The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part Five: Buddhism
William Brown
"for the past thirty years people in music, art, and culture generally have had a fixed, precise notion of the enemy and the ways in which he [sic] is to be resisted." In a quick step, Frank goes on to say, "it is the obsolescence and exhaustion of this idea of cultural dissent that accounts for our singular inability to confront the mind-boggling dangers of the Information Age." The Information Age has most certainly internalized, recuperated and re-deployed the spectacle of cultural dissent in its own interests; this is its way of suppressing disorder.
For Frank, the originators and "patron saints [sic] of the countercultural idea" were the Beats (he includes Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, all of whose images have, not coincidentally, recently appeared in commerical advertisements of one sort or another).
The verdict of the Beats [he writes] is the centerpiece of the countercultural idea to which . . . aspiring poets, rock stars [and] anyone who feels vaguely artistic or alienated . . . still ascribe such revolutionary potential: the paramount ailment of our society is conformity . . . [which is] a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism.In a well-chosen example, Frank quotes from Ginsberg's great 1956 poem "America," in which the poet says that Time magazine is "always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me." Forty years later, things are obviously quite different in America: our boxershorts-wearing, saxophone-playing, Elvis-loving President is clearly unconcerned about not appearing "serious"; today, nobody wants to be perceived as (too) serious. Perhaps the turning point came in 1979, when then-President Carter made the politically disastrous "mistake" of correctly observing and soberly reporting the simple, easily verifiable fact that there was a serious "malaise" affecting the country, which -- though Carter didn't say so -- derived from the spectacular perpetuation of class society and the market economy. And so there is no problem with asserting, with Tom Frank, that, ever since the Reagan years, "the countercultural ideal has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression, change for the sake of change, now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices." Indeed, the fate of the "Beat Generation" has been the fate of all the Youth-oriented "countercultures" of the second half of the twentieth century.
But it is not logical to conclude, simply because the ideology of consumer society is now based upon "difference" rather than conformity, that "advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fullfilment." (It is on the basis of this erroneous conclusion that Frank completely dismisses the "annoying ravings" of Camille Paglia, which are clearly based upon the supposition that American society, with the exception of the "pagan" forces of popular culture, is still rigidly "puritanical and desensualized.") There is no reason to believe that ideologies of "difference" cannot co-exist with puritanical self-denial; the abolition of the ideology of "conformity" does not necessitate the abolition of puritanism. This is especially true in the United States, where one of our founding myths is that the nation was established by Puritans who wished to be different (in religious beliefs and practices) from the English. Our society, racist as it is, has always been ethnically and racially heterogenous in composition. But America has also always been a puritanical place, and it still is, despite the reigning spectacle of a world without conformity, limits or rules. The references here are several: to the numerous commercial advertisements that (still) cynically play upon the "immorality" of body odors, bacteria, cockroaches and the like; to the fact that the "perks" of being a corporate executive are increasingly limited to personal and financial security measures; and to the global reality of the HIV, which was invented and introduced into the general populace for the express purposes of reversing the advances of the "sexual revolution" and re-vitalizing Puritanism's greatest weapon, the fear of God (i.e., death). It would be a great understatement to say that both the fear and the reality of a world-wide AIDS epidemic have been extraordinarily effective tools in the post-1960s "pacification" and re-puritanization of the United States, and in the more recent endo-colonializations of the entire world. (Gee, how neat is it, Mr. Science, that the HIV is said to have come from Africa, the continent most exploited and damaged by colonialism as it was practiced in the past, and that the HIV's target groups are precisely those groups that Puritanism has always hated the most?) In short, Puritanism in America has never been stronger or better equipped than it is today.
For a moment, let's focus on the current status of personal liability insurance as a perk in the "business world." Significantly, personal liability insurance appears to be the least understood of the three major types of security "bonuses" given to top executives listed by the New York Times in an August 1995 "business section" piece. About personal liability insurance, only the following is known by our trusted "experts," despite the fact that this is reputedly the Information Age:
[It] is a perk that insulates executives from another sort of danger: financial [the first sort of danger was personal]. This coverage, which protects executives from business-related lawsuits, is cheap, and companies consider it to be worth the money."In a world where anyone will sue everyone," said Ms. Edelstein of Hewitt Associates, "this is the kind of often-overlooked perk that can save managers from disaster."
