Mendieta and Misogyny.

An Earth-Body Dynamic.

 

Looking at the work of Ana Mendieta the cogs in my mind wound back four years to Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The reasons for this I will expand upon soon enough. The body of work she amassed could be taken for sanguineous and morbid if her recreation of rape scenes are misunderstood. The shock value of these pieces is appropriate as they were made in response to the rape of her fellow students. It was certainly the right time and place for a female artist to be engaging with the prevalence of sexual violence. The decline of an array of social conventions regarding the place of women in society was at its beginning in the early 1970s. It is often forgotten that what is described as the Feminist movement came about in the wake of 60s cultural revolution in reaction to its ambiguity on the question of women's liberation. So it was a ripe subject for exploration in art.

The depictions of femininity in Mendieta's work are particularly interesting in this regard. It reminds one of Antichrist where we are told nature is Satan's church, the locus of misogyny being found in suggestions of an absent autonomy: women as subjects of various natural forces outside of their own control. In ancient religion we find this is most overt in the aversion to female genitalia and the rituals imposed around the menstrual cycle. All of which feeds into the controls set on sexual conduct. This is not just the case in the monotheist tradition, it is even true of Eastern religion where, for example, we find the Buddha was born out of his mother's side. It then makes sense that Mendieta's work links together the Catholic and pre-Christian pagan traditions of Latin America with a certain conception of femininity. Not coincidentally Mendieta produced art on sexual violence as she was moving in this direction.

Death seemed to feature heavily as a theme, whether in the form of natural decay and peformative destruction in the burning of trees and killing chickens. Mendieta would later move away from performance art, which she disliked for its immediacy; and she was further exploring her Cuban heritage. Ochún (1981) was named after a water goddess in Santería - an Afro-Cuban religious movement based on a blend of folk Catholicism with Yoruba customs - who also the goddess of love, intimacy and beauty. According to Wikipedia, Ochún is said to be generous, beneficent and kind as well as capable of incredible chaos in the few occasions where she loses her temper. The extent to which she romanticised the syncretic cultural heritage of Cuba may be more of a matter of speculation at this point. Such a romanticisation may run as far as embracing this model of femininity. It would be easy to attribute this to her deracination as a Cuban-American.

Unfortunately, we will never know how her work would have developed if she had not died in 1985. Even with all of this in mind, Mendieta's work could be interpreted as a genealogy of misogynist themes. After all an earthly conception of femininity parallels what is to be taken from the traditional organic view of the family and a woman's position in said social unit. In Mother Jungle we find a portrayal of womanhood synthesised with nature comes across as much darker. The imposing dark figure with its jagged features and womb on display seems charged with angst; but this is an almost genderless depiction at the same time (aside from the emphasis on the womb). As Rachel Spence has noted, Ana Mendieta resisted attempts by American feminists to reduce her work to goddess worship. In a way the body of work she produced was far more ambiguous.

Spence notes that Mendieta claimed her work held to a particular culture and time. So it might be taken as a representation of womanhood in terms relative to a certain culture. The art made in a natural environment, carved out of rock and wood may seem to be a more warm-hearted a view of nature. Around this time Mendieta was becoming much more conscious in terms of a two-front struggle in feminism against racism and capitalism. She did describe her work as pre-industrial and situates herself in line with Neolithic paintings. If she had lived she may have become involved in the anti-globalisation movement, which shares this nostalgia for the pre-industrial past. In her work she situates humankind in relation to nature, life and death; and she condemned Robert Smithson for his brutalisation of nature in his invasive land art. Where this trajectory leaves women is another matter.

Man of Gonzo.

The words of Dr Johnson which mark the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are highly appropriate "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The image of the swaggering obscene paternal figure comes to mind, Raoul Duke stands as an obvious figure which Thompson equated himself with in a way which he never really did with Paul Kemp. It is worth keeping in mind, when he wrote The Rum Diary Thompson had yet to dabble in psychedelics but he was a seasoned drinker and went on to garner a reputation as an "impervious man" when it came to drugs and alcohol. When he had dinner with George McGovern, who was running for the Presidency in 1972, Thompson ordered three Margaritas and six beers in one sitting. This is the man who became a beast in order to continuously purge himself of an unending source of pain. Are we talking about the burden of masculinist norms here? Perhaps we are talking about masculinity itself? The beginning of The Rum Diary is marked with an eye-opening sentiment from Eileen O'Connell from 1773:

My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought you your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay.

