Completeness as Sham

So we can see pattern narrative as the fundamental “building block” of society, which instils a need for completeness through the imposition of its fictional structure (beginning, middle, end) on ‘reality’ (‘realities’?). What also occurs here is the perception of life as a ‘quest’, a cause and event ‘journey, between birth and death. Or perhaps we could see life as an attempt to restore a (fictional narrative) completeness that is ‘remembered’ from early life? We engage in a search for something which did not, and cannot, exist – something we think of as ‘lost’, yet this ‘lost’ is an ideological construct, instanciated and magnified by constant exposure to, and consequent subjugation to, pattern narrative.

Sartre may say that we choose to make our birth important, but the more interesting question is how and why we ‘choose’ to do this. Within that existentialist framework, it is simply that the human person chooses the events of their lives on which to confer importance, without any kind of mythological entity deciding this. This does not, however, account for the deterministic effects of ideology. It this a simple case of replacement? Well, no, because the “mythological entity” is a product of historical ideology, a promise of “eternal happiness” if one bore the trials of life with stoicism – “eternal damnation” if one protested (or belonged to the wrong sect). The promise of some kind of immaterial ‘heaven’ has now been replaced by a rather more materialist concept: the idea that, if you can just make enough money, you can inhabit “heaven on earth”. Gambling promises this, as does “hard work”, the twin gods of the capitalist system – because what else are “the markets” other than a vast lottery? Or our conventional notions of gambling? And “hard work”? Something which promises an ultimate “happy end”, but one that will always remain just beyond one’s reach.

Have ‘happiness’ and “financial security” become interchangeable terms? It would appear to be the case, mainly because that aspirational idea, of financial security, is ouwith the reach of so many. ‘Happiness’ seems to be a category that is defined by its rarity, as something that is unacheivable by the majority. However, what must be taken into account here is that ‘happiness’, in capitalist society, is an ideological construct – a consumeable, as are the consumer goods from which it is constructed. To be ‘valuable’, it must be rare, it cannot be something achievable by all, because that would diminish its ‘value’. In this, it merges the intangible with the tangible: ‘happiness’ in our “free society” means freedom to buy and, moreover, to be able to buy, to have, what others cannot. Then the next step: to convince oneself that this apparent ‘achievement’ is the result of one’s own “hard work”, the “fruit of one’s labours” as the archaic saying goes. It is not a case of “being happy”, it is a case of possessing happiness, of owning it. Put another way, one’s ‘display’ of happiness must be validated by the approval, by the envy, of the other. Their lack confirms one’s happiness. Happiness is a vital component of completeness, but that completeness is defined by the inability of the other to achieve it.

Social media, media in general, provides models of aspiration: smiling video clips, photographs – demonstrations of “the good life” – are designed to prompt thoughts of “Don’t you wish you too could be like this?”, “Don’t you wish you were here?”, “Don’t you wish you were happy like me?”. Sitcoms, for example, show us twenty minutes or so of confusion and conflict, which is always resolved by the end of the episode. Soap operas offer brief respites from the trials of everyday life before plunging us back into the desire for more and other, for difference, for an escape which will never come.

Social media causes a split in personal identity, in the conception of the self, a split which harks back to the Renaissance idea of self-fashioning: we construct a public self, then become enslaved to the maintenance of that public façade which, in turn, produces the trauma of self-perception. Our private self, our (as we see it) more authentic Being, aspires to become one with the public, to become ‘complete’ – our aspiration is to reach an ‘end’ we can live, to mirror, to imitate, the pattern narrative by which we are surrounded/engulfed.

What this pattern does is create a sense of inadequacy, an ideological construct to which an ideological construct is the apparent ‘solution’. The way that society constructs us as ‘subjects’ begins by positing the ‘individual’ as the basic unit of society. This ‘individual’ apparently possesses free will and, therefore, is responsible for all of their actions (if, and only if, those actions conform to the generally accepted notion of ‘free will’). As the child grows up, encountering, for example, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and consumerism, they develop ‘sets’ of inadequacies, some general – the need for a ‘good’ job; to “work hard”; not to be seen as ‘lazy’; to compete, because competition is ‘natural’ – some, as they see it, applying only to them – to have ‘good’ friendships and relationships; to be sexually active (or not); to have an acceptable ‘body shape’; to be outgoing and self-confident. We could also identify these, and the many others, as ‘anxieties’ which then result in apparent inadequacies…or maybe it would be simpler to call them ideological ‘deficiencies’.

