By Dr Mark Featherstone
After having been away from blogging for a few months because of research leave and teaching commitments, I decided to return after a research visit to Paris to finish talking about the sociology of immobility. I was curious to essay my own situation upon my return, but it has taken me more or less a month to get around to writing this piece. This is, of course, no advertisement for the high speed society, nor the advantages of blogging where information moves lightning fast. I wish that I could claim laziness, say that I had plenty of time on my hands, and that I simply hadn’t been bothered to write, because this would mean I had taken time off. But there is no laziness in the high speed society and unfortunately the truth is much worse. I simply have not had the time to write anything. Now, as research projects stack up around me, must-read books pile up in ever increasing quantities covering my office, and my diary swells with meetings, and many more appointments I have probably not written down, I thought I needed to sit down to write about the paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in contemporary society. So here we are.
There was something interesting about flying off to Paris, spending a day and a half in the suburbs of the French capital, and then returning to the UK in a desperate attempt to secure a visa for entry into China a week later. I never made it to Beijing in the end and had to postpone my trip. But by the time it became clear I was going nowhere the very effort of trying to organise a visa, flights, foreign currency, not to mention finish off papers to present in the Chinese capital, made me feel as though I had been to China and back without ever having left my office. Email went back and forth, and I made aborted phone calls to Beijing, without getting anywhere, before I eventually accepted I was staying put. In the end I had achieved very little, apart from discovering I had the wrong documentation to enter China on a lecturing visa. I had remained completely immobile in every sense of the word, and yet by the end of the week, I felt in a state of panic.
Admittedly, I may be prone to this kind of reaction when confronted with the prospect of travel. Those who know me know very well that I have never really considered myself a member of the global elite, having been brought up in a particularly immobile environment where nobody seemed to do anything and nothing ever seemed to change. On a continuum spanning those who belong to, or dwell in a place and those who live nowhere and everywhere at the same time, I fall very much into the former category, having never found mobility very easy. Unfortunately, having said all of this, I am, perhaps, in the worst possible position, being somebody who wants to dwell somewhere, but is also an exile from that place. So I live between somewhere and nowhere, which really means nowhere or a kind of liminal place. As a researcher of utopias I know that nowhere should be best possible place, or at least that’s what Thomas More told us, when he called his perfect world utopia meaning both good place and no place, but I can’t really sustain that belief. Nowhere is really no good. It is like the non-places French sociologist Marc Auge talks about. These places, airports and the like, are only good for moving through on your way somewhere else.
But then again, I’m ambivalent. Nowhere has its attractions. For example, I like airports. They’re transitory places and I feel a great sense of freedom in them. The paradox of airports is that even when you’re loaded down with bags, you have no baggage. You’re on the move and you could go anywhere. Unfortunately, the problem with non-places is that its easy to get stuck there. Nobody wants to be stuck nowhere, like the traveler in the Tom Hanks’ film, who ends up living in an airport for months on end, because its impossible to settle and grow any kind of roots there. There is some kind of freedom in that admittedly, but it becomes a bit tiresome in the end. So nowhere, and the non-place of the exile is nowhere to be, even though sociologists have long known that aliens make the best critical thinkers because the normal looks absurd to them. That’s okay, and it may make for good academic work, but it’s hard to live on the outside looking in. Having said all of this, I should not over-egg my status as melancholy exile. I spent my early life thinking about escaping from my immobile situation. Everybody I knew did. That was life. In this respect, roots and the idea of dwelling are based on a kind of imaginary situation for me. In the language of Benedict Anderson, I have an imaginary view of what it was like to live in a working class community.
But I also know that in a society premised on the idea of mobility, immobility kills. Perhaps this is why airports are the best and worst of places to be – we are all mobile in the airport, until we get stuck, and then our immobility is thrown into sharp relief by the very fact that the place we occupy is a kind of transitory non-place that exists for no other reason than to move people on. You absolutely do not want to get stuck there. In fact, perhaps we should learn to appreciate airports more for what they can tell us about contemporary society and our mindset today because the condition of the airport which enables movement but also invariably malfunctions and breaks down causing panic-inducing immobility symbolises the great problem of the mobile society. That to say that the great problem of moving around and running about without stopping to take stock is that you end up getting nowhere and nothing ever happens.
As such, there is a point where mobility folds into immobility, with the added ingredient of the desperate need to move in a society geared towards dynamism and change. Herein resides the difference between me now, stuck between Paris and Beijing in a kind of twilight zone, and me twenty years ago, caught on a council estate on the edge of Hull, wondering how I could escape. In the past I had nowhere to be. I had no reason to leave, even though I knew there had to be more to life, whereas now I have somewhere to be, but have come to see everywhere as a kind of transitory place on the road to somewhere else. In the past everywhere was an end, a kind of dead end, and now there is no end, but only endless movement. What is more is that I am not unusual in this view – I use myself as an example of a particular world view, the world view of the contemporary global nomad, the unsettler, who is propelled ever forward by the demand to move contained in contemporary society.
Unlike the nomads of the past who went to a place and eventually settled somewhere, today we are unsettlers because we never stay anywhere for too long. My own case is hyperbolic, because as I am well aware that I have a dislike of both mobility and immobility, and this puts me in the difficult, even comic position of not wanting to go anywhere, but also not wanting to stay where I am for too long, wherever that may be at any given time. Perhaps this makes me the ideal of citizen of More’s utopian city that did not exist, a place that was also a no place. But I don’t think so. The problem with More’s people was they were far too settled where they were and that’s not how the unsettler is today. Caught in a place that’s not a place, but rather a non-place, the unsettler displays a strange psychological condition we might want to call topophobia – the fear of places. More’s people don’t show any symptoms of this problem. They seem happy where they are. By contrast the contemporary topophobic does not like any place that exists, but instead wants to imagine places they would like to inhabit and then inhabit these imaginary places through mental constructs made up of equal parts of melancholia and desire. Imagination and the desire to move are, therefore, key to understanding the topophobic. As I see it, there is none of this unrest in More’s people.
This is, of course, paradoxical since one would imagine that unrest is exactly what makes one a utopian. Is unrest not what defines the utopian imagination? But we know that unrest is difficult to live with and nobody wants to live between places. It’s not easy. Does this amount to saying that utopia is bad, and that social dreaming is no good, because what it means is that you will never be happy where you are, and always want to find somewhere else that doesn’t really exist? Does this mean that the utopian topophobic is a person who is addicted to movement, but at the same time hates going anywhere because what they want more than anything is to stop moving and rest for a little while in some imaginary place they will never find? In many ways this question touches upon the key point of utopian thinking and practice. What most utopian dreamers have done over the course of history is to try to design imaginary places where people could rest and would have no more need of their imaginations. In utopia other places cease to exist. You are where you are and that’s it.