The mild-sounding category "business-related lawsuits" presumably includes those few areas of the law in which executives can still be held personally liable for the torts they (in the name of their companies) have committed. These lawsuits -- which are, to the modern executive, simply one of the overhead costs of doing business in this world -- include products liability cases (the class-action suits brought against the "providers" of poisonous commodities) and personal injury or death actions (the suits brought by individuals against the perpetrators of such "accidents" as illegal dumping of toxic and nuclear wastes, wrongful death at the hands of private security forces and etc.). In short, "business-related lawsuits" brings together into one ugly category many of the real events about which the spectacle gathers and stores far more information than it ever intends to make available.
These lawsuits are quite costly to the capitalist. On the one hand, these suits, even if settled out of court for a pittance, "tarnish" the public image of the company by disseminating what the company would certainly call "disinformation" about its products and activities, and sometimes force its executives to release information during the discovery process that they would rather keep secret (as has been the case in the current round of class-action suits against the manufacturers of cigarettes). On the other hand, these lawsuits -- if they come to trial and end in a verdict for the plaintiff(s) -- can lead, among other things, to the awarding of large cash settlements and the imposition of sizable punitive damages. What the business writer for the Times plumb forgot to mention is that the Republican-controled Congress has been working all year for "litigation reform" measures that would make it nearly impossible for groups of injured consumers to win certification as a "class," reduce the number of lawsuits filed by individuals, and put very low ceilings on the amounts the plaintiffs can recover and the defendants can be fined. If and when these measures are signed into law, personal liability insurance will be even more available and desirable. It will be increasingly inexpensive to buy, and it will indirectly protect the company as a whole from "freedom of access to information" and other potential sources of damaging leaks. And so the executives who now receive personal liability insurance as a perk are being cheated: there is nothing intrinsically valuable or enjoyable about any form of insurance; this perk can never be as directly enjoyable as the perks of old, which were intended to enrich the executives' everyday lives; and, in this case, the company bought the new perk on the cheap, thus generating a little more profit for itself (certainly someone other than the executives).
To return to Tom Frank's essay: if its thesis is correct -- that the dominant culture has recuperated the Beats and their conceptions of youth revolt, and is now using them in an apparently non-puritanical way to sell commodities to people who empathize or identify with the Beats for one reason or another -- then one would expect Beat literature to include potent, explicitly anti-puritan passages and rhetoric. Otherwise there would be no compelling reason for the spectacle to try to recuperate that literature: it would pose no harm to the puritanism that everybody acknowledges to have been a central characteristic of the 1950s. It is undeniable that many examples of "anti-Puritanism" can be found in the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. But these examples, no matter how spectacular they are, will inevitably be enveloped and thus neutralized by what the situationists called "the rotten-egg smell exuded by the idea of God." "Mystical cretins" to their more clear-headed contemporaries, Kerouac and Ginsberg (Burroughs must be considered separately, for he never was a Beat, i.e. a spectator of the Culture of Religion) did indeed denounce Puritan, that is, radical Protestant America, but they always did so in the name of other, more exotic opiates: Catholicism and Buddhism in Kerouac's case and everything-but-Christianity in Ginsberg's case. To the extent that they justify and supervise the rejection of everyday life, that they promote what E.P. Thompson has called the "chiliasm of despair," all religions are essentially "puritanical" and thus well-suited to the society of the spectacle.