There is something defiant about the figure conjured up in O'Connell's words, the world could not slay this man. This is not the normal paternal presence, whose symbolic authority is derived from a phallic insignia. Keep in mind that the phallus facilitates the articulation of desire, simultaneously a symbol of sexual difference - the lack of the signifier in the Other - and the object of desire. Desire in the Lacanian sense of the longing which persists even after needs have been satisfied. It is not a case of the wish to simply possess an object, it is a lack of being which signals the split at the heart of the subject. The phallus is symbolic, so it cannot be possessed as an attribute of sorts. In a way desire is an appeal to receive from the Other the complement to what it lacks, so desire is a longing for the desire of an other and so on. It is tempting to designate the figure as not merely wearing the phallus, rather the man is the phallus. But if we accept that to be slain is to be possessed then we can't hardly hold onto this position. Really then it is about the dissatisfaction of desire which is consequent of the unattainable and fleeting quality of the object of desire - objet petit a.

We could continue along this psychoanalytic line for answers to the "bestial" indulgences of man that Thompson advocated as a kind of release from a great pain which seems to be connected with existence itself - perhaps in Schopenhauerian vein. Freud might have designated the bestial drives of man as the Id (to put it in rather crude terms). Think of Harpo Marx as the Id, which is just as ambiguous and silent as him. The strange antics of Harpo were childlike - in the pursuit of mindless fun - but gripped by a primordial evil at the same time. Here we should turn to Nietzsche who reserved great praise for the grand passions, which have often been treated as bestial and animalistic drives in the past. Passion brings meaning to life, it can bring insight, understanding and orientation. This is because of the attachments that are born out of a passionate life: the friendships and relationships we forge, as well as the ideals we hold dear and the creative powers we can exercise through art. The acceptance and love of life is the highest passion, as well as the highest virtue, for Nietzsche. To unleash the passions might be to "make a beast" of oneself.

The passions which gripped Thompson in life ranged from Freak Power and Fitzgerald to motorcycles and mescaline, there were plenty of attachments made to art, music, friends and lovers. He experimented greatly in his life, the indulgence in drugs and alcohol was not just a form of hedonism it was part of the persona he worked to create. The same goes for the passionate lives led by the protagonists of Thompson's books, though the lives they led have been crystallised in fiction for us to enjoy. Most tragically Hunter S Thompson ultimately chose to end his life partly in reaction to the political climate of America. It was a most un-Nietzschean end, Thompson had become a hostage to the persona he had built over the years. It would be easy to paint him as a simple hedonist, but look at the Wave Speech and it is not simply a celebration of hedonism (though there is an element of that involved). Rather it is a joyous eulogy to the 60s zeitgeist, the immense explosion of energy which would prevail over the old politics. Take his words in The Proud Highway "Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street."

The Latest Series from Adam Curtis.

Here are the three episodes of the latest series by documentarian Adam Curtis, in full wholes and not in tedious 10 minute chapters, along with the articles I wrote on each episode and the series in recent weeks. I strongly recommend the work of Adam Curtis, whether it be his documentaries, his blog or his articles in the press. The commentary he has to offer is related to the areas of his focus back in Oxford, specifically: genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, politics, sociology and elementary statistics. In his latest series of films he looks at the way we have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be supplanted with self-organised networks from the internet to the global economy. Today we dream of systems which can balance and stabilise themselves without the intervention of authoritarian power. In reality this is the fantasy of the machines, it is not indicative of nature and it is an insufficient means of changing the world for the good.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Ayn Rand, Computers and Capitalism

Adam Curtis has offered a consistently fascinating and intelligent alternative to the realm of acceptable commentary in the mass-media. With the standard BBC accent Curtis comes across as just another Oxbridge liberal and, in all fairness, Curtis studied and worked at Oxford before he went to work in television which means he was born into a bourgeois background. But it is not the case that Curtis is a part of the Establishment and has been routinely attacked by the commentariat for his more controversial documentaries. In Pandora's Box he explores the dangers of the use of technocratic and supposedly rational theories in politics to run society, whether it be the social engineering of Bolshevik Russia or economic science in Britain. The acceptable commentary on monetarism in Britain is that it has been a successful way of controlling inflation and Curtis challenged this and pointed out that the money supply was actually on the rise by the time inflation was brought down to less than 3% in the 1980s.

