[everydayanalysis]

Drones, Panopticism, and Ossuaries

Whilst not so very long ago the notion of the drone evoked a sense of foreboding not unlike that which accompanies the digestion of a Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report, or a revisiting of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, recent events suggest that consideration of this technology has been defanged, recasting it with the banal aspect of cameras at gas stations or the perfunctory urine samples for a job interview. This turn strikes me though as an unfortunate one, reflecting a failure to appreciate the deeper, more sinister dimensions of the proliferation of these eyes in the sky... and this along two distinct, if related, directions. For one, certainly, it hardly requires too much thought to be distressed by the manner in which drones are largely in the service of organizations whose spectating of the general public is hardly a welcome one, organizations directed towards the ends of surveillance and manipulation whether through espionage or force. And indeed much ink has flowed in critical reflection on how the control of the drones largely devolves to institutions whose existence stands in, if not inimical, at least very uneasy relation to democratic ideality. From the outset, let me acknowledge this. However, there is another dimension to this matter, to which I would like to direct the predominant focus of these remarks. Namely, it is how drone technology epitomizes another more broadly implemented technology, one whose asymptotic ubiquity makes the comparative infrequency of its mention suggestive the panopticon. The panopticon... an ominous word corresponding to a portentous notion. Originally, an architectural schema of Jeremy Bentham for the ideal construction of a prison, the principle underlying the logic of its construction would render it a blueprint for more than a building; for the basis of a disciplinary society. Hence Michel Foucault remarks in his seminal consideration of Panopticism:

[T[he Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form: its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.

But what is that political technology? To recapitulate the outline of Bentham’s first casting of the project, we can echo Foucault’s own description well enough, namely, “...at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower…” Within the “periphic building” cells are so arranged as to enable them and their inhabitants to be viewed from the central tower, though in a manner whereby they are precluded from seeing back into that tower, or, if you like, from watching the watcher. “Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The basis of that automatic functioning then is surveillance, and, moreover, a particular sort of surveillance in which, again as Foucault puts it, the seeing/being seen dyad is severed. “...in the periphic ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”

The significance of this dissociation is thrown into sharper relief by a consideration of the relationship instantiated by the gaze itself as central to the panopticon. To proceed after a roughly Lacanian fashion, the gaze of another represents the compromise of one’s experience as a free, as an unfettered subjectivity. The encounter, though, of the perceived, fixed look of another constitutes an experience of, if not one’s outright objectification, at least that very possibility. That such an encounter can arise not only with regard to other “uncontroversially” sentient beings (e.g., people, cats, or octopi), but also ‘mere’ objects (e.g., paintings, televisions, gaping elevator shafts) proves to render the phenomenon’s significance all the more unsettling. Yet what marks these various occasions of the gaze is at least a potential to relate with the onlooker in a manner that can aspire to a reassertion of one’s subjectivity, one’s freedom. Among the salient features of the panopticon, though, is the annulment of this potential for relationality. By contrast, the watcher remains invisible and thus immune to the defiance of the watched, at least inasmuch as that defiance is manifested through their own gaze, their own fixed return of the gaze of the overseer. In virtue of this, the negation of the person as a subject within the panopticon is radicalized. And, maybe even more remarkably, this depersonalization extends not only to the watched, but even to the watchers. For, in contrast to how their position might be seen as an exhibition of sovereignty or power under a different more monarchical dispensation, within the disciplinary society enacted by panopticism, they are merely functionaries of a power which is decentered from locus in any singular individual.

With the drone, this depersonalization becomes even more pointed, with even the need of a human agent becoming dispensable. We thus arrive at an order which approaches a total inversion of the instrumental relation, a space where the human is subordinated to the technological. This, however, is perhaps the essence of the disciplinary society . To recur to Foucault:

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.

With panopticism, society accedes to an order, a space whose operation is predicated on its own members’ objectification. It represents an anatomy of power that ultimately ossifies the subject. The drone incarnates that panopticism with a novel mobility which permits its extension beyond the fixity implicit in architectural metaphor. Is then our acquiescence to the drone but an acquiescence to a ossuary society?

[everydayanalysis]

Getting Shirty: Cameron's Suit, Fresh Meat and Magical Realism

In a week where Corbyn was blasted by Cameron for the cheap appearance of his suit, it is interesting that a reference to the importance of one’s suit in a fictional Channel 4 TV programme has gone unnoticed.

On Monday 22nd February, the new series of Fresh Meat aired on Channel 4. In this episode, the show’s token uppercrust character, Jack, struggles with the plans that his brother, ‘Tomothy’ imposes on him for his future. Tomothy responds to this by advising on his brother’s appearance; presenting his younger brother with a suit. This is a suit not unlike the kind of Saville Row suits you can often see Cameron sporting in fact. (The suit is grey, and slightly shiny, in appearance; presumably a product which denotes some kind of status to others.)

He tells his brother to mind his “Ps and Qs”, put on the suit, and go for an interview at the family firm. This, he says, will guarantee him a successful future. In no time at all, he can expect to be working “5 til 9” and presumably living a blessed life among upper, privileged society.

On Wednesday 24th February, during PMQs (which is broadcast live) the Prime Minster also had some advice for Jeremy Corbyn on his suit. When responding to a question regarding what his mother would say about his efforts to scupper the NHS, he replied by saying that she would advise Corbyn to ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.’

It is also worth noting that, in another strange example of life imitating art, which Cameron is no stranger to (see Black Mirror), the character of ‘Tomothy’ also looks remarkably like a younger Cameron in his appearance. It is almost as if the writers based this young actor on the living caricature that is David Cameron. This throws up some peculiar questions; does our heavily mediated society have an overarching collective consciousness, which supersedes reality? Is this not magical realism becoming real magicalism?

David Strecher, in his article on the writer Haruki Murukami, defines magical realism as being ‘when a highly detailed, realistic setting [is] invaded by something that is too strange to believe.’ A fictional character in a television programme advising another on a suit. The prime minister, who bears a striking resemblance to the fictional character advises another on a suit in the House of Commons. A character in another television programme (the prime minister, in fact) is forced to have sex with a pig in order to, he believes, save his country from attack. Allegations arise, almost four years later, that the (real) prime minister, did in fact have sex with a pig. The creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, interestingly said that the story was complete fiction, and he had been suitably 'weirded out' by the whole debacle.

It also raises questions regarding materiality and reality. In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, the concept of the spectacle consumes objectivity, the so-called ‘real’. ‘Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order (…) every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real’. Cameron’s ‘dressing down’ of Corbyn on the basis of his inexpensive suit poses as ‘lived reality’; in the sober surroundings of the House of Commons nonetheless. But the spectacular order, the fictional TV programme, preceded this exchange by two days.  (The same with the pig story and Black Mirror, which was aired in 2011.) In a sense, then, the spectacle, the 'story', becomes a kind of ‘super reality’; it has overtaken ‘lived reality’. In the theatre of the political, mediated as it is by the media, the true really is, then, ‘the moment of the false’.

[everydayanalysis]

Freud and Football Manager

Football Manager is a big deal. It has been a contributing factor in dozens of divorce cases. It has been the subject of two films and has had a best-selling book written about the lives it has destroyed. At the Edinburgh Fringe festival, an entire standup routine is dedicated to the game and its ability to ruin lives. It has even had an influence on real football. In 2008, Everton signed a deal with the game manufacturer Sports Interactive which allowed them to use the game's database to scout players. In 2012, Azerbaijani student Vugar Huseynzade was promoted to the manager of FC Baku's reserve team, a club in the top division of Azerbaijani football, based on his success in Football Manager. This game has changed lives. Of this, there is no doubt.

