The Words Of The Prophets.

And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"

Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence, 1963-64

BOMBER’S RIGHT about Adam Curtis’s latest offering, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, it is brilliant. You can tell it’s a work of genius by the way it leaves you looking at the world through its maker’s eyes. Just as I can never see at a sunflower without thinking of Vincent Van Gough, or take in a mega-city by night without recalling the first scene of Bladerunner, I will never again be able to see a couple dancing cheek-to-cheek without thinking of Adam Curtis.

And like Adam Curtis. This morning, for example, out with my family for a leisurely Level 3 Lockdown promenade, I encountered an unfamiliar tag, spray-painted on just about every available flat surface between my front door and the park.

“TRAZE STATIC.CA”

What did it mean? Why was it there? Who was its audience?

These questions were certainly not unanswerable. For a start, tags don’t have to “mean” anything. When we see a dog cock his hind leg and urinate on a power pole, we are not inclined to question the meaning of his behaviour. We understand immediately that the animal is simultaneously identifying itself and registering its presence to all the other dogs in the area. It has no more meaning than the nod of recognition I just gave to the couple passing our little group on the footpath. Just a simple mammalian gesture signalling “nothing to fear from us”.

Where does Adam Curtis come into all this? He intrudes by prompting the sort of questions that make his documentaries so riveting. What has led so many mostly young human-beings to mimic the behaviour of dogs? A tag may not have a unique olfactory signature, but its distinctive visual shape and style is intended to convey exactly the same messages: “I was here” and “I am here”.

Now, readers of a certain age will immediately recall the “Kilroy was here” graffito which first began to appear on the walls of European cities during and immediately after World War II. An Anglo-American meme, by all accounts, the image of the lugubrious observer started popping-up wherever American military personnel ventured. From the soon-to-be-vaporised infrastructure of the Bikini Atoll A-Bomb test-site, to the blasted walls of Vietnam, “Kilroy” bore silent witness to the tragedy and absurdity of human conflict.

Solidaristic Meme: Allied soldiers of World War II allowed "Kilroy" to bear witness to the tragedy and absurdity of war on their behalf.

The difference between the “Kilroy was here” meme and the tagger’s message is, of course, that the latter has absolutely no interest in communicating anything beyond the existence of its creator. Kilroy, by contrast, was a shared identity: one available to everyone who had participated in the overwhelming experiences of combat. For many World War II veterans, talking about what they had seen and done was often extremely difficult. But, Kilroy knew what had happened. He had seen it all. Kilroy had been there.

What, then, is signified by this contemporary retreat from genuine communication? How and why was the mass audience for graffiti shrunk down to these tiny communities of taggers? To handfuls of practitioners who, alone, are capable of recognising the signatures of their fellow scribblers. When did graffiti cease to be a proclamation aimed at anyone who could read, and become instead an arcane collection of secret symbols, intelligible only to the cognoscenti of the spray-can and the magic marker?

In Curtis’s documentary, the older style of graffiti figures prominently. Those who wrote on walls in the decades following World War II were generally communicating messages the “mainstream media” of the day would point-blank refuse to print or broadcast. By slapping up their slogans for all-and-sundry to read they were announcing the existence of alternative interpretations of social, economic and political reality. What their paintbrushes and spray-cans were saying was very simple: the official version is not the only version.

Alternative Messages: What the old-school graffitists were saying with their paintbrushes and spray cans was very simple: the official version is not the only version.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Daft old Boomer. Hasn’t he heard of the Internet? Why would anyone risk being done for wilful damage when they can say everything they want to say on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook without recourse to messy paintbrushes and spray-cans? Who needs “Kilroy” when far more powerful memes are just a few judicious keystrokes and mouse-clicks away? Time and technology have passed these old slogan-daubers by. Wake up Grandpa!”

Fair enough! But questions remain.

Isn’t there a difference between posting and painting? The taggers certainly think so. Risking one’s life and limb (not to mention one’s liberty) to make one’s mark on a surface visible to the whole ‘hood speaks volumes about the courage and resourcefulness of the tagger.

Asserting individual identity by spraying one’s tag all over an inner-city billboard may not carry the political cred’ attached to spray-painting “Stop the Tour” across a motorway overbridge, but it remains an impressive achievement nonetheless. Preaching to the Twitter choir about this, that and the other, just isn’t the same. No one is surprised. No one is challenged. So many posts – my own included – strike me as little more than long-winded tags.