In the conclusion of The Trap Adam Curtis calls for the reformulation of positive liberty in order to pursue radical change, which will not necessarily lead to tyranny and oppression as Isaiah Berlin argued. Before that in The Century of the Self Curtis argued that the average citizen has become a slave to their own desires, just as politicians have as well, in doing so we have forgotten that we can be more than that and that there are other sides to human nature. In The Power of Nightmares he concludes that the politics of fear will not last forever and leave the political class where it was left to concede that it has no ideas to offer the masses. For him the "War on Terror" is a grand narrative which was used to make sense of the world, it served the interests of politicians, journalists and terrorists in this way. The view of terrorism Adam Curtis put forward in The Power of Nightmares was criticised on the false grounds that he "implied" that al-Qaeda did not exist. It is clear that these are not the projects of just another Oxbridge liberal.

Social Networks, Resistance and the New Capitalism

Holism, White Whines & Multiculturalism

As a commentator Curtis is primarily concerned with the way ideas can effect the world, which would distinguish him from classical Marxists who would stress the role of the economic system in relation to ideas and the way the world is run. He is concerned with the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. The latest series of films challenges the ideas of the Left which originate in the counter-culture of the 60s. Since then have been fused with the ideas of the libertarian Right, so to eliminate race, gender and class in a radically individualistic conception of the world. For him there is a dire need for leadership and inspirational visions of a better world on the Left, to challenge power we need to go beyond self-organised networks of individuals. There is a lack of a grand alternative to capitalism right now, there are plenty of alternatives which are not articulated well and are left to stew in academic circles for a long time.

The thesis is reminiscent of the Žižekian call for serious collective acts, as well as an examination of old ideas like communism, critique of ideology and the reactualisation of Lenin. We should not be so fearful of power, but rather be willing to use power. Slavoj Žižek would also emphasise that there are times when we can and should just sit still. He has also suggested that the contemporary Left should "begin from the beginning over and over again." In other words, we should not attempt build further on the revolutionary epoch of the 20th Century and descend to the point at which we started and rethink what we are doing. After doing so we can once again attempt to ascend the High Mountain, to borrow a simile used by VI Lenin. Even after the disaster of the 20th Century we should reorganise and make another serious attempt at radical change, just as Samuel Beckett once wrote "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Africa, Barbarism & Civilisation

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene

The Post-Politics of the Selfish Gene.

 

You may have read of the New College of the Humanities which AC Grayling is eager to set up, which will charge £18,000 a year for a course and has £10 million in private capital to back up the scheme. The major selling point being the staff of money-grubbing dons which includes Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson among others. These are the intellectuals whom Grayling designates as "pink around the gills and a little bit left of centre", which might just be a sign of delirium on his part. Grayling argues that the decision came in response to the slashing of public subsidies to the humanities and the hike in tuition fees. It looks more like brash opportunism to me, but that would not contradict Grayling's claim. Appropriately, Richard Dawkins will be teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy at the New College as he is the prominent author of several books on the subject including The Selfish Gene.

For those who have been following the latest documentary by Adam Curtis you will know that Richard Dawkins was a student of Bill Hamilton and George Price, he had also been a computer programmer before he studied science. The work of these biologists had led to the conclusion that the human race are basically automata capable of self-reproduction, the actions of human beings are guided by the genetic codes which adhere to a rational strategy of which the aim is to pass on copies of themselves. The individual is only the temporary host to such genes, which calculate our behaviour even in a way which Price understood as the workings of a computer. Hamilton argued that the calculations went as far as to produce altruism as a survival strategy. The radical conclusions of Hamilton and Price brought down the Enlightenment view of humanity as distinct from animals and nature. It also undermined the role of religion in society and thus Dawkins has played a leading role in the rise of New Atheism in the 21st Century.

George Price and Bill Hamilton were each affected by the revelations in different ways. Price was an obsessive rationalist at first and yet he attributed the equations to God and had a religious awakening, which led him to devote his life to helping the homeless and then killed himself in 1975. Hamilton went on to become one of the most famous scientists in the world and was given the highest honours from the scientific establishment. He later traveled to the Congo where he looked for evidence that AIDS was the result of experiments by American scientists on chimpanzees. The chimpanzee version of HIV was then transmitted to humans through vaccinations for polio, Hamilton died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in 2000. Importantly, Hamilton always held that Price's religious awakening was superstitious and he would have been better off to continue his work in genetics than helping the homeless.