This is exactly what communists of all types have sought to do over the course of history – from Plato through Stalin to Pol Pot, reds have sought to destroy our ability to think otherwise. Let’s imagine imagination out of existence, because its too hard to keep wanting something that you can never have, a place that does not exist. The response to this strategy has, of course, been the great dystopias which say exactly that. From Diogenes the Dog to George Orwell, the utopians of freedom have told us that even though its hard to keep moving, nobody wants to be subsumed in a place that is completely immobile. So accept your desire to move and live with it. I think that’s true, and I would go along with the radical critique of Plato’s Republic and the Orwellian attack on Stalinism, but the problem is that our own society has taken the idea of mobility too far.
Nobody wants to be stuck in a hopeless situation, where all you can do is dream but never go anywhere, but equally topophobia is no good either. In many respects this is where we are today in contemporary global capitalism. We are all supposed to be ‘super-busy’ - and smile about it. If we have any time we are meant to cram it full of work or leisure. There is no time to do nothing. But it’s enough to drive anybody mad and I’m not sure what’s worse – sitting on a council estate bedsit somewhere wondering what could be or finding yourself caught in a similarly immobile position frantically struggling to manage an overloaded work and leisure schedule.
Although the nature of the collapse of time may have changed, the experience of immobility remains the same. In the case of the bedsit dweller, time has no meaning and it is impossible to go anywhere, because they have nowhere to go and no reason to be anywhere. By contrast, the member of what Zygmunt Bauman would call the contemporary liquid class has no time and can’t get anywhere because he has to be everywhere and has no time to do anything. The outcome of both situations is the same, I think: topophobia, the desire to move, and escape, into a stable yet imaginary place which does not continually propel one forwards.
The great founder of liberal philosophy Thomas Hobbes would have considered any such attempt to find a place beyond mobility ridiculous, since he thought about life in terms of a race. In his view people are like atoms bouncing around in abstract space. They possess trajectories and this is what keeps them alive. Unfortunately, however, nobody can ever have an unimpeded trajectory through life. The very nature of human existence means that people desire similar objects and therefore invariably clash in their life trajectories. As such, we must compete and struggle to ensure that we come out on top in the great race that is life. Obviously, Hobbes was no Darwinian before Darwin, and he did not simply advocate natural selection and the survival of the fittest, but rather thought that it was necessary to take the natural inclination of people towards struggle and competition and lift it onto the level of economic competition where it could be safely controlled. Or at least, this is how the great Canadian theorist of liberalism, C. B. MacPherson, thought about Hobbes' most famous work on the emergence of society.
Although his work is not so well known today, I think that MacPherson provides us with a useful insight into the nature of contemporary society because what it illustrates is that the root problem of our situation – and the problem of the simultaneous divergence and similarity of the experiences of the bedsit dweller and the global traveler – is the result of an economic system that imperils us in equal measure every minute of the day. Why do we fear staying anywhere for too long? Why are we all topophobic today? The answer is quite simple. In the great game of capitalist survivalism, it does not pay to stay still for too long. In order to stay in, and preferably ahead of, the game you absolutely have to keep moving and stay mobile. However, as we have seen, there is a limit to how far this is possible, and in the end it is likely that our society will congeal into a kind of immobile opposition between those who cannot go anywhere because they have nowhere to go and those who cannot move because they have to be everywhere all at the same time. We really need to avoid the emergence of this kind of society because it will result in one outcome – a massive outpouring of psychological unrest in a society committed to mobility.
What should we do, then, to oppose this situation? First, we have to resist the utopian temptation to oppose the addiction to movement with the resolution of stasis in a society where nothing changes. This has been tried by communists throughout history. It does not work. Total immobility is no way forward and only results in the reemergence of the obsession with change and dynamism. Second, I think we have to try to transform our society into a less competitive place, which is not geared around endless change and transformation, but rather takes care of those who cannot keep up and stops challenging people to do more and move faster. As Marx saw in the 19th century, and Simmel recognised early in the 20th century, the society premised on the notion that ‘all is solid melts into air’ is not easy to stand. We all know this to be true and yet, in many respects, we have yet to learn the lesson of the classical sociologists. I think this is the challenge for our society in the immediate future – we must learn from Marx and Simmel. We must learn to demobilise. But how can we do this in a society which functions like a race track? Perhaps this should be the subject for another blog. But for now I fear I must suspend my commitment to demobilisation - I need to try to re-book my flights to Beijing.
Showing posts with label Globalisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Globalisation. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Monday, 4 October 2010
The Sociology of Immobility I
By
Mark Featherstone
It is entirely fashionable today to talk about the sociology of mobility, but I wonder whether this discourse is already more or less out of date. The theory of mobility turns off the idea that processes of globalisation have resulted in unprecedented levels of interconnectedness across the world, resulting in the emergence of what is normally called the network society. This process of global interconnectivity relies on information communication technologies to achieve the integration of financial markets and complex transport infrastructures to allow flows of people to move through global space. Ironically, this process of integration and networking, which we might imagine would lead to new levels of sociability, has also resulted in the emergence of a new brand of what we might call asocial hyper-individualism, whereby those linked into the global network are simultaneously sunk in networks of co-operation, but also provided with enormous levels of freedom.
Although it may seen strange to talk about asociality or a lack of social interaction in the context of networks of co-operation, it is important to remember that one can exist very well in society and be quite unsociable in terms of how one thinks about other people. The key here is, therefore, that processual co-operation does not necessarily entail deep social interaction. Instead I think that what continues to happen in the contemporary global society is that the high levels of co-operation demanded by the network in order to enable mobility are endlessly undercut by the kind of hyper-individualism produced by the desire to move, what we might call the will to mobility, and that it is this that means that the potential sociability written into the form of the global network continually collapses into a kind of manic individualism, whereby everybody is set on making it big and escaping from the constraints of the very social form that creates the possibility of making it in the first place.
But before we move on, let’s slow down and take stock. What we must recognise from the above is that the sociology of mobility is not simply about flows of money and people around the world or the technologies that make movement possible. Instead, I think that we have to understand that to a large extent mobility is in the head and a psychological condition. This may, in large part, be a psychological condition created by the explosion of ICTs in the final decade of the 20th century. What do ICTs do, if not allow us to let our imaginations run wild and explore the world of the mind in the fantasy space of the net?
In many respects, then, it is possible to say that the entire world is available on the World Wide Web. Moreover, the strange philosophical consequences of this statement, which revolve around the emergence of a form of spatial short circuit that shrinks the global to the level of the local and makes the macrosphere totally available to the cybernaut locked into the delimited space of microspherical PC terminal, are that it is absolutely not metaphorical to say that the internet makes the world available to everybody without the need for movement. On the contrary, what the internet, the hard infrastructural technologies that make the WWW possible, achieves is the telescoping of the entire world, or the entire networked world, into every individual node or terminal connected to the global network. According to this logic, there is no need to travel anywhere or be mobile in a physical sense, since I can go anywhere and be everywhere, without leaving my PC terminal that plugs me into the global network. This is precisely what the French writer Paul Virilio talks about in his works on globalisation, speed, and ICTs. Virilio talks about ‘the terminal man’ or the last man who gives up his body to his PC in order to inhabit the new global network. Recalling science fiction films such as the Matrix he tells us that an ethics of 21st century should be about saving people from becoming sedentary no-bodies who never leave their house, but rather travel through the interface between their mind and the globalised network.