In the aftermath of the release of Football Manager 2016 we are asking: what about how it affects the rest of us, the average Football Manager player (of which there are literally millions) who doesn't leave his wife or get headhunted by a lower league club?

When we start playing Football Manager there is something very social about it: young FM players share starts and discuss players at school, at work and online. The game sucks us in through competition with others, making the game quiet a sociable one. But darkness soon falls on this bright day, and players cease to play multiplayer or even mention their gaming to anyone, retreating to the isolation of their rooms and playing only against the computer for hours and hours on end. By 2014, with the advent of Football Manager Handheld, which does not have a multiplayer function, the user competes only with imaginary 'others.' Multiplayer FM has never taken off, and there are political reasons why.

One player uploads evidence of 7800 days of game time (that is real 24 hour days)

The replacement of the actual competitor with whom the player competes (say, a fellow FM gamer from high school) with an imaginary or virtual other (the computer AI) is something Sigmund Freud accidentally explains. In one of his most groundbreaking essays, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle,' Freud discusses the pleasure found in children's games and writes:

If the doctor looks down a child's throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.

The statement makes something clearer about the relationship between Football Manager and the workplace. The child's experience at the doctor's must be seen as analogous to the employee's feelings in the workplace, being passively 'operated on' whilst a figure of authority commands conformity. I interviewed many players of the game, and nearly all of them spoke of an 'alternative career,' or a career 'success' when explaining why they loved FM so much. Football Manager is for dissatisfied employees.

What we see in Football Manager is the replacement of the real playmate with a virtual one so that every gamer can take successful revenge on the computer. In the solitary world of Football Manager, no one has to lose. This active revenge is taken against the computer for a passive defeat suffered at work.

So, the game operates to prevent us facing our dissatisfaction and thinking about it (which could at least potentially lead to organized opposition and revolt). Yet, at the same time it operates on us in another way, instilling a sense of career 'success' which builds up our desire to strive towards this capitalist ideal. After we finish chastising ourselves for playing the game (and for taking time off from being productive in our jobs to do so), we return to work not only having managed to avoid confronting our dissatisfaction but with our sense of commitment to capitalist success very much renewed. 

[everydayanalysis]

HEGEL AND NYAN CAT

As an April Fool’s joke in 2013, after eight years in existence, YouTube posted a video announcing that they would finally be choosing the ultimate winner of YouTube and that the fun was over. If only this had been for real (but think what we would have missed out on!).

So here we’re asking, from a critical philosophy point of view, what should really win? What is the best YouTube contribution, from a radical perspective? What is the most anti-capitalist thing to erupt out of the capitalist enjoyment system that is YouTube? I have an answer here, and I think I’ve got it right. (Please comment any alternative suggestions for the most radical YouTube video below).

In my book “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism“, I tried as hard as possible to prove that within the most conformative and apparently ‘mindless’ kinds of enjoyment in our society we sometimes find radical moments that threaten to ruffle and unsettle our cultural order. This has always been one of Everyday Analysis’s main projects. Sometimes it is not arthouse cinema or highbrow political satire that makes the most disruptive and radical move, but video games, soap opera or reality TV. These things are of course not radical (on the whole), but within them and through our relationships to them, they can produce unsettling moments of enjoyment which threaten our identities and our capitalist order.

A prime example, and a truly unsettling, massively appealing and genuinely beautiful concept, is the YouTube idea of ‘For 10 Hours.’ For those of you unlucky enough to have missed this experience, I’ll outline it for you: a YouTuber takes a ridiculous two minute video designed to waste everyone’s time in a momentary blast of bizarre enjoyment and puts the clip on loop for 10 straight hours. They then upload the new 10 hour clip. Tens of millions tube in. Nyan Cat and ‘Nyan Cat For 10 Hours,’ are probably the prime examples:

These 10 hour videos are astronomically popular, but not as popular as the originals that they loop. I want to be clear here. Whilst a normal reading would assume that the longer version is simply more of the original, or an excess of it, too much of it, I think it is something completely different.

The enjoyment of the ‘For 10 Hours’ version is, in fact, the opposite to the enjoyment of the original. The enjoyment of the original video is completely conformist in terms of capitalism. It is a momentary waste of two minutes of our time on mindless rubbish, after which we return (feeling slightly guilty) to our important jobs, chastising ourselves for wasting time and taking with us a renewed energy to serve the capitalist order. In other words, these enjoyments fit nicely into the working day. On the contrary, ‘Nyan Cat (10 Hours)’ is a very different gesture: it is a complete rejection of the structures of organized and productive time, a complete overthrow of capitalist rules.

The opposite of ‘Heman HeyHeyHey for 10 Hours‘ is what business language calls ‘Time Management.’ ‘Heman HeyHeyHey for 10 Minutes’ is (by the standards of these videos) a complete failure. Like most of us, I had no desire to click its link. I’ve seen the three minute original, what would 10 minutes offer me? Nothing much. YouTube agrees:

On the contrary, ‘Heman HeyHeyHey for 10 Hours’ is appealing from the second our eye sees the link. We have a powerful impulse to click it. And click it we should. The feeling of liberation that accompanies our experience, the unsettling enjoyment that stops us from closing the link, (I watched 1 hour 20) is found in a temporary rejection of the laws of capitalist time that usually constrain us.

Nyan Cat for 10 Hours then, is not an extreme version of the mindless and conformist entertainment found in Nyan Cat. It is not, of course, for those of us who just can’t get enough of Nyan Cat. Instead, it is for those with an unconscious drive to reject that very kind of enjoyment, a Hegelian negation of a negation which rejects how we are meant to enjoy things in capitalism.

Everyday Analysis is a new feature at Critical-Theory. For more follow Critical-Theory on Facebook.

[everydayanalysis]

Space Cowboy Capitalism: The Martian

“Satellite's gone, way up to Mars,

Soon it will be filled with parking cars”  Lou Reed, Satellite of Love

 In his lecture at the end of The Martian, Mark Watney tells a theatre full of aspiring, dreamy-eyed astronaut candidates, and the audience:

“At some point, everything is going to go south on you... and you’re going to say: ‘this is how I end.’ Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. ... You do the math. You solve one problem...Then you solve the next one. ... And if you solve enough problems you get to come home.”  

In other words: ‘science will save you’. Or, to follow the film’s overeager attempts to make ‘us’ identify with the Americans on the mission: ‘science will save us’.

But will it? I’d say that’s a rather questionable statement, and The Martian is nothing if not a piece of highly effective propaganda that wants to motivate us to put our fate and money into the hands of science, scientists and the ideology of technological progress and growth that they represent. But, one may ask, why are ‘we’ on Mars in the first place?  

There seem to be basically two plausible reasons: one that points back to the actual moon landing in 1969, one that points forward to visions of the future as depicted in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, and none of them very good. The motivation behind the 1969 mission to the moon was propagandistic: it was a strategic move in the cold war of symbols and ideas, showing the commies who really had the longest trajectory. This project was clothed in a language of heroic pioneering, reverberating with the good old Western/American tradition of discovering and exploring, while conveniently remaining silent about the subsequent conquering and massacring. Neil Armstrong pointedly declared – definitely pre-scripted – “That’s a small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind”, thereby making all humanity feel American. He also told what now looks like a blatant untruth. Looking at the course of history since then, we can most definitely say that no giant leap of any kind has occurred – we’re still just about muddling through, as before.

