidimensional dialectical narrative. 

But is the dialectical view a truly convincing mode of analysing history, even when it comes to modern society? There are two significant ways that society has evolved to become dysfunctional with the mechanics of a dialectical system: first, with the expansion of society on a global scale, there is now an overload of forces in dialectic tension with each other; second, the dissolving of truth and understanding make it more difficult for us to label and apply the dialectic model of thesis, antithesis and synthesis onto current affairs. Both of these phenomena pose a potential threat to the dialectical model. Geopolitics is now so vast that pairings of thesis and antithesis appear insignificant against near infinite layers of socio-economic forces. The ‘bigger picture’ is becoming  too big to step back from – too complex for the dialectical model to be convincingly applied. Even in the time between Hypernormalisation’s release (2016) and present day, society has undergone several substantial metamorphoses: the rise of social media influencers; the covid-19 pandemic; and the explosion of digital finance (with cryptocurrencies and NFTs) to name a few. Just as our grasp on the uncountable forces at play in the world slips away, another threat to the dialectical mode of understanding has emerged: post-truth politics. Vladimir Putin and Vladslav Surkov’s post-truth tactic is an example of how an overload of information can lead to mass confusion. Not only do we struggle to track the innumerable events and the causal trails they are part of; now we must also discern true events from false ones. With a fading vision of ‘what is in tension with what’ it is increasingly difficult to discern the dialectical forces in action. 

In light of these set-backs, historical analysis through a causal or dialectical lens may have become a futile exercise. In fact, the sheer scope of socio-political forces at play makes it difficult to avoid conspiratorial representations of the world, since there is a risk of a causal narrative oversimplifying the casualty in question. This is something Curtis’ films are often slated for edging towards. The dialectic mode of historical analysis is often criticised for being an oversimplification when it comes to thoroughly understanding changes in history; now the complex socio-political scenario has forced the dialectical system to advance this oversimplification to a point of implosion. Could an implosion of the dialectical system mark a fundamental change in the way societies are developing? Perhaps we ought to conclude that history has entered a ‘post-dialectic’ stage; the capitalist model has accelerated society to a point of historical malfunction, at least  insofar as cause and effect is concerned. 

In its place, we might adopt a view that history evolves through contingency; unpredicted phenomena are what drive change, rather than chains of causality. Chance governs our direction and events occur due to indiscernible fluctuations. This is even more so the case in the present day, with the ever-growing effect of global warming on the planet’s ecosystem. Hurricanes, droughts and pandemics have shown to affect the global system with greater force than most political manifestos and new laws, and yet they are birthed out of chance, not a traceable chain of causality. 

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects explores the notion of objects “that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans (p. 1)” such that they transcend both spatiotemporal coherence with our reality and traceable patterns of causality. Morton argues that global warming is one such ‘hyperobject,’ since it is so expansive that it continually outpaces our efforts to grapple with it. We might even say that the capitalist superstructure is a lesser kind of hyperobject – one not quite as vast and transcendent as those described by Morton, but still recognisably formidable and complex. 

Hyperobjects could be one of the reasons for the collapse of our causal (and dialectical) understanding of the world. Their unknowable influence takes away any chance of understanding the superstructure thoroughly (there will always be something we couldn’t have predicted). In this sense, one cannot rely on causality to elucidate a system involving both hyperobjects and non-hyperobjects; such a system is burdened by contingent forces. The complexity this presents is incompatible with  our prior readings of history. Therefore, we might conclude that modern history is better understood to be shaped by chance occurrences than by the kinds of dialectical narratives seen in Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation.

However, substituting the causal understanding of history is not entirely productive. Without a clear vision of how society got to be where it is now, we lose a sense of society’s direction into the future. Although the Curtis style narrative can be regarded as an oversimplification of the  sociopolitical superstructure, it does provide us with a greater sense of our trajectory. The dialectical model of historical analysis helped us understand  how the future comes into being. Replacing this with a view that focuses on chance and contingency, we risk falling to the criticism that Hypernormalisation opens with: that “no one has a vision of a different or better kind of future.”

 

References:

Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation, 2016

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-history/History-as-a-process-of-dialectical-change-Hegel-and-Marx

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, 2013

 

