Author: harry.coveney.21

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

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

Our train may occasionally be late, but it is certainly never infinitely long. In this sense, the world as it appears before us, may seem to be a little disappointing when compared to our favourite Sci-fi planet. Perhaps this is because fiction has the power to portray ideals – those concepts and objects that transcend empirical, experiential reality. Infinity and perfection are two significant examples of such ideals; while we may understand the concept of perfection, we are unable to tie it to a thing that we experience in our own reality, because we simply haven’t ever had the perfect slice of pizza or a truly bottomless drink. In this sense, there is a disconnect between ideals and our reality. However, in a fictional realm this disconnect is somewhat breached. 

infinity pool (not an infinite pool)

Infinity is, to me, the most fascinating ideal, since it can be applied to space and time. We seem to possess the ability to ponder the notion of an infinite train or boundless swimming pool, and even imagine how we would experience such things. However, in fictional works, we may take this a step further. Infinity can be portrayed as a mechanism that ‘successfully’ operates within the fictional world. For instance, a fictional character may pick up a book with an infinite number of pages and we may read about ways in which it plagues him (this is the content of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Book of Sand). Or perhaps we are met by a character who has lived for an infinite amount of time: when they account for their experience, there is no moment to doubt the truth of the tale: it simply is true within the world presented to us by the author. Significantly, we are told how interactions with infinity play out and what happens next. In this sense, infinity descends from a purely conceptual realm to interact with the fictional world. Our lack of agency, as readers dropped into the author’s narrative, enables us to encounter the infinite and observe its effects in ways usually limited by our faculties of doubt and reason. 

However, the introduction of such ideals into a fictional narrative does not come without complication. A fascinating dichotomy arises between the ‘ideal’ and the ordinary mechanics of the world: between perfect and ordinary; infinite and finite; linear and nonlinear. Roland Barthes touches upon these tensions in Mythologies. He discusses Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – a novel that, in many ways, challenged the perception of time and space. Verne places the infinite and finite in tension with each other: the confined space of the Nautilus submarine is depicted traversing a seemingly inexhaustible world at great speed. Barthes notes that “the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity.” To some extent, the passengers’ confinement is presented as almost fractal; as we zoom into the finite, defined boundary of the Nautilus, it seems as though we may repeat this process perpetually, zooming in on the objects and realms within the confined space. The seclusion of Verne’s submarine with a window facing out at true vastness induces a feeling of paradoxical vastness itself, for an infinitely finite space. For Barthes, Verne exercises a “ceaseless action of secluding oneself.” It is the kind of exercise that aches the brain. 

Perhaps above all, the power of Verne’s fiction is his portrayal of characters responding to the forces at play in the fictional world. By presenting the characters’ relations with the infinite vastness and excruciating finiteness, we are given a more tangible account for these concepts. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the passengers’ reactions to confinement are varied. For Ned Land, the confinement is nauseating imprisonment, whereas for Professor Arronax, the vast ocean provides a seemingly infinite source of intrigue. By observing the characters’ responses to the infinite and finite, we may somewhat establish relations with these transcendent concepts ourselves.

 

Bibliography:

Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Project Gutenberg, 1994

Roland Barthes, ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat’, in Mythologies (Vintage 2009)

Jorge Luis Borges, Book of Sand, 1975

In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s two protagonists appear to be abandoned beside a country road, awaiting the arrival of someone, or something, called Godot. Despair and failure are central themes in the play, with Estragon and Vladimir succumbing to bored insanity in the face of a seemingly futile, meaningless world. From the moment the play commences, we are dropped into a state of limbo; Estragon is tries and fails twice to remove his boot, before declaring that there is “Nothing to be done.” Indeed, from this opening line onwards, nothing is done.