So, is the mission depicted in The Martian merely another chapter in the long list of attempts on the part of America to overwhelm the rest of the world with sheer awesomeness? It seems to me that the actual reason for Watney’s mission to Mars is closer in spirit to Interstellar than to Apollo 13 (though The Martian was obviously made by massive fans of the latter film). In Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic, life on earth is dying, and mankind has to flee to space to “find a new home”. Even though Mars isn't far enough for Nolan, who wants us to migrate into different galaxies entirely, the idea that humanity has to move somewhere else once we’re through with Earth is driving many of the real-life fans of a human mission to Mars.     

In 1979, the philosopher Hans Jonas proposed a new formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative to match the reality of an earth whose natural environment was threatened by human destruction: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life”. But you don’t have to know this pretty spot-on maxim in order to see the enormous, defeatist abdication of responsibility at work in scientific escapism. We have a perfectly good planet at home, but instead of keeping it in habitable condition we waste our time and resources looking for another one. While movies like Interstellar and The Martian purport to exult in the heights that humanity or science can reach, they actually reduce us to a bunch of mean little parasites. The copious amounts of trash that the very first humans on Mars leave in their wake in The Martian do not seem to bode well for the red planet’s future.

The siren call of science and technology suggests that humans can, or even should, exist independently of nature. In the most extreme example of this situation I have witnessed on Earth, in modern-day middle- and upper-class Hong Kong, people spend most of their lives in an artificial, air-condition-generated climate, breathe air ‘purified’ of all bacteria, drink distilled water, move around through subterranean tunnels, disinfect absolutely everything, eat food imported from thousands of miles away and have their children raised by nannies, also imported from elsewhere.

Viewed through the lens of this ideology, life on Mars is well-nigh ideal, although I doubt that Jonas would let it qualify as ‘genuine human life’. It is possible only because it is not really life on Mars: it is life in an artificial, sterile environment created by and utterly dependent on technology. Science is therefore implicitly celebrated as a tool which enables humanity to emancipate itself from nature, and nature is conveniently reduced to an inessential commodity, which like all other goods can itself be fed into the economic machinery, discarded at will, or filled with garbage. From a capitalist standpoint, a Mars-like lifestyle also is highly desirable for a different reason: on Mars, nothing is free. Everything has to be imported or technologically produced, and therefore bought and sold: from the very start, everything is part of the economic process. Ironically, there is no way out of capitalism on the red planet.

The Martian thus inadvertently exemplifies that far from saving us, science and the technology-dependent, trash-producing existence it enables and pushes us to lead could just as well be said to chain us ever more firmly to our own planet’s self-destructive economic system. It also shows that believing that science is ‘the answer’ is actually part of the problem. Notably, the film, and Watney, fail to learn anything from the astronaut’s near-death experience: it ends with him training up new astronauts for future space missions. Obviously, the disaster has not humbled Watney, who in spite of his own knowledge to the contrary, still believes that science will save us all.

[everydayanalysis]

How Soon is Now? Interpellation and Pop Misery

At the risk of over-simplification, the French Marxist Louis Althusser’s development of his theory of ‘interpellation’ is incredibly useful for understanding the extent to which our subjectivity—or the discourses through which we can articulate what it means to be a ‘self’—is shaped by all manner of ‘simple’ and ‘everyday’ things, such as pop music.

Perhaps one of the most evocative illustrations of pop music’s connection to the concept of interpellation can be found in the opening moments of the film High Fidelity—based on the Nick Hornby novel by the same name—where the protagonist, played by John Cusack, poses the question:

“Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”   

The insight this question provides regarding the concept of interpellation is to be found in the quote’s complication of conventional notions of rational agency. Rob, Cusack’s character, isn’t sure if he listens to songs about heartbreak and loss because he is miserable in the aftermath of a breakup, or whether he is miserable in the aftermath of a breakup because of the sheer familiarity he has with what we could call the subject of heartbreak. In other words, Rob’s question poses the possibility that he might feel very differently about what a breakup means if popular songs (and other popular media like cinema or television) depicted breakups other than as soul-destroying episodes that ruin lives. The way this illustrates Althusser’s theory of interpellation is that it suggests that our sense of self, rather than being something ‘natural’ that simply springs forth from us, is in fact ideological—that is to say, shaped by our culture and in such a way that this shaping is forgotten or disavowed. This is to say, when I respond to a breakup in precisely the way that my culture affords, it is more common to assert that “this is simply natural” than to pose questions about whether such a response seems normal only because of its ubiquity—i.e., only because I have encountered it time and time again in popular texts.

The point to make, however, is not that we are beholden to the ideological subjective positions that popular media offer us, and that we must there therefore look for ‘less ideological’ forms of art to enjoy. Instead, the question becomes one of how we are to read popular texts—like songs about heartbreak, for example—in such a way so to locate different subjective positions than those that have become seemingly hegemonic. For example, if we take a popular song about heartbreak and loneliness like The Smiths ‘How Soon is Now?’, it looks, on face value, to present this exact interpellative function that we have been describing. The song presents us with what appears to be a fly-on-the-wall view of a lonely young man who is told about a nightclub by his friend, the visitation of which, his friend suggests, will allow him to finally meet someone. The lonely young man feels accused by his friend of going about romance in “the wrong way”, and is offended by this and reminds his friend that he, the lonely young man, is “human and needs to be loved, just like everybody else does”. Later in the song it is revealed that the lonely young protagonist does go to this nightclub only to stand on his own, leave on his own, go home and “cry and want to die”. Such sentiments could strike the listener as painfully lugubrious and almost bathetic in its reproduction of clichéd sentiments about heartbreak. Moreover, one could be forgiven for viewing this text as functioning in the ideological manner outlined above, insofar as it makes the inability to find a partner appear naturally and unproblematically devastating, as if one’s capacity to find love is ‘naturally’ and ‘universally’ more significant than other forms of praxis such as political action or aesthetic accomplishment, for example.

However, another way of reading this text does present itself, and, the only thing the reader need do to open themselves to such a reading is to put aside the assumption that the text is addressing some external story or state of affairs, so as to attend to the possibility that the text is actually addressing the listener. When Morrissey sings “you shut your mouth/how can you say/I go about things the wrong way?/I am human and I need to be loved/just like everybody else does” it is very easy to assume that Morrissey is addressing some friend or acquaintance who has made the mistake of attempting to offer advice on the ‘right way’ to go about romance. In this reading, the song seems to be simply about romance, about the struggle to find love, and one that all the while reaffirms the centrality of romantic love to our contemporary subjectivity. However, the song also seems to afford a more existential interpretation. For example, what if we took the song to be addressing the listener and not a ‘character’—the lonely young man or their friend—that the listener is meant to identify with? What such a move potentially reveals is a song that raises questions about what we could call the ontological status of isolation or alienation—i.e., raises questions about what these phenomena actually mean. Can you be alone, alone at a club, walking home alone, going home alone and wanting to cry and die because of feelings of isolation and alienation, even if you are surrounded by people or in a committed relationship? Indeed, while we mostly receive pop music as affirming the simplistic binary: in love = good; out of love = bad, is it not possible that one could more or less coincide with the conventional subject of romance—being with someone, having a stable relationship or regular sex, etc.—and still have done nothing to engage the question of a more fundamental sense of aloneness and alienation that permeates our sense of ourselves? Approached in this way, Morrissey’s line “you shut your mouth/how can you say/I go about things the wrong way?/I am human and I need to be loved/just like everybody else does” might be not so much a message for the protagonist’s ‘friend’—the character we presume to reside ‘in’ the song—but instead is a form of interpellation, a hailing or addressing that offers us the position of considering the ontological status of love and aloneness aside from the conventions of our present culture. Indeed, if we sneer at Morrissey’s lugubriousness or sentimentality, or if we praise him for expressing what we ‘naturally feel’ in moments of heartbreak, it is because we feel we ‘know’ what a sophisticated or complex depiction of heartbreak looks like, and have, therefore, disavowed the constructed character of such a ‘natural’ feeling. Indeed, while we might agree with Morrissey that needing love is fundamental to human existence, what exactly love means or what forms it could take can only be posed as serious questions if we distance ourselves—even if only temporarily—from the conventional ways of posing such questions—or, as Morrissey might say, we can pose such questions anew only if we first learn to “shut our mouths.”      