1968 was a year of the Revolution in France, May 1968 had a disruptive effect on society. But the revolution failed. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello wrote in their book “The new spirit of capitalism” that the revolutionary critique was split into two groups: the workers on the one hand, who mostly supported a kind of social critique, focused on social securities, fair wages, and stable living standards, and the students on the other hand, who supported an artistic critique, focused on flexibility, self-fulfilment at the working place and flat hierarchies. Capitalism in the aftermath of 68 co-opted the artistic critique. Organizing the working conditions became more flexible and implemented creative forms of working, identifying with the brand or the enterprise became more important and therefore, the self-fulfilment. The social scientist Andreas Reckwitz embedded the artistic critique in a history of counter-culture. Following Boltanski and Chiapello he marks the 60s/70s as “a pivotal point in history which ushered in a post-materialist labour ethos” (Reckwitz: 124). Integrated into the mainstream capitalism many elements of this kind of critique became hegemonic: “The formerly anti-capitalist ‘artistic critique’ […], the critique of alienation in the name of self-realization, cooperation and authenticity, is already built into the current project-based way of working and to the organizations with their flattened hierarchies” (Reckwitz: 4). Reckwitz analysis a hegemonical complex of creativity in many areas. Its concentration can be found “in postmodern art, in the critical psychology of self-realization, in design, fashion and advertising made for a progressive audience, in the rise of pop and rock culture, and in critical urbanism” (Reckwitz: 31). The subversive wish of being creative mutated to an imperative to be creative.

“Patti Smith and man others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try and change it they just experienced it. […] Radicals across America turned to art and music as means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people’s heads and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action.” (Hypernormalisation: Minute 8)

What Curtis describes in his movie HyperNormalisation (2016) is very similar to the artistic critique. He describes the hope that change comes through the individual first. If we isolate the underlying focus on the individual, we definitely can see something in common with neoliberalism in which “private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation” (Harvey: 64). Disruption starting within the individual is something that neoliberalism and some versions of the counterculture share. In one version it’s the subversive disruption of the capitalistic system and in the other, it’s the Schumpeterian disruption bringing the whole system forward.
The cultural theorist Mark Fisher argues that in this context capitalism has appropriated the creatively produced “new” in a broader sense. A version of politics that challenges this appropriation shouldn’t reclaim it by “adapting to the conditions in which we find ourselves – we’ve done that rather too well, and ‘successful adaptation’ is the strategy of managerialism par excellence” (Fisher: 28).
But why and how was this critique co-opted? David Harvey mentioned something very important:

“But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation” (Harvey:44).

One could argue that some ideas of the counterculture found their way into the capitalistic production: The “workers” at Google and Facebook are trying out new forms of relationships or LSD-micro-dosing. But obviously, they are forming a new liberal middle class or even an elite. The key workers, the cleaning workers, the securities in Google and Facebook are other people. And this topic wasn’t implemented, this would be a contemporary social critique: to raise the awareness of class differences, the lack of financial and social securities. On the surface, for the upper-middle class, the working conditions changed, but in general the divergence between the rich and the poor became bigger (Harvey: 25) and competition for jobs became harder.
To change this could be a starting point for today’s social critique: to change the financial and material vertical differences.

On the one side, one can argue that counterculture was a pivot point in history from which creativity and the creative individual was more and more integrated into hegemonical culture. But on the other side, it is more complicated. Curtis who blames the counterculture for today’s individualism might oversee the accomplishments achieved by them.

 

If you identify concrete movements just like the second-wave feminism or the Free Speech Movement in the US (there were many others: gay liberation, Ontological Hysterical Theatre, radical therapy organizations, Mental Patients’ Liberation), you definitely can argue, that they changed everyday life for some oppressed minorities and the public discourse and awareness.

It does not do justice to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s describing their heritage as something that failed totally. The neoliberals “wanted to extend the market across into the social area” (Olssen: 199). This economization of the social leads to the extension of economic criteria and “market exchange relations now govern all areas of voluntary exchange amongst individuals” (Olssen: 199). In view of this neoliberal project, it becomes more and more clear that it differed very much from the intentions of the counterculture, which is a broad and to some extent inaccurate category to summarize locally different “countercultures”. The counter cultures often tried to escape a capitalist apparat and focused on a mental aspect of the subject to overcome the subject, viewed as a capitalistic and individualistic form of existence. We will take the Schizo-Culture as an example. There exists a historical direct link between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, leading figures of Schizo-Culture and Patti Smith: on a visit to the U.S., the French philosophers met her and attended her concerts (cf. Demers: 266). Sylvère Lotringer, strongly involved in America’s Schizo-Culture, defines it: “‘by Schizo-Culture, we don’t mean, of course, the end-product of institutional repression or social controls of all kinds, but the process of becoming, the flow of creative energy unchecked by ego boundaries: body intensity, affirmative, revolutionary disposition’ (Lotringer, Letter to Allen Ginsberg)” (Demers: 290). I would argue that it is too easy to see the counterculture as a scapegoat for today’s post-Fordist “new spirit of capitalism” as Curtis might do. The counterculture has certainly indulged in certain naiveties and thus missed out on real political opportunities. It has also prepared the ground for a perverse and simplified form of itself, which runs towards a distinction-seeking individualism. But the imagination and the real change that was also part of its time should not be underestimated.
To conclude, I am coming back to Mark Fisher and will risk a gaze into a possible future of taking action:

"If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy. For example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy" (Fisher: 79).

References:
Boltanski, Luc/ Chiapello, Eve: The new Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, 2005.

Curtis, Adam: HyperNormalisation. BBC, 2016.