It's clear that, at certain times, some religions are more useful to capitalism than others. The so-called Protestant work ethic has, of course, been extraordinarily useful to American industry for a very long time. But it isn't any longer: there isn't much in it to help capitalism adjust to the changed conditions brought about by the events of the last thirty years. The same could be said of Christianity as a whole: it is so thoroughly teleological and certain of the orderliness and rationality of the divine plan that it can't adequately explain (that is, lull people into passively accepting) social disarray in any other than apocalyptic terms. But capitalism has never been comfortable with the very idea of "the end of the world," though its atomic scientists, toxic polluters and power-drunk political leaders have flirted with the reality of it for decades. Capitalism would prefer not to have to grant that the 1960s both represented and triggered a "sea change" in the way people perceive their society and their own lives in it. Capitalism would prefer to say precisely the same thing that it had been saying before its desirability (that is, its idea of happiness) was widely contested -- something along the lines of "It has always been thus, and thus will it always be"
-- for its strategy is to make us forget that it has, in crucial ways, only just arrived, and that it, too, shall someday pass. And so, in a kind of vindication of the Beats, pop Buddhism is now pressed into service as capitalism's co-pilot. In Tom Frank's wording, "even the beloved Buddhism of the Beats has a place on the executive bookshelf" as countercultural rebellion becomes corporate ideology. Let's go further than that: especially the beloved Buddhism of the Beats has a place on the modern executive's bookshelf; there has always been a special place on the executive's bookshelf for the Beats, precisely because of their love for Buddhism. In 1955, the Beats' pop Buddhism -- that is to say, their apparently subversive way of justifying passivity and non-interference in the name of honest, industrious, self-denying and "beatific" poverty -- was a general or sufficient precondition for recuperation; in 1995, it is a particular or necessary precondition.
Take, for example, The Leader as Martial Artist (1993), in which Arnold Mindell advises today's rulers in the ways of the Tao, to which -- in an interesting turn of phrase -- he compares "surfing the edge of a turbulent wave."
Change is . . . an incomprehensible, complex phenomenon; we have no way of knowing what creates change or when it is to occur. . . . Albert Einstein would cite the principle of nonlocality. . . . C.G. Jung would speak of synchronicity, and Rupert Sheldrake of morphogenic resonance. We could just as easily call it chance, the Tao, or a miracle.
It would not matter, one supposes, if Karl Marx would speak, apropos of "change," of class struggle and proletarian revolution. For the corporate executive/martial artist/pop theologian could say, "it is only pop Buddhism that provides a home for the co-existence of Einstein (physics), Jung (psychology) and Sheldrake (biology), as well as for your bitter and contentious Karl Marx (political economics)." More and less than a religion, pop Buddhism can be all things to all people, if need be: it is an ideology that contains within its packaging a cosmology, a world view, an ethical system, an art form if it is practiced correctly (that is, yields to a higher rate of profit), and a science of economic management. Insights into the theological and cosmological natures of "perpetual change" can easily be applied to the boardroom and workplace: "since agreement and antagonism are inevitable, the leadership position in a group should plan on being opposed or attacked"; "even a harmonious and balanced system must have a dynamic fluctuation between equilibrium and chaos if it is to grow."
IBM, following what its executives think is the model for Japanese corporations, has been organizing itself in accordance with the "Oriental" principle of perpetual change for years. Surely it can't hurt the multinationals to know something of the ways of the Orient, which they would love to and indeed need to colonialize; as everyone knows, more than half the world lives in India or China, both of which are defined by capital as huge labor and commodity markets that have hardly been brought under of the sway of and exploited by the global spectacle. There remain formidible barriers to total integration: the Internet, the World Wide Web and software such as SGML are only "universal" applications in countries where two conditions are met in advance (the alphabet is based on Latin characters, and English is the standard Latin-based language); though English is a common second language in India, it is not in China and probably will never be; India and China are widely considered to be even more corrupt than Italy and Mexico, a fact which requires potentially major adjustments to the ways of local politics and organized crime; more so than any nation on earth, China has been an autonomous power, "closed" to "the outside world," for a very long time; and again, more so than any other nation, China -- the best example one can find of what Debord has called the society of the integrated spectacle -- has both the economic strength and the strategic power to become a "Superpower of the Information Age," that is, to become a rival of the United States on the world stage, whether Britain, Japan, the United States and Tawain like it or not. The significance of the fact that Buddhism was born in India and raised, so to speak, in China is obvious: pop Buddhism might very well be the only common "language" (the lowest common denominator) in which all of the citizen-consumers of the global spectacle might be able to speak to (that is, produce and exchange spectacular information and commodities with) each other; it seems clear that no other "language" or shared cultural heritage stands much of a chance.