[everydayanalysis]

The Tunnock’s Trauma: Biscuits and Nationalism

Following a new advertising campaign in which tea cake giants Tunnock's referred to their iconic Scottish snack as the 'Great British Tea Cake' and removed the Scottish Lion from its packaging, nationalists in Scotland have called for a boycott of the company. Some pretty severe anti-Tunnock's sentiment from patriotic Scots can easily be discovered by a quick Google.

This strange eruption of ill-feeling towards the traditional confectioners threatens to make us aware of a very peculiar relationship: the connection between nationalists and biscuits. It raises a slightly odd question: can a biscuit company be wrong to abandon its use of national identity in advertising campaigns, letting down its Scottish roots? Perhaps more interestingly, it raises a question that is even odder still: could the biscuit company have been wrong to employ imagery that would encourage nationalism in the first place?

Many nations have national biscuits: Scottish shortbread, Italian biscotti, German Spritzgebäck (the list is endless). Generally speaking, they are a fairly harmless example of national pride in traditions of baking and have little to do with negative nationalist feeling (though a German EDA contributor tells me that Germans are very reluctant to use their flag in advertising). Despite this, the latest Tunnock's saga is not the first time biscuits have caused nationalists a bit of serious trouble. In the early 1990s, in the midst of the conflicts that led to the break- up of Yugoslavia, Serbians and Croatians squabbled about whether Gingerbread Hearts were part of Serbian or Croatian culture. As each side desperately fought to avoid losing their prized confectionery to their greatest enemies, many reports surfaced of arguments about Gingerbread Hearts resulting in full scale fights and significant nationalist violence.

There are various opinions as to the most important things in determining national identity. In Imagined Communities, one of the most influential books ever written on nationalism, Benedict Anderson argued that newspapers and the media are the most important factors in creating and constructing our sense of national identity. Famous historian Eric Hobsbawn took a different view: he felt that the elite classes were the force most in charge of constructing national identity. Both of these are compelling claims in the case of us British: the royal family, as well as other aristocratic and elite traditions, are obviously powerful signifiers of our national identities, supporting Hobsbawm's view. At the same time, the media's reportage, celebration and portrayal of aristocrats (and of other things) clearly play an equally powerful major role in forging our sense of our Britishness, Englishness, Scottishness, etc. Both the elite and the media construct national identity: but so does the biscuit.

Gingerbread Hearts: the trigger of nationalist violence in the 1990s These are not just the views of two academics analyzing nationalism: they are the two main ways in which we talk about nationalism generally at the present moment. We often stress that the elite is to blame for nationalist sentiment. In the ongoing refugee crisis for example, those in power have often been the least open and most preservative of their own national boundaries and their own national identities, even if this comes at the cost of disaster for others. Likewise, we notice how the media is often to blame for whipping up further nationalist feeling. The elite and the media remain two influential forces in forging nationalist sentiment.

As the Tunnock's saga unfolds it might be worth asking: what about biscuits? Could they rival the elite classes or the media as the force most in charge of how we conceive of our national selves? Do we need to get into discussion about the media's portrayal of biscuits, or whether the biscuits are a class signifier of any kind? Probably not.

What we can at least see though, is the relevance of the everyday in forming and constructing national identity. Whilst we are familiar with the elite and the mainstream media constructing national identity and encouraging nationalist sentiment, we are less attentive to everyday signs of national identity and the impacts of them on us. The humorous saga of the Tunnock's Tea Cake rubbing some Scottish nationalists up the wrong way forces us into this very serious realization. That is it not just the elites and the media that are responsible for nationalism but the everyday; the times we inadvertently or unconsciously see a British flag, a Welsh dragon or a Scottish lion rampant emblazoned innocently on a packet of crisps, or Irish shamrock on the side of a packet of sausages or a tub of butter.

To return to the two questions raised by the Tunnock's business. First, can the company be blamed for either leaving behind its Scottishness? And second, should we consider whether the confectioner is guilty of contributing to the buildup of nationalism in the first place?

The answer is, I think quite obviously, a resounding no. Of course, neither act committed by Tunnock's (using Scottish patriotism to sell biscuits or ceasing to do so) is particularly reprehensible. We probably will not get away with making the (admittedly quite reasonable) claim that all advertising should be free of patriotic pride in their product in case a few people get too far into it and become nationalists. But what we must do is be attentive to the power of the everyday in forging national identity: if a Tunnock's advert can ruffle nationalists up the wrong way then a great deal more seemingly innocent things are responsible for our conceptions of our national selves as well.

Far from being two unrelated news stories, the Tunnock's saga is the other side of the coin to the migrant crisis. At a time when our nations have shown themselves to be less welcoming and more insular than we might have hoped, convinced that we share an identity with each other and willing to demonize and reject those of other nations, we need also to ask what role apparently innocent symbolism, from Tea Cakes to the Bake Off, plays in the construction of this unwelcoming attitude.

[everydayanalysis]

The Politics of Christmas Trees in China and Germany

We have a Christmas tree. This might not sound special, but in Shenzhen, a city of 15 million, we might even be the only ones who do.

Okay. It’s not really a tree.It’s two steel rods fitted together, covered by branches and needles of green plastic. But it gets the job done.

Our plastic companion is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, he’s a hybrid, a hyper-Christmas-tree – he has both fir and pine tree branches, as if his creators tried to squeeze the essence of all possible Christmas conifers into his tiny 1.50 meter frame. Second, he is covered in everything you could possibly think of as Christmasy – bells, baubles, pinecones (the only thing organic about the whole contraption), snowflakes, a star of Bethlehem, even a snowman. And finally, he doesn’t just glow, but glints, radiates (as if emanating Chistmas), twinkling in a whole range of colours, evoking inappropriate associations ranging from Red Alert over E.T. to Star Wars in its attempt to be Christmas itself.

What this all points to is that Christmas and its symbols function as a fetishized ‘essence’(think of phrases such as ‘the Christmas spirit’ for example). This is not a particularly controversial thing to say: it is not the tree that we love but what it signifies: an elusive, imprecise and ultimately undefinable set of family and social (originally religious) values, feelings, atmospheres and impressions. What is more important is the class politics of this Christmas ‘spirit’ contained within the tree.

In terms of what we might call German Christmas tree prestige (or GCTP), I have to admit that this year we’ve hit rock bottom. We Germans like it subdued and low-key. Hence, a prestige-pregnant (to borrow a German expression) Christmas tree should be:

1. Real. This is the most important point. And I mean “real” as in “alive and kicking until I came by the other day and chopped it down with a logging axe”

2. Modestly decorated. We’re talking five to eight baubles plus eight to ten real candles plus a select few angels and other figurines, made of cloth or straw. Okay, and a star on top is also fine. But no things plastic, God forbid!

