Just have to share Rick Rodderick with the philosophy crowd here:
This video is one of many in the series "Philosophy and Human Values." Here's a bit from the transcript, where Rodderick describes the relationship between modern life, despair, Freud and popular democratic revolution (those are typical themes of his):
"So the goal of analytic treatment would be for those unreflected massive areas – again to go back to that metaphor of the city – to become part of the garrison as it spreads out to things we are clear about. In other words, it’s not a bad metaphor saying we shouldn’t be clear about who we are, and have an “I”, or a self, or a subject. Now, why am I bringing this up now? Well, to contrast it with my last remarks about culture, if the goal of psychoanalysis is that the unreflected parts become reflected, that the “it” become the “I”, then the goal of a mass simulational culture – and this is a remark that I am using from the Frankfurt school, don’t worry about it.
The goal of a mass telecommunication culture is psychoanalysis in reverse. It’s that the little, last remaining parts of that garrison become unconscious. It’s precisely to reverse that process of enlightenment. Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse gear. Precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of autonomy. It is a constant assault upon it…
…That was why the last time I was out here, I approached it first from this religious angle of Kierkegaard’s, and characterised the assault as one that caused despair. Where despair was not a mood, but a structure that belongs to a captured garrison. Not an accidental feature of a captured garrison, but part of it. A structure of it. Fundamental to it.
And so now, the reason to use the Freudian text is to remind us that the kind of culture I am talking about is simply to reverse that process that Freud saw as the goal of “talking it out”. Well, philosophy has always been a form of therapy in that sense. You all know that from nights when your life has felt like it wasn’t working and you got together with somebody you liked and you got drunk and you talked about “what did it all mean?”, or “what does it all mean?”, and you start talking it out. Well the goal of that is that those unreflected parts are to become refected.
The account I am giving of this mass telecommunication culture – the postmodern culture – is that it’s goal is the opposite; that the “I” become “it”. That the parts that were just yours become general property. So even if you are an idiosyncratic single woman, like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” again, which is a nice thing to be, but by the time you have watched a few of those, there is not much of you left that isn’t “it”. You can forget about it, it’s been understood, it’s now a part of the general property of everyone.
I gave the example earlier, I’ll return to it for the fourth time, of the telephone sex. It’s just an amazing phenomenon to me. First of all, I can’t imagine anyone that bored, but in any case, there your deepest fantasies, which Freud was going to draw out in an analytic framework, now you just… that’s the way that something that was going to be “I”, you know, that special thing, no matter how perverse, and remember, when something becomes reflected in Freud’s picture – it doesn’t mean… I mean, you may not know this – even if it’s sick, you are supposed to remember it, and it is supposed to become a part of you that you know.
So you dig up even really ugly memories, so that you can know them, and know them about yourself. It may not be pleasant, in fact it isn’t. But then again, that’s part of the pleasure principle of mass culture, is it does just the opposite. It takes socially uncomfortable memories, and takes them out of that clear garrison, and throws them into the wasteland around the city. In the way that elements of the culture of the late 60’s broke everyone’s heart. Because families were divided, the country was divided; no-one knew what kind of culture we should have after that, or during that. No-one knew who the heroes were, whether it was the boys who were forced to fight the grunts down there, or Quaker pacifists who froze in jails in this city. No-one had the guts to choose, or a way to choose.
So our culture since then – has been not just about the 60’s, but other great revolutionary moments, as I am not afraid to say – is in a process of continually burying and reburying them. Making them a part of the “it”, scattered out all around. I can go further back, based on my father’s memories. Great moments of rebellion like the populist movement around the turn of the century, The Knights of Labour, and so on. It’s the goal of a mass culture to bury that. It’s a goal of mass culture to take that culture where we have begun to reflect and understand, and reverse it and make it unconscious.
So, that’s the reason the discourse of Freud is important. It’s because the parts of our culture that we understand and can reflect on are just those tiny garrisons, and around it the mass of the culture. And one can think in our situation, of the tonnes of information, for example. This city probably has – this city we are in – you know, ten billion tonnes of paper on which are printed billions and billions and billions of words. Perfectly analogous to Freud’s unconscious, no-one is going to dig most of them up; most of them have no meaning to anyone. The goal of mass culture is to make sure that the narratives of our lives fit somewhere in those documents. Just as fileable, malleable, and trainable as possible.