Because this post will be very long, I’ll split it up into two parts.
I’ve been on an Adam Curtis fix of late. Curtis makes television documentaries such as 2002’s The Century of the Self and 2004’s The Power of Nightmares. His films focus not only on the direct connections between people and groups (some of which can be astonishing and unexpected), but on the way in which ideas often have implications far beyond what might initially be perceived. They often give off the frightening tone of a conspiracy theory, suggesting an undiscovered history of hidden connections and sinister plots, and yet they completely undermine the very notion that a successful conspiracy is even possible.
“Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they’re supposed to,” Curtis stated in an interview with Errol Morris, “History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they’re taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.” Curtis’ series take this idea of unintended consequences as their starting points, demonstrating how often radical, liberatory ideas such as those of Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and the Human Potential Movement were used by powerful elites to form the basis of new methods of social control. I cannot overstate the importance of these films: the fact that they don’t show them in every American high school is almost criminal.
Way back in 2007, Momus posted a blog entry titled “Bourriaud x Curtis” in which he presented a series of notes drawing parallels between Curtis’ The Trap and Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics. Having both just begun watching The Trap and reading Relational Aesthetics, I find it fitting to expand upon Momus’ notes. I also wish, however, to incorporate additional points of reference. Firstly, R.D. Laing, who’s The Politics of Experience I’m also currently reading, and who plays a large role in The Trap. Secondly, Hakim Bey, who’s collection of utopian essay-poems, T.A.Z., I’ve been periodically dipping into for the past sixth months.
(links to watch The Trap and The Century of the Self online can be found here)
For those of you familiar with the thinkers and works I’m writing about, I hope I provide new ways of thinking about them. For those of you who are unfamiliar, I hope I pique your interest enough so that you might seek them out on your own. All of them are well worth reading/watching, and seeing as how this post will barely scratch the surface of all these things, I highly recommend that you do so.
The Trap traces the trajectory of game theory (a mathematical model of predicting human behavior developed by a right wing think tank during the Cold War) in influencing contemporary psychiatry, politics, and military policy. “[H]ow a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.” Curtis argues that game theory presents an inaccurate and dangerous conception of human nature in which human beings are selfish, suspicious, and incapable of altruism or empathy. John Nash, who had a large influence in the development of the theory, was a paranoid schizophrenic who would later attribute much of his theorizing to his paranoia.
From here, Curtis moves on to introduce R.D. Laing, a radical British psychiatrist of the 1960s. During that time, schizophrenic patients were typically treated as less than human. Restraint against their will, forced medication (of powerful psychotropic drugs in high doses), and shock therapy were the norm. Laing was one of the first psychiatrists to actually talk to his schizophrenic patients, and found that amazingly, all of them became well enough to leave the institution in short time. Within a year, however, all of them had returned. This led him to study the families of his patients - the home situations to which they were returning. His conclusion was that where a patient was “disturbed, their families were often very disturbing.”
From here, he would go on to study not merely the families of schizophrenics, but the families of “normal,” clinically healthy individuals. The method he used to examine the interactions between family members would find inspiration its in game theory. The results of these studies was a radical treatise on familial and group psycho-dynamics (Sanity, Madness, and the Family), in which he claimed that in all group dynamics, but in families most especially, psychological manipulation of the other group members for ones own benefit was pervasive (placing conditions on one’s love, for instance, or making a loved one feel guilty, in order to get them to act a certain way).
Here is where I disagree with Curtis’ interpretation of Laing. In The Trap, Curtis makes the accusation that it was Laing’s use of game theory-inspired methods that led to his conclusions, and that these conclusions further perpetuate the paranoid, robotic model of human behavior put forth by Nash. But this is simply not true. The beginning of The Politics of Experience finds Laing highly critical of game theory, listing it alongside behaviorism and object relations theory as models of human psychology that he finds “dehumanizing” and a “mystification” of human nature. These forms of psychiatry, he said, merely reproduced in their own theory the symptoms they hoped to treat.
Anyone who’s ever felt hurt or pressured by their parents, anyone who’s ever been in a romantic relationship, anyone who remembers trying desperately to fit in as a kid, can attest to the fact that the manipulations Laing describes take place frequently. Most of us would admit that we have perpetrated them on numerous occasions - whether knowingly or not. But unlike Nash, Laing does not propose these cruel “games” as the total array of human possibility. He sees them as regrettable aspects of our nature, but ones that, if we are aware of them, can be overcome or at least minimized.
Laing and Curtis are essentially arguing the same thing: that the propagation of false conceptions of human nature such as game theory have had an ultimately dehumanizing effect on society. In order to counteract that effect, a new, fuller, more human conception is necesarry.
Laing would go on to establish the Philadelphia Association at Kingsley Hall, an experimental treatment center for schizophrenics that completely did away with coercion, encouraged creative expression, and placed patients and psychiatrists on equal footing. He also challenged the validity of psychiatric labeling. He saw psychiatry as a highly political practice, and rejected the idea that it was the psychiatrist’s job to make his patient “normal.” Rather, he saw normalcy itself as mentally and socially unhealthy. “The perfectly adjusted bomber pilot may be a greater threat to species survival than the hospitalized schizophrenic deluded that the Bomb is inside him,” he wrote, “Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized.”
Is society as a whole dysfunctional? Is it possible to be of sound mental health in a dysfunctional society? John Nash mathematically calculated that if everyone acted solely in their own self-interest, a stable society would result. But what good is stability when you cannot connect with another human being? When you are constantly suspicious of everyone you are close to? What good is stability when love is impossible?
NEXT TIME, IN PART 2: how the ideas of Bourriaud, Bey, and others constitute a potential “treatment plan” to match the grim diagnosis of society offered by Curtis and Laing.