Demers, Jason: COLLECTING INTENSITIES: THE ARRIVAL OF FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA, 1970s. Library and Archives Canada, 2009.

Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Ollsen, Mark: Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: assessing Foucault’s legacy. In J. Education Policy,, 2003, Vol. 18, No. 2, 189-202.

Reckwitz, Andreas: The Invention of Creativity. Modern Society and the Culture of the new. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.

https://secure.telegraph.co.uk/customer/secure/checkout/?productId=nyytq4zthbvwsoliojugwyzzmyzha3dt&offerId=freetrial-digital-month-RP001&campaignId=038A&ICID=conversion-subscription_onsite-asset_overlay_hardaem_subscribecta&redirectTo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2018%2F03%2F18%2Fstudent-uprising-1968-still-dividing-france-macron-mulls-celebrations%2F

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/world/europe/france-may-1968-revolution.html

https://laimagendelfilosofo.wordpress.com/tag/jean-paul-sartre/

 

 

In broad terms, the neoliberals have argued for the reduction of government, stripping back of welfare systems, and freeing of markets. The neoliberal ideology proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices (Harvey, 2005, p2).

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, new strains continue to emerge, posing a constant threat to human health. Although neoliberalism may have various flaws in the economic system (details in my previous blog), I still want to discuss the extent to which it can help to curb the COVID-19 pandemic in public health.

Epidemiological neoliberalism

Herd immunity is epidemiological neoliberalism. Much like the unconditional belief in the free market, herd immunity relies on the assumption that a pandemic is best overcome by leaving it unregulated. What might seem like a laissez-faire policy, is actually a refined and complex system of automated structural violence against the weak, which also shatters any possibilities of resistance.But just like neoliberalism, it results in violence against the weak and the poor: elderly and disabled people, homeless people, refugees and people with severe health conditions – many of whom are likely to also have a lower socio-economic status because of the correlation between poverty and illness. These are the people, who are at the highest risk of dying from COVID-19 – especially if the healthcare system is overwhelmed and doctors have to perform triage (Autore, 2020).

The initial reaction from most governments to the outbreak was an exercise in “epidemiological neoliberalism” (Frey, 2020). This policy bluntly exposed the politics of the whole project: pretend to do nothing while making sure that the “natural laws” of markets keep functioning, even if it means allowing people to get sick and die from “just another flu”. Encapsulated in the social-Darwinian “survival of the fittest” notion of “herd immunity”, this solution in practice consisted of voluntary behavioral guidelines – business as usual, just wash your hands and keep your distance (Šumonja, 2021). This, in effect, turned a social problem into an individual matter, thus shaking off any responsibility the authorities had for the public health crisis. When epidemic prevention has changed from a compulsory act to a personal moral issue, it is difficult to blame one person specifically because everyone has different moral values due to their level of education and cultural background.

Limited vs. unconstrained freedom

Eric Li (2021) raised the following issue:

“What good are individual rights if they result in millions of avoidable deaths, as has happened in many liberal democracies during the pandemic?”

After the initial peak of the outbreak, governments have also realized that measures such as travel restrictions and social distancing take precedence over guaranteeing unconstrained freedom for everyone.

The nine metrics used to calculate the Government Stringency Index are: school closures; workplace closures; cancellation of public events; restrictions on public gatherings; closures of public transport; stay-at-home requirements; public information campaigns; restrictions on internal movements; and international travel controls.

As we can see in figure 2, the vast majority of countries, with the exception of some in Africa, have index above 50, and the index are generally higher in developed countries than in developing countries.

A higher score indicates a stricter government response (i.e. 100 = strictest response). Although a higher score does not necessarily mean that a country’s response is ‘better’ than others lower on the index, to some extent, it implies the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country’s response.

However, comparing with figure 2 and figure 3 that people around the world are tired of the repeated outbreaks and that embargo restrictions in all countries have been reduced to varying degrees from May.  Many countries adopted epidemiological neoliberalism to the pandemic, with governments pinning their hopes of containing the virus through vaccines rather than social isolation.

Nonetheless, I still believe that the blockade restrictions were relaxed not because the vaccine was effective enough, but because people could not stand the endless lockdown.

William R. Gallaher (2021, para.19-20), a scientist from the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology, Louisiana State University Department of Health, states:

"I am, and always have been, a strong proponent of vaccines. My wife and I have been fully immunized and boosted as soon as humanly possible. Still, I feel compelled to warn that we may not be able to immunize our way out of this, as immune escape becomes increasingly prioritized as an evolutionary pressure in the generation of variants. We need to be careful about being addicted to our high tech solutions, that meet considerable resistance and global supply chain and delivery issues. As some countries have discovered, viral epidemiology 101, interrupting the chain of infection, is vital. Masking, handwashing, sanitizing and social distancing – keeping infected folks from uninfected folks – remains the surest path to reducing the reproduction number anywhere. Cheap. low tech and effective means can be most broadly applied globally.

