ACFM - ACFM Trip 60: Shock!

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

Jem, Nadia and Keir apply their weird-left lens to the power and potential of shock. Starting with an investigation into economic shock therapy and the way that Trumpism models the concept of shock doctrine, they move onto modern art’s relationship with the shock of the new, from Dada and Eisenstein to gangsta rap and radio shock jocks. Can you acclimatise yourself to shock either through repetition or training? Can shock be commodified? What other shocks are coming down the pipeline? These ideas and more with musical input from Kylie, Herbie Hancock and Stravinsky. Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined by my friend Keir Milburn. Hello. And my other friend Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about shock. So guys, why are we talking about shock today? I think there's a couple of reasons.

I think one of them is that, yes, there is some shocks coming, like an oil shock and probably a food price shock. They're probably already in the post, I think. and they're sort of working their way around the world and are going to hit us. There's a delay because companies buy their oil into the future, a set price, etc. And there's going to be a food price shock because a large amount of the fertilizer for the world's food production comes via the Straits of Hamoos.

So that gives you a little glimpse of why these shocks are there. The war on Iran is having these ramifications in the economy. There's this oil shock coming down the road and already it's hitting countries actually already around the world. Pakistan has declared free public transport last week in order to try to reduce the amount of traffic. In Myanmar or Burma as it was known,

basically depending on what your registration plate, whether it ends in an order and even number, you can either drive on one day or the other day but you can't drive two days in a row. So it's already sort of working its way through. So we're going to have some shocks in the future, basically. That's one of the reasons why you want to talk about shock. But I think it's also, like the other reason is that the war in Iran is one example of this sort of like government or governance via

shocks and unpredictability, which is sort of Trump's mode, basically. And so, yeah, those are two reasons why we might want to think about shock and how we incorporate into politics. This use of the term shock. like oil shock, food price shock. It's really part of a sort of economic journalism language since the early 70s. So we're part, and we are kind of riffing off that, but we're going to talk about lots of other uses of the word shock. But what about you, Nadia, because you were kind of keen on this topic as well. What do you want to talk about?

Yeah, I think this is a great topic because we can really kind of understand how this concept and this term shock, not just has been used, you know, by governments economically and we're going to get into like the policies and those aspects of kind of governance, but also in terms of like why that term shock was used in the first place. And of course, that is because of the experience of shock, you know, as human beings. Like what does it mean to kind of go into shock? What's the, what needs to be preempted to create shock? Like what are the different ways in which shock can be created or manifested or enacted, but really interestingly, and this is, I think, the interesting thing where we can pan across, but both from economics and politics to, you know, psychology, to interpersonal, to like gender, sexism, misogyny. What are the effects of shock? Like, what happens to humans, like on an individual level, but also populations to groups of people, like to economies when shock occurs? And I find that like a really, really interesting and kind of core ACFM topic, because it might be. might help us understand how we can have some kind of shock absorber. I think that was,

Keir brought this phrase when we were preparing for the show. And I think that's really important. Also, like on a personal level, but also, you know, on a radical and kind of political level when we come to organising. How can we, how can we absorb that shock and make sure it does not stop us from living the lives that we want to live or organizing politically in the way that we want? think this is a really, really kind of key ACFM topic, and I'm so happy we're going to get into it today. But of course, before we get into the episode, we should mention that as we do. You can go even weirder and left ear by subscribing to our newsletter, which we send out with every new trip. That's a full episode. So no more than once a month. And we always have a lot

of fun bonus content and updates from the whole ACFM crew. So if you're not signed up yet to sign up, go to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. But for more music and less chat, you can follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify, just search for ACFM. And also, please do leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on. It really does help push us up the algorithm. And of course, last but not least, to support us to keep bringing you even more from this ACFM Cosmos and Beyond, please support our hosts, Navarra Media for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. Okay, on with the show. Where would we like to start? One place to start might be the book by Naomi Klein

from the mid-2000s called The Shock Doctrine which is an interesting one because Naomi Klein is writing in a slightly different context to us now but like a lot of similarities actually yeah a lot of similarities now come to think of it and she's trying to deal with this the political effect of shock and so she's writing in a sort of post like 9-11

and during the Second Iraq War, she's sort of trying to deal with the effect of the shock of 9-11, which came to real shock, you know, this big event that happened, comes a real shock on the sort of US body politic, if you want to put it that way. One of the responses was this war on Iraq. During that war in Iraq, one of the terms that got used was shock and awe, so like a really big sudden bombing campaign

to try and disorient the Iraqi regime, etc. And then one of the other things that goes on there is this use of torture by the US forces in Iraq, most famously at Abu Ghraib, if you remember, the pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib of people being tortured. And also at Guantanamo Bay, which is the U.S. base in Cuba. You know, and some of what was going on there were electric shocks, electric shock therapy. And in the beginning of the shock doctrine, Naomi Klein sort of draws on CIA, torture manuals to sort of think about that, that conception

of shocks. So it's not just electric shocks. I remember at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, they were like playing really loud music like on a loop, basically. I remember they were playing Metallica on a loop. Let's not play Metallica, but Lars Ulrich was really pleased that they were playing

Metallica to torture prisoners, etc. Really quite, you know, basically they killed people at Abu Ghraib as well, tortured them to death, etc. So you shouldn't make fun of it. But like, what The thing she was trying to get out of that was, they see, I, torture manual, so these sorts of effects,

both electric shocks and these, you know, these other forms of like overstimulation, probably, we'd put it that way. So, like, sensory deprivation, and then, like, barking dogs, heavy metal music, that sort of stuff, basically ruptures a prisoner's ability to make sense of the world.

And she linked that to, like, to neoliberal, the introduction of neoliberal policies, etc. And there's a famous quote from Frederick, I know it's Milton Friedman, sorry, which talks about it's only a crisis that can produce the conditions for real change, basically. And when a crisis occurs, you know, what matters is the ideas that are lying around. And so the neoliberal project, when he was writing, he was probably writing this in the early 70s,

was to develop a whole series of policies which can then get implemented. So they're trying to put those two things together, basically, and make this argument that neoliberal politicians used shock, this inability for populations to make sense of the world, in order to impose policies that, you know, might have been resisted if the public could maintain its coherence and its political action sort of thing. That's the general idea of this shock doctrine. You know, and now we're in effect, it's not the Iraq War anymore,

it's now the Iran War, etc. So that might be a good place to start because it sort of links the sort of like bodily physical or perhaps psychological shock to like collective shock, social shock. When I was thinking about this, I was trying to kind of think about, like, what's the architecture here? You know, like you're saying, Keir, like how important it is to kind of disorient to achieve whatever result you want to achieve. And I think we'll talk about, you know, USSR and some other examples in a bit. But what stood out

to me is that it seems that in the case of like shock as policy, the end justifies the means. And it's the creation or the encapsulation of an event or events or some kind of reality as crisis. So it's saying because there is a crisis and defining the crisis and saying this crisis justifies some this kind of extreme shock behavior. Like this needs to happen because there's something unmanageable. There's economic collapse as we define it here or we're going to get onto this severe mental. illness or whatever, and we can't have a gradual approach. The only way where we are going to get to the end of what we want to achieve, that's people in power, the people who are enacting this in this, whatever specific scenario, is that we have to deploy some kind of shock because

other approaches are seen as, you know, too gradual or too slow and ineffective. And of course, things like, you know, human rights go completely out the window, right, in this case. And there's also, I think something about speed, perhaps. I was thinking about like speed over consent. Like there's too much bureaucracy. There's too many processes if we want to achieve X, like we've got to kind of go in and do stuff. That's really interesting because obviously one of the inspirations for Klein writing that book and calling it the shock doctrine was this continuity between the things Keir was talking about and the way in which policy planners actually did talk about the imposition of radical neoliberal policies on the former Soviet bloc in the

