Stuck in the Past

Adam Curtis's latest documentary series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, is subtitled An Emotional History of the Modern World. That adjective is significant both because he has previously criticised emotionalism in public life (even to the point of admiring the sincerity of Enoch Powell) and because it suggests that what he is offering is a personal interpretation. This is an example of Curtis's meta approach to narrative: he is highlighting the importance of the singular ego in a story that revolves around the conflict between individualism and collectivism, but he is also suggesting that this makes the story suspect and that he may be an unreliable narrator. But maybe this particular hall of mirrors (cue archive shot of a hall of mirrors) is just a double-bluff. The criticism that he has faced in recent years - for his patrician omniscience, selectivity and flirtation with the ideas of the libertarian right - has perhaps made him more guarded. Despite this precaution, it is clear from the opening episode that he hasn't abandoned his signature technique of building a narrative around a binary opposition, hence the starring role awarded to Boolean logic. Nor has he eased up on the surprising (but insignificant) connections: thus the final episode reveals that George Boole's great-great-grandson is Geoffrey Hinton, who was central to the development of the use of neural networks in artifical intelligence.

Adam Curtis's worldview lends itself to TV, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that TV selects for the likes of Adam Curtis, but this prompts the question: why aren't there more people doing this sort of thing? It's true that trawling the archives and securing music rights takes up a lot of time and money, so this isn't cheap programming, but as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon reminds us, crafting a collage of coincidences and bizarre relationships isn't that hard to do. The fact that Curtis is unique (outside of YouTube parodies) merits some thought. I think the answer is that he embodies the BBC as an institution in a way similar to previous figureheads such as Richard Dimbleby (who makes an appearance in the latest series interviewing Anthony Blunt before the latter was publicly unmasked as the "fourth man" in the Cambridge spy-ring). With David Attenborough on his last legs, Curtis increasingly looks like a throwback to an ideal of public service broadcasting, but with a pessimistic and even misanthropic edge. For all his hip music selections and apparently radical reinterpretations of history, Curtis - or more precisely his soothing middle-class voice - is a comforting presence. This is authoritative as much as authored broadcasting, and for that reason it has to be singular.

The relationship of individualism and collectivism is unquestionably a theme central to our understanding of modernity, but what Curtis's approach ignores is that most of us live in the messy space between these two poles. This allows the viewer to remain detached as she watches film of people experiencing the extreme manifestations of one or the other: a transsexual struggling with unsympathetic doctors or Red Guards waving their little red books. Keeping emotions in check is clearly part of Curtis's method, but the purpose appears to have more to do with neutralising empathy than cultivating dispassionate and clear-eyed judgement. Whereas non-diegetic music is traditionally used to prompt an emotional response, here it is used to create a distancing effect. Whereas montage is traditionally used to suggest connections separate from (and even contradictory to) the commentary, here it is used to flatten complexity. As ever, Curtis makes some good and interesting points along the way, but I can't help thinking that what he's really engaged in is essentially a critique of the "dumbing-down" of TV news and current affairs (so this really is personal). 

Central to CGYOMH is the question of the self. In an interview in the New Statesman, Curtis claims "The vision of our time is that individualism would create strong and empowered individuals. But at the same time, many of the human sciences that studied people started to eat away at the idea of the confident self. ... What I’m asking in these films is why in the great age of individualism, which promised empowered individuals, have we ended up with entire societies that are uncertain, anxious and distrustful". Is the self simply "An accessory of the brain that tries to make sense of this incoming chaotic data", imposing a narrative on our impulsive and often irrational behaviour? Daniel Kahneman is presented as a proxy for the essentialist view that false consciousness is the inescapable nature of the human mind. This makes change impossible, a point reinforced by chaos theory - i.e. we cannot anticipate the consequences of our actions, which is why revolutions fail. All we can do is maintain good order. From this follows the idea that society (or the "dreamworld", as Curtis puts it) must be managed for its own good, and that, from the 1970s onwards, has meant mass surveillance.

Writing on the subject of Trump's second impeachment for the LRB, Eli Zaretsky noted how the prosecution case was unusual in putting Trump's action into a wider, historical context: the US constitution, the pathologies of the American right and the fomer president's employment of the "big lie" (the idea that the 2020 election had been stolen). In contrast, "Modern journalism, even before the internet, makes it almost impossible to form a realistic picture of what is going on in the world. It breaks knowledge up into unco-ordinated categories and ignores context and connection, which are the soul of historical understanding. Above all, the news distracts". This could have be written by Curtis, indeed this is essentially his critique in HyperNormalisation (and the abbreviated Oh Dearism films he made for Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe) of the way that the mass media leave us feeling disempowered. But the difference is that Curtis isn't presenting a "wider, historical context". Indeed, his occasional attempts to do so are often ridiculous, such as the idea that Brexit was prompted by nostalgia for a rural idyll, or that this persistent delusion had earlier led Getrude Bell to prefer the rural tribes to the urban middle-class of Iraq after 1918, thereby eventually causing an ISIS army to advance on Baghdad.

