The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

4 episodes in and loving it tbh. i'm not as well versed in history as the majority in this thread so lots and lots of stuff new to me in these. thought the person at the start of 'what is the people are stupid' was peter kay at first, turned out to be julia grant, and boy was her psychiatrist enraging.

the musical play out of that episode outstanding as well.

About two minutes into this my brain decided Curtis sounds fucking exactly like Kieth and I can’t make myself unhear it

it just feels like 5 hours listening to Kieth reading his focus-grouped shopping list with nothing on it or briefly apologising after fatally running you over with his tory cunt SUV.

I’m loving this so much. Thrilled to find out how quickly we can go from Ken Dodd to ISIS.

Yeah this is a blast

the Hong Kong material is powerful stuff, especially the children's choir singing a rod stewart song! but also the hypocrisy of a country that had run a colonial police state for over a century chatting shit about democracy during the handover and the shocking footage from '78 of Brit arsehole colonial thug cops giving some gentle treatment to the *natives*. On the BBC you still get lots of mealy mouthed bs reportage about HK and it wasn't that long ago some of the HK protesters were waving colonial flags.

I find Deng much more interesting than Jiang Qing, perhaps partly because I'm a sexist bastard! During the cultural revolution one of his sons was thrown from a window and seriously injured and left disabled, he was perhaps somewhat reluctantly given protection by Mao as a fellow long marcher, fellow early days revolutionary veteran etc despite becoming politically suspect, but that protection involved doing a mundane factory job and living in an obscure shithole for years. I'm not too sold on the importance of all that "unit of one" thing he has going on, but it's his show!

lol i’m into the individualism stuff tbh. actually suspect that content/thesiswise this is his best since at least TCOS (in which tho i could have sworn he claims psychologists “discovered” in the 20s and 30s what he claims this time they “discovered” in the 80s) (which is actually like, in shakespeare lol) tho i dunno if there’s as much eye candy as (the kinda muddled) bitter lake. looking forward to eps 5 and 6 as to a birthday party.

just been intensely moved by a bright eyes cue. may need to be taken out and shot

closing montage in e4 of iraqi militias / fictional klansmen / english pastoralism v good.

sorry, e5.

yes that was good, also farage + empire myths = oxycontin.

I can't remember which writer it was who suggested Jiang's power was very formidable but still somewhat exaggerated at her trial because the die was cast and the CCP had decided to deliver an Empress Dowager Cixi type figure to the people to cop for the murderous excesses of the cultural revolution and the mask fitted her perfectly. She might have been ruthless but not ruthless enough to win at the game of political factionalism.

The last episode is superb.

watched 1.5 episodes so far and have to say I am really enjoying it so far, being back in a full-length series and including more archive interviews seems to be the key here, everything he did in the 2010s seemed a bit too busy and unfocused, but this really seems to be a return to form

it's definitely been an improved experience on some of his weaker stuff in recent years. I think I'm going to watch it all again.

chris de burgh loving jihadist is the adam curtis content i crave

Not seen yet but good rev

arguably a bit spoily https://t.co/PLwHHZ8Ltx

— joolsd (@joolsd) February 12, 2021

best since the mayfair set is where i ended up too.

The new ones seem to be in YouTube now, not sure if they have the original music.

really good on britain+russia afaict. can't evaluate at all on china but sure liked looking at that big ceiling. some fuzzy claims i thought in some of the stuff about the domestic american experience of vietnam (seemed to nudge 70s economic crisis back into the 60s so as to explain antiwar unrest with it? which is funny cuz it's out of character) but the afeni/tupac stuff was terrific.

music cues v fun, "love" motif v effective, laughed in delight when end credits punched in.

i am on episode 3 and loving this

it just took me about 45 minutes to work out it was the track Corrin by Roly Porter from dubstep duo Vex'd that was making me go mad thinking I know what that is and also I don't know what the fuck it is when the intro kept resurfacing throughout.

Back in the Factsheet Five era of zine publishing I got a couple of Kerry Thornley’s zines/rants. Knew the story and it’s wild seeing it get the Adam Curtis treatment.

"What's Up?" house remix, you're a wily bastard, Curtis

one day i will maybe watch some adam c that isn't the living dead lol

today is not that day

just watched the first episode and though it was v good. i mean as a few people have said, Curtis is v good even when he's not very good, because there's almost no television that covers ideas. given the last ten years have seen major shifts in salient ideas, whether economic, technological or political, and the arguments about them (post GFC neoliberalism, the determinism of technology, the potency of social media, horseshoe politics, technocracy, centrism and populism, to name just a few that leap to the front of my mind), and that there are written expressions daily of these ideas on the left and right and from less politically defined groups, with new disciplines covering new thinking, it's quite incredible that television covers absolutely none of it with any degree of intelligence.

but this first episode was also good in itself. he's still vulnerable to ahistoricism ('we live in strange days,' 'societies have become split and polarised,' 'there is anger at inequality.' - show me the conditions where these haven't applied). But he does explicitly say that what he wants to analyse is the paralysis, and dynamic that some fear and some desire, of a 'return to normal.' That in itself is thrown into sharp relief, though he doesn't mention it, by climate change. So it's a reasonable question to be analysing, even if i don't agree with some of his terms.