early 90s. And the term they're used, which was really inspired by people like Milton Friedman, you know, who was a... Keir already mentioned as the neoliberal economist, who's the sort of great disciple of Friedrich Hayek, I should say. And they used this term shock therapy. And the argument was that the way in which you would transition the Soviet Union and the former Soviet bloc successfully to a contemporary liberal democracy, which is the rapid and intense application of, like, of radical policies of privatisation, a massive, like, rapid, huge scale of privatisation of assets. And that would, and everybody could see, well, if you're going to do that,

you're going to switch from, like, a command economy, you're going to switch from the Soviet model, not just to, like, sort of Swedish social democracy or a core of Austrian mixed economy. You're going to switch all the way to some contemporary neoliberal idea of an extremely free market, low tax, low regulation, highly privatised economy. That's going to be an enormous, like, social change. And that sounds a bit mad. In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that conservatives have been telling us for the past 200 years you should never try to do. And so they had to come up with a narrative according to it, exactly that was a good thing to do. And the narrative was, this is shock therapy, which is obviously which is used.

using, that's a metaphor, derived from their electro-shop therapy, electro-convulsive therapy, which is a type of therapy where people literally have a high-voltage electricity, pass through their brains as a way of trying to jolt the brain out of really damaging patterns. So the whole story of shock therapy is something we can go into, I guess. I think before going into those details, though, I wanted to think about the very contemporary relevance.

Because he was talking about Trump and he was talking about Iran. And it does seem to a lot of people like sort of Trumpism as a political practice, if you like, it seems to really kind of instantiate Naomi Klein's idea in that book, that basically the way in which contemporary elites think about how they should realize their objectives is that they should just deliberately subject both their own population, and external populations to intense, brutal, like damaging, like forms of transition, like as rapidly as possible, because it is through subjecting societies to high levels of dislocation, the opportunities are created for various kind of powerful actors to intervene

and shape things in their own image and in their own direction. So I think that is really, I think it's really interesting. I think it's really interesting. I think you really can see Trump in those terms. I would refer to Lawrence Grosberg's book under the cover of chaos which is like an analysis of the first Trump presidency which really makes that argument

when we were getting ready for the show I was also thinking about an essay by Adam Ramsey about the Boris Johnson premiership in the run-up to the 2019 election and his argument was that well part of what Johnson and the Tories were trying to do was with their kind of things like suspending parliament and stuff

was just really just make the situation feel so chaotic for people, the people would just be like relieved and happy. If you had a government with a solid majority that was implementing a program, just whatever the program was, that the idea was just to make politics

so horrible that people didn't want to be involved in it. So therefore, the kind of the continuation of a kind of post-democratic technocracy could be furthered, even if it was a slightly different group now, these kind of mad hedge fund

Brexiters were going to be running that system, rather than the old, like, third way cosmopolitan neoliberal technocrats who are more pro-Europe. So I'm saying all that just to demonstrate how I think it is really useful as a way of thinking about very contemporary issues. And it seems to be, you know,

that seems to be consistent with Trump's sort of foreign policy, this sense that, as everybody keeps saying, there is no real plan in Iran. Yeah, there's no real plan for America's military intervention in Iran. There's no clear objective. Trump uses terms like victory or regime change and just sort of completely

changes what they mean from one week to the next. And that can be seen as evidence that you've just got this kind of infantile idiot in charge of the American state, which is clearly true on some level. But the argument that's sort of implied by the analysis, you know, by Larry Grossberg and, you know,

and it draws partly on people like Naomi Klein as well, it would be, well, that's not that's not all that's happening. It's not just this random idiot is in charge of stuff. That is the whole point. The point is for everything to be so random that nobody can really formulate an effective strategy in response to it. And the whole point of it is to be this kind of exercise of power,

which doesn't operate according to any norms, because norms as such will always constrain power to a certain extent and make its behaviour predictable. It's consistent with the Silicon Valley. ideology, you know, move fast and break things. Of course, it's always worth saying at this point, it's always worth saying that arguably none of this is new. Arguably, this has been part of the program of colonialism for hundreds of years. Colonial projects have always known that if you subject populations to massive disruption, it becomes easier to subjugate them. And it's

built into the logic of capitalism. You know, it was Schumpeter, the kind of the early 20th century economist who was not a Marxist, well he was not a socialist, as I think we've mentioned before, he kind of, he's one of the few sort of pro-capitalist economists who really understood Marx and any of the implications of Marxism. And Schumpeter famed, he says that the capitalism as such is this process of what he calls creative destruction. So the idea that there is this kind of necessarily sort of destructive process is in capitalism and colonialism isn't really a new idea. And it's it is going to produce these effects of shock a lot of the time I think

but there is something particularly there's something particularly sinister about how it becomes this like deliberate policy especially with the so-called shock therapy in the early 90s but of course it's now looking back it's kind of interesting because obviously in case anyone listening doesn't know

like shock therapy as it was applied to the former Soviet Union didn't at all work on the terms that were promised okay what it produced was exactly what both Marxists or just like Keynesian, like traditional Keynesian economists would have predicted. It produced like massive inequality, massive social disruption, a turn to authoritarian politics, as people desperately looked for any kind of social order returning. And, you know, the...

Oligox. Yeah, oligarchs, exactly. And, you know, the worst peacetime collapse in life expectancy, like, since the European plagues. My friend Mr. Stats has got some stats on that actually. Yeah, let's hear the stats. I was talking to earlier. Yeah, these are from. Owen Jones was tweeting this out yesterday as we record.

But there's an estimated 12 million people got killed by that economic shock therapy. When I used to teach this sort of period, the university, I used to say, like, you've got to keep in mind that you have these two powers, the US and the Soviet Union, facing each other with nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons don't get fired. but the death toll is similar to if you had had a medium, you know, a low intensity nuclear confrontation between the countries. 12 billion people dead. Male life expectancy in Russia falls by 6.5 years, basically, to 57.6 average male life expectancy.

Incredible disruption of living standards, collapse of living standards, etc. I think the economic activity collapses by 40% or something. like that, you know, within a couple of years. Then the question for me is always, well, did anyone actually believe that wasn't going to be the outcome? Exactly. If you are an economic fundamentalist, as these people are and continue to be, then people's lives, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not, you know, I know it sounds trite, but like people's lives do not matter. They are looking at certain indicators about the opening of markets and privatisation. That is their end. Their end is not like a.

better society. They are wanting to open markets and look for a certain kind of liberalisation. And of course, all of this continues in well into the 2000s with structural adjustment in like so-called developing countries, right? The same logic is used and ruins all sorts of countries around the world. And then in Britain. Well, no, before that, from 1975 in Britain, the original, the theory was if you did austerity and did a load of privatisation and made a load of people unemployed, in Britain in the second half of the 70s through to the early 80s, what would emerge from that was a leaner, fitter, more competitive, more productive manufacturing economy in Britain

that would then be able to compete with the Asian economies in Germany. And by the 90s, we were all supposed to be back having like jobs in these cool, efficient new factories. None of that is what happened. But of course, I think you're right. I mean, I think in all those cases, there's like multiple audiences. And I'm totally sure that Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan didn't give a shit if like 12 million people died in the Soviet Union, in Russia.

