The redo is the fantasy behind a film like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it's also the premise, according to Naomi Klein, behind almost forty years of conservative thought.
In her recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein argues, extremely persuasively, that much of global conservatism since the 1970s can be traced back to the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman, particularly his notion of the "shock doctrine," the idea that societies damaged by war, revolution, or natural disaster can be thrown back to a near-Edenic phase of perfect market capitalism. Much of the influence of Friedman's ideas on 1970s and 1980s Latin America in particular has already been delineated by others, particularly Greg Grandin in his essential study Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U. S. Imperialism. What makes Klein's synthesis extraordinarily striking, however, is the way in which she connects Friedman's notions of systemic shock to the rise, not just of torture, but of psychologist Ewan Cameron's specific use of ECT to "shock" individual psyches back to a blank state in which they can be recreated in a more productive form. Hand in hand, these two ideas--and Klein does show rather convincingly that they have frequently been pursued in deliberate tandem in any number of conservative revolutions since the 1970s--allow for the possibility that both societies and their citizens can be wiped clean and brought to a desired fresh state by suitably resolute functionaries.What's strange about this sort of Edenic notion is that it's not the sort of ideological orientation one expects from pro-capitalists. Yes, yes, yes, Adam Smith, unseen hand, blah blah blah--but have you read The Wealth of Nations lately?
Smith's not talking there about going back to something, he's talking about going forward. According to Smith, capitalism and its markets need to be unchecked because they move society forward, progressively, toward ever greater perfection. The problem with market interference for Smith isn't that it changes things, but that it inhibits natural change.
This is typical of most theorists, conservative or liberal (if those words, as usual, have any real meaning) from the American Revolution through World War II. All throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both rabid Marxists and rabid anti-Marxists were interested in societal improvement and advancement. Simply put, they were all in favor of progress. They just disagreed on what it might look like, inevitably asserting that their side was the one doing the advancing, while the other side was atavistically impeding "nature." Historian David Donald once suggested that early nineteenth-century American Whigs and Democrats differed in that the former conceived of society as a flower that needed to be tended and cared for, while the latter saw it as a machine that would run perfectly if left undisturbed, but even at their most diametrically opposed neither party saw society as static or tending toward some perfect pre-diachronic past. Not just the distinctions between political parties, but the sometimes crucial distinction between religious-based and social-science-based reform in the nineteenth century also makes less difference than one would think on this score. As late nineteenth century reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd once put it , "God is the name we give to the future."
All this changes, for some reason, in the mid-twentieth century. For the purposes of this entry I'm not even going to try to speculate why. Round up the usual suspects from the period (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the emerging consumer ethos, etc.) for yourself, and pin it on one of them if you can. What interests me, though, is that by the 1970s, particularly in the United States, there are very few reformers left of any stripe who want to move forward: they all want to go back to the time before Eden was tampered with. These days, the only people I know who believe in progress are those who work in new media and the internet: they exhibit the same faith in the future that the industrialists and social scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century had. For old school liberals, though, the Golden Age now lies in the New Deal/Great Society technocratic nexus, when government seemed compassionate and the broker state kept big capital at bay. For Friedmanites, the trip back is even more radical: they want to go back to the time--which may never have existed--when capital and exchange were in their original, untampered-with state, the theoretically perfect unimpeded free market.
Consequently, the 18th century theorist that diehard Friedmanites remind me of most is not Adam Smith but Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This is odd, because Rousseau is supposed to be a patron saint of liberalism, not conservatism. Things would go much more smoothly here if I linked the Friedmanites up with John Locke and his idea of the "blank slate" of initial consciousness (Locke can be seen as conservative or liberal depending on who's doing the looking), but Rousseau's thought is more resolutely anti-interventionist. Surprisingly, the interventionist/restorationist distinction, like the perfect future/perfect past distinction, is more useful here than throwing around words like Enlightenment or Romantic, let alone liberal or conservative. Even though Rousseau and Friedman would obviously never have agreed in any programmatic way, their work does share a jarring emotional resonance. Everything that's been done before now is clutter. Let's go back to what (I believe) is essential about humanity. Let's deny the relevance of history.