3. Tall. If it doesn’t leave a stain on the ceiling, there’s definitely something wrong with it.

We don’t usually say it out loud, but in Germany there exists a hushed-up hierarchy only brought into visibility at Christmas but clearly hidden under the surface of society all year round, a complex class system into the slots of which all members of society can be conveniently fitted: Let’s call it the GCTP pecking order.

On top, we find the true traditionalist Christmas aficionado’s dream, a proud, majestic Caucasian fir, hand-logged, sparsely decorated with real candles and family heirlooms going back five generations. From their noble perch, these kings of Christmas look down upon the next level, who do have a real tree of sorts, possibly a dwarf pine or lowly spruce. They did not chop it down themselves, though, but bought it in a freezing lot off someone more manly than themselves. Also, they do not have the means or aesthetic sensibility to go for real candles – fairy lights will have to do for them. They know it’s not cool, but what can they do? Despise those even lowlier than themselves, that’s what! At the very bottom of the pile writhe the dregs of Christmas – the PVC tree, smothered by a mountain of cheap plastic trinkets, choked by tinsel, strangulated by Christmas lights glowing in various garish colours. In other words: Our tree.

Here we see that the richer you are, the closer you get to the apparently ‘authentic’ experience of Christmas, with its natural furs and traditional roots. At the bottom end of the financial ladder is a copy of a tree with no roots at all, which those with a ‘real’ tree see as a false imitation of what they have. At Christmas, ostensibly a time of equality, the deep prejudice of our social world makes is presence felt in the essence of our trees.

Being the only ones with a tree in Shenzhen we were aware of what we don’t have to deal with in China, highlighting the problematic politics of the Christmas Tree in Europe.

[everydayanalysis]

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Go ‘Checkout Provo’

Steve Hanson joins the Everyday Analysis Collective

A friend and I met recently and started to discuss how, completely independent of each other, we had been engaging in tiny acts of ‘checkout escalation’ over the last few months.

It started by accident. I dropped a bag of rice and it flopped across the barrier, half on my side and half off, creating a real sense of anxiety from over the garden fence.

That moment, when the customer behind expects that you will reach over and place a line between their shopping and your own, is a highly delicate one. I didn’t do it on purpose, but once it happened, I left it, curious to see what it might do. I then got into the habit of refusing to put the barrier down on the conveyor belt, on the way out. 

Now I stare vacantly at the ceiling and refuse to move forward. The person behind coughs, increasingly desperately. In Britain, very few people ‘make a fuss’. They are literally ‘defenceless’. That barrier, in psychological terms, is the wall of their home. They don’t know that what they are seeing is provocation, even if they suspect. It enrages them, but they don’t know why. Often they think it’s simple absent-mindedness, but the ‘tuts’ and sighs are great. I have come to think of these as applause.

A week later, I put a bottle of wine onto the conveyor belt first, and it rolled right into the shopping in front, as a default barrier, and I just left it. The customer in front stared at it, transfixed in helpless horror, unable to touch it or speak. 

The following week, my tactic of getting a new barrier from an adjacent, closed till lane emerged, causing the checkout assistant a similar sense of anxiety that some sort of line had been overstepped. Again, they couldn’t react or fully understand what was needling them. I was addicted.

It turned out that my friend and I had been doing all of this simultaneously, lingering on the spot, not moving, as our own shopping jerked ahead of us. Staring blankly at the ceiling, denying the customer behind access to the barrier, as they awkwardly tried to reach around, uncomfortably entering your personal space, coughing, at which point… we carry on standing there… for as long as we can…

We began to meet more regularly, to enthusiastically discuss our ‘barrier incidents’, provo versions of Georges Perec’s ‘infra-ordinary’, micro rituals that are highly complex, but enacted semi-consciously. We both recounted the stress radiating as a result of our actions, and agreed that this pointed to the highly ‘individualizing’ social function of the act of purchase. But of course, the idea that buying a specific selection of objects in Tesco makes you unique is sheer madness. And these fantasy ‘individualizing’ processes were being ever so slightly interrupted by our refusal to carry out the necessary social ritual, right down to the very last detail. We may just be mildly irritating human beings, but we really do believe in our own theories, and now, our practice.

  My friend is even deeper in. Up to his neck, in fact. He moves things from one place to another in supermarkets. He went through a phase of buying stuff in Sainsbury to leave on Tesco shelves. He fantasises, utterly enraptured, about doing a whole shop in Lidl, before trying to pay for it again in Booths.

I did Waitrose. I threw their green tokens into the rubbish bin on the way out, when it was really busy, on a Sunday afternoon. That really outrages the customers who see it. It generates tutting like the sound of pistols being cocked. Because the thing they all do as a guilt alibi – via the green Waitrose communion wafer of privilege – that perverse anthropological confession booth, is being treated like the garbage it really is, right in front of their eyes. And the great thing about it is that they can’t touch you for any of it. Right in the dead eye of soulless tedium and consumer inevitablility, there lies hope for transformation.

We’re now contemplating having checkout barriers made with ‘you don’t own it yet’ printed along their lengths, and are considering the radical potential of the ‘oh, hang on, I just need to go back and grab’ moment. This kind of faffing already interrupts a process of auto-Fordism, and could be devastating, provided the queue behind consists entirely of checkout-provo agents…

I am glad that there is some comedy here. Because our wanderings in 24-hour Asda at night have shown us capital’s obsession with eradicating as much labour as possible, and stretching what remains. These places, massive concerns, disinfected of any staff except G4S hirelings, operated almost entirely by an obedient, often poor paying customer base, beeping exotic goods into identikit bags, present perfect alien comedies for transmission back to other, perhaps more civilised planets.

[everydayanalysis]

Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism

This video explores some of the book ‘Enjoying It,’ which is available now. Written by one of Everyday Analysis’s editors - please check it out and get the book.

[everydayanalysis]

THE HUNGER GAMES: Is it Radical?

Today Everyday Analysis launches a mini-series of video analyses of films, music and advertizing, in the spirit of Roland Barthes and Slavoj Zizek. 

Hope you like it!

[everydayanalysis]

The Kanye West Wing and the Rise of the Entertainment State

Stephen Lee Naish

At the VMA awards in August 2015, Kanye West took to the stage to accept his Video Vanguard Award from Taylor Swift. He concluded his acceptance speech by announcing that he would be running for President of the United States. The audience, consisting of multi-millionaires, bestselling musicians and mega celebrities, all cheered and fist pumped in approval. Those who saw the event on television, and were all too used to West's proclamations and stage-hogging antics, assumed it was a lark. The following month, West's statement drew remarks from President Barack Obama.  Obama stated that: ``You got to deal with strange characters who behave as if they are on a reality TV show,” a reference to West`s wife, reality television star, and possible future First Lady, Kim Kardashian. He then continued: “Do you really think this country is going to elect a black guy from the southside of Chicago with a funny name to be president of the US?” Of course stranger things have happened, are happening, and are yet to occur in America.                                                       

To be clear, I wouldn't dismiss West as a presidential contender. In another life he would make an outstanding public servant. In some respects West's upbringing and background would even prepare him for public office. From a young age he showed a proficiency for art and eventually became involved in Chicago`s vibrant hip-hop scene, first as a writer and producer, then morphing into a world class performer. West carries more weight as a Man of the People figure than even Obama can muster. Certainly he is more connected to the plights, triumphs and failings of modern Americans than say current Republican candidate, Donald Trump. In 2005, West appeared in a live telethon in support of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, he proclaimed to the audience that "George Bush Does not care about black people." which summed up the feelings of frustration against the Bush administration. As the situation played out in New Orleans, one could hardly disagree with West's comments. West has also shown divergence from popular discourse. Before his presidential announcement he even suggested some pretty radical amendments to popular culture:

I believe in myself, we the Millennials bro. This is a new mentality. We not gonna control our kids with brands. We’re not going to teach low self esteem and hate to our kids. We’re going to teach our kids that they can be someone. We’re going to teach our kids that they can stand up for themselves. We’re going to teach our kids to believe in themselves. It’s about ideas, new ideas, people with ideas, people who believe in truth.