Is this science fiction? Although the above arguments sound like the plot from a Phillip K Dick novel, consider the Japanese phenomena of the shut-in and the net addict. In both cases the globalised network starts to take over from reality rendering the body, what Virilio calls the last vehicle, an archaic irrelevancy. For the shut-in, a figure closely related to the NEET who withdraws from the public world of education and employment, the entire social world becomes a frightening place to the extent that even the family becomes an alien institution. Thus the shut-in’s world contracts to the space of the bedroom, which often becomes a kind of cockpit for connecting to the wider world through ICTs.
Herein we enter the strange world of net addict who spends his entire life in cyberspace, often neglecting to attend to the basic physical requirements of human life, eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, sleeping, and gradually losing the ability to differentiate between the fantasy space of the net and the hard materiality of the real world. Surely the classic example of this phenomenon is the recent case of the Korean couple who allowed their 3 month old baby to starve to death while they surfed the net, raising a cyber-child in the process. It would, of course, be hyperbolic to suggest that this is a generalised condition today, but the seeds of the problem of voluntary immobility and the consequent wasting of the obsolete body are clearly present in our contemporary globalised society.
After all, who has not spent their entire day sat in front of a computer screen, surfing the net, sending e-mail to people sat at PCs in far off places, and moving about in the globalised network that collapses mobility into immobility in the light speed it takes to connect to the world wide web? My wager would be that the majority of the people reading this short piece have spent days like these. It is for this reason that I would suggest that we counter the sociology of mobility, which seems to me to be largely celebratory in its view of the value of movement and dynamism, with a new dire sociology of immobility, which recognises that the flip side of the explosion of kinetic energy that has resulted in processes of globalisation is a implosive force that exerts an enormous gravitational pull on every one of us, commanding us to stay put, don’t move, because the only way to really move is to live in the wires of the net.
Mark Featherstone
It is entirely fashionable today to talk about the sociology of mobility, but I wonder whether this discourse is already more or less out of date. The theory of mobility turns off the idea that processes of globalisation have resulted in unprecedented levels of interconnectedness across the world, resulting in the emergence of what is normally called the network society. This process of global interconnectivity relies on information communication technologies to achieve the integration of financial markets and complex transport infrastructures to allow flows of people to move through global space. Ironically, this process of integration and networking, which we might imagine would lead to new levels of sociability, has also resulted in the emergence of a new brand of what we might call asocial hyper-individualism, whereby those linked into the global network are simultaneously sunk in networks of co-operation, but also provided with enormous levels of freedom.
Although it may seen strange to talk about asociality or a lack of social interaction in the context of networks of co-operation, it is important to remember that one can exist very well in society and be quite unsociable in terms of how one thinks about other people. The key here is, therefore, that processual co-operation does not necessarily entail deep social interaction. Instead I think that what continues to happen in the contemporary global society is that the high levels of co-operation demanded by the network in order to enable mobility are endlessly undercut by the kind of hyper-individualism produced by the desire to move, what we might call the will to mobility, and that it is this that means that the potential sociability written into the form of the global network continually collapses into a kind of manic individualism, whereby everybody is set on making it big and escaping from the constraints of the very social form that creates the possibility of making it in the first place.
But before we move on, let’s slow down and take stock. What we must recognise from the above is that the sociology of mobility is not simply about flows of money and people around the world or the technologies that make movement possible. Instead, I think that we have to understand that to a large extent mobility is in the head and a psychological condition. This may, in large part, be a psychological condition created by the explosion of ICTs in the final decade of the 20th century. What do ICTs do, if not allow us to let our imaginations run wild and explore the world of the mind in the fantasy space of the net?
In many respects, then, it is possible to say that the entire world is available on the World Wide Web. Moreover, the strange philosophical consequences of this statement, which revolve around the emergence of a form of spatial short circuit that shrinks the global to the level of the local and makes the macrosphere totally available to the cybernaut locked into the delimited space of microspherical PC terminal, are that it is absolutely not metaphorical to say that the internet makes the world available to everybody without the need for movement. On the contrary, what the internet, the hard infrastructural technologies that make the WWW possible, achieves is the telescoping of the entire world, or the entire networked world, into every individual node or terminal connected to the global network. According to this logic, there is no need to travel anywhere or be mobile in a physical sense, since I can go anywhere and be everywhere, without leaving my PC terminal that plugs me into the global network. This is precisely what the French writer Paul Virilio talks about in his works on globalisation, speed, and ICTs. Virilio talks about ‘the terminal man’ or the last man who gives up his body to his PC in order to inhabit the new global network. Recalling science fiction films such as the Matrix he tells us that an ethics of 21st century should be about saving people from becoming sedentary no-bodies who never leave their house, but rather travel through the interface between their mind and the globalised network.
Is this science fiction? Although the above arguments sound like the plot from a Phillip K Dick novel, consider the Japanese phenomena of the shut-in and the net addict. In both cases the globalised network starts to take over from reality rendering the body, what Virilio calls the last vehicle, an archaic irrelevancy. For the shut-in, a figure closely related to the NEET who withdraws from the public world of education and employment, the entire social world becomes a frightening place to the extent that even the family becomes an alien institution. Thus the shut-in’s world contracts to the space of the bedroom, which often becomes a kind of cockpit for connecting to the wider world through ICTs.
Herein we enter the strange world of net addict who spends his entire life in cyberspace, often neglecting to attend to the basic physical requirements of human life, eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, sleeping, and gradually losing the ability to differentiate between the fantasy space of the net and the hard materiality of the real world. Surely the classic example of this phenomenon is the recent case of the Korean couple who allowed their 3 month old baby to starve to death while they surfed the net, raising a cyber-child in the process. It would, of course, be hyperbolic to suggest that this is a generalised condition today, but the seeds of the problem of voluntary immobility and the consequent wasting of the obsolete body are clearly present in our contemporary globalised society.
After all, who has not spent their entire day sat in front of a computer screen, surfing the net, sending e-mail to people sat at PCs in far off places, and moving about in the globalised network that collapses mobility into immobility in the light speed it takes to connect to the world wide web? My wager would be that the majority of the people reading this short piece have spent days like these. It is for this reason that I would suggest that we counter the sociology of mobility, which seems to me to be largely celebratory in its view of the value of movement and dynamism, with a new dire sociology of immobility, which recognises that the flip side of the explosion of kinetic energy that has resulted in processes of globalisation is a implosive force that exerts an enormous gravitational pull on every one of us, commanding us to stay put, don’t move, because the only way to really move is to live in the wires of the net.
Thursday, 25 February 2010
The Hurt Locker: What is the Death Drive?