But I think the people they had to sell the policy to, like in the early 90s, it was the Clinton administration. And people like Bill Clinton, I think, did have to be genuinely convinced or they had to be given a narrative according to which they could persuade themselves that they had been convinced, that shock therapy was a thing that could actually work and would be good and would produce democracy. The argument they're used at that point, though, was that like it had to be a rapid move towards the privatisation of all of all the assets

in order to ensure there wasn't any backsliding towards either communism or social democracy, basically. That makes sense if you're measuring everything by the quarter and you want to make loads of money in the next quarter, doesn't it? I mean, the same thing happened. No, no, but I think I think that was, it was more that like the process is to construct a fully capitalist economy. But like the problem is if we do it gradually, we know what the population of the

Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states, we know what they want. They want like a social democracy, democratized form. Yeah, they want to live in Austria. They don't want to live in like, you know, some kind of cartoon version of Texas. They want to live in Austria. And the whole point is you can't let them have that, because then everyone will want it. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah. And also they wanted to keep the Soviet Union together, but like in a democratized form, basically. That was a referendum in 91 or something like that. Because what happens in Russia is that the people who get all assets are publicly held and they all go to like really tiny amount of people. So it's like it goes to people who can control those assets and that's like

gangsters and extra KGB people basically like Putin. Any like middle ranking like manager in the Soviet like publicly held industries who could convince the CIA that he wouldn't like he would be an anti-communist force was pretty much allowed to just take over like to be effectively handed like millions of shares in these privatized assets. I mean, that's how it happened. It's just incredible. Then comes like this real gangsterisation of that thing. And like basically, if you couldn't get people killed

and protect yourself and kill other people, you're basically out. Exactly. Yeah, it was like, you know, absolute like Wild West period for in the late 90s and so in Russia in particular. You know, the whole point of that is that, you know, it was that we need to shock people.

We need to do this quick. And so to answer your question you asked a while ago about, like, how do they see this? What's causing it is that like sometimes you take advantage of things that happen, which are caused a shock, such as 9-11, such as COVID, etc. Such as 2007, 2008 financial crisis, etc. Sometimes you engineer these things, either by war, producing a war, which is a political decision, or by implementing neoliberal policies at such a rate that people can't adjust to them. Do you know what I mean? The whole point, though, is to prevent democracy, to prevent democracy, to prevent.

like people's ability to make sense of the world in any sort of coherent or particularly collective way, which I think gets us quite a long way, basically, of like, and thinking about what shock is and like how you think about it in sort of political terms. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, you know, there's, it's kind of like the normalisation

of suffering, I guess, in some way. Like harm is necessary, you know, and that becomes kind of normalized, because you're trying to create this greater good of like achieving this thing at the end, which is, you know, ideological. So there we go. The shock therapy is shocking when you look into it, to be honest. This is like really triggering me to all of my like political economy studies from like 25 years

ago, however long it was now, you know, like going through all of like these structural adjustment policies and how it was kind of delivered. It's really interesting how it was sold, I guess. That's the area of interest for me. She's shot by the Power of Love. This is from 1991. This is Kylie Minogue shocked at producer Matt's insistence that we play this. Classic piece of actually very early, British sort of commercial rave music.

This is a piece of vocal piano house with kind. Tiny Minogue already, a big, big pop star at the time this was released. And this is produced, interestingly, by the classic British pop music production team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman. Originally from Manchester, I think, I think based in Manchester. And Stockkeken and Mortimer, really interesting phenomenon. They were responsible for so many of those 80s British sort of pop hits, people like Banana Ramah, Rick Astley. And they released music on their own label a lot of the time. So their music would go into the indie charts.

So if you switched on the TV to watch the indie charts show, you would have all this kind of jangly guitar music from the John Peel show. And then the number one thing would be something like this. Really, this style of music at the time might still have been referred to by some people's high energy. High energy is kind of a thing that's been almost forgotten about. but it was basically it was the sound of sort of white gay clubs in Europe, including

Britain in the 80s really and we tend to associate it with a very synth-driven sound like you know, Bronzkybee or something like that but people were still referring to this sort of thing as high energy at some points as I recall

anyway, it's Connie Minogue who of course began life as an actor on the and a popular Australian soap opera at a time when Australian soap operas were a big, big thing in British TV culture for reasons

which remained somewhat historically mysterious. She then went on to become a kind of pop icon. This record becoming a big, big hit in gay clubs where people were taking a lot of, people were taking a lot of pills and sniffing a lot of poppers

is one of the reasons why she ended up becoming this big queer icon at that time. This is shocked. We could go back to the 70s because people have been talking quite a lot about the oil shocks of the 70s as like a precursor to what's going on now. There were two oil shocks in the 1970s, one in like 73 to 4, which is provoked by the Yongkippur war basically and the fact that the US was rushing new military supplies to Israel in the Yon Kapoor War and the reaction from OPEC, which is an organisation of oil producing countries,

particularly from the Middle East, was to constrict supply of oil. And so she pushed the price of oil up massively, basically. Now that actually is one of the things that feeds through into, is it Dennis Healy, as the Chancellor at that time, accepting an IMF bailout? I was reading the other day that, like, economically, that IMF bailout, where so the UK goes to the IMF and says, we need a bailout. and they said, well, you've got to implement these neoliberal policies. So pre-Thatcher, you can't remember where I was reading it,

but it was suggested that Healy was doing that basically because of like, driven by like internal Labour Party factional politics rather than anything else, basically, being able to tie his own hands, if you know what I mean. Well, Healy always blamed the civil service, actually. I think it was only about four or five years after it happened. Healy said, like they realized that the civil service people had been feeding them all, this data which was inaccurate

and that they wouldn't have accepted it if they'd had accurate information. Yeah, so there's, I mean, there's something about the history of the kind of the capture of the treasury by monetarists and neoliberalers, which I don't know if anyone has really written about properly, which seems to have been going on. That is sort of interesting,

because there's another oil shock in 1979 because of the Iranian revolution, and that's just like, that's not something that's produced, etc. That's just one of those events. One of the other shocks that happen is called the Volker shock. Basically in the 1970s, the oil shocks and along with all sorts of other sort of stuff produces this stagflation sort of situation, basically, where you have a stagnant economy where it's not growing, but you have inflation, basically, driven by all sorts of stuff.

And so one of the ways that that was dealt with was this Paul Volker, who was the chair of the Federal Reserve, so the chair of the US Central Bank raised interest rates to 20% basically and provoked a massive recession as a consequence. You know, the aim of that was to basically smash the power of the, to provoke a recession in order to crush the unions and basically workers bargaining conditions. Their claim is that it was to reduce demand in the economy and to promote investment. That's the same thing in it, basically. Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's always worth spelling out to people like what they say.

Because the big shift in economic thinking like orthodox and government economics in the 70s is really, before, people are really deep in talking about neoliberalism. The shift is from Keynesianism to monetarism. And one of the doctrines of monetarism is this idea that when you have inflation in an economy, the only cause of it is excess demand. Whereas classically, the assumption is if you've got inflation, your prices going up, there's some mismatch between supply and demand. And you might solve that problem by increasing supply, by increasing efficiency and productivity. And the monetaries come along saying, no, no, no, it's only all you can do is squeeze demand. And also the only way you can squeeze demand is not by raising taxes, which is, again, the classical Keynesian way of, if people have got too much money to spend, you take someone off of it and do something productive with it. If you're the government. Now, you don't do that. You raise interest rates, because interest rates improves the rate of return for investors and asset holders and people who own debt and hold debt. It's completely mental. It's completely mental.

