Author: leo.staatsmann.21

 

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.

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

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

 

 

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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‘Its trace it will remind us that we are, after all, not God’ (Commander Adams, played by Laslie Nielsen, to Altaira, played by Anne Francis)

‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956) was directed by Fred M. Wilcox and Written by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, adapts The Tempest by Shakespeare, and mingles it with Freudian Psychoanalysis, and adds a different ending. The characters of the Shakespearian play find their pendants in Forbidden Planet, just a Caliban is missing. Caliban in his animalistic viciousness and anarchy presents a character, which is nearly untameable, a furious and physical alternative to the (self-)mastery of Prospero. In this sense, one could argue that he has much in common with what Sigmund Freud calls the id, a part of the human subjectivity motivated by (partly destructive) drives and desire. Freud claims that the id is an existential part of every human subjectivity, controlled by the superego, and the ego, which mediates between the id and the disciplining Superego.

‘There is no exact equivalent to Caliban in Forbidden Planet […] but in the hole [the film] inserts the Id-beast’ (Merrell 1994).

Morbius, the Prospero of Altair IV, the isolated planet, just inhabited by the presumed survivor of a failed colonizing mission and his daughter Altaira, manipulated his mind, that he can create a robotic servant, his Ariel. But he has also freed the animalistic id, which presents itself attacking the earthy space mission and defending his incestuous claims on his daughter, who starts exploring heterosexual love with the manly crew of the space shuttle, and especially with Commander Adams, leader of the rescue expedition, the Ferdinand of Forbidden Planet. The monsters are materializations of Morbius’s id. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it clearly: ‘The monsters ‘are the realizations of the primordial father’s incestuous destructive impulses against other men who might threaten his symbiosis with the daughter’ (Zizek 1999).

Morbius uses Robby the Robot who is an enabler of his repressed desires and is suspicious about the invaders coming from planet earth. But he can’t see himself, and Robby reinforces Morbius’s state of mind by just following his instructions and being a mindless robot, or more precisly: he can’t see a mostly unconscious part of himself, the id, his id, manifests as a monster. Realizing that it is his ‘dark’ side that threatens him, trying to invade his station, it is too late: His id destroys everything even himself.

In this sense, Morbius is a transgressor in two ways, by following his mostly hidden incestuous tendencies and appropriating the forbidden knowledge of the highly developed but perished civilization of the Planet. Morbius suffers and dies from the aftermath of his transgressions; therefore the movie can be reasonably described as a ‘cautionary moral fable’ (Merrell 1994).

The movie sanctions the id’s greed for omnipotence with death and reminds the audience of the deficient human disposition. On the one hand, it could be understood as a memento mori: ‘remind[ing] us that we are, after all, not god’, as quoted above. But on the other hand, it is way too moralistic by just showing the complete dystopia, which was initiated from the inside of Morbius. The movie isn’t showing a line of flight for handling the abyss of the id but is determined ‘by the peculiar and pointedly moralistic conventions of the 1950s science fiction film’ (Merrell 1994). The couple of Adams and Altaira can finally escape the dystopian monster emanating from Morbius’ Inner space and presents therefore from today’s point of view, a more than ambiguous, if not clearly moralistic ending.

 

Sources:

Knighten, Merrell: The Triple Paternity of “Forbidden Planet”. In: Shakespeare Bulletin , SUMMER 1994, Vol. 12, No. 3 (SUMMER 1994), pp. 36-37.

Zizek, Slavoj: The Thing from Inner Space. September 1999: https://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm

Forbidden Planet (1956) by Fred M. Wilcox

Pictures:

https://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Summaries/F/Forbidden%20Planet.htm

This Is What Scared Robert Englund As A Child…

‘Vladimir: Say something!

Estragon: I’m trying!

[Long silence]’ (54)

The play ‘En attendant Godot’ (‘Waiting for Godot’) written by Samuel Beckett was firstly staged in Paris in the year 1953.  Vladimir (‘Didi’) and Estragon (‘Gogo’) are waiting for Godot in two Acts, but he never comes. Instead, they are meeting Pozzo and Lucky and a Boy who brings the message of the delay of Godot. Beckett presents with his play a realm in between, difficult to define or to locate, and in which “nothing happens twice” as famously described by Irish critic Vivian Mercier. The first sentence of the play “Nothing to be done” uttered by Estragon, introduces the paradigm of the following.

But what are the protagonists doing on the edge to nothingness?

I argue that the play, in which obviously somehow ‘Something’ happens, surrounds the topic of langue. Vladimir and Estragon are talking the whole time and there are methods with which Beckett problematizes language itself.

Vladimir and Estragon have problems understanding each other: ‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying’ (13) but continue speaking. Their plaintive parlando style conveys a mood of uncertainty and meaninglessness. There are many pauses between the mostly short utterances of the characters. Their usage of language implies a strangeness to the intended meaning.  They repeat some words and split them into syllables:

 ‘Vladimir: Tied?

Estragon: Ti-ed’ (13)

The split and redundancy reveal the materiality of the words, and thus violate the unity of signifier and signified. Another example is the play with homophonic names:

‘Estragon: [Pretending to search.] Bozzo….Bozzo…

Vladimir: [Ditto.] Pozzo… Pozzo… 

Pozzo: PPPOZZZO!

Estragon: Ah pozzo… let me see… Pozzo….

Vladimir: Is it Pozzo or Bozzo?’ (15).

The words lose their initial meaningful purpose, becoming mere sounds in an empty space, or simply just printed marks.

These are assaults against the grounding, the stability of language itself. Didi and Gogo are stuck in between the usage of the language as a habit filling the silence and the real process of symbolizing which can touch or move. ‘But habit is a great deadner’ as Vladimir says, and a few moments later: “I can’t go on! [Pause.]’ (83). He speaks as a subject seemingly conscious about what he said. But in the next moment, he is uncertain asking himself the comedic question of ‘What have I said?’ (83). For me, this part stands characteristically for the potential alienation of language, the strangeness of ourselves, the otherness within the subject. We touch something by symbolizing it and in the next moment we are alienated from it or language was lacking representing what we really wanted to utter. We are Estragon and Vladimir, waiting for the impossible moment of clarity where everything seems alive in contrary to the dead habits.  But we maybe couldn’t stand it, as well as Didi and Gogo protesting Lucky’s torrent of words. Beckett succeeds to presents the slipperiness and artificiality of representation and meaning within and through language.

But just as Estragon tries to follow Vladimir’s imperative to ‘Say something’ as quoted in the first sentence, Beckett tries to follow the obligation to express, answering a question about the makers’ possibilities and told what he preferred:

‚The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.‘

 

Sources:

Mercier, Vivien: “The Uneventful Event”. The Irish Times, February 18, 1956

Beckett, Samuel: Waiting For Godot. faber and faber, London 2006

Gontarski, S.E.: Beckett and the ‚Idea‘ of theatre. In: The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1015

Beckett, Samuel and Duthuit, Georges: Three Diologues.

Fotos: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/photographs-of-waiting-for-godot-by-samuel-beckett-1953

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1433597.Samuel_Beckett

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