By
Mark Featherstone
I have recently written two papers on the psychoanalytic idea of the death drive and the ways in which it manifests itself in society. In these papers I focus on the war on terror and the ways in which violence, destructiveness, what psychoanalysts call aggressivity, and other perversions such as sadism have become widespread in western society.
My argument in these papers is that although we regard these perversions as horrendous distortions of what it means to be a social being when they occur in events such as a the Baby P case, it should come as no surprise to us that these events happen because our culture is in many ways characterised by violence and sadism. Consider contemporary popular culture. We watch 24, where Jack Bauer tortures people on a regular basis, play Grand Theft Auto, and enjoy torture porn movies, such as the Saw franchise. For the cultural sociologist Henry Giroux, our popular culture provides us with an education in cruelty and creates a general atmosphere where violence and aggression is tolerated and in many cases encouraged. This is not the place, however, to discuss the finer points of Giroux’s theory or enter into age old debates about media effects.
Instead, the reason I start with reference to this work is because it was in the context of having recently written these papers that I viewed Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed film The Hurt Locker and recognised that it perfectly captures the idea of the death drive as a social and cultural phenomenon that transforms violence, aggression, and more centrally destructiveness from social pathologies into aspects of a norm or ethical principle of deadly risk to be employed as a guide for living and dying. Moreover, my sense was that The Hurt Locker, a film about bomb disposal in Iraq, could be used to show how psychoanalytic theory could be employed in social analysis to reveal a meta- or socio-psychological condition, on the basis that film condenses these kind of conditions into a text that we create in order to tell ourselves about our own society and culture.
The idea of a link between the psychological condition of the death drive and contemporary society raises some interesting questions. First, we must ask ourselves, how is condition this written into the film and how can psycho-social analysis reveal its presence? Second, we have to think about timing. Why now? What is it about contemporary society that makes the death drive current, since as we will see, Freud saw the death drive as a kind of ahistorical phenomenon, which is somehow hard-wired into humans? However, before we start to answer these questions, let us think about the idea of the death drive.
Freud wrote about the death drive or thanatos in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In his view human psychology is governed by two opposing principles – a life drive (eros) and more fundamentally, a death drive (thanatos). For Freud thanatos emerges because human existence is characterised by trauma. Human birth is traumatic. In Freud’s eyes the newborn experiences birth as a traumatic separation from its mother. This experience is then repeated later in life when the child learns from its father that it will eventually have to leave its mother behind and become an adult in its own right. All of this psycho-sexual trauma means that humans are wounded creatures.
For Freud we are naturally wounded creatures and we spend our lives searching for a sense of completion and peace. But there is no ultimate satisfaction. There is no way to return to the state of peace that we experience before the original moment of trauma, birth. There is no way to return to the womb. In Freud’s view this is why human life is largely characterised by a kind of raging turmoil set on the return to the peace originally experienced in the womb which in his view can only be repeated in one experience, death. Hence the founder of psychoanalysis regarded humans as essentially self-destructive creatures who have evolved various defence mechanisms for staying alive.
The first of these mechanisms is called projection, whereby the desire to destroy oneself is projected onto other people in the shape of what psychoanalysts have come to call aggressivity. But how to control aggressivity, which would essentially transform humanity into a self-destructive species? The answer is society or what Freud calls civilization. Civilization controls our violent impulses and prevents us from killing each other, but only at the cost of limiting our instincts. Society is, therefore, a social control machine.
This is the meaning of Freud’s idea of the life drive or eros. The life drive counter-acts the death drive by re-directing our natural instincts to destruction into social construction and social development. But unfortunately, civilization offers no lasting peace and we are haunted by thanatos. For example, we may seek out peace and completion through religion, which tells us about heaven and the afterlife where the endless desire to find the thing which will complete us no longer exists, and other secular forms that offer ecstatic experience, such as sex, narcotic, and alcohol addiction. All of these forms of addiction numb the pain of life and provide us with the momentary relief Georges Bataille talked about in terms of le petite mort, or the little death, meaning the moment of orgasm, ecstasy, or inebriation, where we lose ourselves, go blank, and descend into nothingness for a short period of time.
The little death is, however, just that, a small death. The limit state of ecstasy is forever balanced by the need to carry on, by the need to persist, by the need to live provided by eros. Eros means that the apocalyptic moment of death is postponed for as long as possible. The apocalypse is, therefore, not now, but rather distributed across life in whatever limit experiences we can manage to cram into our limited time in the world.
This Freudian theory is, of course, perfectly captured by the film, The Hurt Locker, which tells the story of an American bomb disposal expert in Iraq, William James (Jeremy Renner), who takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience. The film clearly shows that he feels most alive when he is closest to death, a condition supported by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who spoke about being-towards-death, and told us that we should live every moment as though it was our last, in order that we might live a full and meaningful life. I think that this much is explicit in the manifest content of the film. However, a deeper, psychoanalytic understanding of the film, requires an interpretation of the latent meaning of the scene of bomb disposal itself that we might talk about through Heideggerian language, being-with-bombs. I use the term being-with-bombs because in Freud’s theory humans live with bombs every day of their lives. We all live with psychological bombs lodged deep in our unconscious minds waiting to explode, turning our lives to rubble. The death drive, the product of the trauma of birth, is, of course, the ultimate unexploded bomb, the bomb that Freud knew could never be defused or disarmed. In Freud’s thought the best we can ever do is to avoid detonation. We can hold our selves, or in Freud’s language our egos, together and keep the death drive in check.
It is this situation, this psychological complex, that is beautifully captured by The Hurt Locker. The psychological complex of the struggle between the life and death drives is perfectly depicted by James’ confrontation with the bomb. The moment when he is most alive, the moment when he is potentially about to die, the moment when he confronts the bomb, is the moment when the life drive meets the death drive and life hangs in the balance.
Should we consider the work of one of Freud’s followers, Melanie Klein, we can reinforce this theory, so that it becomes more than simply a metaphor. For Klein, who wrote about the life and death drives as they play out in child psychology, psychological processes are always embodied processes that we also project onto the world around us. In this respect, the link between the life / death drive complex and bomb detonation is no longer simply a metaphor because the threat of psychological collapse is the threat that the body will be exploded to pieces. Moreover, the fact that the war between the life and death drives is played out in terms of bomb detonation is not simply a metaphorical connection, since it is possible to see the latter social political reality as an expression of a deeper psychological reality in the same way that everything in the world is from a psychoanalytic perspective an expression of human psychological reality.
Following this train of thought, we can consider the meaning of the bomb suit, which the detonation experts wear to protect themselves from blasts. The bomb suit is the Freudian ego, the front stage social self, that defends us against the chaos of the death drive that threatens to blow us to bits. When James dons the bomb suit to confront the bomb he is caught on the line between the life drive, designed to keep us alive by turning us into unified selves, and the death drive, that threatens to blow us to bits, but when he throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive. Herein lies James’ ethic of deadly risk, his attempt to realise Heidegger’s idea, being-towards-death, in what for Freud would be a perverse form, being-with-bombs.