But what is Beckett aiming to convey with such a pessimistic portrayal of the world? We might first infer that Waiting for Godot is a reflection of the widespread nihilism that spread across the postmodern world; after the Second World War, many lost faith in the fundamental human values of reason and meaning, having witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. Estragon and Vladimir appear to be in some kind of post-apocalyptic setting, promoting us to make this connection. But perhaps more relevant than the nihilistic undertones of the play are its references to existentialism. The protagonists’ relentless faith that Godot will arrive and repetitive behaviour are reminiscent of the Myth of Sisyphus, which was used by existential philosopher Albert Camus to illustrate the absurdity of life. Sisyphus was condemned to endlessly repeat the meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, just as Estragon and Vladimir appear to have condemned themselves to the endless task of waiting for Godot; in both cases the situation is static. The final interaction closes the play while also opening it up to a perpetual looping:

Camus concludes that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” since he must  become contented with the absurdity of his task. But what about Estragon and Vladimir; in this reading of Beckett, can we conclude that his heroes are of Sisyphus kind, accepting of their fate? I would argue that it is unclear as to whether they have even become conscious of their perpetual task.

However, we may explore a further existential reading of Waiting for Godot: one that may get closer to Beckett’s intended message. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes two mutually exclusive kinds of being: the unconscious (being-in-itself), which is unchangeable and concrete in its essence; and the conscious (being-for-itself), which is aware of itself and changeable, but lacks a prescribed essence. For Sartre, the conscious being must create itself out of nothingness, since it lacks a predetermined essence; unlike a tree, which is fated to simply be a tree, humans act within the world and thus actualise their being. In Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir appear to have estranged themselves from such freedom and consciousness, instead opting for inaction and ceaseless waiting in a world full of nothing. But, unlike the tree that they stand beside, our protagonists may in fact possess the power to shape their own essence from this nothingness.

To our despair, we leave Estragon and Vladimir still fixated on the arrival of Godot, wherein their essence is estranged. They seem to be stuck in a ditch, unwilling to actuate their own being from the nothingness around them.

References:

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, 1953

The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, 1942

Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943

 

 

Thomas More’s Utopia explores the concept of an ideal society – a topic of discourse that continues back to classical philosophy, with Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics. Unlike his classical counterparts, More’s exploration of Utopia reveals a paradoxical side to idealist society. In the fictionalised discussion between More, Peter Giles and a traveller called Hythloday, Utopia is presented as an egalitarian society with peculiar authoritarian undertones.

Utopian citizens are granted a short six hour work day so as to minimise the exploitation of labour. And yet, underneath the facade of liberty, this Utopian workday requires that “free time not be wasted in roistering or sloth, but used properly in some chosen occupation” (p.52 More). The Utopian day is sectioned rigidly into activity permitted by the state. Could it be that the cost of existing in a perfect world is the loss of freedom and expressive humanity?

 

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Utopia of a Tired Man, a time traveller born in 1897 finds himself in a Utopian world several hundred years in the future. He meets a man called Someone who, like More’s Hythloday, tells of the societal structure of Utopia. Facts no longer matter to Utopians, who are instead taught the skill of “doubt and the art of forgetting” (p.66, Borges). Birth is controlled and simultaneous suicide is being collectively considered. Borges’ world, which openly references More’s, is presented in a marvelously transient way; the characters’ abrupt conversations and emotionless responses to each other evoke a sense of despair and loss in the ‘perfect world.’ The reader floats between interactions without thorough attention to intermediate moments, as if large sections of the narrative have been blotted out. The tale ends with Someone dismantling his entire house and leaving to a crematorium to end his long Utopian life. Borges paints Utopia as an ethereal and somewhat uncanny place. 

What I observe in both Borges and More’s Utopias is a complex, almost dialectical relationship between perfection and humanity; the creation of an ideal state relies on authoritarian control and results in the sterilisation of human qualities (Human qualities, in this context, refers to the plethora of human activity that engages with expression and unpredictability, from art and friendship to emotional outbreaks and intuition). Such a clinical system is bound to a standard higher than human condition warrants, begging the question of whether perfection and humanity are simply incompatible.

The homogeneity of personality and neutralisation of human character in Utopia surely flaws the entire project. How can a sterile world be preferable over a world of mixed good and evil? How can a world without entropy be a world at all? Thus, Utopia is either imperfect by its inclusion of chaotic humanity or imperfect by the oppression of chaotic humanity. To this end, the Utopian state is paradoxically self-destructing: it is by no accident that More chose the Greek words ‘ou’ (not) and ‘topos’ (place) to denote the perfect state trapped in its own project of perfection, never to be realised. 

 

References:

More et al., 2002. Thomas More : Utopia / edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. Rev., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis: The Book of Sand. Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex, England. 1979