His joint analysis of individualism across China, the States, Russia was really sophisticated I thought. And it was a good and interesting choice that one vector of his approach to expression of the individual against was the foregrounding of women, and their relationship to authority and men with Jiang Qing, Maya Plisetskaya, Edith Boole and Sandra Paul.

Still, it seems very hard to say that Jiang Qing was someone who helped usher in an age of individualism and the 'unit of one'. She may herself have been an expression of that but the society which she was according to his narrative helping to create was clearly not.

And there was something of a gasp at the very deep waters he was wading into with the statement that the internet has seen "patterns of suspicion moving into the data and multiplying endlessly across the system."

Still, he's set it up nicely, hitting definite areas of contention and relevance to the modern world, and i'm looking forward to watching the second episode possibly today.

Alan Whicker documentary was remarkable.

When Sandra Paul and Robin Douglas-Home from the Alan Whicker documentary came on, I thought "Hang on, this seems familiar" and I soon remembered that it was because I'd seen it via Adam Curtis before. He shared the full 40-minute film on his BBC blog a few years ago. It's a great watch.

And in checking that, I discovered that there are a whopping 500 or so films on the BBC's Adam Curtis archive page, mostly clips but sometimes full programmes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003tz2x/clips?page=1

i don't think i knew that existed, Alba, thanks!

the same!

interesting to see daniel kahneman make an appearance in the second one – he's clearly one of those people absolutely central to an awful lot of thinking in finance and behavioural policy and strategy, corporate and public. it's interesting that although his system 1 and 2 thinking still seems fairly standard, there are murmurings of replication crisis around social priming. Kahneman himself (of his populariser Thinking Fast and Slow):

What the blog gets absolutely right is that I placed too much faith in underpowered studies. …I have changed my views about the size of behavioral priming effects – they cannot be as large and as robust as my chapter suggested.

Curtis' notorious 'but in reality' phrase is v odd considering his approach. He uses it twice in Ep 2. 'In reality Jiang Xing had lost control.' How is reality constituted in this example, and in Adam Curtis' universe generally? Is it purely when successful ideas fail? Does that mean that 'reality' has reasserted itself? Or merely the dominance of another idea? For such a central Curtis narrative beat, it's curious not to have any understanding of what he means by it.

the whole 'colonising of the interior and emotional world' theme is still tantalisingly unrealised and unexaminable, though the setting up – that the failure of external radicalism, maoism and anti-fascism led to a sense of internal responsibility for violence - is suggesting this will be returned to, and brought together with the question of algorithmic mental and emotional ontologies. one thing he's doing very well is show the mental spaces of the people existing at the pressure points he identifies. this is what he says he set out to do, so it's really powerful that he manages it so well tbh. less clear is how well he manages that with other omnipresent entity in his work which is 'us', 'people' 'you and i' 'normal people'. in theory his images and footage are mapping the fabric, context, subliminal imagery and spaces which that shadowy and ill-defined, passive yet powerful entity exists and transacts in. i'm not sure quite whether his BBC and wider archives can be said to provide that mapping. i don't know, the relative power of his approach to the ideas has paradoxically reinforced a question of how the images and script treatment of ideas relates (which wasn't so much a problem with the less good and more sweeping Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation). I don't think I've got an answer here, which ofc is part of the pleasure of his programmes.

i'm fascinated to see how he approaches the technology area. the question of how we generate an aesthetics of cloud and technology, and therefore how it can be visually represented and understood in terms of the imagination is still a live one i think. in fact you could argue there's been a regression from more speculative versions of technology envisioning in science fiction, to the relatively moribund attempts to represent a technology of information flows (i feel it hasn't moved much beyond cascading green glyphs on a screen in the matrix).

He seemed to be sketching a history of radicalism and authoritarianism and its relation to Israel, Palestine and anti-semitism without really following through in this episode. Daniel Kahneman himself developed a lot of his theories with the Israeli military iirc.

Although there's still necessarily very little substantiation in his programmes - that's not what he's doing, but it's still disconcerting - there is also not too much that is too 'Oh come on!' glib. Two bits did stick out. The first that 'Mao had been using Jiang Xing to create the violence to destroy his opposition'. His opposition was certainly destroyed, but... it implies she had a different motive? Which was an expression of her power? How was she being *used* exactly?