In the United States, we are on track to have 1,000,000 Americans dead from COVID, within basically two years of onset of the pandemic here. What was inconceivable here has become almost inevitable. That we are not doing every conceivable thing to stop this carnage here and globally is beyond unacceptable."

From the data above, it seems that neoliberalism cannot contain COVID-19. Similar to economic neoliberalism, epidemiological neoliberalism allows governments to delegate power to individuals while at the same time delegating responsibility to them. However, unlike financial giants who use this power to engage in unproductive accumulation, people with no medical expertise but enormous power can be misled by incorrect information, causing the epidemic to get worse.

But could we have beaten COVID-19 completely if governments around the world had imposed strict lockdown at the start of the outbreak (although this would have been impossible)? It is also hard to say.  It is like the Cannikin Law, where the outcome depends on the shortest plank.

The pandemic is a special reminder that humankind is a community of shared destiny, that responsible and decisive government policies are necessary in the face of pandemic.

Useful Links:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Cases – Statistics and Research – Our World in Data

Policy Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic – Statistics and Research – Our World in Data

References:

Autore, M, Corizzo, S, 2020. From health emergency to social crisis. International Viewpoint, 17 March, viewed in 15/12/2021. Available at: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6454

Eric Li, 2021. Eric Li on the failure of liberal democracy and the rise of China’s way. The economist, 8 December 2021, viewed in 15/12/2021. Available at: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/12/08/eric-li-on-the-failure-of-liberal-democracy-and-the-rise-of-chinas-way

Frey, 2020. ‘Herd immunity’ is epidemiological neoliberalism. The Quarantimes, 19 March, viewed in 15/12/2021. Available at: https://thequarantimes.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/herd-immunity-is-epidemiological-neoliberalism

Harvey, D., 2005. The new imperialism / David Harvey., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Šumonja, M., 2021. Neoliberalism is not dead – On political implications of Covid-19. Capital & class, 45(2), pp.215–227.

William R. Gallaher, 2021. Omicron is a Multiply Recombinant Set of Variants That Have Evolved Over Many Months, viewed in 15/12/2021. Available at: https://virological.org/t/omicron-is-a-multiply-recombinant-set-of-variants-that-have-evolved-over-many-months/775

 

 

What is freedom? Can we say that we are really free people?
In this day and age, the word freedom is a distinguished topic in our society; either because of the number of protests which are held everyday worldwide, or because of the number of freedoms that have been
achieved over the years. This word has its origin in an Indo-European root whose meaning is “to love”. This root is used as an antonym of “freedom”, placing the prefix a- in front. The concept of “freedom” could be defined as the ability of the human being to act through his own will, that is, his freedom. Although this act of “freedom” must be limited, in my opinion, the freedom of the other. In other words, freedom is doing what everyone wants without harming another person or groups of people.

Having defined this and having read one of the last works that we have dealt with in the subject, we can relate freedom to the work of the French writer, Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869). This novel belongs to a collection of books based on adventures and travels, “Extraordinary Travels”. In this work we can locate several moments in which the characters try to put an end to their self-consciousness.

For example, in the beginning of chapter eleven of the play,
“The Sargasso Sea”, in which the character in the first person, tries again to find the end of his stay in that place where they are now “Nor had we
any means of opposing Captain Nemo’s will. Our only course was to submit “”would he not consent to restore our liberty, under an oath never to reveal his existence?”. This occurs when Captain Nemo and his men take Ned Land, Professor Aronnax and Conseil as prisoners. The reason is because these three have discovered the Nautilus so they cannotreturn, not to tell what they have seen.

Another example, we can see in chapter twelve, “Cachalots and Whales”, in which we can see an intervention by Conseil, one of the three characters imprisoned in the play. He introduces an observation speaking in honor of his friend Ned Land, saying that he needs to go home as he longs for everything he had, “Poor Ned is longing for everything that he can not have. His past life is always present to him; everything that we are forbidden he regrets. His head is full of old recollections. And we must understand him. What has he to do here? Nothing; he is not learned like you, sir; and has not the same taste for the beauties of the sea that we have. He would risk everything to be able to go once more into a tavern in his own country.” These three finally put their lives at risk trying to escape since they prefer to die instead of being in that boat trapped.

What’s more, there are a large number of symbols known worldwide, whose purpose is to claim freedom in some way. Statues for this purpose are scattered around the world, but the one that stands out the most is undoubtedly The Statue of Liberty in New York. The French nation gave this monument to the American in 1886 on the occasion of the centenary of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America with respect to the British Empire. It should be pointed out that the monument was designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the same engineer who designed the great and famous Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Another symbol that has been very successful, especially today, has been the rainbow, which froms the gay pride flag. This has its origin much longer than we imagine. In 1978 it was used for the first time on the occasion of the San Francisco LGTB+ Pride march. The creator was Gilbert Baker.From then on the rainbow has been associated with sexual diversity. It was initially made up of eight Qcolors, after that there were seven and finally ended in six.