In Freudian / Kleinian terms, the bomb is also a projection of the self because it consists of a hard shell containing powerful explosive material. In light of this process of objectification, the disposal experts’ tinkering with the bomb’s wires and components is really an expression of his attempt to work out his own life / death drive complex through the object that will ultimately decide whether he lives or dies. And should he live, he will confront bombs, different bombs, but essentially the same bomb, over and over again, because the war between eros and thanatos never ends, apart from the moment when we finally succumb to death and thanatos reaches its telos. Freud called this condition which runs through life the compulsion to repeat. Klein talked about it in terms of the vicious circle. Either way, what it means is that the battle between the forces of life and death is always on and will never end so long as humans are alive and continue to be born.
It is an understanding of this fact that gives the film its existential edge. We see James’ attempt to live a normal life. He spends time with his son and his divorced wife, who he tells his friends stuck with him for some reason that he can’t fathom, but he can never leave the bomb behind. So he returns to the front and the war re-starts. At that point the film ends.
What we can see then is that James’ psychological war with himself is played out across the urban war zone of Iraq. The idea of the war zone is crucial here for enabling us answer the vexing question, why now? What is it about our society, the society of risks we might also call the society of the death drive, that makes it more risky and more deadly than previous societies, given that Freud thought that the death drive is a primal human condition?
Essentially the answer to this questions reveals the beauty of The Hurt Locker, which is that it is plays out a deep existential conflict common to all humans in a contemporary scene and manages to suggest that there is something very particular about this contemporary scene that thrusts this deep existential conflict front and centre.
In Freudian theory we know that war, the war in the self, and the projected war with other people, is resolved by society, and the norms and values of society. What we have not mentioned is that these norms and values are only effective because authority, the primary authority of the father figure, is internalised in the form of what Freud called the super-ego. The super-ego, the law in our heads that tells us that you cannot do this, that, or the other, is the authority that keeps us in check and prevents the war from breaking out, holds society together, and ensures that the life drive maintains some semblance of control over the death drive.
What the film illustrates through its depiction of the Iraq war, which symbolises the condition of perma-war that has come to characterise contemporary globalisation, is what psychoanalysts knew in the 1960s, which is that authority is on wane and that the forces of violence and chaos are now, more than ever before, barely contained by civilized social structures. We can see this condition today. Globalisation is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what the recent economic collapse was all about? Is this not what the war on terror is all about? Society is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what theories of broken Britain are about? Is this not what panics about youth deviance are about? And the self? The contemporary self is in a state of barely contained chaos on the edge of complete breakdown. Is this not what the story of James in The Hurt Locker is really about? Is this not what gives this film its particular resonance?
So all of this is contained in The Hurt Locker, a film that illuminates the chaotic nature of globalisation through its depiction of the Iraq War and the chaotic nature of the self thrust into these chaotic circumstances in the form of a bomb disposal expect who plays out the endless struggle between the life and death drives every time he confronts a bomb in the field. In this way we can see how it is possible to link psychological theory to cultural analysis to form a complex theory that can shed light on the contemporary human condition, a condition that takes in the microscopic level of social psychology and the macroscopic level of globalisation.
Mark Featherstone
I have recently written two papers on the psychoanalytic idea of the death drive and the ways in which it manifests itself in society. In these papers I focus on the war on terror and the ways in which violence, destructiveness, what psychoanalysts call aggressivity, and other perversions such as sadism have become widespread in western society.
My argument in these papers is that although we regard these perversions as horrendous distortions of what it means to be a social being when they occur in events such as a the Baby P case, it should come as no surprise to us that these events happen because our culture is in many ways characterised by violence and sadism. Consider contemporary popular culture. We watch 24, where Jack Bauer tortures people on a regular basis, play Grand Theft Auto, and enjoy torture porn movies, such as the Saw franchise. For the cultural sociologist Henry Giroux, our popular culture provides us with an education in cruelty and creates a general atmosphere where violence and aggression is tolerated and in many cases encouraged. This is not the place, however, to discuss the finer points of Giroux’s theory or enter into age old debates about media effects.
Instead, the reason I start with reference to this work is because it was in the context of having recently written these papers that I viewed Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed film The Hurt Locker and recognised that it perfectly captures the idea of the death drive as a social and cultural phenomenon that transforms violence, aggression, and more centrally destructiveness from social pathologies into aspects of a norm or ethical principle of deadly risk to be employed as a guide for living and dying. Moreover, my sense was that The Hurt Locker, a film about bomb disposal in Iraq, could be used to show how psychoanalytic theory could be employed in social analysis to reveal a meta- or socio-psychological condition, on the basis that film condenses these kind of conditions into a text that we create in order to tell ourselves about our own society and culture.
The idea of a link between the psychological condition of the death drive and contemporary society raises some interesting questions. First, we must ask ourselves, how is condition this written into the film and how can psycho-social analysis reveal its presence? Second, we have to think about timing. Why now? What is it about contemporary society that makes the death drive current, since as we will see, Freud saw the death drive as a kind of ahistorical phenomenon, which is somehow hard-wired into humans? However, before we start to answer these questions, let us think about the idea of the death drive.
Freud wrote about the death drive or thanatos in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In his view human psychology is governed by two opposing principles – a life drive (eros) and more fundamentally, a death drive (thanatos). For Freud thanatos emerges because human existence is characterised by trauma. Human birth is traumatic. In Freud’s eyes the newborn experiences birth as a traumatic separation from its mother. This experience is then repeated later in life when the child learns from its father that it will eventually have to leave its mother behind and become an adult in its own right. All of this psycho-sexual trauma means that humans are wounded creatures.
For Freud we are naturally wounded creatures and we spend our lives searching for a sense of completion and peace. But there is no ultimate satisfaction. There is no way to return to the state of peace that we experience before the original moment of trauma, birth. There is no way to return to the womb. In Freud’s view this is why human life is largely characterised by a kind of raging turmoil set on the return to the peace originally experienced in the womb which in his view can only be repeated in one experience, death. Hence the founder of psychoanalysis regarded humans as essentially self-destructive creatures who have evolved various defence mechanisms for staying alive.
The first of these mechanisms is called projection, whereby the desire to destroy oneself is projected onto other people in the shape of what psychoanalysts have come to call aggressivity. But how to control aggressivity, which would essentially transform humanity into a self-destructive species? The answer is society or what Freud calls civilization. Civilization controls our violent impulses and prevents us from killing each other, but only at the cost of limiting our instincts. Society is, therefore, a social control machine.
This is the meaning of Freud’s idea of the life drive or eros. The life drive counter-acts the death drive by re-directing our natural instincts to destruction into social construction and social development. But unfortunately, civilization offers no lasting peace and we are haunted by thanatos. For example, we may seek out peace and completion through religion, which tells us about heaven and the afterlife where the endless desire to find the thing which will complete us no longer exists, and other secular forms that offer ecstatic experience, such as sex, narcotic, and alcohol addiction. All of these forms of addiction numb the pain of life and provide us with the momentary relief Georges Bataille talked about in terms of le petite mort, or the little death, meaning the moment of orgasm, ecstasy, or inebriation, where we lose ourselves, go blank, and descend into nothingness for a short period of time.