The second was on Horst Herold's plan to break radical terrorism: "His solution was to use a computer, because there was no law to stop that." :| I think you *have* to work harder there if you're Curtis, and at least provide an explanation, which presumably is 'the legal sanction in Germany against Federal law enforcement meant that he had to find a way round the process of a national approach and... computer surveillance wasn't covered by the law'??? i mean i don't know, that seems unlikely tbh and i haven't been able to find out for certain yet. It does sound like Horst Herold is as much a piece of work as implied in the programme though, which is kind of reassuring! RAF founding member and Stammheim inmate, Andreas Baader was “the only man who ever really understood me, and I’m the only man who really understood him”, [Herold] would tell an interviewer in 2013.

Anyway, maybe i'll watch one more before the end of the day. I'm not doing much else and it's quite nice to binge on Curtis world.

xp
Same! Thank you.
There's a bit of footage in one his old blog posts that's stayed with me - black and white, British, maybe 60s, just a random average working man talking about how life is just waiting for death, completely empty. Never bookmarked it and the blog archive is a pain to navigate - anyone know what I'm looking for?
(Only 1.5 episodes into this one. Enjoying more than the last few.)

back in the era of The BlogsTM (by which in this case i mean the cluster of discussions that largely centred round (a) KPunk and (b) Dissensus) the fact of the existence of the curtis archive was (IME) very much considered his redemption: meaning that while AC's politics in his docs did not on the whole align with many in that grouping, and everyone had sharp things to say against the more recent docs at that time, they mostly admired and agreed that they admired that he first of all was putting all this material out into the public realm (which he has continued to do), and second, was consistently subjecting it to genuine critical and intellectual exploration. further, in fact: that he was -- seemingly almost alone in this as such a high-profile fgure -- unafraid of and evidently a proponent for critical and intellectual exploration, even if you sharply disagreed with all his conclusions

so there's also still that (things haven't got better: KPunk is dead, The BlogsTM are dispersed, the hold by the timid and the mediocre on nearly all the upper realms of (lol) The Discourse is arguably worse than it was in like 2007 (= era of The Trap) -- tho tbf 2007 is also when the first good parodies began to emerge iirc

there are murmurings of replication crisis around social priming

this will come up later!

'In reality Jiang Xing had lost control.' How is reality constituted in this example, and in Adam Curtis' universe generally?

materially no? as he tells it she is betrayed by mao and removed from her position of power, as if even at her political+artistic apotheosis she were still only an actress in someone else's melodrama. if she were truly in control, no one could do this to her. that someone can probably always do this to you suggests control may be... well you know.

The first that 'Mao had been using Jiang Xing to create the violence to destroy his opposition'. His opposition was certainly destroyed, but... it implies she had a different motive? Which was an expression of her power? How was she being *used* exactly?

he sets her up as believing the revolution has been left unfinished (by the people) or hijacked (by her hated enemies) and that the people need to "break thru" to some postauthoritarian world in which they are as unbowed as she is... yet instead she ends up channeling a mass desire for the purgation of power into choreographed violent reinforcement of the autocracy of her betrayer-husband... in a way i think is meant to be analogous to the incorporation of post-60s individualist ideology and the science of irrationality into the unbroken power-system of finance capitalism? this is muddy and AC doesn't provide a lot of details about his read on her thought and it's difficult to say what the freed society she supposedly sought to create looked like if it didn't look like dengism or the cultural revolution... but then this v difficulty (regardless of how right it is re: jiang qing) is maybe a theme?

agree about that horst herold line; "ordinary people"; the matrix.

obviously i have not watched this but i can't help spotting that the "unit of one" is very clearly at odds with the "gang of four" lol

(which is the context in which ppl my age first heard of her)

(the other earlier gang of four ffs shut up ilx)

lol he doesn't leave the Go4 joke on the table, tho i thought for a while that (w monumental effort) he had done so.

another thing that was noted back in the days of the BlogsTM was that AC's tragedy was that he didn't really have anyone sparring with him who he ever needed to take any chastened notice of: just TV reviewers (whose knowledge of e.g. jiang qing and lin biao and the inner dynamics of the cultural revolution is of course negligeable) and, well, bloggers who possibly DID now and then have the deep knowledge but no access to the appropriate tools (countervailing documentaries which could deploy film and music with the same freedoms but perhaps a different approach to montage or the ethics of construction or whatever) and -- very related of course -- the acknowledged authority to give him pause once in a while

which is bad for The DialecticTM

thread around the letterboxd review xyzzy linked mentions that new series gives the impression of his having consciously responded to criticism on a few fronts, some trivial (stop saying things were a fantasy) and some not (wait are you an idiosyncratic leftist or some kind of RCP-derived propagandist?) altho this is no doubt still pretty impoverished as discourses go. he should post here obv (as mentioned somewhere upthread i choose to believe that he got a minor theme in hypernormalisation from a youtube video i uploaded lol) (my own influence is disappointingly absent from this, superior, work)

'In reality Jiang Xing had lost control.' How is reality constituted in this example, and in Adam Curtis' universe generally?

materially no? as he tells it she is betrayed by mao and removed from her position of power, as if even at her political+artistic apotheosis she were still only an actress in someone else's melodrama. if she were truly in control, no one could do this to her. that someone can probably always do this to you suggests control may be... well you know.