I'm not talking about denying specific sets of inconvenient facts. This is not your gardenvariety Mel Gibson's Dad sort of Holocaust denial here. I'm talking about denying the relevance of change and the specificity of precedent event on general principle. In late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century philosophy, history is a trap, something to be avoided since it can impede action. Not just Friedmanites but existentialists, phenomenologists and postmodernists of nearly every stripe frequently regard the past as a genealogical thicket of obfuscating discourse that must be hacked through and exposed so that one can finally arrive at the clear truth of the current moment. This is one major difference between the standard operating procedure of, say, a (modernist) Freudian and a (postmodernist) Foucauldian: the former disentangles the balled-up threads of past discourse so that future action can be guided in light of a much more evident past; the latter more often shows that all prior logic has been a sham and a scam and need not be taken into account when determining future justifications.
For such latter-day thinkers, there is no God, no Heaven, no Utopia, no future (for you). Only momentary heroism and even bliss may be possible, as in the swim that several characters take as a respite in Camus's The Plague. Hell, of course, may be very real for such thinkers, and it's not just Sartre's other people: postmodern hell is that very thicket of discourse, the paralyzing genealogy of past ways of shared knowing that must be hacked through before any kind of individual action is possible. Maybe the most striking example of this dilemma in 1980s popular culture was Sting's song "History Will Teach Us Nothing" (written by a former English teacher, I might point out), in which an argument is made for the liberation of political prisoners in Augusto Pinochet's Chile on almost exactly the same metaphorical grounds that Pinochet's Friedmanite advisors used to dismantle that country's developmentalist economy: prior discourse is simply superstition--move forward into righteousness in light of what you know.
And here we begin to see why what Donald Schon would have called the generative metaphor of amnesia might be so attractive, not just for conservatives who want to remake the global economy, but for liberals who want to feel happier in their clearly degraded world. In terms of the popular culture versions of such resets over the last three decades, Groundhog Day can be seen as not only ahead of the curve but tied to an earlier form of social philosophy.
Like the Back to the Future films that preceded it by a few years, it clings to the idea that one person's incremental knowledge can actually remake things for the better: these films don't present redos predicated not on amnesia but rather on one everyman's ability to remake his environment in light of his augmented knowledge in quasi-technocratic albeit comic fashion. Bill Murray's Phil Conners is not in as excrutiating psychic pain as, say, Dr. Sam Beckett in the "Shock Theatre" episode of Quantum Leap, in which the character literally has to submit to a second course of ECT to stop the experiential memories of all his post-Leap experiences from bleeding back in.
Far closer to our own emotional temperature in the twentyfirst century is a film like Christopher Nolan's Memento. Amnesia has been a commonplace of noir since Cornell Woolrich at least, but even in Woolrich's twisted world, the loss of memory was still usually seen as a bit of a curse.
In Nolan's world, though, most of the other characters in the film seem to regard the protagonist Leonard's erasure of memory as a blessing and wonder why he would ever want to have his supposed deficit replenished. In Nolan's world, we don't feel the old school private detective's responsibility that he must close the case so much as the trauma victim's wish that the past be past. Resets are bliss. Accept the present, and don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
I'm obviously exaggerating for effect here, but I do wonder if cultural critics fifty years from now will see amnesia as one of the great shared fantasies of the last quarter-century. Even Joss Whedon's upcoming television series Dollhouse seems to be premised in this idea: the so-called "actives" of this show's world have reportedly chosen to have their memories wiped so that they can exist in a state of moment-to-moment, almost childlike enjoyment of their mutiply identified existence. In this formulation, even depersonalized slavery is preferable to excessively personalized history.
If amnesia is the epic quest of our age, then Dashiell Hammett, even more than Cornell Woolrich, may ultimately be seen as our Homer, because of the famous "Flitcraft story" in The Maltese Falcon, in which a man gets to run away and restart his life fresh, only to repeat it in almost every detail in another town. However aboriginal, though, Hammett's embedded anecdote is still too oldschool for our time, too embedded in the idea that each of us has an innate "nature" that will always prove out when tested by circumstances. One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is so much more a story of how we would like to forget in our own era is that its whimsical method of memory wiping (so much more discriminating and easier to take than Cameron's global bulkerase) is based in discourse. You remove memories one by one, following threads of genealogy like a Foucaldian dismantling a panopticon, in order to strip away the traces of instrumentality that have caused you pain or trauma.
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