These inadequacies are then structured as per pattern narrative and, most importantly, are configured as ‘failures’ or ‘lacks’ on the part of the individual. The overarching message is that if the individual was just prepared to make the effort, these inadequacies could be overcome and ‘happiness’ would be assured.

As with everything else in a capitalist society, business is seen as the ultimate response to any ‘problem’ (a ‘problem’ which has been created by the system itself), hence, the mindfulness industry (now worth millions) and the pharmaceutical industry (already worth billions). Both of these operate on the usual “business model”: it is the individual who is responsible for themselves, in this case for their mental health. There is no question of examining the system under which the ‘individual’ is forced to live to find an explanation; whether the ‘solution’ is pills or yoga or colouring books, the blame lies with the individual’s ‘weakness’ – a term mobilised each time the ‘individual’ falls victim to the system, whether it be poorly-paid employment, lack of housing, failed relationships etc. etc.

There is, however, a ‘refuge’ from all of the inadequacies that beset one: consumerism. Buy more, buy bigger. Incorporate materials goods into your journey, your quest, and gain a series of fleeting ‘satisfactions’ from TVs, cars, travel and so on. We can see this pattern working in media: Take TV Detective series. There will be one metanarrative that spans the entire series, yet within each episode smaller crimes will be solved, providing the spectator/reader with lesser amounts of satisfaction.

In our society, one driven by competition at all levels (whether we realise it or not), we are bombarded with instruction: how to have the perfect body; what relationships need to flourish; how to garden; how to vote; how to understand. Obviously, the latter is the metanarrative of all the others, the ‘message’ being “If you want to understand X, Y or Z, then you must understand yourself, and to understand yourself you need to understand A, B and C”. This metanarrative both causes, and purports to offer solutions to, our apparent inadequacies – a vicious, brutal circle, the goal of which – completeness – can never be completed…

The great irony here is that individuality is defined by conformity, admittedly this is “smuggled in”, but it is the default setting; pattern narrative creates a desire for safety and security – a desire to be able to impose a pattern on (arbitrary) events. Cultures, and sub-cultures, establish their own patterns of perception which, although they purport to differ, are reflections of one another. Pattern narrative causes the human person to yearn to ‘belong’ in some sense or other or, if one is unable to ‘belong’ in the way one thinks necessary, then to seek explanations or refuge in other groups…essentially “I want to associate with others like me, or to understand why I am not like them.”

The defining characteristics here are inadequacy, insecurity and anxiety – characteristics that are created by capitalism (of which postmodernism is merely another function in its attempt to obscure the power relations – the metanarrative – which it denies) as an ‘evolved’ means of control.

However, what we are seeing in contemporary society is a return to Althusser’s distinction between two kinds of ideological state apparatus: (i) the plurality of private state apparatuses, operating through education, culture, the media etc. and (ii) a single public repressive state apparatus. The latter is the use of (legal) force by the police or army of a state; any other use of violence is deemed ‘terrorism’, “mob rule” or ‘thuggery’. We need only look to the USA (Black Lives Matter; Student protest camps) or Israel (the ‘actions’ in Gaza) – these are only the obvious examples at the present moment. I could just as easily cite the Miners’ Strike or the Poll Tax ‘riots’ in the UK. All of them share a common denominator: the abuse of power by right-wing governments, but abuse passed off as “the maintenance of law and order”.

The rise of populist politics in Europe – in France, Germany, Ireland, the UK – is evidence of a retrenchment of understanding, a return to the old binary oppositions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Nationalism has again made in-roads as the conservatives in each country move further to the right as they try to ‘accommodate’ those who we might properly call fascists. The demand is to enshrine the nationalist narrative, to return to a (nostalgic) sham completeness fostered by pattern narrative as a function of capitalist ideology.