PASTICHE JOURNAL

After a Chinese company acquired the American app Musical.ly, creating the extremely popular app Tiktok, the US government opened a national security review in fear of data being sent to China and censorship of anti-China content.

After the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Chinese companies and the Chinese Basketball Association suspended ties to the team.

While the two situations seem rather different, they are nonetheless the grounds for somewhat of a new cultural cold war.

In most forms of entertainment, there is a perceived cloaking of the mechanisms beneath. It is hoped to be ‘entertainment, plus nothing’. However, when these mechanisms come to the forefront, they face a confrontation. Both TikTok and the NBA are private entities connected to these two governments who are silently at war.

When entertainment culture is unmasked, the results are the conflicts we see today. However, if we go farther in this apparent ‘unmasking’, perhaps we find the part that social media, sports, etc. play in a society displays not only how they function, but their purpose. The part they play in sustaining a ‘functioning’ society.

Apart of a CIA program to help promote ‘American ideals’ abroad, the CIA funded American abstract expressionists during the height of the cold war. Organizing shows abroad and funding the arts. It is however most important to acknowledge that the artists were completely unaware that their work was being used as propaganda. After all, how could abstract expressionism be seen as any kind of propaganda? It is here which the Marxist statement they do not know it, but they are doing it is most prevalent.

As abstract expressionism’s aura escapes any dogmatic intent of the meaning behind the work (relative to the socialist realists), the presentation itself (funded and utilized as propaganda by the US against Communism) provided the same cloaking of meaning. However, it is not just a cloaking (similar to Marx’s commodity fetishism — the commodity as a transcendent object that hides the labor involved in its production), it is the very process which is the mechanism at work today. It is not a mask with something to be exposed underneath, but this system as a whole including this ‘masking’. Likewise, today, after the revelations from Snowden, Assange, etc. we no longer live under the they do not know it, nonetheless they do it, but they know it, nonetheless they do it anyway.¹

TikTok and China, FaceApp and Russia, Facebook and the United States. It is no longer a perceived cloaking process that underneath each lie data collection and other methods of control, but a disconnect in seeing forms of implicit propaganda in each. Not only do we have these freedoms and beneath them lie systems of control (data collection, mass surveillance, the more we do the more the government and corporations know etc.), it is that this system is the best at maintaining social order and avoiding any kind of structural change. It is freedom and the branding of freedom which hold us back.

“One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants- then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the ‘red ink’: we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom… our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom.” Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002

Walter Benjamin’s messianic event is what happens when time stands still as a major rupturing in the continuity of history takes place. It is the American system — perceived ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, consumerist overabundance — which functions as being anti-messianic. Conformity to the present and therefore a reliance on future generations puts revolution as a revenge for the past. Through freedom, we consume our cheap commodities, fantasize of becoming millionaires, etc. There is no need for a shift of our course if we have freedom. We simply look to tweak our system within, there is no need for an event to stop this path to create a new one outside of our capitalist freedoms.

China is different in their authoritarianism. Beyond the more obvious situation in Hing Kong, a prime example of this is the new forms of surveillance which are different to the US. In Chinese cities, when a camera captures you jaywalking, instead of staying as an invisible big brother, a photo of the person along with an ID and address (found through facial recognition database) is posted on a giant screen publicly, sometimes on social media. Some cities also have short poles which spray water when someone passes it before the walk light changes. Not only are the pedestrians made aware of the presence of cameras, but they are instantly apart of a kind of show trial. If there are less police and military, instead of being replaced by technology that stays cloaked, they are replaced by technology with a physical presence.

It is here where protests in Hong Kong are causing time to stand still as this messianic event, fighting daily for inland China to loosen the grip on Hong Kong. However, similar to Cuba before Fidel Castro’s death, Hong Kong has to confront the idea that the new path this messianic event puts them on might be the one of the Americanized anti-messianic. One in which future issues will not be as clear to oppose as ones imposed by an authoritarian government.

It is in America’s interest for this to happen, which is where the NBA and TikTok seem much more important than how they appear in the news and online. It is not that China has Americans’ TikTok data or is filtering out anti-China content, but that TikTok and the NBA both play a role in sustaining a culture of the anti-messianic. Blending apps and sports implies the two as tools not just for implicit propaganda, but methods of distraction and conformity.