Yes, i think materially is always the answer I come back to. but i don't think it quite works in the sense that there is a material base of cause and effect, which i just think isn't the approach Curtis takes (there's an argument for saying he doesn't take it into account enough - but this all comes back to mark's point about the lack of sparring partner). 'power' is the other answer, as you say, but the suggestion that 'power' = 'in reality' seems to me to produce a different sort of world to the one curtis portrays, in which power is distributed in ways even the people utilising it don't fully understand. which again brings me back to the point - what is the baseline of history that people's ideas crash up against that are implied by the word 'reality.' Basically i just don't think it's an enormously helpful word, though as an easily comprehensible way to say 'the fantasy of this cultural idea was not able to construct the reality it needed to survive and maintain,' in other words the tutelary epigraph from David Graeber "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" doesn't feel quite right. there is something resisting that 'making.'

Fantasy may have been suppressed in his lexicon but it's still present in his thinking.

and yes agreed i think that jiang xing thing is meant to be analogous - and i like that he's trying to do that sort of thing - but yes, agree also that it's muddy.

and lol at Go4 gag. no way he was going to avoid that. (funnily enough it was an ilxor itt who introduced me to that album!)

woof - yes i remember the footage you're talking about, but similarly did not bookmark and having just been to his blog (basically thinking oh come on i'll be able to find it) wtf how are you supposed to find anything.

ah I emailed to someone bitd - fourth thing down here -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/843165bf-1e69-3dec-873e-973fc8e604a5

he's absolutely wonderful.

i hope they found some happiness.

I went through a period of being a bit obsessed with the cultural revolution and started this book called The Killing Wind which concentrated on it on a more localised level and concentrated on a massacre in one specific region. And it was so unremittingly violent and grim I couldn't finish it. When you get away from from all the flashy disturbing imagery of mass rallies and struggle sessions and people with placards around their necks and factory bosses getting thrown of bridges etc you start moving into much more relatable and disturbing territory. As in in meetings in smoky working men's clubs where groups of *normal* people are deciding who they fancy murdering today of course under the pretext that they are politically bad. I'm not even sure what point I'm making here - just an idiot typing!

My wife's grandfather (in a small town in Hubei) was targeted as a "capitalist roader" - he had to wear a sign in the street, etc. His own daughter was a red guard, pretty typical I think. She is now the most well-to-do of the three sisters, if the small town has an upper-middle-class then she's in it for sure, but she still goes to the local park to sing "red songs" with her friends. Think my mother-in-law might be doing this now as well, she certainly feels nostalgic about the cultural revolution too.

i know v little about the cultural revolution (which this series has brought home) - the killing wind sounds really interesting. more generally adam curtis tends to focus on ideological tribes and probably underdetermines on that more local violence. i think it's fair enough, in that local drama probably has too high a level of salience in modern culture (people's personal relationships with each other), compared to ideas.

xpost

watched e01 last nite. entertaining but his the narration often makes insane logical leaps that annoyed me. i try to watch it as entertainment (as a sequence of music videos set to archival videos it’s fantastic) but knowing the way some friends of mine respond to his films (‘you gotta watch it man—they’re controlling our minds!’) makes me sad

curtis’ faith in the power of a single person to control the minds of an entire society feels paranoid to me, and finding instances where that seems to have been the case isn’t as dispositive as he thinks. sure, you can take something like the illuminati conspiracy theory and unravel it backwards to find that two ayn rand fanboys accidentally started it by writing letters to playboy magazine. but attributing the rise of the conspiracy theory to “two chums went bowling one night and talked about philosophy” is the wrong counterfactual—obviously in their absence a very similar conspiracy theory would have taken root with slightly different details

i'm not sure that's what he's saying? he was saying those two were trying to undermine conspiracy theory (which had already been established). can understand your response to your friends, but he's standing at a distance from the 'they're controlling our minds' people? i think this series is a lot better than the last two long films, where i could understand that reaction a bit more.

but also he's looking at the arcs of people like michael x and jiang qing - what happens to people at the edges of implementing ideas of power.

also i want to know where that incredible aerial video shot of the chinese city towards the end of episode three comes from.