They're real fundamentalists. This is so psychosis. We're going to get on to psychosis, but it's pretty weird. As Keir says, like in class terms, what does that mean? To reduce demand means you're reducing the purchasing power of people. And ultimately to do that, you have to raise unemployment. Because people won't feel that their purchasing power has really been reduced, even if their own wages have declined, if they think there are other jobs available for them to go to,

like to seek to push up their wages. So you have to raise unemployment. and ultimately you have to attack the collective and individual bargaining power of labour, just as Keir was saying. Basically restrict the money supply, basically, which is what raising interest rates. But like that is orthodoxy right the way through

until like, you know, the last sort of five to ten years, do you know what I mean? It's until the Great Recession. It's still 2008. Yeah, I know. But the response there is to increase the money supply, do you know what I mean, which is quantitative easing. Yeah. Exactly.

It's only in the last sort of five years you have this turn to like industrial policy, do you know what I mean? Which is like some sort of turn to like Keyneson, isn't it? Yes, no, you're right. It's orthodoxy that messing with the money supply, rather than doing something about the productivity at the industrial base is how you deal with a mismatch between supply and demand. Because we've learned from history that if your response to economic problems

is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the industrial, industrial base, then sooner or later you will empower the working class in ways you don't want to do. And then you'll get inflation again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we move on, I just want to come back to the oil shop in a sense, because it's important to assert and make clear that in this case, quite different to quite a lot of examples we're talking about, on the political and economic plane, the shock is created a non-Western actor, right? So there's a political situation where Arab states kind of leverage their geopolitical

strength in that case and are effectively imposing an embargo on states that are seen to be supporting Israel and energies use as a political weapon. The West, United States mostly goes into shock and is like, oh shit, we can never allow this to happen again, right? because a global, effectively global south in the widest sense, resource power is deployed, right? And then, and basically it's really important to understand that a lot of what we see in geopolitics is basically trying to cater to the fact that that will never happen again in terms of alliances, in terms of, you know, how like the whole, yeah, yeah, basically how geopolitics is constructed is a response to making sure that that never happens to the European. again because in the US, if you suddenly have, you know, if people are not able to drive their cars, then you get real revolution, my friend. Yeah, and continuous with that. The victims of the

Volker shock, I mean, the initial victims of the Volker shock are homeowners with mortgages. Who are the people who bear the brunt of interest rate rises, like from that period through into the 90s? But of course, that is why after the 2008 financial crisis, they can't use really high interest rates anymore to squeeze out demand. They can't do it now because there are too many homeowners. It's too politically damaging for them. But the other, the real victims are these global South governments who have these loans who've been encouraged by the IMF to take these development loans from American and European

banks. And the effect of the Federal Reserve raising its base interest rate is to raise the interest rate on all those loans. And that's what provokes the so-called third-wheel debt crisis in the 80s, which is just never ended. And that money that was lent out, that is like, that's the increased profits that flow into like Wall Street, etc. Because the oil price goes up and basically all of that new oil money, all of the new profits that go to like countries such as Saudi Arabia, etc., end up in the US basically, and then they get lent out to third world countries, etc. You can see that

story. It's a very neat story. Yeah. I mean, the centrality of the dollar is like, you know, a big, a really big thing in these stories. Obviously, Latin American debt crisis is like huge in this situation. Okay, we've done our economic story. A little bit more comprehensively that I imagine. Yeah, we should have told people at the start, we're going to do a load of stuff about the history of monetarism. But then we're going to talk, don't worry,

then we're going to talk about Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Yeah, you can drop your acid now. This is the right time. By the time you come up, yeah, we'll start talking about your kids. We can't talk about shock without playing a little bit of punk rock, and particularly the Sex Pistols. There's a number of songs we could start playing from the Sex Pistols. Anarchy in the UK, when it was the Sex Pistols first performed,

Anarchy in the UK on Top of the Pops. There was a famous newspaper story that a Laurie Driver was so angry, He's so shocked, he put his foot through the TV screen, apocryphal, no doubt. But perhaps the moment on which the sex pistols and the group around, the people such as Malcolm McLaren, etc., and the people who were surrounding the sex pistols and in some way were feeding into the direction they should go, the moment when that strategy of using shock was most effective as when the sex pistols released.

The song, God Save the Queen in 1977, in 1977 was Queen Elizabeth II, silver jubilee. There were street parties all around the country, etc. And at the time, the song that got to number one in the charts, or perhaps it was number two, because the BBC fixed the charts, etc. Was this song God Save the Queen, a fascist regime, etc. made me a moron. People did find it really shocking, I think, you know, and it was a little bit too much, actually, because like the sex pistols, the members of the sex pistols got attacked in the street quite regularly at that point and their tours, etc., got cancelled, etc., etc.

Let's hear, Gimmiegmy-gmy-chok treatment by the Ramones. Now, the Ramones are bands you simply cannot overstate the importance of the Ramones in the history of guitar-based music in the late 20th century, along with. with The Saints, a band from Queensland, Australia, who don't get the credit they deserve, they seem to have pretty much contemporaneously come up with the thrashed guitar, fast bass line sound, which would come to define punk rock, along with this kind of shouted, you know, almost sort of football chant type vocals, which they were famous for, exactly what the Ramones are up to, how serious they are,

how much is all some kind of performance stick is never totally clear, Their look was never classically punk. They had sort of shoulder-length hair and biker jackets. And throughout their career, they sort of presented themselves in the style of, you know, sort of early 70s street kids rather than sort of art school punks of the mid to late 70s variety. They sometimes referred to their own music as stupid rock. And there's something about this track which captures that. I mean, it is a song.

somebody legitimately seems to be saying they want to get electroconvulsive therapy because a friend of theirs got it in his scene to work. The song literally says, gimme-gimmie shock treatment. Are they serious? Do they really want shock treatment, the Ramones? We just don't really know. You can never really

tell. Obviously, in a sense the song is designed to shock the listener to an extent in the way that may be most punk rock is, really. It's classic punk from the Ramones, from their second studio album in 97, it's

Gimmy Gimmy Shock Treatment. We should talk about then where does this term shock therapy? Where did it even actually come from? As I've already mentioned, it comes from this idea that some forms of therapeutic intervention to help people who are

suffering from distressing mental conditions could involve shock. And I mean, electroconvulsive therapy, probably everybody listening will have heard of it. Like it is a thing it's a thing that is still used in some very treatment-resistant cases of like chronic depression. And it does seem to work for some people sometimes.

There's a sense, I think the consensus is it was probably used too much when it was a relatively new discovery in the 50s and 60s. I don't have that much to say about it, apart from to say, I think one thing that's interesting about it to me from a sort of cultural history put perspective is that, well, that idea partly comes from the idea that people had about what brains are, and how brains work in the mid-20th century, when people had realised that a big part of what's happening with the processing of brain activity is that it's kind of electrical or electrochemical in nature. So people start to think, oh, the brain is like a kind of complex electric circuit. And what you need to do is, like, maybe you need to reset it

the way you would reset an electrical circuit. Maybe you need to clear out the static. You need to kind of change the polarities or something. And you can make an interesting comparison, with today where like people really the AI people really want to tell us that brains work just like computers which is as accurate

and inaccurate as saying that the brains work like a mechanical electrical circuit and so the way those things kind of shift is kind of significant but I think it's kind of interesting because often these days you hear like the history of VCT talked about as if this was

just a like sadistic barbaric thing that was done to people in the same way that like really crude brain surgery was sometimes done to people, the way it wouldn't be now. But my understanding is that's not really accurate. Like, it probably was overused, but my understanding is that it is still used. Sometimes it's used in very treatment-resistant cases, and it does seem to be effective sometimes, and people don't really know that much why.