Noam Chomsky has been known to label sports as a medium of conformity in its function to utilize the same critical thinking structure of politics, but minus the controversy while providing a real sense of impact (unlike politics). We engage in critical and lengthy debates of the latest trade, make predictions, we feel apart of the process.

“One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.”²

It is not simply that the powerful benefit from a distracted public. In a way, sports and entertainment act as a fantasy to support a view of a functioning ‘normal’ society. To function, the mechanisms that lie beneath it, must remain under an apolitical mask. As Jacques Lacan observes, when we initiate the process of ‘going through the fantasy’, or ‘unmasking’ it, we should see that our ‘normal’ society is held to appear ‘normal’ only through these fantasies. Although this was precisely the case in China’s response to the NBA (after finding out that people in the NBA shattered this apolitical mask, they cut ties), the common response is that even after this ‘going through the fantasy’, we nonetheless act as though the mask is still there to continue living in a ‘normal functioning’ society (think of the sports site Deadspin and their fight to ‘stick to sports’).

Confronting today’s issues are therefore not as simple as installing our flavor of freedoms across the world or tweaking our own. What is clear, is that we face a crisis today, not in the future, of confronting the pressing structural mechanisms. The youthful climate movements might have the most promise in their understanding that it is the ‘adults’ of today who are responsible for the climate crises of tomorrow. If we are to avoid such a crisis, it won’t be through the channels of tweaking from within, but through a messianic event which understands the overbearing structures of ideology.

The issues in regards to TikTok and the NBA display that maintaining an anti-messianic culture requires a mechanism of not just masking systems of control and propaganda that support the hegemonic ideology, but sustaining it through our preference for a fantasy driven ‘normal’ society. “That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe … hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.” Walter Benjamin, from the essays On the Concept of History and Central Park.

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989

For history to become what it always was, symbolism must be established in the future. The effects of neoliberalism and the post-Fordist workplace have only recently started to gain a kind of general consensus. Although symbolism can be initiated prior to an event (fiction, cyberpunk, etc.), for thinkers and media to reflect in the face of an overabundance of events is to start the first step of glancing back at the ‘vanishing’¹ moment whose symbolism will only emerge concretely in the future as what ‘will have been’². While it’s unclear where the late Mark Fisher is on this spectrum of concrete reflection on the symbolism and historicity of our time (he quotes many who have speculated before him), his thoughts on the neoliberal induced mental health crisis is a good spot to jump into as The World Health Organization’s updated definition of Burnout Syndrome (linking cynicism and distance from work to the workplace) in the International Classification of Diseases — ICD-11 — is making its way around the major news outlets. Although this is only a small step towards connecting mental health to the post-Fordist workplace, to understand the case being made by Fisher and how it relates to the real (burnout syndrome becoming mainstream as being connected to the workplace), it’d be beneficial to first walk through the differences between Fordism and post-Fordism.

    For Fisher, a good example highlighting the differences between fordism and post-fordism is the differences between the gangster movies of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (between 1971-1990) compared to more contemporary gangster movies (Fisher uses Heat as an example). The ideology evolves from the ‘families with links to the Old Country’ to the ‘rootless crews’ prepared to abandon everything at a moments notice. The ‘old fashioned’ ideology prioritizes certain characteristics like family relations, respect, and religion, while the ‘newer’ ones cut through all of this to survive most efficiently. Fisher highlights the new ideology by quoting Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” The ‘traditional’ gangster’s way of life is challenged in the new field where “Family ties are unsustainable in these conditions…” Fisher goes on:

Like any group of share-holders, McCauley's crew is held together by the prospect of future revenue; any other bonds are optional extras, almost certainly dangerous. Their arrangement is temporary, pragmatic and lateral - they know that they are interchangeable machine parts, that there are no guarantees, that nothing lasts. Compared to this, the goodfellas seem like sedentary sentimentalists, rooted in dying communities, doomed territories. 

This ‘no long term’ is echoed in the post-fordist career models in which jobs are increasingly more and more temporary. The long term hierarchical fordist model “obligation, trustworthiness, commitment - are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism…” Jobs no longer promise a hierarchical ladder to climb over decades, but a day to day struggle to maintain income. If the gangs held on to permanence, they’d be quickly confronted with the wave of individuals whose only permanence is the lack thereof. The connection to family is then challenged: “The situation of the family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory, in precisely the way that traditional Marxism expected: capitalism requires the family (as an essential means of reproducing and caring for labor power; as a salve for the psychic wounds inflicted by anarchic social-economic conditions), even as it undermines it (denying parents time with children, putting intolerable stress on couples on couples as they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each other).” Those who have surrendered their ideology and lifestyle to reflect the conditions in which they hope to interact with and succeed in are then at a great advantage. 