Years before his awakening George Price had worked for IBM and helped construct the first mainframes of computers, for him the equations of Hamilton could be understood in computing terms. Price was a free-lance science journalist dedicated to smash superstitious myths in order to promote rationality. For him computers and mathematics were the key to saving the world, we can measure happiness and contain Communism with mathematical equations and computer technology. When Price discovered the work of Bill Hamilton he concluded that the human being was simply a soft machine controlled by an on-board computer. The mathematical conclusions of Price explained murder, warfare and genocide as strategies undertaken by the genetic codes which control human behaviour. Some people may even be wired to be murderers, we might kill distant relatives in order to secure close relatives for the sake of our genes.

By the time of his death Bill Hamilton had written a series of books which took the logic of Darwinian ideas like natural selection to an extreme conclusion. He argued that Western scientific innovations should not be utilised to prolong the lives of the genetically inferior. Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the strategies of the genes. We should take a stand against the slide into degeneration and against the scientific establishment, which he thought had covered up its own part in the creation of AIDS. He believed that the desperate struggle of everything to pass on its genes explained everything. For him there was no room for altruism and the weak should be left to die. Hamilton died after he contracted malaria, refused to take the proper medication and instead took aspirin which caused his gut to hemorrhage. As he died Hamilton knew he would live forever as a genetic code which he had transmitted in his life time.

With the particular brand of evolutionary biology, promulgated by these men, Richard Dawkins went on to dismiss the exaggerated notion of free-will and in much more vivid language which the scientific establishment could not marginalise as easily. As a result these ideas were able to seize the public imagination. Dawkins argued that the behaviour of human beings is guided by genetic codes, which are almost like an on-board computer. We are simply machines which are interconnected and constitutive of a higher order. Each of us play tiny roles in a vast strategic game in which different genetic codes compete with one another and have done for centuries. For Dawkins the individual is a machine for passing on genes, he would emphasise it is the selfish gene but not the selfish individual. For it is the selfish gene is the immortal replicator, not the selfish individual and so there is room for plans to do what is conducive to the happiness of the largest number of people.

In spite of the strenuous rationalism of George Price, Bill Hamilton and Richard Dawkins, the three of them had recreated the idea of the soul as the genetic codes of human beings. These codes are immortal and will survive us into eternity with no distinction between good and evil. The existence of the individual is lesser than the genetic code which will surpass us and ultimately carries greater significance than us. At his most un-Christian moment Dawkins declared that we are descendent of a "tiny elite of successful ancestors", we carry the ancient "wisdom" of that elite with us in the form of DNA which is a lot like a computer code which has archived all that was good about the past. For Dawkins our ancestors were "winners" which might explain why he oozes complacency and smugness when he claims that the people alive in the 21st Century are more moral than the people who were alive in the 1920s. It would seem he is devoid of a sense of tragedy or even the most elementary form of moral realism.

It should also be noted that Richard Dawkins adheres to the Enlightenment conception of history as Progress, which Christopher Hitchens and numerous other New Atheists are also ensnared. The Progressive view (in the Herbert Spencer sense) of history was also shared by Bill Hamilton, which would be why he thought there is no need for radical change and we should just leave the "losers" to rot. The obvious moral outlook for Dawkins is utilitarian as he seems to have a bit more compassion than Bill Hamilton, but not enough to see that the New College of Humanities is a thoroughly disgusting proposal. Though it is the bourgeois self-interest proposed by Hamilton which is much more in line with the trajectory of their Darwinian outlook. It is clear that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins' work comes with the Thatcherite project interwoven into it, in a manner which is a lot like a genetic code funnily enough. It would seem that it is not coincidental that the liberals have become obsessed with matters of secularism whilst the radicals have started to look into theology more and more.

We should take note that the Fascist promise of an alternate modernity has changed a lot over the decades and the liberals have managed to shape it along the way. Though not in specific relation to Dawkins, but in relation to the post-political theories of genetics and technocratic liberal ideas favoured by the New Atheists. There is the permissive quality in postmodern nationalism today that claims it wants to restore free-speech by giving you the right to call coffee black which also allows us to call black men niggers. There is also a new affinity for technocracy and evolutionary economics among the radical Right. This would explain the alliance between the EDL and the Tea Party against Islam, let alone the support of the EDL for the spending cuts in Britain. It is clear that these crypto-fascists do not offer a 'social revolution' to buy-off socialism just before it could be killed off with the untermenschen.