But I suppose actually, this does touch on really cool historic ACFM concerns, actually, because that was one reason why people were very interested in therapeutic uses of LSD, in the 50s into the early 60s was the idea that maybe LSD was doing the thing that they were hoping like electroshock therapy would do. It's just sort of wipe the slate clean to somehow to jolt the brain out of kind of negative patterns so as to enable new patterns or new neural, you know, new neural connections to be made. All of that is not like totally not true. Like it does seem to be the case that one of the things that causes people, a lot of mental distress, is having kind the neural patterns they can't shift and that finding some way of shifting them is good.

But of course, you know, again, core ACFM concerns. We also know that historically there are all kinds of psychophysical technologies like intense meditation practice, you know, maybe really intense kind of exercise as well, which probably have more of a kind of neuroplastic effect than most of these mechanical interventions like drugs or electroshock. And that's one reason there's so much more interest in that stuff these days. Sure. And I think, you know, it's important to be thinking about like, again, power and agency, right, with these experiments and these historical examples. I mean, in terms of, if we're thinking specifically about shock, you know, my research, the research that I've done for this, it's not just ECT. There are other things like insulin coma over history. And I mean, I think there were physicians, there were people who were thinking that the shock is the thing in itself. which needs to happen to the body kind of neurologically or chemically or in some sort of form

to produce a certain outcome. And I think for our purposes, that's interesting, right? And that's political, obviously. And that's, I think, one of the things that we're trying to bring forward in this conversation. That doesn't mean, like you said, that there aren't interventions using some of those techniques or from those worlds, which have not, you know, the data that shows to have a positive effect. Like, there is that information out there. I mean, like, currently, for example, there's smart wearables for, you know, PMDD and perimenopause sufferers like myself.

Like, there are things that you can buy, which you put on your head and, you know, is interfering with, like, with your neurology, like, as a therapy, you know, and these are very well-researched tools that are out there. But I think it's different when you're, when, if we're thinking about it as, or if it is being sold in terms of the discourse around it as, shock, I think that's quite different because it's interesting then to unpack, like, why is shock to the body and kind of all shock to, you know, economics as we've just been talking about. What is that understood as? And like, what are what are the power differentials around that, I suppose? Yeah, that is a really interesting point, isn't it? Because initially when people are thinking about the relationship between shock and like mental conditions or psychophysical conditions, people think it's, shock is obviously a really bad thing. So Shell, Shell shock was the explanation for why soldiers coming back from World War I experienced what we would call PTSD, which I'm sure it's true. I'm sure it was true to us that it is extremely traumatizing, taking part in the first ever mass mechanized war. I was thinking about shell shock in relation to that, you know, the idea people had in the mid-19th century that it would probably be really dangerous to have vehicles that would go more than about 20 miles an hour because they thought maybe the human body couldn't take it. it, maybe the human brain couldn't take it. There would be too much of a shock. You know what?

I often find myself thinking, it might have been better if that was true, actually. It might have been better if that had been true. Like, we wouldn't have cars, but we probably would have, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have the hold of mechanised warfare. And then they'd probably have invented the internet, like a lot faster.

Oh, shit, I'd much prefer planes than the internet, goodness. I'd on the other side, definitely. I'd rather, I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind it taking three weeks to get to the state, as long as I can still Zoom call someone, and there are no cars. Let's go back to Shell Shot, because Shell Shot sort of plays quite a big role in psychological conceptions of shock, and Freud's conception of shock and that sort of stuff,

because it was a huge, it was something like 200,000 sort of soldiers, but got Shell Shock so badly they could continue to fight in these sorts of things, basically. At first they thought that shell shock was like it was a physical condition basically being close to like being shelled etc would cause some sort of traumatic physical injury basically and then people started getting shell shock where they weren't near shelling

and they sort of right started to realise that in fact it's a psychological condition basically and lots of people were like shot for cowardice because it was seen as a psychological condition caused by you know some predisposition towards cowardice and these sorts of things, etc. When Freud comes to start thinking about shock

or conceptualising shock, he's trying to deal with this conception, this phenomenon of shell shock, basically. So he has this thing of like, conception of shock as over-stimulation, the importance of like protecting yourself from overstimulation being this like central thing to live in organisms, basically.

That sort of gets taken up later on by people like Walter Benjamin, etc., and these sorts of people. When they try to do sort of like cultural analysis around this, what shock is and that sort of stuff. Shell shock, the condition of shell shock seems to confirm this sort of like,

almost like economic conception of the nervous system that Freud develops, basically. This conception of shock becomes a really important thing in conceptions of modernity, basically. I mean, for Freud, it still assumed that shock is related to trauma. Like, it's probably, it's not going to be good for you. Yeah. Well, like, where trauma is like, when you can't,

protect yourself from shock basically. And that's probably a kind of normative view in most ways people have had of thinking about, mind and bodies, like for a long time. You could say, I mean, you could point to maybe you could say there's a kind of sub-tradition within Zen Buddhism of people like trying to be kind of startled out of their

epistemological complacency by a kind of some incredible paradox, you know, the idea of the Kewan, the sort of riddle. that can't be answered is going to like immediately provoke enlightenment and the idea of sudden enlightenment, the sudden enlightenment tradition in

in Zen. But even that it's supposed to be like, it's not really shock in the way we're talking about. And I was thinking the idea of shock is something healthy or good in that kind of, which is only really once people are talking about shock treatment in the early 90s, isn't it? Like no one's

really, no one's even really saying like the oil shock of the early 70s is bad. The Volker shock is well, it's just something you've got to deal with. It is sort of implied in discourse around the Volkerchot by the hardcore monetarists, and it might be good for people. They might be shaking degenerate, lazy, union-ridden economies

out of their complacency. But it's talked about as something that people are kind of having to deal with. The idea of shock as being something potentially positive, yeah, it really has its roots in, as you said key in modernism, in the late 19th century. So this term modernism is always when you've got to be

a bit careful with because it's a term which is around in the 20s and 30s people are talking about modernism in literature people like Ezra Pound are talking about it and and in particular in architecture people are talking about the modern movement but the idea that really develops after world war two that there's this thing between like the late 19th century into the mid 20th century which encompasses like surrealism and impressionism and cubism in painting and it encompasses modernist poetry and it probably includes the symbolist poets in the late 19th century and includes all the different avant-garde musics of the first half of the 20th century that's an idea it's not doesn't really get going into the late 20th century until after world war two and i i mean it's a contentious claim but i i think it's

really it's part of the the cold war and it's part of the american claim to to somehow represent a kind of a liberal version of what it means to be modern and to make a claim on these kind of European avant-garde. So it's not really a term people are using, but retrospectively it is still a term we use a lot. They're like a concern of like what is modernity and like the conception that like changes happening at a really rapid pace from like the mid-19th century. Well, up until the First World War and then that basically there's a different conception of shock happens with this First World Wars we mentioned. But I think you can say, I mean, people are bothered about modernity from the mid-18th century, basically. People can see the industrial revolution is happening. They can see urbanisation is happening.