The little death is, however, just that, a small death. The limit state of ecstasy is forever balanced by the need to carry on, by the need to persist, by the need to live provided by eros. Eros means that the apocalyptic moment of death is postponed for as long as possible. The apocalypse is, therefore, not now, but rather distributed across life in whatever limit experiences we can manage to cram into our limited time in the world.
This Freudian theory is, of course, perfectly captured by the film, The Hurt Locker, which tells the story of an American bomb disposal expert in Iraq, William James (Jeremy Renner), who takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience. The film clearly shows that he feels most alive when he is closest to death, a condition supported by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who spoke about being-towards-death, and told us that we should live every moment as though it was our last, in order that we might live a full and meaningful life. I think that this much is explicit in the manifest content of the film. However, a deeper, psychoanalytic understanding of the film, requires an interpretation of the latent meaning of the scene of bomb disposal itself that we might talk about through Heideggerian language, being-with-bombs. I use the term being-with-bombs because in Freud’s theory humans live with bombs every day of their lives. We all live with psychological bombs lodged deep in our unconscious minds waiting to explode, turning our lives to rubble. The death drive, the product of the trauma of birth, is, of course, the ultimate unexploded bomb, the bomb that Freud knew could never be defused or disarmed. In Freud’s thought the best we can ever do is to avoid detonation. We can hold our selves, or in Freud’s language our egos, together and keep the death drive in check.
It is this situation, this psychological complex, that is beautifully captured by The Hurt Locker. The psychological complex of the struggle between the life and death drives is perfectly depicted by James’ confrontation with the bomb. The moment when he is most alive, the moment when he is potentially about to die, the moment when he confronts the bomb, is the moment when the life drive meets the death drive and life hangs in the balance.
Should we consider the work of one of Freud’s followers, Melanie Klein, we can reinforce this theory, so that it becomes more than simply a metaphor. For Klein, who wrote about the life and death drives as they play out in child psychology, psychological processes are always embodied processes that we also project onto the world around us. In this respect, the link between the life / death drive complex and bomb detonation is no longer simply a metaphor because the threat of psychological collapse is the threat that the body will be exploded to pieces. Moreover, the fact that the war between the life and death drives is played out in terms of bomb detonation is not simply a metaphorical connection, since it is possible to see the latter social political reality as an expression of a deeper psychological reality in the same way that everything in the world is from a psychoanalytic perspective an expression of human psychological reality.
Following this train of thought, we can consider the meaning of the bomb suit, which the detonation experts wear to protect themselves from blasts. The bomb suit is the Freudian ego, the front stage social self, that defends us against the chaos of the death drive that threatens to blow us to bits. When James dons the bomb suit to confront the bomb he is caught on the line between the life drive, designed to keep us alive by turning us into unified selves, and the death drive, that threatens to blow us to bits, but when he throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive. Herein lies James’ ethic of deadly risk, his attempt to realise Heidegger’s idea, being-towards-death, in what for Freud would be a perverse form, being-with-bombs.
In Freudian / Kleinian terms, the bomb is also a projection of the self because it consists of a hard shell containing powerful explosive material. In light of this process of objectification, the disposal experts’ tinkering with the bomb’s wires and components is really an expression of his attempt to work out his own life / death drive complex through the object that will ultimately decide whether he lives or dies. And should he live, he will confront bombs, different bombs, but essentially the same bomb, over and over again, because the war between eros and thanatos never ends, apart from the moment when we finally succumb to death and thanatos reaches its telos. Freud called this condition which runs through life the compulsion to repeat. Klein talked about it in terms of the vicious circle. Either way, what it means is that the battle between the forces of life and death is always on and will never end so long as humans are alive and continue to be born.
It is an understanding of this fact that gives the film its existential edge. We see James’ attempt to live a normal life. He spends time with his son and his divorced wife, who he tells his friends stuck with him for some reason that he can’t fathom, but he can never leave the bomb behind. So he returns to the front and the war re-starts. At that point the film ends.
What we can see then is that James’ psychological war with himself is played out across the urban war zone of Iraq. The idea of the war zone is crucial here for enabling us answer the vexing question, why now? What is it about our society, the society of risks we might also call the society of the death drive, that makes it more risky and more deadly than previous societies, given that Freud thought that the death drive is a primal human condition?
Essentially the answer to this questions reveals the beauty of The Hurt Locker, which is that it is plays out a deep existential conflict common to all humans in a contemporary scene and manages to suggest that there is something very particular about this contemporary scene that thrusts this deep existential conflict front and centre.
In Freudian theory we know that war, the war in the self, and the projected war with other people, is resolved by society, and the norms and values of society. What we have not mentioned is that these norms and values are only effective because authority, the primary authority of the father figure, is internalised in the form of what Freud called the super-ego. The super-ego, the law in our heads that tells us that you cannot do this, that, or the other, is the authority that keeps us in check and prevents the war from breaking out, holds society together, and ensures that the life drive maintains some semblance of control over the death drive.
What the film illustrates through its depiction of the Iraq war, which symbolises the condition of perma-war that has come to characterise contemporary globalisation, is what psychoanalysts knew in the 1960s, which is that authority is on wane and that the forces of violence and chaos are now, more than ever before, barely contained by civilized social structures. We can see this condition today. Globalisation is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what the recent economic collapse was all about? Is this not what the war on terror is all about? Society is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what theories of broken Britain are about? Is this not what panics about youth deviance are about? And the self? The contemporary self is in a state of barely contained chaos on the edge of complete breakdown. Is this not what the story of James in The Hurt Locker is really about? Is this not what gives this film its particular resonance?
So all of this is contained in The Hurt Locker, a film that illuminates the chaotic nature of globalisation through its depiction of the Iraq War and the chaotic nature of the self thrust into these chaotic circumstances in the form of a bomb disposal expect who plays out the endless struggle between the life and death drives every time he confronts a bomb in the field. In this way we can see how it is possible to link psychological theory to cultural analysis to form a complex theory that can shed light on the contemporary human condition, a condition that takes in the microscopic level of social psychology and the macroscopic level of globalisation.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
A Sociology of Swine Flu?
How can we use sociology to understand the threat of swine flu? From a sociological perspective we could say that swine flu illustrates the problem of globalisation. For sociologists globalisation, which describes processes of interconnection between diverse peoples and places across the world, is made possible by high speed communication and transport networks. While these technologies have provided the world’s elites with great freedoms, they have also made their world feel like a far riskier place than it did before, simply because they expose them to not only local uncertainties, but also threats emanating from far off places.