At worst, West`s ambitions point towards something more sinister: the belief that politicians should be suave, savvy, well chiselled iconoclasts with easy sound bites and a digestible platform, as opposed to being hard working lawmakers who understand the hardships people face. We are venturing further towards an age of extreme spectacle, where reality and fantasy converge. The ascent of Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 Republican Party nomination has shown that Americans may be even be prepared for such a spectacle to occur. Trump’s approach has been to tap into the extreme prejudices against immigration that lie within the dark heart of the American psyche, and to blame immigration on the financial, and cultural wasteland that is apparently rampant. Trump's answers are extreme: build real walls to keep immigrants out, build virtual walls to keep prejudice locked in. Trump`s merciless nature and desire for conflict is extremely dangerous in a world faced with tremendous unrest. Nonetheless, at the time of writing Trump has excelled in the opinion polls.

As detestable as it sounds, Donald Trump and Kanye West are reading from the same script. Like Trump, West's positions on matters such as medical care, U.S foreign policy, finance, economics, care for the elderly and poor, America’s space program and education reform have not been disclosed. If West`s campaign is real he will have to work with a huge group of managers, organizers and volunteers, and here lies the problem. There is a false presumption in America that the presidency is the ultimate accumulation of power and status, the totality of the American Dream. But the presidency is far more than just one individual. There is a cabinet office, a senate, the people to contend with. Based on his evoking of Christ-like imagery (the song 'I am a God' from an album called Yeesus) the vision West has for his presidency will be to embody every aspect of America. With lack of experience in representing real Americans this embodiment of every American reality is ultimately an empty vessel, and makes any post-Kanye presidency worthless, with any popularity seeker vying for office (Lindsey Lohan stated she`ll run in 2010) and willing to flip the switch from self-involved to righteous.

In his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges applies commentary to the mass disillusion that America seems to be partaking in. Hedges comments that "The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip, and trivia." The pseudo-events and trivialities have now entered into the political playing field. Under this cardboard template of democracy the atrocities of rampant capitalism, the crippling of the working classes, the decimation of the environment, the failings of the education system can continue unabated, and Kanye West would be powerless to stop it, even if he wanted too. After all, his presidency is just another tick-off in his path for popularity, as he said at the VMA's "I just want people to like me!” A West Presidency is trading record sales and ticket stubs for votes. No longer will America exist in the same reality as the rest of the world. America will instead operate in a permanent state of entertainment. No lefty, moderate, or right-winger with hard earned credentials will dare to follow the circus. 

[everydayanalysis]

The Politics of not Leaving Martin Amis Alone

This article neither deeply respects nor violently chastises Martin Amis. As a result, it is going to look pretty unusual on the internet today. Very recently Martin Amis criticized Jeremy Corbyn and he is neither the first not the latest (since this was a whole day ago) to do so. Generally speaking, it’s good to see the left coming out to defend Corbyn against right wing attempts to discredit him in any way it can, and especially against attempts to wheel out figures that people might identity with (i.e. Blair or Amis) who are willing to slag him off. That said, it is worth warning against a culture, which seems to be developing on social media at the moment, of uncritically saying that everyone who criticizes Corbyn is a dick. Anyhow, the Amis case is a more unusual one which needs attention.

Hatred for Amis on the part of the left is not new and it long predates Corbyn. In fact, Amis’s utterly crap new comments (which we should have all ignored) have simply provided another opportunity for the left to vent these old and established feelings. The argument goes (and probably quite rightly, if a bit boringly) that Amis embodies something that is wrong with neo-liberalism and that we should be criticizing and ultimately abolishing this. On the other hand Corbyn stands for the first possibility of an alternative to this neo-liberalism that we have seen in quite a while. Therefore, Amis vs Corbyn in some ways makes sense, and we could be tempted to join the debate.

Yet, every critique of Amis (of which there are a great many) insists that he is a dried up and washed out old writer who hasn’t written anything worth paying attention to since at least the 80s (maybe even since Money in 1984). Amis is the Mick Jagger of literature who is not at all relevant today. This points to a pretty interesting problem: how can Amis be, on the one hand, an outdated writer with nothing to offer the modern world and, on the other, the perfect embodiment of modern neo-liberalism that we ought to attack? It has to be one or the other, or we’ll end up attacking a past we don’t need to engage with any more and treating something which is already dead as if its the true enemy of the present. This is, essentially, what has happened this week.

We have long been living in what Walter Benjamin called ‘a culture of distraction.’ In my book, I made some really heartfelt attempts to show how important mobile phone games are (inside andnearby to the workplace, eg. on the train home from work) in keeping us distracted and preventing us from developing organized opposition to our working conditions. But that idea, in a book that has not yet completed the publication process, is already too old.

We are now living in something more like a ‘politics of distraction’, which is crucially different. Whilst a ‘culture of distraction’ implies that culture distracts from politics (hype about the Superbowl distracted from Bush’s foreign policy for example), by a politics of distraction I mean that we are now distracted from politics by politics. It is often when we feel we are ‘debating the issue’ that we are least political, least critical and most inside ideology.

To get back to Corbyn vs Amis. If we enter this debate, we already take a side: the side of a politics of distraction. It is too late, we are inside it now and so we must care about it (that is how this politics works). The left is increasingly becoming aware that we should pay attention to the right-wing policies that are getting through parliament on the very day that we are in a fury about Cameron fucking a pig, but there is even more here. A politics of distraction ensures that we waste our time becoming angry about things that will be gone tomorrow. Will we be talking about Amis in 2 weeks, 2 days, by the time this article is published online? It is safe to say that we will not. A politics of distraction works to focus us on a moment, on a temporary concern that gives us something to talk about over breakfast but will ensure that we do not think political in a long term way. Frenzied discussions of Donald Trump play exactly this role in the American presidential candidacy, so that the Clinton-Bush legacy can continue unchallenged in a years time.

So why can we not leave these issues aside? Why can’t we realize that Martin Amis is an old sod whose comments aren’t worth even pricking our ears up over, let alone treating them (very bizarrely) as a genuine threat to Jeremy Corybn? (Corbyn really and truly does not need the help of left wing social media to overcome the critique of Martin Amis). Why do we have to weigh in on every piece of crap The Guardian publishes. Why cant we leave Martin Amis alone!??

Perhaps it is because the culture of distraction has trained us to be ready for this politics of distraction. Whilst we might praise the recent politicization of social media, we must be weary of the social media-ization of politics. This is what we must now fight against, a politics which denies us the ability to think carefully about what we care about and what we should discuss and instead forces us to respond furiously and quickly to a debate we see ‘raging’ on social media. Herein we might begin to resist.

In the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, I am not sure this article is not guilty of the very thing it wants to criticize.