In the last twenty-0dd years political struggles have been castrated as politics has been transformed into nothing more than management of society. The end of the Cold War supposedly marked the End of History as liberal capitalism went global. The old politics of grand narratives were then tossed aside, the world was beyond 'big ideas' now and the new politics would be managerial and pragmatic. But the evolutionary ideas of Hamilton and Price remain influential in our society to this day, above all the idea that human beings are automata controlled by genetic codes and we may have embraced that idea because we live in a world in which everything we do either good or bad seems to lead to terrible consequences. We have no idea what to do about the problems in the world in order to provide a comforting answer, a fatalistic philosophy, to excuse our failure to change the world no matter what we do. It also fits in neatly with the ideological constellation of our times.

Social Networks, Resistance and the New Capitalism.

Genealogy of Systems.

Adam Curtis has churned out an article on the history of the 'ecosystem' in relation to the protests against cuts. The notion is linked closely with the idea of a universal equilibrium in all of nature. The central problem with the idea is that it can be manipulated by the powerful and utilised to serve other ends. It can be used to justify and enforce a particular view of the world, in order to maintain power structures of authority and domination. The idea of an 'ecosystem' was used by the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s as thousands of young Americans formed communes in order to leave behind the old forms of control - political, hierarchical, sexual and so on. A new order would be forged out of a network of communes throughout which information would flow freely in house meetings and a kind of stability would emerge as a result. In actuality, house meetings turned into sessions in which the strong would bully the weak and everyone else could only stand back and watch.

It was Arthur Tansley who came up with the concept of an 'ecosystem'. He had done so after he read Freud in search of answers for a disturbing nightmare he had in which he murdered his wife. Tansley actually underwent psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. He took the Freudian idea of the brain as a kind of electrical machine - a network throughout which energy flowed - and applied it to nature. For Tansley the complexity of the natural world conceals an array of interconnected systems around which energy flowed and he coined a name for them - ecosystems. From here Tansley went on to claim that there is a universal equilibrium in nature, everything from the mind to nature and society tend towards a state of equilibrium. Essentially Tansley had projected mechanical qualities onto nature, in order to make sense of the complexities of it, without any real evidence to do so. Then Jan Smuts came along with an even grander theory of nature, Tansley hated it.

Jan Smuts was one of the most powerful men in the British Empire and he ruled over South Africa. When the Hottentots refused to pay their dog licenses Smuts sent in planes to bomb them. Smuts found time to get away from bombing black people to go up into the mountains, get naked and contemplate the natural order of things. Smuts came up with Holism, which held that the world is composed of wholes which are each a part of a giant system that would find its own stability if all the wholes were in their right places. Each of the small wholes are evolving and coming together to form larger wholes until all come together into one big whole. As critics pointed out, Smuts was merely providing a justification for imperialism as well as racial segregation. It was clear that the Empire could be seen as a giant self-organised and regulated system in which wholes are kept in the proper place: blacks should stay in their natural whole and not disturb the order of the system.

The Hippies used a hybrid of the ideas of Arthur Tansley and Jan Smuts in combination with cybernetic theories drawn from recent innovations in computer theory in the 1960s and 70s. The dream of a better world which could regulate and stabilise itself failed time and again, whether the ideas were applied for radical or conservative ends. It is incapable of dealing with power, as there could be no sides to take nor alliances to forge in a totally self-regulated and stabilised system. It leads to that same managerial style of political engagement, which has become prevalent since the end of the Cold War in this post-political era. Today the anti-cuts movement has adopted the same idea of how to reorder society through systems organised through autonomous networks, literally the social networks of the internet. Though it is a very effective way of organising demonstrations which are creative and expressive, it is not an effective method for changing the world. The concentration of power must be confronted.

The New Capitalism.

The article was controversial as it linked the libertarian approach of UK Uncut, and by extension the other anti-cuts demonstrations, with the dominant ideology. In an interview, before even the first episode was shown, Adam Curtis explained that he supports the protests but believes that the form of the protests is deeply flawed. The cuts cannot be defeated by self-organised and regulated networks of individuals rallied through social networks like Facebook. Without adequate leadership or even a central vision the schismatic tendencies within the movement can explode. For Curtis the retreat to the idea of a self-organised resistance is a cowardly one made by the Left from confronting the concentration of power in very few hands. There is a great need for an inspirational alternative to unite and rally the people in protest against the cuts. There is some truth in that given there are alternatives to the cuts, but these alternatives are not articulated very well in protest because of the self-organised nature of the demonstrations.