Even though the concept of freedom that we use at present has evolved over many years ofstruggle to become what we know today, we cannot say that we live in a totally “free” world. The reason is that day after day things continue to happen that make us see that we are not free. Currently, there are not a few
cases of physical and mental harassment and aggression against LGBT people or people of another race or ethnicity.This does not have to be a stranger, since even some relatives are part of this. Without going any further, last Christmas, a gay friend suffered a situation that no one would like to experience. His way of dressing is somewhat extravagant, so he came to the family dinner and before sitting at the table, he began to receive insults from his own father regarding his
wardrobe and sexual orientation. He only replied that he is free to dress and date whoever he wants. Following this, he left.

Another point is the thousands of cases of disappearances of both men and women. This is something that, although we may not believe it, continues to happen every day, people with a completely normal life who are suddenly kidnapped, obviously against their will and therefore their freedom. As it happens, in my town, which is located in the South of Spain, which has 36,000 inhabitants, a few years ago a man with a van was dedicated to kidnapping children and teenagers. This obviously ended up being reported to the security forces and that person got the consequences for him.

After having reflected on the issue, on the whole, freedom is in my view something very relative that depends on each human being, their race and their culture. Compared to the old days its situation has improved. Around fifty years ago, LGTBI was a taboo topic; now we have managed to quell the aggression against this one with the help of demonstrations, as well as, events in support of them. Therefore, we will be able to act the way we really want, without being held back by anything or anyone, as in Jules Verne’s work, where the three characters are held back.
Likewise, in everyday life, a society will be achieved in which
there will be no fear of going alone on the street, of being attacked or kidnapped. In addition to putting an end to the murders and suicides that this entails. This will require a lot of global support, protection and work, as has been done so far.

 

REFERENCES:
2021. [online] Available at:
<https://symbolsage.com/es/12-simbolos-de-la-libertad-y-sus-origenes/#top_ankor> [Accessed 24 November 2021].

Imdb.com. 2021. [online] Available at<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11166512/> [Accessed 24 November 2021].

Fernández, P., 2021. Discriminación grave, falta de libertad y protección internacional. [online] Mujeres Refugiadas. Available at:
<https://mujeresrefugiadas.accem.es/discriminacion-grave-falta-de-libertad-y-proteccion-internacional /> [Accessed 24 November 2021].

freedom?, W., Natividad, T. and Wainwright, S., 2021. What is the etymology of the word freedom?. [online] English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. Available at: <https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/422103/what-is-the-etymology-of-thewordfreedom#:~:text=%22Freedom%20comes%20from%20the%20Indo-European%20root%20which%20means,thought%20it%20might%20be%20interesting%20for%20your%20discussion.>

[Accessed 24 November 2021].
El Orden Mundial – EOM. 2021. LGTB: logros y retos en el siglo XXI. [online] Available at:
<https://elordenmundial.com/lgtb-logros-y-retos-en-el-siglo-xxi/> [Accessed 24 November 2021].
Significados. 2021. Significado de Libertad. [online] Available at:
<https://www.significados.com/libertad/> [Accessed 24 November 2021].

Gutenberg.org. 2021. The Project Gutenberg E-text of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (slightly abridged), by Jules Verne. [online] Available at:<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/164/164-h/164-h.htm> [Accessed 24 November 2021].

LOS40. 2021. ¿Qué significan los colores de la bandera LGBT? ¡Te lo contamos!. [online] Available
at: <https://los40.com/los40/2017/06/26/love40/1498496045_643065.html> [Accessed 24 November
2021]

The Movie Poster (Source)

Forbidden Planet is a 1956 American science fiction film based on the play “The Tempest” (1611) by William Shakespeare. The following blog post asks about the visual conceptions of “space”, their cinematic compositions and attributions of meaning, as well as the narratives that can be identified. Due to the complexity of the source genre “film” – the level of production, content and effect/reception – not everything can be discussed completely here. I will show how the props and the built spaces and costumes shown in the film interact with the content shown, thereby laying the foundation for the genre of “science fiction” as early as the 1950s. A specific film genre that defines the cinematic imaginary space of “outer space”.

Source

Context: materiality, props and design
Shakespeare’s work was, as already mentioned, reinterpreted: The island became Altair 4, Prospero became Morbius, Miranda became Altaira, and Ariel mutated into the robot “Robby”. According to the original story, the film was supposed to be set in the (then still distant) year 1972. However, since the makers thought it unrealistic to have such technology in the 1970s, they moved the action to the 23rd century.