[everydayanalysis]

The Campaign for Nuclear War and the Unknown Known

As Slavoj Žižek explains: ‘in March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’ – a man whose finger was never too far from the button – ‘engaged in a little amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”’ Žižek then fills in the remaining gap: ‘what he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge that doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.’

The criticism that Jeremy Corbyn has met with for the fact that he would not be prepared to launch a nuclear bomb or two should things get a bit hairy – tantamount in itself to something of a campaign for nuclear war, or at least for Cold War II – might wish to categorise itself, should it have to, under the ‘known unknown’ – or even ‘unknown unknown’ – tag. That is, the arguments might run along the lines of: ‘we know there are a lot of baddies in the world, but we don’t know what they’re capable of’ – in the first instance – or even: ‘we’ll never know what might be round the corner, so it’s best to arm ourselves to the teeth’ – in the second – in support of a ‘nuclear deterrent’ (any launch of which would expose the oxymoron that the concept is supposedly based on). However, these logics seem to be operating in the mode of disavowal, specifically in relation to the latter clause in each (and the former too, in the second): the ‘unknown’. That is, what is truly radical – perhaps even terrifying – about the unknown is its contentlessness. The ‘known unknown’ argument of ‘there are things we know we don’t know, which we have to protect ourselves against with a nuclear deterrent’ elides this precise emptiness. The unknown is not actually unknown here, but knowledge of it is assumed, a form of knowledge generally agreed upon as rather reckless. It is the same in the case of the unknown unknown, except doubled (the liminal point of the unknown cannot in fact be accessed, as Kant might have argued). In both, the radical aspect of the contentlessness of the unknown is disavowed: ‘I know very well that I don’t know, but nevertheless I assume I do know’. These, then, should rather be categorised under the ‘unknown known’. The unknown known, that is, of an assumptive unconscious.

What this continual assumption will lead to – or we could even say, what it has been creative of, in the stagnation and stalemate of the Cold War and what’s followed – is the type of paranoiac state recounted in The WikiLeaks Files, that ‘Daniel Ellsberg—later famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers—[and who] had a top-secret security clearance’ warned Henry Kissinger of:

 ‘[I]t will… become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular area that may be greater than yours.’

 Firstly, perhaps we should recognise that Corbyn is in effect someone without these ‘clearances’ – currently – that we (and those that do have them) might in fact be able to learn something from, should we (and they) not let the content of the clearances get in the way. But secondly, what we see here is that that content of the clearance is in fact contentlessness itself; what is in exchange in the paranoid economy laid out above is not the knowledge that that person with access to it has, but rather the non-knowledge that those without access to it represent. It is on this contentlessness that the former speculates: to every response, he must ask: ‘but would that response be the same if they knew what I know?’ A question which – whether the answer is, ‘yes, the response would be the same’, or no – could only really lead to dictatorially tying itself up in solipsistic knots.

The unconscious of the assumptive ‘unknown known’ would thus lead to action being taken based upon inklings and hunches, such as was the case in the war with Iraq – which was started through suspicion that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction – Bush and Blair’s disavowal of which operated in the mode of: ‘I know very well that all the reconnaissance suggests he hasn’t, but all the same…’

So much of today’s international situation is a result of such an assumption; how much of tomorrow’s do we want to be? Those calling on Corbyn to (be prepared to) push the button should perhaps put themselves forward for election to the task of doing so, for if they truly wish to raise the unknown known of such an action to the known known of nuclear devastation – that is, to ‘become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ – in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s words, taken from the Bhagavad Gita – to fight World War III with the weapons that would insist that World War IV is fought with sticks and stones, as Albert Einstein put it – then this would represent the ethics of, to coin a phrase, an unconscience from which what we could learn not only is already known to us, but should its result come about would force (once again, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki) the utter radicality of the contentlessness of the unknown unknown into reality itself.

[everydayanalysis]

Oh, the Precarity! A Worker’s-Eye View

You finally find a job through an employment agency who seem halfway worthwhile, not like the others who you’re convinced advertise fake jobs in their windows to get the punter through the door, and then say: ‘sorry, that opportunity’s just gone’ or is ‘fully subscribed for interviews now’, and offer you something far inferior, if anything at all (but they’ve got you and will keep you on their books). The work comes in after the best part of a year unemployed, in which you attended meetings at a Job Centre week in week out for a month, only for them to then send a letter declining your Job Seeker’s Allowance due to there having been insufficient National Insurance contributions made on your part in the tax year that they assessed, despite the fact that that year you were a student, and struggling to find regular employment then too, and as such could not claim JSA – which would have assisted with the contributions – due to be being a student. You mightn’t have been in the desperatest of desperate need – but others are – but the catch 22 rather goes to highlight that wide gap (obviously not clearly enough marked, as people are forever falling down it) between the media image of the gratuitous ease with which anyone can trade in work for scrounging off the state and the paltriness of provision epitomised in the response to the inquiry about the refusal of benefit (a more adequate, less accusative and patronising term for which would surely be ‘assistance’): ‘you’ll be alright though, you’ve got a qualification.’

The office of this job in administration – paid at minimum wage by the agency – is located on a floor above a company specialising in private surveillance, whose curtains were rather oddly always open (at least until the day after Corbyn’s leadership election, perhaps coincidentally) for passers-by to espy their spying on endless personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, no doubt probing claimants’ intimate snaps for that revelatory, indemnifying smile, and whose slogan, no kidding, was ‘turning suspicion into irrefutable evidence’, a conversion rate no doubt motivated by targets and incentivised by bonuses. Settling into the job over the first six or so weeks of the twelve of the temp-to-perm contract with the agency, you start to make a few friends, learn the craft, pick up the systems from the training, and then you get the old mid-shift lay-off by the agency, who are in dispute with the company you’re working for, claiming they haven’t been paying the agency; the retort being that a fair few of the agency staff they’ve been providing have been up and leaving after a day’s (paid) training, but no work, but ‘my name’s Paul, and this is between y’all’; that is, this dispute doesn’t concern the just-terminated worker, whose been used not even as a bargaining tool, but as a weapon of attrition, whose services have just been revoked, by the agency, to spite the company. The agency contact you with another job for tomorrow picking and packing in a factory double the distance of your previous bike ride commute – that is, hardly like-for-like – in a pathetic attempt to cover their asses, but one no doubt contractually sound.

The term for the working class today finding themselves increasingly in positions like this one – and each no doubt as idiosyncratic – is ‘the precariat’. The word is a conjunction of two terms: ‘precarity’ – being the precarious state that the working class finds itself in today; in relation to the fragility of agency and temporary work, zero-hour contracts, cuts to, and increases in waiting times for, working tax credits and unemployment benefits, etc. – and ‘proletariat’, the working class itself. Indeed, as Guy Standing defines it:

‘The precariat can be identified by a distinctive structure of social income, which imparts a vulnerability going well beyond what would be conveyed by the money income received at a particular moment. […] A feature of the precariat is not the level of money wages or income earned at a particular moment but the lack of community support in terms of need, lack of assured enterprise or state benefits, and lack of private benefits to supplement money earnings. […] The precariat does not feel part of a solidaristic labour community. This intensifies a sense of alienation and instrumentality in what they have to do. [It] knows that there is no shadow of the future, as there is no future in what they are doing. To be ‘out’ tomorrow would come as no surprise[;] not all those in the precariat should be regarded as victims. Nevertheless, most will be uncomfortable in their insecurity, without a reasonable prospect of escape.’