The French revolution happens. Like, people are bothered about all that stuff. So, Charles Baudelaire, this Parisian poet in the 1860s, who writes his famous essay, The Painter of Modern Life. And he's talking about the fact that some contemporary artist at these times, some painters are starting to paint pictures, which seem to depict, like, contemporary urban life. in a way which hadn't really been normal, certainly not for kind of academic,

like exhibiting painters. And it becomes really a concern of Bodleur and the generation of poets inspired by him. You know, people are like probably most famously in retrospect. People like Juan Boen Valens in the later 19th century this idea that what art should do

is it should somehow reflect like the shocking newness of the world. people find themselves living in, you know, the world of the cities, the world of photography, it's going to become the world of the cinema and electricity. You know, there's this incredible technological revolution people live through in the latter decade of the 19th century up until World War I where you get the invention of a combustion engine, powered flight, you know, telegraphy, electricity, audio recording, cinema, all this stuff happens. And how you relate to it is like really

a big thing for people. What you get from the late 19th century onwards as well as you get this kind of sequence of aesthetic movements, kind of art movements in poetry, in literature, in painting, who are really radically experimenting with form. The idea that to experiment with form, whether it's the form of painting or the form of poetry or music, is the thing you should be doing.

And that is a really new idea. Like, it's not the idea that what you should do, if you're an artist, is trying to figure out some formerly radical new way of doing your art. It's not even really there with the Romantics in the early 19th century. They sort of have that idea, but it's really a kind of late 19th century idea. And of course, very often, you know, these radical innovations in painting or music or poetry, they appear to be sort of shocking to people who are not part of the avant-garde networks

within which people are making those innovations. And it's from the late 19th century, you start to get this idea within those bohemian and radical circles. You get this idea that's a good thing. So this slogan, which is usually credited as belonging to the kind of networks of poets in particular in Paris in the late 19th century. Epatee le bourgeois or epitee le bourgeoisie, to shock the bourgeoisie, to shock the middle classes, the complacence of middle classes as being a thing you should try to do. do really starts to circulate. But that's interesting because what it sounds like you're saying and tell me I've got this right is that there's an upheaval, there's this massive social change going on,

but the norms of society have not caught up with that change. So like there's a lack of consciousness around it or a story about it. So what these movements are saying is that shock is kind of in a way important to break that perception, right? And to understand the world as changed. Is that kind of, right? Or is that relevant? It's also, like, the conception, like, modern life produces an effect of shock as well, basically.

That's what, like, Baudelaire is talking about in, like, Le Fleur de Malle, etc. The evil flowers are the flowers of evil, flowers of evil, yeah. And so, and like Walter Benjamin then in the sort of, like, 20s and 30s and 30s. his writing is like, you know, interpreting Beau Dele, et cetera. And like, you know, and his thing is that, you know, the urban life, contemporary urban life with all of these new things, such as cars,

et cetera, electric lighting and all these sorts of things, you're constantly colliding with. I've other people who are not like returning your gaze, the way that are saying hello to you, the way they were in rural situations, etc. Or you're just, you know, constantly being bombarded by these new sensations, etc., which produces a sort of sense of shock, basically.

people are shocked. And unlike Benjamin, you know, he has this sort of much more, not ambiguous, probably dialectical relationship to shock where in some ways it's a bad thing because, you know, it pushes people until, he calls it like a dream state, basically, in which they fall into the seductions of consumption, basically, you know. You could still see that in the way that people do that,

consuming to have safety, etc., these sorts of things, you know, the fact that a McDonald's taste, is supposed to taste the same in every country in the world, a little taste of home when you're abroad, that sort of idea. But at the same time he's really interested, Benjamin is really interested in these, the things that Jen was just talking about, like the attempt to actually produce shock

as a way of bumping people out of their habitual, sort of like frozen patterns of thought in some sort of way. And Benjamin is particularly, he's in conversation with Brecht, the sort of like the theatre, theorist and practitioner, basically, who has this idea of estrangement, which goes along with sort of Benjamin, sort of Benjamin's idea of shock, I think, you know, the techniques in order to produce a certain form of alienation, basically, we're already being subjected to alienation, first by like urban

living, etc., second by the introduction of like these big factories and like, you know, the work of the proletariat, which say alienating, etc. I think that's a really important thing, that like almost like diagnostic conception of shock, conceptual, you know, what do we do about the fact that modern life is shocking us all the time and that can produce a certain level of docility, etc. How do we mobilize shock in order to produce a more critical subjectivity is probably like Brecht's problem and probably Volta Benjamin as well, I would say.

You know, I grew up in a culturally very liberal household. You'll be amazed to learn, listeners. And my mum wasn't easily shocked by anything. She wasn't particularly shocked by punk rock. the only one time I remember my mum being genuinely shocked by anything I did culturally at all. She found me sitting in the living room watching the famous South Bank show that was a British cultural magazine show of the 80s. South Bank's show special about the Smiths

and the song that was playing was, There is a Light that Never Goes Out, the song in which Morrissey appears to fantasise about dying in a car accident with the object of his romantic fixation. Well, the Smiths obviously were the essential British indie band of the 1980s, understood by the music press, the kind of the high-status broadsheet music press of the time to be the kind of definitive British rock bands of the era.

I think often a bit overstated how original they really were, actually. I think the cure and orange juice don't really get as much credit as they deserve for having anticipated a great deal of the Smith's sound. But it was the fact that there was something about the Smiths coming from Manchester, coming from the home of post-punk, Britain's second city, the site at which it felt like the transition to a post-industrial society was being experienced in a very raw way that made them have this kind of resonance with people all around the country and all around the world,

as well as the sheer cleverness and articulacy of the lyrics and the brilliance of Johnny Mars arrangement. and guitar playing. And you can certainly hear all that here on this track. This is a song I kind of like to play when I'm DJing. I've played this at the sort of peak of a disco set and people love it and sort of everybody in the whole room will sing along to Morris sitting if a double-decker bus crashes into us to die by your side, etc. Well, I think it's interesting to think about what's going on there. Look, this is about fantasy and it's about fantasy understood in the properly psychoanalytical sense that fantasy

is not really about things you really wish would happen. It's about things it's sort of fun to think about happening, even though a lot of the time if they actually did, you'd be shocked, you wouldn't like it, you wouldn't know what to do about it. And it stages a kind of experience of adolescent introspective fantasy in a very moving way, and then it connects this to this very rousing chorus

with the big strings and its fantastic classic Johnny Meyer arrangement to produce one of the few really classic pieces of British, I'm going to say it is effectively a disco anthem, even though Morrissey would be shocked to hear that. But the fact that it shot my mum, my mum, a kind of a left boomer, a product of the civil rights movement, the new left, etc. And it was shocking to her,

because rather than being an expression of some kind of social and political outrage, it was, in a sense, an expression of the sense of relative sadness, desolation and hopelessness, which was afflicting my generation in, as we often say on the show, I'd say really in the wake of the great political and social defeats of the early to mid-80s. That sense that the future that might have been available or might have seemed available to people a bit older than us was now gone, I would say, was already there,

even if I think people were not really conscious of it a lot of the time. It was that sense of loss, I think, and it being expressed very explicitly in this song, or not very explicitly, really kind of obliquely actually, that, you know, shock my mum. And I think that's very interesting to think about. I'm trying to understand whether the avant-garde movements are like talking about art as kind of like a mirror

or are they using it as a hammer, which is Trotsky's or attributed to Trotsky anyways. Are they saying, well, like life is shocking and therefore art needs to be shocking or are they saying the norms are that this is what beauty is or this is what art is, And what we're deliberately trying to do is to break that perception by creating shock. I mean, those are very different ways of understanding the role of shock,

depending on what your understanding is, what your baseline is happening in society. So, you know, that's my question about the avant-garde. Well, I mean, you've asked the right question, but basically the whole history, like from the 1860 to the 1960s, is a series of different efforts, attempts to answer that question and different answers to that question. And it's not even clear, like, initially, if people would, would recognise the question as you're asking it.