The film was the first film ever to depict a human-piloted spaceship as a flying saucer. A model of the C-57D cruiser, approximately 51 metres tall, was built for the film. This was surrounded by a large studio-built surface of Altair IV, which blended seamlessly into a painted representation of the planet’s horizon. There were three different sized models for long shots in which the spaceship was visible, for example for shots in space or landing approaches to Altair IV. The models were 50, 110 and 220 cm tall. So all the scenes set on the surface of the planet were composed of several special effects. The robot Robby was the most expensive effect of all time at the time: at a cost of 4,900,000 US dollars for the film, the portrayal of Robby alone swallowed up 125,000 US dollars.

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MGM had originally been lured into making the film cheaper because the monster was invisible. When it was decided to suggest the creature’s outline by animation, help from illustrators at the Walt Disney Company had to be used, since MGM no longer had its own animation studio at the time. As a result, production became much more expensive, which contributed to the commercial failure and discredited the science fiction genre with financiers for years to come. However, the film was to inspire many subsequent films and thus represents a milestone in the science fiction genre.

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The film was released in German cinemas in 1957, the year the first satellite Sputnik 1 was launched. There was no space travel at the time, nor was there any usable knowledge about space. Alarm in Space had a great influence on science fiction, especially Star Trek. Its creator Gene Roddenberry claimed to have been inspired by the film. One example is the synthetic production of food and commodities. Whereas in Alarm in Space Robby the Robot was responsible for this, in Star Trek there are so-called replicators. In addition, there are, among other things, the communicators, the “simple ray weapons” and the “United Planets”. Furthermore, there is a preliminary form of “beaming” (dematerialisation of the crew) when changing to sub-light speed, which is similar to the later beaming. It is also similar that here as there the captain, the ship’s doctor and the first officer take part in external missions. The story of the submerged alien civilisation, with threatening energy beings and the captain’s obligatory love affair, also resembles some later Star Trek episodes. Like later Star Trek, the film predicted the end of the Cold War; the ship’s doctor, Doctor Ostrow, is from Russia.

George Lucas was also inspired by the film and its visual effects. For example, the Krell’s machine shops provided the model for interior shots of the Death Star in Star Wars and for the generator hall in The Dark Menace. The melting tank doors at the end of the film can also be found here. Furthermore, the robot Robby, who can speak a variety of foreign languages, is reminiscent of the droid C-3PO with similar abilities. The trailer for Alarm in Space began, like the Star Wars series later, with a yellow scrolling text.

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Robby the robot, the pinball machine Twilight Zone, who first appeared in the film, became a cult character in his own right and continued to make guest appearances in films and series for years after, including SOS Spaceship, Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Love Boat, Columbo, Gremlins and, as a drawn version, on The Simpsons. In 2004, he was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. The Id Monster was created based on the well-known Looney Tunes character Gossamer. The aliens’ underground facilities were the model for the “Great Machine” in the television series Babylon 5, which appears from the episode Attack of the Aliens onwards. The two facilities are almost to a hair’s breadth alike.

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The plot – Imaginative utopia, space adventure and technical wonders
The space cruiser C-57D is on a search-and-rescue mission to the 4th planet of the Altair system. Twenty years earlier, the spaceship Bellerophon (named after the eponymous hero of Greek mythology) had disappeared there with a group of colonists on board. However, the crew of the cruiser under Captain Adams only meets a scientist named Dr. Morbius there. He and his daughter Altaira, who was born on the planet, are the only survivors.

Morbius explains to Adams that the presence of the rescue team is not necessary, as he and his daughter are supplied with everything they need by the robot “Robby” constructed by Morbius himself. The colonists had all been killed by some inexplicable force. Only Morbius and his wife, who died of natural causes a few months after giving birth to their daughter Altaira, were immune to this force. While Morbius insists that the soldiers leave the planet again, Adams senses a secret behind the doctor’s strange appearance and the inexplicable technical achievements that Morbius demonstrates to them. Adams soon sees this confirmed when important parts of the spaceship are destroyed and the ship’s propulsion system is sabotaged. Adams wants to confront Morbius and discovers his secret research documents and a secret passage, which is located in Morbius’ laboratory.

Reluctantly, Dr Morbius gives an explanation: the planet was once home to the Krell, who were technically and ethically superior to humans, but whose civilisation was inexplicably destroyed in one fell swoop. No signs of their civilisation remain on the surface – but beneath the planet’s surface are huge functioning machine systems, laboratories and massive libraries in which the Krell’s knowledge is stored. Morbius has managed to acquire some of the Krell’s knowledge and operate the machines.

One of the protagonists of the movie (Source).

While Adams urges Morbius to share his findings with Earth, the crew of the space cruiser is attacked by an invisible creature. The crew can only with difficulty resist the attack; several crew members die. Adams decides to leave Altair 4 and take Morbius and his daughter, who has fallen in love with him, with him for their safety. When Morbius refuses and Altaira decides to leave her father, the invisible monster attacks Morbius’ house. Adams figures out that the monster is the professor’s raging unconscious, unwittingly released when he used a machine that can materialise thoughts, which also explains the destruction of Krell culture. Only now does Morbius recognise the repressed truth, admit his guilt and thus defeat his own monster, which, however, fatally injures him beforehand out of anger at his actions.

