The culture industry and Freud

The interpretation of dreams was for Freud an important element of psychoanalysis. What Roland Barthes later claimed about art, namely that there is no "noise", was for Freud the basic premise for entering the dream world. Phenomena that were believed to be banal, arbitrary and inconsequential, like dreams or slips of the tongue, fascinated Freud; not in and of themselves but as symptoms of unconscious mental processes. What happens when we dream, according to Freud, is that some elements of our waking life (e.g. experiences, persons, events) are selected and arranged into a new whole, which is the manifest content of the dream. To the naive observer, even to the dreamers themselves, this manifest content seems chaotic and without meaning, it is all "noise". Actually it is all signal, because there is a latent structure underlying this apparent chaos: dreams fulfil repressed wishes in a symbolic manner, where elements of the manifest dream content represent objects of the wish. Because the superego censors these wishes, they can be expressed only indirectly as symbols. Freud mentions the example of a lady patient who dreamed of a friend, who had just recently married. From the context in which this person appears in the dream (the dreamer had bought some theatre tickets early and found out she could have latter bought them at a better price, like her friend did), Freud interprets the friend to represent a repressed regret of the patient: she had gotten married too early. If she had just waited, she could have snatched a better husband.

Perhaps you are expecting that I will now furnish examples of how products of the culture industry cater to these repressed desires, reducing art to a sort of phantasmal wanking off, perhaps explaining how Popeye represents repressed aggression towards sexual competitors (Bluto always behaves in a manner that legitimises aggression, circumventing the cultural taboo and enabling the male audience to live out their aggression in a way that is not sanctioned by the superego):



What I am more interested in are the changes the models of the culture industry are going through. Advertising nowadays likes to tell us that a picture is "epic" and I guess this is meant as praise. The funny part is that advertising is telling the pure and simple truth here (it rarely tells outright lies, but it tends toward using hyperboles lavishly). Motion pictures today might most adequately be described as "epic", a few recent examples:

Ninja assassin:


The road:


2012


Sherlock Holmes (a bastard child of James Bond and Night of the living dead)


The perplexing thing is that epic forms abound today, when none of the social circumstances that gave them meaning in antiquity are present. In Greece for example the epic form developed under the auspices of warlords, it was a sort of propaganda for their great deeds (mostly consisting of murder, rape and plundering). The warrior hero ethics were also a way of promoting enlistment, recruiting soldiers who would willingly give up their lives in battle ("May you live forever" was one of the most insulting things you could say to a man in Sparta). When the merchant class gained power in city states like Athens, culture was becoming more refined, focusing on feeling and creativity, largely abandoning the heroic epos of yore.

What, then, is the charm contemporary epos exhibits over contemporary audiences? Surely the events portrayed are utterly alien to their lives and their perception of themselves. In complex societies, one can hardly imagine oneself as a heroic figure, which is able to change the course of the world with its solitary actions. One is rather embedded in the many subsystems of society, which mediate our actions and make it nearly impossible to gauge their final consequences: we are told that buying a more efficient vehicle will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that our contribution to a charity will benefit some village in Africa, that responsible consumption habits can contribute to a more humane economy, that our vote counts, but the effectiveness - even the meaningfulness - of our actions remains utterly opaque to us.

Whose story is the contemporary epos telling? If the answer can not be found on the side of the users, it must be on the side of the producers. Yet what aim could the producers be following in serving audiences contents they can not meaningfully relate to? Is there a secret plot to militarise our societies with Hollywood as the vanguard (the epos of the Third Reich comes to mind)? The truth might be simpler than that. Karl Marx painted a picture of the world in which the living individual is passive, while dead labour (capital) is active, determining the life of society. The hero of contemporary epos is none other than capital itself, an exquisite parody of the dialectics of spirit, as told by Hegel (history does have a talent for parodying Hegel, does it not?). Producers are merely following through the logic of the market: since substantive innovation is too risky a business the culture industry exhibits a tendency to follow certain proven stereotypes (today's plots basically repeat those from the 1920s, albeit in a more sophisticated manner) - with stereotypical cultural formats the investors can anticipate future profits, and advertisers know what type of audience to expect (by the way, do you really believe MPAA ratings were instituted to protect children?). Innovation in Hollywood is rather showcasing the sheer might of productive forces: grandiose special effects are the main difference between the pictures of today and those 50 years ago. The grandiose Mannerist style of Hollywood is not a fad, the epos is not a symptom of nostalgia: it is the ideology of capital, told by capital itself.

