June 20, 2011
It seems to me that there are arch-rationalists, who believe that Nature is comprehensible only to rational thought, and then that there are ‘arch’ rationalists, like that parody makes you. If you would like to hear my defense of Adam Curtis, it runs something like this: All of us exist within a horizon of rational control over circumstances/situations/Nature/whatever. We don’t have to pray or cast a spell to make coffee in the morning, we just turn on the machine that does it for us. Everything the coffee machine does is very simple and understandable, as it should be, because another person made it that way. A coffee machine is a great example of controlling your circumstance using rational thought. In a pinch you or I could probably make one from just the stuff lying around our house. In more dire straits, maybe even in a forest with no stuff at all: just your connect-the-dots rational thinking and the things in a forest. Ok, so scale this rationalized coffee-making up to a planet-wide scale. It really doesn’t work. The control and comprehension we are supposed to have over Nature and ourselves gets ragged and loose the larger you make your scale, until at the largest scale (continents and governments and economies) it evaporates. No one has any control over Nature at the largest scales, nor economies, nor the interactions of national governments. There are two ways of understanding why we lose control at very large scales. One is that we just aren’t sophisticated enough, that the rational principle at the heart of everything is still there, but it is unknown to us. That is, there is a way of managing economies and governments and Nature at these large scales, but no one’s figured it out yet. It’s in the wind, waiting for some genius to identify it. The other way of understanding why we lose control is pessimistic. It says that there is no rational principle at the heart of everything, and it is only at the larger scales at which we attempt to employ it that its absence becomes a Big Problem. This is a huge revolution in how people think about the world. Since the fifteenth century we’ve been on a trajectory that assumes a latent rationality governs everything, and our job if we want to make things better for ourselves is to excavate the rules hidden in a phenomenon. You then make those rules into math, and by that math control (or at least predict) every other instance of that phenomenon. In other words, once you understand how water behaves when there’s a lot of it, and you’ve done the science of (in this case) hydrodynamics, and you can build dam after dam after dam without needing to treat the construction of each one specially. It’s such an obvious principle it doesn’t seem to bear stating, but it was a big deal to people accustomed to saying incantations when they wanted their morning coffee to come out right. Enter Adam Curtis. The failure of our rational endeavors at the large scale of societies and continents and weather systems and economies leaves a gaping hole in the enterprise. That is, it kills the whole project if there is some level or aspect of the world at which it (rationality) is inapplicable. Now, again, this assumes you’re not someone who thinks ‘Give it time, we’ll perfect economics eventually.’ This assumes that you might be skeptical about the be-all-end-all validity of rationality at all levels, and if you are, then Adam Curtis might speak to you. If, however, you believe that anything that can be true must be expressed in a series of logically interlocking statements, then I’m afraid there is no defense of Adam Curtis that will convince you, & sorry to have wasted your time. Goodbye. That person (hopefully not you) is too far within the project Western humanity has been engaged in for the last five hundred years to conceive of situations beyond its ken. Curtis is pointing to the daily crises over which we can exert no control and screaming ‘Conceive of it, motherfucker! Cuz whether you can or not, the World is sure enough able to!’ The way he (Curtis) has chosen to express this scream is in what I would call a collage. A collage is a gone-by-the-wayside artform that we mainly associate with kindergarten. Originally, however, it was supposed to be an extremely avant garde way of expressing the truth of your situation. By cutting apparently unrelated things out of newspapers and magazines, one was supposed to be able to take the pulse of the society you were living in. Putting these cut-out things next to one another might reveal hidden facets about the times etc. Now obviously because you’re the one cutting the stuff out you can make it say whatever you want. Put lady legs on Field Marshall von Hindenburg and you’ve ‘said’ he’s effeminate and not as respectable as everyone thinks. So collage lends itself very easily to propaganda, and it was used that way all the time in the 20’s and 30’s. But, if you can imagine an honest person trying to do collage, a person who is innocently looking for connections and narratives that genuinely wouldn’t have occurred to him before he began snipping things out of the Sears Catalog, then you can get an idea of what collage might do. And if you can do that (and to be very clear ‘that’ means ‘a person who is not trying to sell you an idea, but who is only trying to see the world through a new prism because of a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the world’) then you see why Curtis’ stuff takes the form it does. An ungenerous way of looking at it would be to call it a style. And now, finally, we can put these two things together: the ‘problem with rationality’ bit and the collage method of finding new narratives to express it. That is pretty much how I would describe what Curtis is doing. Simply replace magazines and dead-tree media with the ocean of video footage that exists depicting things that happened in the twentieth century. Obviously like anything else that aspires to exist outside the horizon of rationality (which is a pretty good definition of art, as it happens), what you think of it is called an interpretation. My interpretation is something like ‘We are at a threshold in our history. Rational interrogation of Nature and our own interactions have taken us this far, but they are faltering (to wit, uncontrollable and seemingly programmatic economic bubbles; wars without clean causes, morally defensible belligerents or plausible terms of conclusion; white-hot rancor about how our governments ought to run and sullen discontent at every decision they do make, etc., etc.). If we are to carry ourselves into the future in the style to which we have become accustomed, something has to give, and a new way of conducting ourselves has to emerge. A guy called Adam Curtis is trying to demonstrate these facts thru narratives traced in the archival footage of the twentieth century. Nobody has any particularly good ideas about how to proceed.’ ——& that’s all I have to say about that. So you are free to disagree with me and Curtis, but what I think you will have to admit, after reading this, is that you can’t disagree about the kind of person disagreeing makes you, and the allegiances you hold because of it.