We ought to note that Curtis refers to the figures of the counter-cultural movement, like Stewart Brand, who converged with the libertarian Right in Silicon Valley. The libertarian Right are opposed to old hierarchies and power structures which obstruct the forces of the market and the freedom of the individual. The central thesis of the free-market libertarians is that the capitalist system will flourish if it is liberated from all old constraints and obstacles. Similarly the counter-cultural Left held that through the construction of systems, outside of political power and away from the Establishment, we can build a new society without hierarchy where we are all free and equal in a system. This is where computers come in as a means of self-regulation through which risks can be removed and stability ensured. Government is redundant and so is the Establishment. Today we find the notion of systems as self-regulating is carried over from the reactionaries to the revolutionaries.


For him we are not living in a post-ideological era, the age in which we live is still thoroughly ideological and Curtis aims to explore politically loaded concepts like ecosystems which are commonly taken as apolitical and objective. The idea of a system composed of interconnected nodes which maintain the stability of the system, through the feedback of information, is profoundly ideological for Curtis. It becomes even clearer when we look at the role of the idea that the innovations in computer technology can rid a system of risk. This is the kind of thought which abolished boom and bust under New Labour. The rise of computers has given birth to the idea of a new kind of capitalism in which perpetual growth is possible and the system is not only capable of self-regulation but also self-organisation. The inherent risks and instability of the system can be abolished forever whilst competition and productivity can be enhanced.

Adam Curtis is suspicious of the suggestions that the web has distributed power just as he is opposed to the suggestion that the market has distributed power and that even the class system has been broken down by the meritocratic forces of capitalism. We have abandoned the belief that there could be a better world, that is not based on market principles, and have settled for a managerial approach to capitalism. There has been a shift from the Enlightenment view, that the human being is separate from nature, to the idea that we are each one node in a chain which constitutes the entire system. The system is too complex for a single person to understand, but it can be analysed and predicted by computers. It can remain stable through the flow of information. All of this underlies the view that there can be an economic equilibrium to the radical idea of autonomous cells of resistance to global capitalism. The recent demonstrations in Britain parallel a tenet of the dominant ideology which the protesters are fighting against.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES AND THE DREAM OF A STABLE WORLD WITH NOVELISTS, ANIMALS, THE WORLD WIDE WEB, PRESIDENTS, LOVE, CYBERNETIC PROPHETS, A BALANCED ECOSYSTEM AND A SAFE PAIR OF HANDS.

Good news fellow travelers, Adam Curtis is back with a new documentary series called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, it's title was borrowed from a poem by Richard Brautigan, it looks to be typical of his style and quality. Apparently the "vertigo-inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music" will be included in the package. The central focus of the documentary is the way computers have not liberated us, contrary to popular belief and instead we have lost our vision in a disillusioned age of managerial post-politics. Engrained in computer systems are notions of a perfect balance in ecosystems, ideas which go back to the hippies but have made the leap to Silicon Valley and then onwards to Wall Street. With some contributions from Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins along the way of course, we know Enron couldn't have done without the selfish gene and free-market fundamentalism.


The pseudo-spiritualism of hippie counter-culture in the 1960s with it's communal living, free love, experimental psychedelia and emphasis on the balance of nature's ecosystems have had a great deal of impact over the trajectory of recent decades. It was a cultural revolution of sorts, the individualism of which has since been harnessed by the system. Some of the hippies went on to be major figures in Silicon Valley, the ideas of a natural equilibrium have been built into technology. Now we have social networks as the sign that we are all free and connected, even in love. The idea of a economic equilibrium is appealing to radical free-marketeers like Ayn Rand with her devotee the Chairman of the FED Alan Greenspan. Once we have made the links between hippies turned soft-ware capitalists, Objectivism and the economy we can easily greet Richard Dawkins with his ideas about the selfish gene. But these are just my thoughts on some of the issues Curtis looks at.