Morbius then activates the self-destruction of Altair 4 with his last strength, which is to take place 24 hours later, and then asks Captain Adams to save his daughter, which he does. 24 hours later, the spaceship with the remaining crew, Altaira and Robby on board watches the explosion from a safe distance. Adams wants to ensure that Morbius and what happened on the planet are not forgotten for the sake of humanity’s future existence.

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The description of the story, the actor-constellations and the social relationship in the film point to specific ideas of “space”. In this way, processes of distinction between us, the people in the present and those of the future can be discerned. Even though living beings such as humans, animals and others show similarities to those on Earth, there are differences in their appearance, abilities and capacities for action. How psychologised interpretations of an unconscious are packed into the figure of Morbius and the invisible creature can also be seen very well in the film.

Conclusion and Outlook
I have tried to show what role the film “Forbidden Planet” (1956) plays in the cinematic production of space imaginaries due to the story but also the requisites used. Further detailed studies must follow here and work out comparatively which references can be made between “Forbidden Planet” and films that appeared in the following years. It is also exciting to see how contemporary films take up imaginary worlds of space and which lines of connection can be drawn from the 1950s to the present, the year 2021.

Literature and other sources
Mark LeFanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (1987); chapter on Solaris, pp. 53-68.
Thomas Myrach, Science & Fiction: Imagination und Realität des Weltraums (2009).
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1986).
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1616).
Asif A. Siddiqi, The red rockets’ glare: spaceflight and the Soviet imagination, 1857-1957 (2010).

ARE WE AS FREE AS WE THINK_ (1)

Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation begins by declaring that ‘no one has a vision of a different or better kind of future.” Curtis portrays the world as a complex, interconnected web, where neoliberalism, social media, technocratic power, artistic complacency, ideology and distortions of truth have all played a part in driving us into a new, directionless era of instability. Hypernormalisation tells the story of how we got to this strange place. 

Curtis knits together a web of archival footage from across the last five decades. This collection acts as his ‘detective evidence-board’ of string and pins, from which Curtis presents causal links between seemingly disparate moments in modern history. The narrative begins with two moments on different sides of the world, both occurring in 1975: the fiscal crisis in New York City and the tension between the US’ Henry Kissinger and Syria’s President Hafez al-Asad with regard to the Arab world. The two moments at first don’t appear to be significantly linked. However, Curtis’ narrative plays out in such a way that these two moments appear to directly interact, somewhat forging a new reality in their wake. 

Throughout Hypernormalisation, Curtis continues to place distinct moments in direct causal chains with each other. In this sense, there is some similarity between his view on historical progression and that of the German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel developed the notion of a dialectic system to explain the way things progress and develop. His system comprises three dialectical stages: a thesis; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two, which is resolved through their synthesis. This system repeats when the synthesis becomes a new thesis itself. 

Hegel’s dialectic can supposedly be applied to many that progress through stages of contradiction and reform. In particular, Hegel viewed history as a one enormous dialectic, operating with the forces of alienation, liberty, corruption and rationality among others. For instance, the American Civil War saw the anti-slavery Union (thesis) in conflict with the pro-slavery Confederate forces, culminating in the Union victory and amendments to the US Constitution (synthesis). Hegel’s dialectic is often criticised for being an oversimplification when it comes to thoroughly understanding changes in history. However, I would argue that it functions as a way of observing and understanding the progression of broad tensions in history, and that to some extent, the dialectic synthesis provides us with an understanding of how the future comes into being. 

 

Returning to Hypernormalisation, I would argue that many of its historical moments are presented in dialectic form. For instance, President Asad and the New York fiscal crisis can be seen as the thesis and antithesis, with the shaken world after 1975 emerging as the synthesis. To some extent, there are dialectics present between each event in multiple directions; President Asad could also be in dialectic tension with Henry Kissenger and Neo-imperialist forces, with their synthesis being the emergence of suicide bombings and an unstable middle east. And the New York fiscal crisis could be placed in dialectic tension with the politically disillusioned artists of the 1970s. Countless examples present in Hypernormalisation can be cited: cyberspace utopianism and social media synthesising into echo chambers; the arab spring, social media and youth disillusion; artificial intelligence, future predictions and neoliberal markets; etc. 

Hegel’s dialectical system can also be used with regard to Curtis’ fundamental theme: the dissolution of society’s visions for the future. There are two significant ways that the modern world has evolved to be dysfunctional with the mechanics of the dialectical system: first, via globalisation, there is now an overload of forces in dialectic tension with each other; second, the dissolving of truth and understanding, making it more difficult for us to identify the theses, antitheses and syntheses at play in the modern world. Both of these phenomena are significant overloads to the dialectical system. Vladimir Putin and Vladslav Surkov’s post-truth tactic is an example of how an overload of information can lead to mass confusion. The very same thing is happening with the explosion of dialectical tensions at play in the world. With a fading vision of ‘what is in tension with what’ it is increasingly difficult to grasp the direction that society is heading in.