Under these conditions the principle of communication, which may be seen to represent the positive side of globalisation, is transformed into the principle of contagion, which describes a form of communication which is neither positive nor voluntary, but rather suggests a mode of transmission that is threatening and dangerous to those who may become recipients of the transmitted object or organism. In our global age, there are various manifestations of threatening communication, including the transmission of toxic assets, which recently pushed the global economy to the brink, and global terrorism, which describes a form of terrorism rooted in the networks of global space.
However, the classic carrier of the concept of contagion remains the figure of the virus that today refers to both the computer virus, which threatens to cripple IT networks and bring our communicative world to a halt, and the microscopic organism, such as the AIDS, E-Bola, or Influenza virus, that menaces us through the principle of communication / contagion that is absolutely central to our global age. Although it is clear that the problem of swine flu is primarily a global one, three sources lead me to conclude that there are issues related to Mexico that can help us to understand the sociological and cultural significance of this new virus.
These three sources, which include a book on the idea of death in Mexican culture, an architectural study of criminality and immigration in the American-Mexican border region, and a Mexican movie on fear and paranoia in Mexico City, may appear completely unrelated to swine flu beyond the common ground of Mexico, but I think that each of these texts can shed light on the core sociological problematic illuminated by the virus. My second and third examples, Fernando Romero’s book 'Hyperborder' and Rodrigo Pla’s movie 'La Zona', illustrate the problem of boundaries, boundary transgression, fear, and anxiety in Mexico. These two texts are, therefore, not unrelated.
At the moment, the American-Mexican border region is a hot topic in American politics primarily because of the ways in which Mexican drug gangs have begun to spill over the border, exacerbating the problem of illegal immigration, and making the drugs problem in American worse than ever. In the context of this situation, which has seen Mexico City become one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, rich residents of Mexico’s urban leviathan hide behind the walls of fortified housing complexes. 'La Zona' tells the story of what happens when the paranoid residents of one of these gated complexes are confronted with a group of poor criminals who have infiltrated their space and decide to take the law into their own hands.
But what have these examples got to do with swine flu? The answer is that what both of these examples illustrate is the problem of paranoid social relations, the situation where communication is transformed into contagion, which is exemplified by the problem of swine flu. There is, of course, more to swine flu than paranoid social relations because what the microscopic virus attacks is the body in the infected person or organism. Although this may seem like a banal point, it is far from insignificant to the consideration of the sociology of swine flu in a global context, precisely because what processes of globalisation have produced over the last twenty or thirty years is a renewed focus on the biological body that has led to the resurgence of the sociology of the body and theories of bio-politics.
The reasons for this are not hard to understand. In the face of a completely open world, where national boundaries seem far less important, the individual is thrown back on their own container, the biological body, which becomes the interface between self and world. It is exactly this boundary that the virus threatens by infecting the closed body with microscopic foreign bodies that prevent it from functioning properly. Under these conditions it is not surprising that we become paranoid about viral infections. We struggle to maintain our self-identity because viral infection is the other side of processes of globalisation that threaten the sociological basis of our self-identity and swine flu is simply the latest manifestation of this condition.
Enter my first exemplary text: Claudio Lomnitz’s book 'Death and the Idea of Mexico'. Lomnitz tells us that death has always been key to understanding Mexican culture and that this has been the case since the Aztecs who were obsessed with death and sacrifice. From a sociological perspective, this explains why Mexico had to be the epicentre of swine flu, because what is Mexican experience of death about if it is not about the biological demise of the living body that directly parallels the psychological decline of the self under conditions of globalisation represented by the virus, and shows why viruses such as swine flu will continue to leap from animals to humans because what does this process of contagion across species illustrate but the collapse of the category of the human before a techno-medicalised world that reduces people to DNA code that can easily be manipulated in the name of post-humanity and a globalised capitalism that treats people like beasts to be exploited for profit under the sign of an economy of subhumanity?
Under these conditions the principle of communication, which may be seen to represent the positive side of globalisation, is transformed into the principle of contagion, which describes a form of communication which is neither positive nor voluntary, but rather suggests a mode of transmission that is threatening and dangerous to those who may become recipients of the transmitted object or organism. In our global age, there are various manifestations of threatening communication, including the transmission of toxic assets, which recently pushed the global economy to the brink, and global terrorism, which describes a form of terrorism rooted in the networks of global space.
However, the classic carrier of the concept of contagion remains the figure of the virus that today refers to both the computer virus, which threatens to cripple IT networks and bring our communicative world to a halt, and the microscopic organism, such as the AIDS, E-Bola, or Influenza virus, that menaces us through the principle of communication / contagion that is absolutely central to our global age. Although it is clear that the problem of swine flu is primarily a global one, three sources lead me to conclude that there are issues related to Mexico that can help us to understand the sociological and cultural significance of this new virus.
These three sources, which include a book on the idea of death in Mexican culture, an architectural study of criminality and immigration in the American-Mexican border region, and a Mexican movie on fear and paranoia in Mexico City, may appear completely unrelated to swine flu beyond the common ground of Mexico, but I think that each of these texts can shed light on the core sociological problematic illuminated by the virus. My second and third examples, Fernando Romero’s book 'Hyperborder' and Rodrigo Pla’s movie 'La Zona', illustrate the problem of boundaries, boundary transgression, fear, and anxiety in Mexico. These two texts are, therefore, not unrelated.
At the moment, the American-Mexican border region is a hot topic in American politics primarily because of the ways in which Mexican drug gangs have begun to spill over the border, exacerbating the problem of illegal immigration, and making the drugs problem in American worse than ever. In the context of this situation, which has seen Mexico City become one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, rich residents of Mexico’s urban leviathan hide behind the walls of fortified housing complexes. 'La Zona' tells the story of what happens when the paranoid residents of one of these gated complexes are confronted with a group of poor criminals who have infiltrated their space and decide to take the law into their own hands.
But what have these examples got to do with swine flu? The answer is that what both of these examples illustrate is the problem of paranoid social relations, the situation where communication is transformed into contagion, which is exemplified by the problem of swine flu. There is, of course, more to swine flu than paranoid social relations because what the microscopic virus attacks is the body in the infected person or organism. Although this may seem like a banal point, it is far from insignificant to the consideration of the sociology of swine flu in a global context, precisely because what processes of globalisation have produced over the last twenty or thirty years is a renewed focus on the biological body that has led to the resurgence of the sociology of the body and theories of bio-politics.
The reasons for this are not hard to understand. In the face of a completely open world, where national boundaries seem far less important, the individual is thrown back on their own container, the biological body, which becomes the interface between self and world. It is exactly this boundary that the virus threatens by infecting the closed body with microscopic foreign bodies that prevent it from functioning properly. Under these conditions it is not surprising that we become paranoid about viral infections. We struggle to maintain our self-identity because viral infection is the other side of processes of globalisation that threaten the sociological basis of our self-identity and swine flu is simply the latest manifestation of this condition.
