A thoughtful essay in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting mentions a new work by one of my favorite documentarians, Adam Curtis (his The Century of the Self is a must-see):

The documentary film-maker Adam Curtis takes another perspective and is using a radical form of experimental theatre to enable people to grasp the argument intellectually, and to feel it emotionally. He argues that we need to interrogate much more closely what he describes as the current “moment of stagnation”, our incapacity to bring about political change. What is paralysing the collective will? His new work opens the Manchester International Festival on Thursday. What continues to fascinate Curtis – as aficionados of his television series such as The Century of the Self and The Trap will recognise – is the dominance of individualism. How it came about and what it means for how power is exercised.

“What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It’s enchanting, it’s liberating, but ultimately it’s disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change,” explains Curtis.

His analysis is that power uses stories which shape our understanding of the world and of who we are, and how we make sense and order experience. Powerful, grand narratives legitimise power, win our allegiance and frame our private understandings of how to measure value and create meaning. They also structure time – they fit the present into a continuum of how the past will become the future. This is what all the grand narratives of communism, socialism, even neoliberalism and fascism offered; as did the grand narratives of religion. Now, all have foundered and fragmented into a mosaic of millions of personal stories. It is a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the capacity to generate the common narratives – of idealism, morality and hope such as Sandel talks about – that might bring about civic renewal and a reinvigorated political purpose.

Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.

H/t to Alexa.

via Market dogma is exposed as myth. Where is the new vision to unite us? | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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