The Century of the Self, Written and produced by Adam Curtis, BBC2 Sunday evenings 17 March - 7 April (four one-hour programmes) Reviewed by Andrew Kennedy THIS FASCINATING series, recently screened on BBC2 on Sunday nights, was unusual among present-day TV documentary output for its intelligence, ambition and scope.
Its subject was the development of the self in the advanced capitalist countries in the twentieth century. Its argument was that the selves we cherish as individual and unique have in effect been created by political and corporate power structures in order to ensure obedient citizens and dutiful consumers.
A central theme is the deep complicity of psychoanalysis, particularly Freudianism, in this project. The series thus seems to owe much to the ideas of the French thinker Michel Foucault.
The first programme shows how the ideas of Freud were used by US bosses and political leaders and (ironically, given that Freud was Tewish), by the Nazis. The conduit, or perhaps the sewer, between Freud and the American and German ruling classes, was the psychologist's opportunist nephew Edward Bernays, who argued that people were fundamentally irrational and could be sold anything, whether products or political ideas, so long as what was being sold was associated with their deep unconscious desires.
Roosevelt's thirties New Dealism is presented as an attempt to present a positive alternative to all this: the suggestion is that Roosevelt wanted to resist the corporate agenda by appealing to people as rational citizens.
However, the programme fails to mention the bosses' fear in the twenties and thirties concerning the influence of socialists and communists in the American labour movement who campaigned for a different form of rational, collective identity, based upon class.
Episode two examines the reassertion of corporate power and techniques of psychological manipulation in the US after 1945, which created the conformist con. sumerism of the fifties.
During the sixties, however, as the third episode shows, businessmen and establishment politicians were faced with the problem of the new expressive self, promoted by dissident psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich.(1) in which "selfactualisation" and resistance to conformity was commonly linked to a desire for wider social change.
Cleverly, they worked out that they could sell right-wing ideas and consumer products to the sixties generation by appealing to its desire for self-fulfilment, which tended to become the central focus (often to an absurd degree), after the defeat of New Left radicalism by US state repression. (2) It is revealing how the new selfactualising psychology of the sixties and seventies seems to nave had a largely progressive effect in one case - the spectacular break-up of a US Catholic nunnery, where the few nuns who remained had decided to become radical lesbians.
Cathartic
Yet it appears as quite reactionary in another example - the attempt to stage a cathartic encounter between blacks and whites in which the prejudices of each group would be admitted and people would relate "as individuals". This failed not least because the black people involved felt they needed their collective identity as blacks in order to resist racism. Reagan's and Thatcher's election campaigns are cited as prime examples of the new consumerist politics of the eighties, appealing to individualism against "big government", while the last programme looks at how so-called left-of-centre politicians like Clinton and Blair who copied these techniques were bound to betray the hopes of their supporters. Instead of investing in state education, for example, Clinton played to the fears of parents by promising them "V-chips" in their televisions which would stop their children watching porn. Derek Draper, Peter Mandelson's former aide, contemptuously describes how New Labour politicians hung on the every word of free-associating focus groups: "A bunch of eight people drinking wine determined pretty much everything Labour did". Perhaps rightly, the series concentrated mainly on the US, but it should have looked more deeply, for example, at ideological dynamics in Western Europe, where relatively strong political traditions even now exist which stress the possibility of collective identities based on class and which have often acted as counterweights both to consumerist forms of individualism and to right-wing and racist collective identities. Also, the series tends to overemphasise the role of individuals (which is interesting, given its critique of individualism). For example, Reich seems to be presented as the "cause" of the emergence of the new expressive self, without enough attention being paid to contradictions and cracks in the structure of the family and the wider bourgeois hegemony as key factors.
Its approach can therefore be too pessimistic: it focuses too often simply on the power structure, a few strong individuals and the largely passive masses. Revolutionary marxists would of course stress the masses' collective capacity for self-organisation and resistance and their ability at times to take the offensive. Moreover, I think that the ability of the powerful to create new selves as though from scratch (again, shades of Foucault here) is very much exaggerated.
While marxists might have problems with the idea of a fixed, essential self, there are significant aspects of continuity in the self, especially those based on early experiences, which for good or ill become very deep-seated and can at times furnish the basis for strong personally-motivated resistance to the powers-that-be. Nevertheless, this series stands head and shoulders above other recent "educational" programmes on TV in its sharp analysis of the attempts of our would-be masters to control us and in its construction of a convincing narrative which does not insult the viewer's. intelligence (at a time when critical grand narratives are still unfashionable). I can only pray it gets repeated, and soon.
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