Adam Curtis would introduce a talking head about here: someone to draw out the all-too-obvious moral of the tale. That our world is increasingly driven by an intense hunger for individual recognition and acclaim. In a deeply dispiriting way “speaking truth to power” has become a harmless ritual. Not least because power is, almost certainly, not listening. Tweets, Instagram captions, Facebook posts – all have become mere snowflakes in the “blizzard of the world” that the late Leonard Cohen warned us, way back in 1992, was threatening to cross our thresholds and “overturn the order of the soul”.

Daubing up graffiti was an act of faith in the power of collective understanding. When the old man who lived in the narrow brick house on Dunedin’s Great King Street painted the words “Free Latvia!” on his traffic-facing wall, he was not only appealing for the drivers’ political support, he was also announcing his own faith in his homeland’s future. Back in the 1970s, when I was a student, hardly anyone knew what or where Latvia was. We took in the graffiti with youthful bemusement. But the old man’s faith was not misplaced. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Latvia did indeed become free. And those of us who remembered the old man’s impassioned graffiti, smiled.

The last time I was in Dunedin, I noticed how much the paint had faded. I also noted the crude palimpsest of tags which was crawling up the bricks like so much dayglo ivy.

I had no idea what any of it meant.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 16 February 2021.

Very Different Personages: Vladislav Surkov - Putin's Puppet-Master.

 

The Kremlin Demiurge: "[Vladislav] Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.” - Peter Pomerantsev

 

ADAM CURTIS is a documentary-maker whose work has a way of making the world look and feel completely different. The secret to the success of series as varied as Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), and his most recent work, BitterLake (2015), is Curtis’s ability to bring what’s been hidden in History’s shadows into the light.

 

The nineteenth century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, remarked that: “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Curtis not only takes us behind the scenes, he introduces us to the personages.

 

The latest personage to whom Curtis’s viewers have been introduced is Vladislav Surkov – Vladimir Putin’s political impresario. In the words of Peter Pomerantsev, writing in The London Review of Books: “Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.”

 

Surkov’s great insight into the character of the post-Soviet era was that it would be an epoch devoid of ideological conviction. A society in which all of the grand narratives of the 20th Century (from Absolutism to Socialism to Capitalism) have been tried and found wanting. A place where cynicism and irony will ride shotgun for an amoral authoritarianism whose twinned priorities of self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement recognise no limits.

 

It is a world that fosters in its hapless citizens feeling of vertiginous disorientation. According to Pomerantsev’s chilling description:

 

“[T]he stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.”

 

If all this is beginning to sound unsettlingly familiar, Pomerantsev has more. Surkov, he says, has perfected what he calls “sovereign democracy”, a new form of governance “in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms”. Surkov was also “the man who [turned] television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine”.

 

If you think that’s coming uncomfortably close to a description of New Zealand television (substituting “Key” for “Putin”) then you’re not alone.

 

Obviously, New Zealanders are not ruled over by a political beast as big or as dangerous as Putin, but Pomerantsev’s depiction of a political environment subject to continuous and disorienting shifts of perspective; of leaders performing on a revolving stage whose sets and props are constantly changing; rings more than a few Kiwi bells.

 

Certainly it is Curtis’s view that the curiously “post-modern” style of politics that has distinguished the UK under David Cameron and George Osborne owes a great deal to the political ideas and methods of Vladislav Surkov. (Curtis illustrates his point by advancing video images of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and then rolling them backward – providing a potent visual representation of Osborne’s black is white, 2 + 2 = 5 political style.)

 

Our own Prime Minister and Finance Minister display a similar, loose, relationship with reality. John Key, in particular, seems able to shift his shape almost at will. From the saccharine family man ordering in Saturday night pizza; to the jokey-blokey sports-lover trading wisecracks with commercial radio shock-jocks; to the dead-eyed critic of Nicky Hager’s latest revelations daring the Press Gallery to contradict him; our own post-modern performance artist makes it easy to see from whence his fine-arts student daughter draws her inspiration.

 

Pomerantsev offers us a frightening glimpse of the sort of world to which Surkovian politics is leading us:

 

“In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony. A property ad displayed all over central Moscow earlier this year [2011] captured the mood perfectly. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it showed two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better’. It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules). A few months ago there was a huge ‘Putin party’ at Moscow’s most glamorous club. Strippers writhed around poles chanting: ‘I want you, prime minister.’ It’s the same logic. The sucking-up to the master is completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated 21st-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross you we would quite quickly be dead.”