So the question is, like, well, what's motoring with it? Like, why? Why? I mean, Rambot is famous for the slogan. The teenage, the teenage sort of protopunct, symbolist poet, Arthur Rambot, is famous for his slogan. It for et al-a-absor-modern. It is necessary. One must be absolutely modern. But exactly why, why must you? It's not something he's really that interested in declaiming on.

And exactly what it is they're trying to achieve and why. Not totally clear. So that slogan, epaet le bourgeois, it's most directly associated with the decadent poets, as they were called, in France, which included people like Rambu. It included authors, like, is it Hussiman? Hussman, I never know how to pronounce it,

who wrote this famous novel about a guy who lives in his house and takes loads of opium and hash. And it has a bit of a, has weird sexual tastes. and they were kind of an influence on people like Oscar Wilde and also the kind of the aesthetic movement in the late 19th century and what they dislike about the bourgeoisie more than anything actually is their boringness this is consistent what I said on a show recently

about this idea that there's one of the traditions of critique of capitalism is a tradition which critiques capitalism because it's boring and so these are people they're coming from a kind of position where they are themselves mostly members of a kind of a social elite, but they find the kind of culture which is produced by the kind of newly hegemonic commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, just really boring. I mean, they're people, these are basically like, almost all men, they're intelligent guys who are interested in kind of art and thought and philosophy and history. And yet they're one of the first generations,

really, for whom it's the case that the norm, if you'll remember even of the top social elites, you're basically supposed to be trained to run your dad's business after he's gone. Whereas Historically, if you're a member of the absolute top rank in society, if you're a young man, you're supposed to be trained at least to become a soldier and go to war or something, which is at least more exciting than just like having to run your dad's import, export business. And that's what they're protesting about. They don't want to do that. That all seems really boring.

And therefore the social and cultural norms, which that bourgeois culture produces, which are norms of kind of respectability, like diligent, hard work, very heavily segregated gender roles, you know, very kind of sober, you know, behaviour in life, like not getting too drunk, not having too much sex, which even compared to like the aristocracy of old, like it just seems really dull and boring.

And they want to just sort of reject all that. They want to reject all those norms. And partly these are people in Paris who are kind of experiencing, to some extent they have some contact with the life of the Parisian working class, which has its own history going back to the revolution and has already been through the period of the commune

and is famous for its very kind of advanced attitudes on sexuality and kind of gender relations and seems to have a kind of basically people seem to be having more fun. They want to kind of express those feelings in some way. They develop these forms of art which are quite kind of illegible to most people, at least and certainly to their own, the rest of their own class. They seem to be they're quite difficult

to understand. But of course, it's still a debate, it's a debate to this day within, like, historians of modernism. Like, to what extent this stuff ever really has any radical, social, and political potential? And to what extent it is really about the kind of the changing class composition of the capitalist class. And within that capitalist class, a particular elite is emerging who in the 20th century are going to make that their institutions will be the university and the gallery, basically, and the publishing house. And they're developing a kind of sense of their own, their own importance and their own status and that really the reason they want to produce all this weird art that no one else can understand is just because, like, no one

else can understand it. Because by virtue of the fact no one else can understand it, that's what makes it cool. And, yeah, there is still, you know, there's people like John Kerry, the great kind of Oxford, like literary critic, you know, published a really famous book about modernism, about, you know, 30 years ago now, which basically makes this argument. And it's, it's been a kind of persistent argument. But then it's also the case that like by the 1920s in particular, I mean, sort of our case, if we're going through the history, it's worth mentioning though, for example, like one moment in this history or one or two moments, like a really big moment is the early fove's exhibitions in the 1900s, around 1905, the group of artists in France, who come to

be known as the fove, which means the wild, the kind of wild beasts. But it includes people who are really familiar today, people like Matisse, you know, it includes people to do. It includes people today we think of as just producing very accessible kind of beautiful art and like, you know, Matisse, like I love you know, Matisse is great, you know, Matisse looks lovely and like kids really like it because it's got all these bright colours and it looks

sort of like finger painting sometimes. But of course, that's what, that literally, that is what causes people to be shocked. Actually, I found a History Today article recently about the first Fove's exhibition in 1905 and it uses the word shocked in the description. It said it was considered shocking to people.

But of course, the career of the people is eventually within their lifetimes they will come to be hailed as kind of geniuses who were ahead of their time who were just doing who people people didn't realize how brilliant they were and now it's general contenders how brilliant they are of course that it becomes a really appealing idea for people who want to be aspiring artists in any media and that sounds great like when you're young you want to be like hip and cool and a rebel and everybody says how shocking you are and then when you're 60 everyone's like fating you is this like great figure of the this great innovator, literally avant-garde, literally the vanguard,

the people who were in front but were eventually followed by everyone else. So on the one hand, it just becomes this kind of idea, or this idea gets institutionalized of what it might mean to have a creative career in the era of mass media, actually. What it might mean is you belong to this little group of urban bohemians who nobody gets it at first, but eventually you'll recognise as this great genius. And then I think it's really after the Russian, it's in the wake of the Russian Revolution that really the avant-gards, various members of the avant-garde start to say, well, actually,

if what we're about is like shocking the bourgeois, like if what we're about is like finding whole new ways of seeing the world, like actually, you know, what could be more shocking, what could be more, you know, successful an outcome along those, according to those criteria, the natural revolution, like communist revolution. And so the avant-garde has come to be associated, with the various kinds of revolutionary movement, including the fascists, including the fascists, like the futurists, the Italian futurist,

who is a kind of key avant-garde movement in Italy from the 1900s, they attached themselves to the fascists. And then, so then you get into this period in the 1920s when most of the avant-garde are kind of more associated with communism, but some of them also associate themselves with fascism. And also, you know, because fascism has this critique of what it sees is the tedious decadence of, like, bourgeois culture, that it's going to replace with a kind of,

heroic form of modernity. That's when you get into the really, I mean, in some ways still the most kind of compelling moment in the history of modernism, like from 100 years later, is this period in the 20s. You have James Joyce producing

this extraordinary, you know, this extraordinary text, which is, you know, his novel Ulysses. That was just to hear like one of the best novels ever written. I think it's sort of, it's one of those things which for me, I'm always feel like a bit of shape,

a bit embarrassed, like as a cultural studies scholar to admit, Like I do think that there is something uniquely brilliant about Shakespeare's plays in the context of the 16th century and the next few hundred years of theatre and there is something Ulysses is just fucking brilliant. Like I'm not sorry like it just is. I know it's bad that it's it's bad to praise the canon, but it's just amazing. And, you know, but it's amazing in way for reasons that subsequent critics have tried to link to the sense that it's trying, it is trying to completely get away from the way in which bourgeois ideology. dominate a lot of mainstream prose fiction. It's trying to show the world from multiple perspectives

and it's trying to get the reader to think about the kind of the absolute sociality of everyday existence, that the kind of the boundary between your internal world and the things going on around you is permanently porous in a way that the 19th century novel doesn't quite capture. And that's what people like Walter Benjamin are responding to and it's what the kind of the revolutionary filmmakers in Russia as well are trying to find ways

of using cinema to, like, create a perspective on the world, which is consistent with the sort of socialist ideology, rather than the kind of bourgeois liberalism of Hollywood, is dependent upon this idea of the individual and with their internal life, with their fundamental separation from all other individuals as the basic union of experience. I think one of the bits that's missing from that

is, like, the shock of World War II again, you know, not just Shell Shock. World War I. World War I. I mean to say World War I. Yes, sure. You know, we've already talked about this because we did an episode on surrealism, etc. But then you get like da-da is this really important moment of like, it's basically reflecting like the irrationality of this totally rationally organized

to an irrational end war basically. And you reflect that irrationality back, etc, etc. And surrealism is one of the moments in which, you know, this sort of like avant-garde art that are moving into like revolutionary art or linked to revolutionary movement. And that's one of the key venues for that, the key arenas for that. Then you have like the constructivists, etc. In the Soviet Union who are trying to link these avant-garde techniques and avant-garde formal techniques, part of which is to try to reflect that sort of, you know, what's it like to live in the modern society, etc.