It seems to me that there are arch-rationalists, who believe that Nature is comprehensible only to rational thought, and then that there are ‘arch’ rationalists, like that parody makes you.

If you would like to hear my defense of Adam Curtis, it runs something like this:

All of us exist within a horizon of rational control over circumstances/situations/Nature/whatever. We don’t have to pray or cast a spell to make coffee in the morning, we just turn on the machine that does it for us. Everything the coffee machine does is very simple and understandable, as it should be, because another person made it that way. A coffee machine is a great example of controlling your circumstance using rational thought. In a pinch you or I could probably make one from just the stuff lying around our house. In more dire straits, maybe even in a forest with no stuff at all: just your connect-the-dots rational thinking and the things in a forest.

Ok, so scale this rationalized coffee-making up to a planet-wide scale. It really doesn’t work. The control and comprehension we are supposed to have over Nature and ourselves gets ragged and loose the larger you make your scale, until at the largest scale (continents and governments and economies) it evaporates. No one has any control over Nature at the largest scales, nor economies, nor the interactions of national governments.

There are two ways of understanding why we lose control at very large scales. One is that we just aren’t sophisticated enough, that the rational principle at the heart of everything is still there, but it is unknown to us. That is, there is a way of managing economies and governments and Nature at these large scales, but no one’s figured it out yet. It’s in the wind, waiting for some genius to identify it.

The other way of understanding why we lose control is pessimistic. It says that there is no rational principle at the heart of everything, and it is only at the larger scales at which we attempt to employ it that its absence becomes a Big Problem.

This is a huge revolution in how people think about the world. Since the fifteenth century we’ve been on a trajectory that assumes a latent rationality governs everything, and our job if we want to make things better for ourselves is to excavate the rules hidden in a phenomenon. You then make those rules into math, and by that math control (or at least predict) every other instance of that phenomenon. In other words, once you understand how water behaves when there’s a lot of it, and you’ve done the science of (in this case) hydrodynamics, and you can build dam after dam after dam without needing to treat the construction of each one specially. It’s such an obvious principle it doesn’t seem to bear stating, but it was a big deal to people accustomed to saying incantations when they wanted their morning coffee to come out right.

Enter Adam Curtis.

The failure of our rational endeavors at the large scale of societies and continents and weather systems and economies leaves a gaping hole in the enterprise. That is, it kills the whole project if there is some level or aspect of the world at which it (rationality) is inapplicable. Now, again, this assumes you’re not someone who thinks ‘Give it time, we’ll perfect economics eventually.’ This assumes that you might be skeptical about the be-all-end-all validity of rationality at all levels, and if you are, then Adam Curtis might speak to you. If, however, you believe that anything that can be true must be expressed in a series of logically interlocking statements, then I’m afraid there is no defense of Adam Curtis that will convince you, & sorry to have wasted your time. Goodbye.

That person (hopefully not you) is too far within the project Western humanity has been engaged in for the last five hundred years to conceive of situations beyond its ken. Curtis is pointing to the daily crises over which we can exert no control and screaming ‘Conceive of it, motherfucker! Cuz whether you can or not, the World is sure enough able to!’

The way he (Curtis) has chosen to express this scream is in what I would call a collage.

A collage is a gone-by-the-wayside artform that we mainly associate with kindergarten. Originally, however, it was supposed to be an extremely avant garde way of expressing the truth of your situation. By cutting apparently unrelated things out of newspapers and magazines, one was supposed to be able to take the pulse of the society you were living in. Putting these cut-out things next to one another might reveal hidden facets about the times etc.

Now obviously because you’re the one cutting the stuff out you can make it say whatever you want. Put lady legs on Field Marshall von Hindenburg and you’ve ‘said’ he’s effeminate and not as respectable as everyone thinks. So collage lends itself very easily to propaganda, and it was used that way all the time in the 20’s and 30’s. But, if you can imagine an honest person trying to do collage, a person who is innocently looking for connections and narratives that genuinely wouldn’t have occurred to him before he began snipping things out of the Sears Catalog, then you can get an idea of what collage might do. And if you can do that (and to be very clear ‘that’ means ‘a person who is not trying to sell you an idea, but who is only trying to see the world through a new prism because of a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the world’) then you see why Curtis’ stuff takes the form it does. An ungenerous way of looking at it would be to call it a style.

And now, finally, we can put these two things together: the ‘problem with rationality’ bit and the collage method of finding new narratives to express it. That is pretty much how I would describe what Curtis is doing. Simply replace magazines and dead-tree media with the ocean of video footage that exists depicting things that happened in the twentieth century.

Obviously like anything else that aspires to exist outside the horizon of rationality (which is a pretty good definition of art, as it happens), what you think of it is called an interpretation. My interpretation is something like

  • ‘We are at a threshold in our history. Rational interrogation of Nature and our own interactions have taken us this far, but they are faltering (to wit, uncontrollable and seemingly programmatic economic bubbles; wars without clean causes, morally defensible belligerents or plausible terms of conclusion; white-hot rancor about how our governments ought to run and sullen discontent at every decision they do make, etc., etc.).
  • If we are to carry ourselves into the future in the style to which we have become accustomed, something has to give, and a new way of conducting ourselves has to emerge.
  • A guy called Adam Curtis is trying to demonstrate these facts thru narratives traced in the archival footage of the twentieth century.
  • Nobody has any particularly good ideas about how to proceed.’

——& that’s all I have to say about that.

So you are free to disagree with me and Curtis, but what I think you will have to admit, after reading this, is that you can’t disagree about the kind of person disagreeing makes you, and the allegiances you hold because of it.

2:48am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z3yrYy6GKRru
(Notes: 11)
  
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