Enter my first exemplary text: Claudio Lomnitz’s book 'Death and the Idea of Mexico'. Lomnitz tells us that death has always been key to understanding Mexican culture and that this has been the case since the Aztecs who were obsessed with death and sacrifice. From a sociological perspective, this explains why Mexico had to be the epicentre of swine flu, because what is Mexican experience of death about if it is not about the biological demise of the living body that directly parallels the psychological decline of the self under conditions of globalisation represented by the virus, and shows why viruses such as swine flu will continue to leap from animals to humans because what does this process of contagion across species illustrate but the collapse of the category of the human before a techno-medicalised world that reduces people to DNA code that can easily be manipulated in the name of post-humanity and a globalised capitalism that treats people like beasts to be exploited for profit under the sign of an economy of subhumanity?
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
G20: The Future of Global Society
In terms of political debate, the G20 conference has been billed as a confrontation between Anglo-American free market capitalism and Franco-German social democracy. While the British and Americans want to re-capitalise the financial system and save the banks, whose initial irresponsibility was based on the free market ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan political era, the French and Germans want to concentrate on regulation in order to control future financial speculation. Unfortunately, from the British and American perspective, the effects of this regulatory policy would be to restrict the entrepreneurial scope of the city, cool the global economy, and limit the possibility of future growth. But while the British and Americans are concerned to ensure the possibility of future economic growth, and remain wedded to the neo-liberal theory that understands economic freedom as the essential public good, the French and Germans recognise that the problem of unfettered economic freedom is social fragmentation and disintegration.
We know that these effects have been produced by the current economic downturn: UK unemployment has reached 2 million, house repossessions are on the increase, and despite zero interest rates social insecurity has become the norm for the majority of the population. But what is worse is that British and American efforts to re-capitalise the financial system in the name of economic freedom and the public good will no doubt have further negative effects on social security, precisely because the enormous expenditure of public funds on the financial sector will require cuts in public services, such as health, education, and welfare. Although British and American policy makers are clearly willing to sacrifice public services to the market because they are invested in ideas of the individual and individual responsibility, it is clearly not acceptable to the French and Germans who are attached to the notion of the social state and the idea of social responsibility.
While it may well be necessary to stabilise banks in order to reboot the economy and encourage lending, the British and American approach to limit reform is based on the desire to repair the current neo-liberal system and restart the credit society based on individual speculation. This attachment to individual speculation applies to everybody from the man or woman in the street, who is encouraged to buy now and pay later, to bankers, who have spent the last twenty years speculating on the markets and inventing complex financial instruments called derivatives based entirely on the buying and selling of insurance and debt. It is this political-economic system that both invented the contemporary global economy and caused its rapid collapse over the course of the last twelve months. Given the connection between the credit society and processes of high-tech globalisation, which have been more or less entirely based on globalised communication and financial networks, it may appear that Franco-German plan to regulate financial trading will somehow limit or roll back globalisation and result in the emergence of a proliferation of national protectorates.
But surely there must be some middle ground between free market neo-liberalism, which abandons the individual to the whims of the invisible hand of the global economy, and national protectionism, whereby states close their doors to processes of globalisation for fear of the negative effects of market turbulence on society? But is this really a choice? It may be that there is really no choice between these two options because, as the Chinese have recently discovered, it is not possible to decouple from the global economy. Regardless of whether or not a particular nation state wants to participate in processes of globalisation, it cannot escape the reality of the contemporary global condition, including the global economy. It is clear that the French and Germans know that decoupling is not an option. However, it is also clear that they have no intention of contributing to restarting the consumer boom, which is frustrating for the British and Americans who know they cannot re-boot the neo-liberal economic system on their own. What, then, is the Franco-German plan?
Since national decoupling is not possible, the Franco-German approach is based on a view that what is required is a global or at least integrated multi-national response to financial regulation. Whether or not this view succeeds, and results in the emergence of the new form of social globalisation, is probably more or less reliant on whether Obama remains true to his utopian promise to deliver change. I think this shift to a more socialistic brand of globalisation is unlikely to come from Gordon Brown, simply because he clearly understands economy better than he does society, meaning that what is likely to make or break a global new deal at the G20 conference is Obama, and his courage to advance a more socialistic brand of Americanism comparable to that of FDR and abandon the neo-liberal robber baron capitalism of Bush II.
We know that these effects have been produced by the current economic downturn: UK unemployment has reached 2 million, house repossessions are on the increase, and despite zero interest rates social insecurity has become the norm for the majority of the population. But what is worse is that British and American efforts to re-capitalise the financial system in the name of economic freedom and the public good will no doubt have further negative effects on social security, precisely because the enormous expenditure of public funds on the financial sector will require cuts in public services, such as health, education, and welfare. Although British and American policy makers are clearly willing to sacrifice public services to the market because they are invested in ideas of the individual and individual responsibility, it is clearly not acceptable to the French and Germans who are attached to the notion of the social state and the idea of social responsibility.
While it may well be necessary to stabilise banks in order to reboot the economy and encourage lending, the British and American approach to limit reform is based on the desire to repair the current neo-liberal system and restart the credit society based on individual speculation. This attachment to individual speculation applies to everybody from the man or woman in the street, who is encouraged to buy now and pay later, to bankers, who have spent the last twenty years speculating on the markets and inventing complex financial instruments called derivatives based entirely on the buying and selling of insurance and debt. It is this political-economic system that both invented the contemporary global economy and caused its rapid collapse over the course of the last twelve months. Given the connection between the credit society and processes of high-tech globalisation, which have been more or less entirely based on globalised communication and financial networks, it may appear that Franco-German plan to regulate financial trading will somehow limit or roll back globalisation and result in the emergence of a proliferation of national protectorates.
But surely there must be some middle ground between free market neo-liberalism, which abandons the individual to the whims of the invisible hand of the global economy, and national protectionism, whereby states close their doors to processes of globalisation for fear of the negative effects of market turbulence on society? But is this really a choice? It may be that there is really no choice between these two options because, as the Chinese have recently discovered, it is not possible to decouple from the global economy. Regardless of whether or not a particular nation state wants to participate in processes of globalisation, it cannot escape the reality of the contemporary global condition, including the global economy. It is clear that the French and Germans know that decoupling is not an option. However, it is also clear that they have no intention of contributing to restarting the consumer boom, which is frustrating for the British and Americans who know they cannot re-boot the neo-liberal economic system on their own. What, then, is the Franco-German plan?
Since national decoupling is not possible, the Franco-German approach is based on a view that what is required is a global or at least integrated multi-national response to financial regulation. Whether or not this view succeeds, and results in the emergence of the new form of social globalisation, is probably more or less reliant on whether Obama remains true to his utopian promise to deliver change. I think this shift to a more socialistic brand of globalisation is unlikely to come from Gordon Brown, simply because he clearly understands economy better than he does society, meaning that what is likely to make or break a global new deal at the G20 conference is Obama, and his courage to advance a more socialistic brand of Americanism comparable to that of FDR and abandon the neo-liberal robber baron capitalism of Bush II.
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