 

To which, as Adam Curtis rightly observes, we can only say: “Oh Dear.”

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Tuesday, 24 March 2015.

Why The Greens Should Watch Adam Curtis

Soul Destroying: The classical ecological paradigm regards a state of equilibrium as Nature's "default setting".  Adam Curtis's latest series of documentaries argues that our faith in "the balance of nature" is in fact a manifestation of our own inability to meaningfully disturb the equilibrium of the political and economic machinery in which we are enmeshed. Finding ourselves unable to beat the machines, we appear to be trying to join them.

ADAM CURTIS makes television programmes that challenge our understanding of the world. To call this puckish fifty-five-year-old’s productions documentaries scarcely does them justice. Curtis ransacks his BBC employers’ visual archives for his trademark rapid-fire imagery, and makes free with both classical and popular music for his films’ evocative soundtracks. Elucidated and enhanced by these sensory onslaughts, Curtis’ ideas strike hard and sink deep in the minds of his viewers.

His latest offering, a three-part series entitled All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace should be compulsory viewing for every member of the Greens’ caucus and party.

They won’t enjoy it, but I’m confident it would do them a world of good.

Because the second part of Curtis’s trilogy, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”, interrogates and then radically deconstructs one of the central tenets of the green belief system, that: left to themselves, all ecosystems tend towards a state of equilibrium.

It’s the idea which underpins the entire environmental movement. Stripped of the notion that some mysterious natural force somehow keeps all things in balance, the prospect of the human species abandoning its destructive behaviour – and thereby earning itself a “sustainable” niche in Mother Nature’s steady state – becomes a chimera.

Curtis’s challenge to the original ecological paradigm forms just one part of a much broader critique of the way in which men and women of the twentieth and twenty-First centuries have attempted to empty human behaviour of its moral and political dynamism by applying to it the soulless logic of mechanical systems.

At first blush, this would appear to have little or nothing to do with green ideology. Surely the logic of the machine is precisely what greens are fighting against?

What Curtis demonstrates, however, is that the stereotype of the “luddite” green is almost entirely mistaken. By a series of daring conceptual leaps, Curtis links the right-wing libertarianism and extreme individualism of the tea-partiers’ guru, Ayn Rand, with the “turn on, tune in and drop out” libertarianism of the Californian hippies.

The link? Cybernetics.

Cybernetics and systems theory gave rise to the notion that computers could not only free capitalism from the regulatory chains of the social-democratic herd, but that they would make possible a world in which human-beings and the natural world “did their own thing” in perfect harmony.

The curious title of Curtis’s series is taken from a poem by the celebrated 60’s poet, Richard Brautigan. He wrote of:

a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Curtis challenges the superficial radicalism of Brautigan’s hippie vision by drawing on the very real experiences of those who took the systems theory utopians like Buckminster Fuller at their word and established communes of networked, non-hierarchical, self-organising individuals held in equilibrium by the self-correcting influence of “feedback loops”.

What brought these communes to their bitter, often violent, ends was that their anti-political ethos, far from eliminating coercion and exploitation, actually ended up facilitating it. By forbidding majority decision-making and the formation of factions (evil manifestations of the despised practice of politics) all the communards had done was draft a bully’s charter.

Because all human (and natural) systems are dynamic and subject to constant challenge and response, the question of agency is inescapable. Moral and political decisions cannot be magically excised from our social and economic environment unless – and this is the whole point of Curtis’s series – we are willing to regard ourselves as nothing more than amoral bio-machines.

The conflict within the New Zealand Greens, which Sue Bradford has written about with considerable passion of late, carries alarming echoes of Curtis’s critique. The Greens’ prohibition against faction-forming, and their distaste for majority decision-making, sound remarkably similar to the rules of those dysfunctional Californian communes.

Add to this their newfound willingness to become just another “responsible” component in the political circuitry of capitalism, and Sue’s concerns are readily understood.

That’s why Russel Norman, Metiria Turei and their colleagues should invest three hours in watching Curtis’s remarkable trilogy.

It will remind them of what they once had – and are at mortal risk of losing.

The insight that it’s only our ability to make moral decisions that makes us human.

And that there’s absolutely nothing “natural” about it.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 June 2011.