2403 – The Century of the SELF (2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis)

timespace coordinates: the long 20th century

To say that this epochal documentary with all its flaws, its non-sequiturs, and under-theorizing has marked our generation is an understatement. Some things are left unsaid in retrospect (it is almost 10 years or more since I have watched this series), particularly one should situate this in the context of modernity and the transfer of peoples of ideas that went on between Europe and the US, none of which went one way only. Again this is a very Eurocentric history (for a different perspective on techno-modernity check here), so it has definite and clear limits as it is mostly about the Euroatlantic world and Central Europe. The Century of the Self is also the triumph over the European Old World bourgeois civilization of the US consumer culture zeitgeist aptly described by Victoria de Grazia in her magisterial study Irresistible Empire.

Source: Charnysh 2022 quoted by Adam Tooze (not Curtis!)

But then, on the other hand, you have had the immense impact of these foreigners with bad Middle European or Eastern European accents forced to flee, outernational émigrés escaping anti semitism arriving in troves from the continent. Besides the German Frankfurter Schule critical theory – you also had another cultivated emigree diaspora from the former Habsburg Empire that brought to the East Coast with them the vivaciousness and sophistication of Viennese 1900 cultural life and went on to define advertising, marketing, and even how Western liberalism identity started defining itself during the Cold War against the Communist bloc. Another history that barely gets mentioned is how the Western democracies have been using for example – “rational choice theory” (and here the names of William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan stand out) – to try and immunize the ‘Free World’ and its values by constructing a ‘scientific’ approach to social science research against the Marxist critics of Western democracies. Some ideas found a better reception across the ocean,

Psychoanalysis is just one such example to follow in the wake of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. One could pinpoint others, starting with the Genevese school of neoliberal economics. Another one, followed in detail by Adam Curtis is the trajectory of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays (developer and early pioneer of PR) and Anna Freud in the United States. We should be wary of a pharmakon way of explaining everything or giving too much attention to ‘interiority’ and inner mental states, but since Foucault, detailing such genealogies and discoursive fields helps us understand how we came to be where we are. This documentary is also influenced by The Century of the Self is still a very compelling history of how the SELF became so central not only to advertising but also to identity politics and individual freedom of liberal capitalism also to the anthropotechnics – ways in which Western counterculture has tried to free the human subject or a hidden identity through mindfulness, techniques of meditation, human potential, yoga retreats, actualization what is known as New Age – especially as developed by the Esalen Institute since the 1960s California. It is also the perfect documentary about control after “decentralization”, or what follows in the wake of the uneven transition from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze has termed the society of control in his seminal essay from 1990 (some even say that this was his most important testament). The century of the self has become even more evident in the 21st century – the time when protocols or algorithmic capitalism is really ruling the day and when AI-driven scams, influencers, and deep fakes abound. The century of the self should be also put into dialectical relation with its inverse – the “personality cults” and authoritarian styles of the former East it was meant to overcome, and such a retreat into interiority and VR, when faced with the horrors of Vietnam War, and the government of the US supporting dictators abroad or signaling a failure of nation-building abroad or a certain developmental model. Silicon Valley is itself a piece in this puzzle, an innovation hub based on a startup model supported by Venture Capital funding to ensure US technological hegemony by sponsoring former dropouts of the counter-cultural revolutions of 1968, raised on psychotropics and weaned on petro-dollars.

2369 – The Silence of the Quandts (documentary 2007)

Director: Eric Friedler

“The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War.” (IMDB)

Suffice it to say the family is among the richest in the world and certainly in Germany. Its members were leading German industrialists, specifically Günther Quandt (1881–1954), a German industrialist, who founded an industrial empire that includes BMW and Altana, Harald Quandt (1921–1967), German industrialist, stepson of Joseph Goebbels, and Herbert Quandt (1910–1982), German industrialist, regarded as having saved the BMW firm plus made huge profit afterward. Germany’s role in the world economy was intimately linked to the way it was considered politically expedient to build a strong Germany after the war. One should not single out families and interest groups which is why I find it important to offer a structural analysis whenever possible of the conditions that lead to such close collaborations within the capitalist world system. Important to understand how the car industry (till the energy transition) was not only involved in war crimes but also worked hand in hand with Big Oil, there are no conflicting interests there, and were responsible for the historical emissions that have made our world hotter than in the last 100.000 years.

While the Euro-German industry’s military exports have reached a high in 2023 it is again ramping up its army, and yes, meanwhile Germany is selling weapons to the Saudis.

There is not much on the EN wiki page of this documentary and it is a pity. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube in 6 parts, and while the movie is freely available in German, I could not find any EN full version. Maybe nothing is really surprising and if we think about the pollution scandals that have rocked the German car industry, especially the Volkswagen defeat devices – their dark NS history does not come as a surprise. It seems to have been ripped of the ARTE channel. Anyway, I am thankful to the uploader. There is much to learn here – especially how the chief industrialists wanted to build the battery industry in Europe on the back of slave labor from concentration camps. Whenever driving a BMW one should always keep this documentary in mind.