WE LIVE IN A DREAM WORLD CREATED BY THE MACHINES WHERE WE ARE ALL CONNECTED AND WE ARE ALL FREE. EVEN IN LOVE. BUT THE MACHINES BROUGHT WITH THEM ANOTHER IDEA, THAT WE ARE ALL COMPONENTS IN SYSTEMS – NODES IN A GLOBAL NETWORK. WE DREAMED THE SYSTEMS COULD STABILISE THEMSELVES, THROUGH FEEDBACK, AND CREATE A PERFECT BALANCE IN NATURE’S ECOSYSTEMS. AND IN HUMAN SOCIETY. AND IN CAPITALISM. WITHOUT POLITICS AND THE OLD HIERARCHIES OF POWER. BUT POWER HASN’T GONE AWAY. IT NEVER DOES.

Adam Curtis was "inspired" to make this documentary when he watched amateur footage of a mass experiment that took place in 1991 and was hosted by Loren Carpenter. Hundreds of people were given a paddle and told nothing, but when a big screen in front of them projected a game of Pong all of them began to participate. The people had to operate it together, spontaneously and without any preparation, in the end they succeeded in playing a game of Pong. Loren Carpenter saw the experiment as freedom and order manifested. For Curtis the people were not free at all, in the self-organising systems we are expected to be "happy components" in a machine and our only duty is to stabilise the machine. We are all just cogs in the machine, each important in a way though as a mass the individual cogs are irrelevant and only matter in relation to the machine working smoothly.

Katharine Viner was right to emphasise the focus on power in the documentaries Curtis has churned out over the last 20 years. With Pandora's Box (1992) it was the use of science to control society and shape human beings. Similarly The Mayfair Set was about the collapse of political rise and rise of corporate power. The Century of the Self looked at the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis and the appropriation of Freud's theories by the public relations industry to market goods to consumers. My favourite is The Power of Nightmares in which politicised fear is explored as the only way for politicians to mobilise people in a disillusioned age. Now Curtis has moved onto machines and the way that the idea of a self-regulating ecosystem in nature has been torn from the thoughts of hippies and has become engrained in technology. The idea of a natural equilibrium eliminates the reason for the state and automatically writes-off all possibility of state-intervention. In this sense, the commune is a model for social networking as it is self-regulating and non-hierarchical.

Adam Curtis has also worked with Charlie Brooker in the past and has recently written for The Guardian in the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden. He argued that the death of bin Laden may herald the end of a grand narrative which has served American politicians, Western journalists and Islamists well in making sense of the world. It is only a question of what kind of narrative will open up to make sense of the world now, Curtis speculates that it may be the rise of China which will give America a reason to reassert itself in the world. This could be true as there has already been a great deal of emphasis on American decline and Chinese ascension in the mainstream discourse. Donald Trump made a big deal about imposing a tariff of 25% on imports from China. He might be right unless the Obama administration finds a way to maintain the current narrative of terror. As I am a fan of Curtis I will be making a post for each episode of his new series and I strongly recommend his work to all reading this article.

Crashing and Burning in Montreux.

The controversial book Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov and published in 1955, known for the innovative and lyrical style in which the narrative unfolds page-by-page, the infamy that has enveloped the novel is down to its content which focuses on the most sordid sexual deviancy - paedophilia. It is a dark tale of a middle-aged man and his obsession with a 12 year-old girl, the nature of this "love affair" is disposed towards rape and physical abuse. Nabokov insisted that his book did not convey any message, and it was not a work of "big ideas", stressing that he didn't want to "touch hearts" or "effect minds". I can't help but suspect that this element of Nabokov's work is partly due to his outlook and political views. Nabokov was a strident individualist and considered himself an old-fashioned liberal, which is likely given that his father was a prominent liberal politician, although Nabokov was also a close friend of William F Buckley and a fan of Richard Nixon.


It's important that we consider Nabokov's life. Vladimir Nabokov was born into one of the most powerful families in St Petersberg and inherited great wealth at a young age, he lived in a large house of 50 servants. Though this life of luxury as a Russian aristocrat was cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution, foring Nabokov to go into exile just as he was reaching maturity. This separated him from his first love Tamara, Lolita could have been Nabokov's way of mocking the way he still reminisced on his relationship with Tamara even in old age. Particularly as he aged she would have no doubt remained the same age in his mind as he had known her. Nabokov's father was shot dead by a fascist in Berlin, his gay brother was murdered in a concentration camp. These events not only displaced Nabokov and changed his life forever, but it may be the reason for his individualism. From the trampled ground of Bolshevism and fascism Nabokov emerged, like Ayn Rand although less extreme, in opposition to "big ideas" and "utopian goals" like communism.

