In my last post, over a year ago, I suggested that once you start getting paid to write your personal blog goes up in smoke, which is partly my excuse for shirking. Then again it could have something to do with starting an MRes (in my second year now), reliving my ‘second youth’ (winding down due to the previous point) and leaving the country every five minutes.
A year on, however, and I’m still banging on about the same things, but with some new voices added in for variety. For example, where has Franco Berardi (aka Bifo- yes, even theorists have street names these days) been all my life? His book Soul At Work has had me grinning like a fool, which is ironic given that one of his areas of research is the societal psychopathology of panic and depression, two of my favourite things (evidenced by my Life in AdWords project).
Developing the work of Alan Eherenberg’s wonderfully titled book, The Fatigue of Being Oneself, which outlines depression as a pathology with a strong social content directly linked to pervasive competition, Bifo describes depression as being “deeply connected to the ideology of self-realisation and the happiness imperative”.
Zizek has described this imperative of happiness-first ‘tolerant hedonism’, as emblematic of the what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s call The New Spirit of Capitalism, a revivified capitalism which ‘triumphantly appropriated (the) anti-hierarchical rhetoric of ‘68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism’.
Fulfillment and self-realization is no longer optional in a post-‘68 capitalism which privileges the paramount importance of being happy; what started out as a countercultural antagonism to the stultifying effects of Taylorist managerial/ corporate culture culminates now in a burden, another ‘thing-to-do’: become ourselves, which is understood as become our happy selves.
It transpires that this chimera of selfhood requires work, effort and persistence (hence the fatigue) and a whole industry is geared towards the never-ending DIY project of discovering, and being oneself.
A panoply of tools, tinctures and instruments promise to fill the cracks in our hearts, blast away unhelpful patterns and gloss over our lackluster surface to deliver the self we could be, the self we truly are, underneath all this crap. It’s a paradoxical quest for self-betterment that promises to deliver the self we already ‘really’ are.
And there is so much work to do on this soul: self-help books for everything from time management to heartbreak, meditation for stress, exercise and raw veg diets for health, therapy for head-fucks, networking for status, and so on and on in a spinning top of endless responsibility for one’s self.
Summed up nicely by the slogan (well, and the existence) of Psychologies magazine, Know More, Grow More, this drive for self-improvement also involves a stupendous amount of knowledge accumulation/ sifting. In an attention economy of ever-diminishing time, and ever-increasing speed and volumes of information, this creates yet more psychic stress: what the hell do you fix first? Moreover, failure to achieve this mythical state of self-realization leads to a drop in motivation, where, as Ehrenberg puts it, the depressive individuals are “not up to the task, they are tired of having to become themselves”.
Naturally the info-overload enabled by ever-increasing speeds of connection info isn’t confined to the self-DIY project; it’s a more wide-spread affliction. As Bifo points out, cybertime is limited to human capabilities, which has only a finite quantity of attention to share out, in contrast to the unbounded space of cyberspace, whose speed can accelerate indefinitely, expanding without limits into galaxies of infodust.
Once the limit of cybertime is breached, a cracking commences, where ‘we collapse under the stress/ pressure of overproduction/ hyper-productivity’, unable to accommodate the assaults from the avalanche of attention-demanding goods. The exploding heads in Cronenberg’s Scanners, borne in the early years of the mediafication of everyday life, seem a presciently fitting visual accompaniment.
Speaking of limits, as usual I’ve reached the word count just as I was starting to get excited (or when my head was about to explode, same thing), so I’ll continue this in a ‘part 2’. Sometime next year, probably…
Scanners head explosion SLO MO