References:

Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-history/History-as-a-process-of-dialectical-change-Hegel-and-Marx

1968 was a year of the Revolution in France, May 1968 had a disruptive effect on society. But the revolution failed. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello wrote in their book “The new spirit of capitalism” that the revolutionary critique was split into two groups: the workers on the one hand, who mostly supported a kind of social critique, focused on social securities, fair wages, and stable living standards, and the student on the other hand, who supported an artistic critique, focused on flexibility, self-fulfillment at the working place and flat hierarchies. Capitalism in the aftermath of 68 co-opted the artistic critique: organizing the working conditions became more flexible and implemented creative forms of working, identifying with the brand or the enterprise became more important and therefore, the self-fulfillment.

“Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try and change it they just experienced it. […] Radicals across America turned to art and music as means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people’s heads and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action.” (Hypernormalisation: Minute 8)

What Curtis describes in his movie HyperNormalisation (2016) is very similar to the artistic critique, he is describing the hope that change comes through the individual first. If we isolate the underlying focus on the individual, we definitely can see something in common with neoliberalism in which “private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation” (Harvey: 64). Disruption starting within the individual is something that neoliberalism and some versions of the counterculture share. In one version it’s the disruption of the capitalistic system and in the other, it’s the disruption bringing the whole system forward.
But why and how was this critique co-opted? David Harvey already mentioned something very important:

“But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation” (Harvey:44).

One could argue that some ideas of the counterculture found their way into the capitalistic production: The “workers” at Google and Facebook are trying out new forms of relationships or LSD-micro-dosing. But obviously, they are forming a new liberal middle class or even an elite. The key workers, the cleaning workers, the securities in Google and Facebook are other people. And this topic wasn’t implemented, this would be a contemporary social critique: to raise the awareness of class differences, the lack of financial and social securities. On the surface, for the upper-middle class, the working conditions changed, but in general the divergence between the rich and the poor became bigger (Harvey: 25) and competition for jobs became harder.
To change this could be a starting point for today’s social critique: to change the financial and material vertical differences.

Resources:
Curtis, Adam: HyperNormalisation. BBC, 2016.
Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Boltanski, Luc/ Chiapello, Eve: The new Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, 2005.

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Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices (Harvey, D., 2005, p2).

Based on the concept of neoliberalism, the market is always self-balanced, and the state cannot interfere with the internal freedom of the market upon most occasions. Thus, neoliberalism has handed over a large amount of economic power which should be regulated and supervised by the government to financial institutions or private enterprises. Under such a system, no one can restrain the unproductive accumulation of financial giants. In other words, the giant can directly rely on its own monopoly position for speculative, parasitic and deprived capital accumulation clandestinely.

However, according to Kant, the commercial peace hypothesis can be achieved. Although the pursuit of profits in business competition is ruthless, if there is no violence and exploitation in the process, it can be regarded as a kind of healthy competition (Isiksel, T., 2020). Kant expects economic interdependence to prompt states to accept reciprocal constraints on their behavior, producing a cooperative equilibrium with a cosmopolitan legal order to underwrite it (Kant, 2007). Yet, from my perspective, the interinhibitive equilibrium only exists in government agencies with strong public benefit properties. Conversely, the majority of companies do not care much about moral issues. Though the government can alleviate the gap between the rich and the poor through secondary distribution, such as taxes, big companies have the money to hire lawyers to help them avoid taxes legally, which ultimately leads to the middle class having to shoulder more social responsibilities.

Foucault stated further that there is a paradoxical relationship between liberal economic rationalism and civil society as one moves towards an economic state in that “the constitutive bond of civil society is weakened and the more the individual is isolated by the economic bond he has with everyone and anyone” (Garrett, T.M., 2020).

In conclusion, the emergence of new forms of fascism, new paradigms of liberalism, and new efforts to liquidate governments, like the Brexit are inevitable. However, if these doctrines do not address the fact that financial institutions can maintain their monopolies by reinforcing unproductive accumulation, they may not work well in the end.

 

Reference

Adam Curtis, “I’m a Modern Journalist,” by Hannah Eaves and Jonathan Marlow, in Mark Cousins and Kevin Macdonald eds., Imagining Reality: The Faber book of Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 407-411.

Garrett, T.M., 2020. Kant’s foedus pacificum: Path to peace or prolegomena to neoliberalism and authoritarian corporatist globalization in contemporary liberal democratic states? Annales etyka w życiu gospodarczym, 23(2), pp.7–20.

Harvey, D., 2005. The new imperialism / David Harvey., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Isiksel, T., 2020. Cosmopolitanism and International Economic Institutions. The Journal of politics, 82(1), pp.211–224.

Kant, Immanuel. (1784) 2007. “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History, and Education. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.