In Zaretsky's reading, the history of the democratic era in the capitalist West was the avoidance of revolution by the formalisation of class politics in electoralism and trade unionism. But this was eroded: "in the second half of the 20th century, changes in the socio-economic system weakened and eliminated the class-based identities that had provided this rough stability. This weakening opened new structural faults for politics, such as gender, race and sexuality, but it also precipitated the emergence of the modern masses, the so-called ‘age of the crowd’. While a new politics of identity emerged, so too did large numbers of individuals whose identities were not socially given, or explicit. These individuals served as the social basis for mass psychology." This shares Curtis's view of (and implicit distaste for) the masses, but it proceeds from a structural critique that is lacking in Curtis's work. He tends to start in the realm of pure theory (someone comes up with a startling and unconventional idea) and exhibits a pronounced scepticism about the empirical (not always unjustifiably - e.g. the replicability crisis of behavioural pyschology).

There are four features of an Adam Curtis documentary that I think are worth dwelling on. First, his belief in the power of ideas. This is an idealism that almost completely ignores material factors, allowing him to conflate different movements, with radically different interests and motivations, such as American neoconservatives and Islamist jihadis in The Power of Nightmares, or suggest a dubious parallel between the Opium Wars and Oxycontin in CGYOMH. Second, the emphasis on the individual seer, such as Edward Bernays in The Century of the Self, which is ultimately just an eccentric great man theory of history (Jiang Qing features in the latest to help redress the gender balance). As Dan Hancox puts it, Curtis is "fascinated by the intellectuals, and thoroughly bored by the masses". Third, the idea of conspiracy theory as a substitute for our lost grand narratives. Much of CGYOMH is concerned with how conspiracies have been manufactured and concludes with the irony of supposedly objective liberals succumbing to conspiratorial delusions about Brexit and the election of Trump. Fourth, his foreshortened history, which is probably a combination of the constraints of the medium (we have no archive footage of 1789) and his preference for a horzion that doesn't go back much further than living memory.

In combination, these features suggest a radical conservative outlook that can be summarised as follows. What matters are beliefs, rather than material circumstances, and those beliefs spring from the insights of unorthodox individuals. But postmodernism has left people bereft of coherent social narratives while neoliberalism has cultivated an ever more isolated and anxious subject, so undermining belief. This void has increasingly been filled by conspiracy theories, both populist (i.e. against elites) and state-directed (i.e. engineered by elites). Democracy has been corroded by individualism, leading politicians to see themselves as representatives not of the people but of financial and technocratic power (Peter Mair is cited). Curtis appears to see himself as a progressive, but is hazy on what progress would look like beyond a more robust self and a sense of collective purpose. While many critics have associated him with Frank Furedi, and not unfairly, I would pay him the compliment of pointing to Edmund Burke and Friedrich Nietzsche as intellectual influences rather than the idiot messiah of Living Marxism. I'd also suggest that many of his concerns around the self and personhood, whether it is the pliable monad of B.F. Skinner's behaviourism or the robust "entrepreneur of himself" described by Michel Foucault, go back to Hobbes and Locke.

The final word goes to the man himself, from that New Statesman interview: "I make pretentious films arguing that we’re stuck in the past and can’t imagine the future." Despite the self-deprecation, the real misdirection here is the use of "we" rather than "I". David Graeber (who, if he were alive today, would probably have pointed out that the periodic sacking of Mesopotamian towns by rural tribes goes back millennia, something he wrote about in Debt: The First 5000 Years) provided the epigraph and conclusion for Can’t Get You Out of My Head: "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently". But Graeber famously failed to make it differently when he helped steer the Occupy movement into the dead-end of prefigurative politics: constant debates about decision-making that produced few meaningful decisions. Like him, Curtis offers no vision of what that remade world would look like. In Graeber's case he had the ready excuse of anarchism (not imposing a vision is the point). In Curtis's case I suspect it's because he remains more interested in the failed visions of the past (there's an interesting overlap here with Mark Fisher's nostalgia for lost futures) and is stimulated by imaginary futures only insofar as they reflect that lineage. The immobilisation is personal.