The unease, which the first Terminator movie is still able to cause, stems from the melting away of borders between humanity and its productive forces and the - not at all imaginary - feeling that the unleashed productive forces have grown far beyond our control. The terminator is the best metaphor for the culture industry of today: a machine, masquerading as a human. The Academy awards its Oscars to outstanding individuals. Truth be told, the true recipient is never on the stage of that festive event.

Perpetum mobile

First I must apologize for my long absence, I have been tangled up in real life. This time I will let some quotes speak almost by themselves. They are basically about reification:

1. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik:

Everywhere it is put to stand to availability. To stand as a standing-reserve for being available further. What is so set to be available has its own stance. We will call it the standing-reserve.

2. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The working man: dominion and form):

The task of total mobilization is the transformation of life into energy, as it is unveiled in the economy, technology and traffic in the whirring of wheels or on the battlefield as fire and movement.

3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

4. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter one: Bourgeois and Proletarians

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

You will notice that the first three quotes are from fascist ideologues or sympathizers (Heidegger's text was written later, it records a lecture held in 1949). M&E's prediction that the new state of affairs will enable people to see the true nature of productive forces is refuted by the eagerness with which fascism engaged in total mobilisation of society as a standing-reserve: the capitalist model in which raw materials and people are reified in the productive process is let loose upon the whole of society: sports, education, culture, procreation, friendship, everything is bound into the demand to produce a standing-reserve for the needs of the totalitarian state (its needs were quite basic: production and warfare). The humanity, with which the bourgeois era tried to soothe its guilty conscience, was abolished, the productive process made to truly dominate the whole of social totality. Besides proving that capitalism is by far more persistent and far less progressive than M&E believed, able to mobilise seemingly outlived modes of subjectivity (Like the identification with a race or folk) to come to its defence in a time of crisis it makes a point about the affinity between capitalism and fascism that members of the Frankfurt school have stressed. Not only does fascism utilize a certain type of personality that is bred under the conditions of liberal democracy - the Authoritarian personality, as Adorno et al. called it in their seminal study, it can also be seen as totalizing in the sense that it subjects the whole of society to the reification inherent in the productive process.

Prostitution

It is puzzling how much contempt societies, based upon the principle of exchanging bodily functions for an universal equivalent, have for the sale of one particular bodily function. I make my living selling my intellect, which could be regarded as more integral to my self than my genitals, yet the first is deemed acceptable, while the latter is scorned. Love is not to be sold, after all. Love, a specifically capitalist phenomenon, is the prime alibi of capitalism, its prime obfuscation. Prostitution lays bare the ideological denial of universal mediatedness at work in the bourgeois idea of love, reveals that abstract negation - reserving a sphere of complete self-will in the midst of universal servitude - is hypocrisy. In the hysteric reaction towards prostitution the subject denies the painful realisation that he or she is sold daily and that this transaction is the basis of subjectivity. Prostitution is the lens through which society can be comprehended in its totality. As such it deserves scorn just as much as Galilei's telescope.

The enemy never sleeps

Some time ago I analysed the subtle ideology of RPG games. They do come less subtle than that. The goal of Kirby superstar, an old Super Nintendo game, is to venture:

P.S.: Honest to Marx, I used Photoshop only to paste, crop and save the image.

Hegel on Kafka's Metamorphosis

The reader of Kafka's story is immediately struck not so much by the bizarre transformation of the protagonist into an enormous insect - surely not the most bizarre in the history of literature - as with the indifferent response the transformation is met with. Gregor Samsa at first feels no discomfort with his new shape, which leads us to reject the interpretation that his transformation is in itself a punishment. Indeed he finds pleasure in new habits that come with the new form: eating rotten food, crawling on the ceiling etc. The interpretation that the transformation is actually fulfilling a latent desire might seem far fetched at first, but let us see if it can help us make sense of the story. Gregor is working at a job he distinctly dislikes (that are his first thoughts upon waking) but to which he is bound by debts his father had incurred. The fantasy is not a positive one, a desire to become an insect, but a negative one, a desire to escape inescapable social obligations.