Nabokov's claim to not propagate any message or "big idea" in his work is typical of an "old-fashioned liberal", who would argue that the state should be minimal to protect individual freedom. In the past, and even today, the libertarian right-wing has argued that the Civil Rights act should be repealed on the grounds that it infringes on the freedom of business owners - the freedom to discriminate. Defenders of such a position often claim to be "neutral" and adhere to a minimalist view of the state as "non-interventionist" for the sake of freedom of choice. But in not taking sides and not interfevening in such a way you are taking sides and are interferring. As such "neutrality" is permissive of the racist practices prevalent at the time. In not taking sides in Lolita, neither explicitly condemning nor embracing paedophilia, Nabokov may have taken the side of Humbert Humbert.

Apart from his life as a novelist Nabokov loved football and was an avid chess-player, he was also an entomologist. As an entomologist Nabokov collected over 4,000 butterflies and even discovered a species, which was named in his honour "Nabokovia". The life of a butterfly is particularly interesting in regards to Nabokov's writing. A butterfly begins life as a caterpillar, before entering an immobile stage known as the "nymph stage" before emerging as a butterfly weeks later. During the "nymph stage" the insect is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, in that sense it is in a liminal state. The parallel stage among humans would be the teenage years - which are neither child nor adult - liminal like the "nymph" stage. In the story Lolita is a prepubescent girl of 12, which would place her just prior to entering this liminal stage as a caterpillar. But it is as she is reaching maturity that Lolita dies while giving birth to a stillborn child, she was just 17 at the time - not yet an adult, not yet a butterfly.

However, we must not be rash and conclude from this that Vladimir Nabokov was simply no defender of paedophilia. Humbert Humbert is not the last "nympholept", nor was Lolita the last "nymphet", spawned by the dark-side of Nabokov's imagination. Similar tales of sexual deviancy appear as early as 1939 in Nabokov's work, beginning with The Enchanter and ending with Laura which he never finished and was published posthumously against his wishes. In total there are about six novels in which young girls are lusted after by mature men. As Martin Amis noted, about two or three of these novels are masterpieces but the content is nevertheless unsettling. It would appear that "nympholepsy" is part of the decor of themes and motifs - along with butterflies, chess, Freud-bashing, mirrors; doubles and dopplegangers - that are recurrent in Nabokov's works.

The Enchanter is similar to the first half of Lolita in that the protagonist infiltrates the household of his prey by marrying the girl's mother, after the mother is out of the picture (e.g. killed off), the "enchanter" despoils the prepubescent daughter. Though the differences are more important, and perhaps more revealing, than the similarities between the two books. The "enchanter" has a single voyeuristic "moment" with his nymphet, whereas Humbert Humbert has sex regularly with Lolita for about 2 years. The Enchanter is less subtle and crude than Lolita in terms of writing, in the former Nabokov writes at one point "he began passing his magic wand above her body". And yet it is Lolita in which Nabokov judges Humbert Humbert, tacitly holding him responsible for the trajectory of Lolita's life - from her defiled childhood to her premature death, a life stolen by Humbert.

Interestingly, The Enchanter was published by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, whereas Lolita was published in 1955 when Nabokov was still alive, even though it was The Enchanter which was written first in 1939. This might lead us to conclude that Vladimir Nabokov was worried about the release of The Enchanter, nothing particularly new there as Nabokov contemplated burning Lolita on several occasions and wanted The Original of Laura to be destroyed upon his death. But it was not until Nabokov's later years that he underwent a literary meltdown, beginning with Ada in 1970. As Amis puts it "When a writer comes off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident." It is in Ada that Nabokov creates a world which Humbert would have adored - where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

On it goes in Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), in the latter a Vadim Vadimovich marries a girl 43 years his junior. In Transparent Things an impotent misfit named Hugh Person visiting Switzerland, courting Armande and tending to Mr R an aging eccentric author and a paedophile. Person looks at a picture of Armande when she was 10, arousing and haunting him in dreams from then on, he later strangles Armande in his sleep and dies in a fire at the hotel. The sexual depravity recurrent in some of Nabokov's many novels may place such works further to the transgressive fiction of William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade. Though we might conclude Nabokov's writing on such a rancid transgression is really down to an obsession with the internal chaos of man. But I think that might still be too generous, even for an author of Nabokov's magnitude.