This post-Fordist ideology is also projected into the visuals of everyday life. Fisher observes the places in which the Scorsese and Coppola scenes are set compared to Heat. The organic and flamboyant social spaces (“All the local color, the cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects…”), as opposed to the non-places in post-fordist movies; “... polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens, of featureless freeways and late-night diners… a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where the marketable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises.” It’s natural that the movie Heat starts at a train station and ends at an airport. Both the family and physical landscape have shifted significantly in the transition from the fordist to post-fordist workplace. “The ghosts of Old Europe that stalked Scorsese and Coppola’s streets have been exorcised, buried with the ancient beefs, bad blood and burning vendettas somewhere beneath the multinational coffee shops.” 

The act of comparing gang depictions in film highlights the process and responses to critiquing capitalism, as many argue that we prefer the post-fordist workplace to the fordist workplace. In using the gang as a reference point, we see that there is no angle to create a wholly preferential state. Regardless of the ideology of gangs in social relations, the medium is inherently flawed. Even if we can sympathize with the individuals, ‘ethical’ gangs would hardly be seen as any kind of objective solution to alternative social relations. Although Fisher is highlighting the differences and in some cases the benefits of fordism in Capitalist Realism, his book is nonetheless arguing that ‘the medium is the message’³. Movies (Fisher mentions Wall-E) can be no more explicitly critical of what capitalism holds in store for us, yet we act as though everything will work out (what Slavoj Zizek calls cynical fetishism). The liberals will fight for ethical capitalism, the conservatives will fight for neoliberal capitalism, but the medium will nonetheless remain. Thus capitalism, the call to reform and change capitalism, and cultural attempts to ‘expose’ capitalism, are all mediums that are now ingrained within the ideology of capitalism and support this phenomena of capitalist realism (“there’s no alternative”). 

To examine these different aspects of how capitalism and neoliberalism have ingrained themselves so foundationally in our culture and social relations is to offer a brief introduction into how our mental health is in jeopardy. The machine like act of working 9-5 in a factory of machines is now subtly submerged in daily life, labeled as ‘flexibility’.    

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity', as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.

Although there was a desire to escape the lifelong factory job, the results of post-Fordism birthed a new wave of issues. Fisher brings up the connection between the ‘boom and bust cycles’ of Capitalism and bi-polar disorder arguing that “Capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence,  capital could not function.” 

This link between context and mental health is essential. To contain mental health to exclusively biological ends, excluding any possibility of politicized causation, would largely benefit a system that is potentially causing these issues. Especially when the system would profit off of selling medication to cope as Fisher points out. This also supports the individualized culture, “it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry).” It’s interesting seeing the connection between a sort of Sartrean individualized free will and neoliberal Capitalists. As Existentialism starts from an atheistic foundation to create the bridge to free will, Neoliberalism starts from a market morality foundation that labels an individual’s conditions as a product of their own lack of ‘working hard’. 

By attaching the systems at play behind a mental illness, Fisher is following the same steps as Marx did with commodity fetishism. As Marx attached the labor and laborers involved in producing and distributing a commodity, Fisher attaches post-Fordist working conditions to mental illness. Fisher is recognizing that mental health may be a symptom of these systems (or an element of a system, as Zizek would say). 

If one were to make of this an oversimplified debate between two opposing sides, it would appear that we are in a battle between individualized free will and determinism. However, as Fisher brings to light the data that appears to link the increase of psychiatric and affective disorders in countries that display what Oliver James calls 'selfish' capitalism and as this Burnout Syndrome becomes more mainstream, it appears that this link is now becoming too strong to dismiss and not a simplified matter at all. If the present seems too complex to make sense of, perhaps peace can be found in the idea that symbolism will be attached in the future. It’s only now that we can look back at the past 40 years of research on Burnout Syndrome⁴ and use the very recent mainstream implementation as a support of the real to the writings of someone like Mark Fisher. 

1-2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 159

3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964

4. Linda V. Heinemann1 and Torsten Heinemann, Burnout Research: Emergence and Scientific Investigation of a Contested Diagnosis, Sage Open journals.sagepub.com/home/sgo, 2017