"Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World"
Added 2021-04-13 17:07:36 +0000 UTCIn this episode, Breht was invited on a local NPR affiliate station to discuss Adam Curtis' new 6 part docu-series "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". In this episode he offers some praises of the film, as well as some critiques of the documentary and of Adam Curtis' approach to history.
This is the full unedited version of that discussion, of which only a fraction will make it on air.
Check out the TrueAnon episode mentioned: https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/something-strange-happened-teaser
Watch the full series for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME&ab_channel=AdamCurtisDocumentary
Comments
Breht! I'm on an Adam Curtis Bender right now. I haven't seen Can't Get You Out of My Head yet but I've watched: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Bitter Lake, Hypernormalization, and Power of Nightmares. I love hearing your take on it. If you check his wiki, you'll see that Curtis explicitly disavows a Marxist, materialist view of history and consciously focuses on intellectual / cultural history. Here's a great quote on this: "Well, a lot of people go on about how I’m a leftist, but I’m not really, because I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like Weber is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions—froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences." In this I think Curtis leans heavily on a distorted view of Marxism that Engels himself disavowed in one of his later letters, "According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form." (Engels to J. Bloch, 1890) Curtis's work would be tremendously enriched, I think, by the nuances of scientific (not vulgar) Marxism. In some instances he does adopt something of a material analysis. In Bitter Lake he definitely shows how the Oil Shock in the early 1970s and the crisis of capitalism in that decade had a big impact on the course of American imperialism. But on the other hand, in All Watched Over he seems more to say that the ideas of Ayn Rand and her circle, the Silicon Valley tech utopianists, cyberneticians, and ecologists overdetermined the course of the neoliberal economy. This is very much an idealist, not a materialist, view of history!! And yet there's value in Curtis, I think. His documentaries masterfully undermine the positivism of the neoliberal era, showing what an utter failure the sort of anarcho-capistlist ideas of networked free markets are. He even exposes the ways that these ideas have insinuated their way into the left! Since we're not vulgar or dogmatic Marxists, we recognize how economic base determines superstructure - but we can also see how the superstructure works back on and helps to shape the economic base, as well. I think if we watch Curtis's movies with a grain of salt, he can help illuminate the mutual inter-relation between culture and economy that's a hallmark of dialectical thinking. If we view them uncritically, there's CERTAINLY a risk of succumbing to cultural determinism and a reactionary pessimism that goes with it. The aesthetics of his films are also beautiful. The editing is artful in a way that no other documentarian pulls off. The man is an artist, and he captures the madness of our era's culture and politics perfectly. Overall I'd give his oeuvre an 8/10, and given the almost universal demonization of Communism in our culture anyway, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that point. Although I agree, it certainly sucks!
Matt
2021-07-02 23:28:14 +0000 UTCDamn they might have took it down! its up now here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqX1J-1LyzA&ab_channel=Porker idk how long tho!
Revolutionary Left Radio
2021-04-27 18:00:26 +0000 UTCDid YouTube get rid of this?! Cant find the episodes anymore!
From The River To The Sea 🇵🇸
2021-04-24 14:42:59 +0000 UTC