The ennui that comes with the condition of belonging to the precariat is one being capitalised on by the endless rolling back of workers’ rights, in terms of regularity and regulation of working hours, pay and pay gaps, and of the ability to strike, all found at risk in the new junior doctors’ contract, for example. Indeed, behind Jeremy Hunt’s call for his own version of ‘Asiatic modes of production’ lays the deeply sinister agenda of ideological austerity, as much aimed at enforcing the austerity of workers’ ideas as it is at cutting material resources to society’s most precariously placed.

[everydayanalysis]

Adam Curtis Knows Why You Hate Your Life – Part 2

The second guest post by Here Comes Everyone’s Adam Steiner

In part 1, I riffed about the first spark of targeted marketing that gave rise to “the manufacturing of consent”; controlling voter behaviours based upon personal desire. Now I want to talk about how this evolved into a direct one-to-one relationship between market forces and the individual, and how our current pursuit for happiness has divided the self and made many of us so terribly unhappy.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, helped to flog cigarettes to the female population of early 20th century America and, in turn, influence voter behaviour. Freud’s divining argument was that all actions are fulfilment of desires, even when they appear benevolent; we are selfish, altruism is a lie. Bernays took this idea a step further than this to argue that we should actively will ourselves in this direction, to act selfishly is to live sincerely.

The Reagan-Thatcher-axis of the 80s made this mode concrete. They sold excess as success and encouraged mass deregulation of the financial sector; capitalising the “p” in “Private”, favouring wealth-making over social value. Reagan, the neo-actor, and Thatcher, the bootstraps-yanked greengrocer’s daughter, lived-out this ideology of self-creation: if you weren’t looking after number one, you weren’t truly living, nor living truly.

Worse still, being attentive to others along the death-race of success you would inevitably be left be behind by the fastest, most focused and thus the most successful competitors, and so you would be a fool to do otherwise (see Curtis’ The Trap on John “Beautiful Mind” Nash’s, Fuck You Buddy principle). This cult of the individual created the ironic squeeze where to be seen to break away from common (herd) mentalities was to align yourself as closely as possible to your running mates in both stature and style, swapping the major for the minor.

Eighties marketeers saw that selfhood and individuality could be commoditised and ultimately fetishised as the way to go – against all others. Neo-liberalism bought us fundamental freedoms coupled with the burden of emancipatory and economic pressures, hand-in-hand, confirming the myth that freedoms must be employed to be enjoyed.

For example, the current government’s austerity drive affects almost everyone, excepting the richest 1%. This has driven competition further in the workplace and freelance markets, forcing colleagues against one another during redundancy drives and splintering union stability as people are re-deployed to weaken their resolve and dis-establish workplace organisation, while the encouraged dream ideal is to become one of those 1%.

And on the surface, this seems a logical drive, as an individual driven to thrive not merely survive, private wealth comes up Trumps, at the expense of others. In the economic crash of 2008, banks were bailed out, for us, by us, in order to keep markets fluid and the nation solvent – this embedded business finance (which can outbid public services to purchase or manufacture social value, not generate it via grassroots community action) and property (space, public, natural, and for living) which are disproportionately divided and controlled, by the 1%, to be our zeitgeist societal regulator and universal measure, not positive civic behaviour.

Facing this barrage of need, want and seemingly diminished supply, the individual must shore themselves up against others, fuelled by aspiration and (seemingly) enriched by technology.

As consumer choice is (appears) vast and expansive – the realities of personal life choice are actually narrowed – buy this, do that (a la Nike, see below) – but it is in fact pigeon-holed and limited by your spending capacity – this drives the need to succeed, and to live LARGE, the vague ideal being within some mythical bubble of excess (house of many rooms, more cars than you can drive, sex without emotional engagement).

During the England riots of 2011 one of the most popular items stolen were Nike Air Force 1 trainers (£70). Conversely, bookshops were left undamaged and books unread. The prevailing cultural drive had taught young people, in particular, to want the impossible; consumer goods they could not afford, and every day trapped within condensed areas of deprivaton set against the aspiration-bolstering business skyscrapers fencing-in one of the richest cities in the world.

The individual is torn, between hopes, dreams, desires and the crushing foot of reality (which can be ignored, but only as soma escape). The need to “be more like X”, who succeeds well within common parameters, is consequently to be less like oneself, or even better, the better, BEST version of You. “Fitter, happier, more productive…” etc. Linking back to Bernays, we often choose political leaders who appear simpatico to our personal goals, investing our hopes and energies in the candidate of our choice, which is often limited by economic situation, for the one you feel best reflects you better self: “I believe in social justice – I’m Jeremy Corbyn”; “I’m a good all-round chap, I’m David Cameron” these are two modes of being we can subscribed to that we imagine make things better for ourselves, we are alike, he and I…. But, to live by comparison erodes the self, as much as there is any innate identity, a core self that is difficult to shift, our outer personae are increasingly brittle, multiple and ultimately insincere.

Here the Bernays web of advertising appears to cushion us. There is more information instantly available to us than ever before. Including non-information, web content clusters that scab-up into metadata; open-source websites and comments pages created new generations of peer reviewers and editors, who in turn add equal grist and chaff to the mill, just to keep it churning. Replies demand response, throwaway comments are hounded into apologies and resignations, not actions.

In the past, pros got paid to produce accurate journalism or meaningful artwork, effectively patronised (read that as you wish). This is increasingly less the case as people are undermined by endless internships, zero-hour contracts and dead-end work experience (expendable humans). So there is more information and the best of it still has to be paid for, often via advertising – there is an ongoing struggle here between myth-sellers flogging miracles and truth-sayers trying to keep their heads above water.

Too much information, increasingly a rotten apple, is forced through various (now necessary) framing devices (screen interfaces, the spectacle of Google glasses, Apple watches, the mobile phone-tablet-laptop-triple) with more and more content required to link together and coordinate the best information – and a sump of targeted advertising to trawl – it’s hard to know who you can trust.

Hyper-textuality blurs the lay-lines of context; guiding us towards things making sense. Reality must be made to fit, or made anew. The internal monologue is hijacked, James Joyce’s early-20th Century ad-man, Leopold Bloom would struggle to maintain any kind of narrative under the same barrage, more than half of it would be external “content”. We hold multiple selves in our palms, through social media accounts we must disclose (or pretend to) update and so be held-to account – there is also a sense of debt – something to be settled. There is a validity to these other selves, when they are free, but much of the ideals we are inspired (sold) to pursue can only be “achieved” when bought, our self-worth can plateau at a spending binge we cannot afford and look up to the next edge, but selfishness demands that in order to become our better self we need the personal trainer, high quality cookware, branded clothes and a car to be seen in – there is always another level.

Then we wonder why are dreams are not realised, or reality doesn’t work out the way (we thought) we wanted it to – we are often lead to chase retreating ghosts, mirages that swell and appear more lush the closer you get. Generations of frustrated ambitions, where desires have changed from a terraced house, a double-bed, children, holidays to Margate (Morrisey’s riches of the poor, nicked from Edith Sitwell)

Looking up is hard to do. FOMO (fear of missing out) compels you to compete, keep your eye on the ball, capturing all screens at once. Awareness, beyond the self, is in decline – just before walking into a lamppost or tripping over a homeless person – the things that should make you question where you are, where you are going and why; what it is/was you were meant to be doing/thinking, there is a cognitive dissonance created by people spectating more, living less, operating within shrinking parameters of mindlessness.

Curtis exemplifies this in his method of fast-cutting – our perspective is saturated – as in real life. So, have the marketeers won the internet? Were Freud and Bernays proved right? The future’s confusing; the future’s a blurred rainbow.