The insect can be read as a metonymy of nature (that Kafka declared a Bilderverbot regarding the insect in a letter to Kurt Wolff would indicate that the insect is a place holder for a more abstract idea), nature not as a positive idea, but as a purely abstract negation of human sociality, a wishing-away of the mediatedness of the subject through social institutions, a fantasy of pure immediacy in the midst of universal mediation. The tragedy of the insect testifies to the impossibility of an abstract negation. As Adorno noted in one of the most orthodoxly Hegelian parts of Minima Moralia, the bourgeois demand for purely spontaneous love functions as an alibi for the untrue society - it is not as pure spontaneity that love can offer resistance to the existing, only as specific negation, as "stubborn opposition" as Adorno put it. Note that the motive of family love (especially that of Gregor to his sister) is central to Kafka's story.

The answer to the question what the nature of mediation is, of what Gregor is running from, takes us beyond Hegel to Marx. On all the central parts of the story money is of paramount importance. The debt of the father is forcing Gregor to stick to a job he dislikes. Georg only finds displeasure in his new form when he realizes it will cause him to miss work. Gregor's family start neglecting him because of the jobs they in turn have to take to compensate for his missing pay check and they completely reject him after he has scared away the tenants inhabiting a spare room of their apartment. Gregor's sister put it most succinctly: "When one has to work so hard as we do it is impossible to put up with this incessant torture at home." Brecht's Good person of Szechwan immediately comes to mind, where Shen Te is confronted with an analogous dilemma: "How can I be good, when everything is so expensive?"

The transformation can then be read as a parable, the moral of which is that "there is no right life in the wrong."

Value neutrality

Norms are not stars, glittering on a horizon beyond being. They are an integral part of social reality. The norm of neutrality - besides the obvious fact that a normative demand for the absence of normative demands is a contradictio in adjecto - is nothing but the dictate of applicability. The results of research technique should be free from value statements so that they can be used broadly and efficiently. The measure of neutrality is the extent of capitulation to the existing. The attempt to eliminate the normative moment of cognition wrongs the object (unresolved antagonisms of society are paradoxes calling to be resolved) and the subject, equipping it with blinders that prevent it from seeing beyond the sensus communis. Research does not aim to satisfy a fickle curiosity as Popper had childishly imagined, it is productive work. As all productive work it aims to achieve an effect, that is provoke some change in the world. The question is therefore not whether research should or should not be value free, but what the nature of the values should be: should they be subjective, conforming to doxa (what is today deemed objective) or objective, following from the inherent paradoxes of the object (what is today deemed subjective).

Shizophrenia

In The good person of Szechuan Brecht portrays the protagonist faced with contradictory demands of reality and morality. Schizophrenia is a natural reaction then: Shen Te develops the alter ego of Shui Ta, who steps in when the dictate of being good threatens to destroy Shen Te. "How can I be good," she asks, "when everything is so expensive?" The only rational response to a pathological world is pathological.

When Freud developed his theoretical system he acknowledged that there is an inherent contradiction between desire and reality (what he termed the dynamic aspect of a metapsychological inquiry). When later on in life desire is hampered by reality libido regresses to an earlier stage (Freud gives the example of fetishism), but this regression is unacceptable to the superego, which censors the desire and neurotic symptoms are the only way libido can find an expression. What Freud has missed is that psychological contradictions originate from social ones, the contradiction between desire and reality is secondary, the primary contradiction is between the dictates of authority and the reality it creates. Ruling ideas take on a universal character which transcends particular class rule, hence the individual is faced with the task of yielding to moral imperatives which reality makes impossible to follow. The pathologies of the individual mirror the pathologies of society, the resolution of the psychical dialectic is possible only by resolving the dialectics of society. Until then we can resist totality only by being consistently pathological. As Horkheimer and Adorno noted in Dialectics of enlightenment, the task of philosophy is to be naively consistent, believing the whole of ruling ideology: "She believes that division of labour serves humanity and that progress leads to freedom."