But an information-based corporation need not "re-structure" itself according to the model of the Japanese corporation or pray to the Buddha for that big government contract to come through. "Chaos" captures the image of a world in which disorder is quite real. Ever since 1971, when then-President Nixon's "New Economic Policy" ended the United States' role as international banker, the world economy has been in a state of productive disarray. Tenets about chaos are now taken as "articles of faith" by all kinds of management theorists, even or perhaps especially by the "secular" ones. Religion or "the church" must somehow figure in all current appraisals of the state of capitalism: as the title of Charles Handy's 1990 self-help guide for businessmen indicates, the spectacle of the information economy inaugurates an "Age of Unreason" in which irrationality appears to be "natural," but must somehow be managed (but not resisted) in the name of "sanity." A totally new kind of consciousness is therefore necessary for (personal and financial) "survival"; once achieved, that New Consciousness will allow us to see global capitalism's divine plan and to understand why global and systematic irrationality is necessary in the first place. In "A World Turned Upside Down" -- an oft-repeated catchphrase in Tom Peter's best-selling management text Thriving on Chaos, published in 1987 -- an epistemological revolution is called for, one that allows for "Thinking Upside Down." To remain (mentally and financially) secure, the authors of Reengineering the Corporation (1993) counsel their readers, one must immerse oneself in the spectacular madness of ceaseless change, rather than trying to manipulate it from a relatively safe distance.
Business reengineering means putting aside much of the received wisdom of two hundred years of industrial management. It means forgetting how work was done in the age of the mass market and deciding how it can be best done now. In business reengineering, old jobs titles and old organizational arrangements -- department, divisions, groups and so on -- cease to matter. . . . At the heart of business reengineering lies the notion of discontinuous thinking -- identifying and abandoning the outdated rules and fundamental assumptions that underlie current business operations.
In other words, what religion and ideology already were (kinds of intellectual schizophrenia), society has now become (schizophrenia in material form).
In the corporate sponsorship of the Buddhistic "heap of broken images" we have a recuperation that certainly reaches back beyond Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation of the 1940s/1950s to which he belonged. The recuperation reaches at least as far back as T.S. Eliot and the Lost Generation of the 1910s/1920s. They make an interesting pair, Ginsberg and Eliot: the former has been a devotee of the Culture of Religion, while the latter had been a devotee of the Religion of Culture. Before today, it would have been impossible to imagine them serving the same interests: while the former has railed against academics and the banks in the Holy Name of all that is good in the religions of the world, the latter had been an academic darling, in part supported himself by working in a bank, and fancied himself a bulwark of High Culture. But the total integration of both Religion and Culture into the world of the commodity has brought them together. Our bankers are now just as likely to be pony-tailed, tattooed, ear-ringed and otherwise "culture smart" white men as they are to be short-haired, conservatively dressed and otherwise "culturally snobby" white men. The university students of 1965 used to print up broadsides including apparently appropriate quotes from Ginsberg's "Howl"; the university students of 1995 create World Wide Web home-pages that include apparently appropriate epigrams from T.S. Eliot (such as "We shall not cease from exploration, and of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time"). In the society of the spectacle, we do indeed come back to the same place over and over again, only to misrecognize it, which forces us to start our "explorations" again: we dance round in the night and are consumed by fire. To escape the Wheel, so to speak, we must come upon the place of our departures and arrivals, and know how to open a breach in it through which history might again begin to flow, memory might again awaken to itself, and life might again be lived directly and passionately.
Part Six: Terrorism and the State
Return to William Brown at The Birdhouse
[Writers] [Birdhouse]