You know, a sort of diagnostic thing. And then like a propositional thing basically of like, you know, this is, we can use these formal innovation, etc., to get people to think differently. to get people to denaturalize the things that they've just inherited, etc. You know, when you're in a post-revolutionary situation where people are still carry all of the ideology of the pre-revolutionary period, including religion, etc., these sorts of things, it's important to think about how people can estrange those ideas,

basically, realize that they are socially and politically caused, etc., and you can make different choices and all that sort of stuff. One of the key techniques is cinema, obviously. And so you have people like Eisenstein who try to create these you know, they're trying to represent this feeling of shock, but also create shock with things like montage, etc., this slicing together of different sort of scenes, etc. And that is almost, in some way,

that takes from surrealism's urge towards juxtaposition of like juxtaposition of things which don't seem to belong together, belong to different series, etc. That's one of the ideas in which they think through montage. And, you know, that period is a period in which, just like Matisse is shocking and then he's like the everyday poster on everybody's wall, etc.

All of these techniques invented in Soviet Russia go on to become the main techniques of cinema that flow into the present day, etc, etc. There's nothing a-historicly radical about any of these formal innovations, basically. They cannot remain shocking because we get used to them. But I think that's a sort of useful thing to think of as well.

We can acclimatize ourselves to shock. Do you know what I mean? One of the interesting things with Walter Benjamin and he's talking about Eisenstein and that sort of stuff. He's a bit ambiguous about Eisenstein, actually, because he's sort of thinking... He's ambiguous about everything. He never lands on a position on anything, Benjamin.

Yeah, that's probably fair, apart from hashishing. I think he's ambiguous about that. He's ambiguous about that. But, like, his thing is, like, well, perhaps what's happening with this, when we go into the sin and men and see these juxtaposition is that we desensitizing ourselves to the shock that can come from, from that sort of juxtaposition.

One of the things he takes from Brecht is this idea that, like, one of the ways to ennui yourself against shock and, like, prevent shock causing this sort of passivity, basically. That's the sort of thing that, like, if we go back to Naomi Klein and, like, you know, electric shocks as torture, etc.,

you're trying to create a passive, compliant person who will answer your questions. And, like, one of the ways to avoid that is to, is reflection, conscious reflection. Do you know what I mean? And I think it's a useful way to think that through is that if shock is like this over-stimulation, oversupply of like novel information,

not necessarily information as in a book, but novel experiences, these sorts of things. One of the ways you can protect yourself against shock is to try to have a more reflective conception of that or response to that. And if you can make it a collective response to that, then I think you're getting somewhere like

Brecht's estrangement, alienation techniques, these sorts of things. For people who don't know about Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, this German playwright and sort of theorist was kind of radical who, to put it really simply, Brecht's idea is that if you have the actors, like directly addressing the audience, if you try to completely get away from the idea

that the theatre is a kind of an illusory glimpse into the real lives of the actors, then you're sort of penetrating through bourgeois ideology and you're encouraging audiences to think reflexively about their own social conditions. And Brett Ward's really committed to his plays on being performed in like workers' theatres and stuff in a really interesting way.

Part of the way I sort of think through of like, what should we do about shock? It's to think about how people are acclimatized to shock through things such as like military training or boxing, for instance. I mentioned this when we were preparing the show. Part of like martial arts training is how to get, is a training and how to get punched in the face without going into shock and they're freezing basically

and not reacting. you know, and the way you do that is by constantly getting punched in the face until you climatize yourself to it. I will never understand why people do this. I will never ever understand why people do this for sport or for fun. I think it has to be a real luxury if you enjoy that sort of stuff. I know that's a lot of people. It's definitely not me. Well, but it's also like military training. It's also about, like most, lots of military training is about, it's about trying to instill sort of like automatic or autonomic responses basically. So that when you're, when you, when you experience shock. Dehumanise. Yeah, definitely dehumanise him because it's pre-conscious. This is a

pre-conscious sort of response, basically, which is what that acclimatize it. So that when you get a shell landing near you, or if you're in it, you experience violence in some sort of way, you don't go into shock. You respond with like your training, basically, that people talk about it as your training taking over. One of the things we're talking about on the show today is this idea of future shock. That was the title of a book published by Alvin Toll. Hoffler and his wife Adelaide Farrell in 1970 became an enormous international bestseller. Basically, what they were talking about was to shift towards what we would now call a post-industrial society, one in which information technology is increasingly important,

and in which even compared to the earlier phases of industrial society, very few people work on the land, etc, etc. And they attributed all sorts of social, economic and political problems to this shift, in a way which was not inaccurate, although didn't really necessarily give rise to any very obvious political solutions. But the phrase is obviously an incredibly evocative phrase, future shock, and unsurprisingly,

it's been taken up by loads of artists and musicians. When I was searching around getting ready for the show, I couldn't really keep track of the number of tracks I'd found called Future Shock and especially people doing any sort of slightly dark like electronic music like everyone's done a track called Future Shock

which is understandable you know when the great Detroit Techno pioneers first started producing their music in the mid-80s one of their key number would often say that he was making music which he hoped would help people adapt to the coming of this

this third wave information technology society and these are phrases from Toffler's books and his subsequent books. So there's this real kind of affinity there with that Midwestern American electronic dance music. One Atkins

was from Detroit but the other great home in that region of experimental electronic dance music from the 80s onwards was Chicago. Chicago, the home of house music and Acid House. And one of the most consistently interesting producers to have come out of Chicago is Glenn Crocker,

who goes by the name of Glenn Underground. Glenn Underground, just a very consistently interesting producer and DJ. He's been active since the beginning of the 90s. I think he's basically exactly the same age as me, I think, is in his mid-50s now. There was a really interesting interview with him up on Juno. juno.c.u.c.u.uk A kind of online record shop, but they also interview artists, etc.

That was just up a few months ago, and it was the first time I actually had seen Glenn Underground being interviewed in that much detail, even though I've been buying his 12 inches in obscure record shops, pretty much as long as he's been making them. And one of those early tracks

is called Future Shock. So I think let's hear FutureShop. This is a classic example of early Deep House, a phrase which in that interview, they talk about in some detail. They talk about what does Deep House even mean. And Glenn Underground attributes it to really to the implement of the great American producer Larry Hurd.

This to me is a classic manifestation of the great Afro-psychedelic musical tradition. Of course, Glenn is a black producer, and this is black American music. even though it doesn't fit really within the linear to kind of funk and hip-hop that people think of as dominating that legacy today. Let's hear it. It's Glenn Underground, Future Shock.

Okay, one of the many tracks to go by the name of Future Shock, named after the Alvin Toffler book of that title, perhaps the most famous one, it is Herbie Hancock. It's the title track from this album that Herbie Hancock, released in 1983. My understanding is that this album came out in 1983, by which time Herbie Hancock was already just an absolute legend of jazz. He's a great jazz pianist, played with all the great artists, played on a lot of the key Miles Davis records, played with people like Coltrane,

had his own bands, did some of the best of that kind of abstract, sort of electric, spiritual Jazz in the early 70s, shortly after Miles started doing that. Really an extraordinary figure. Very kind of likable figure as well. I've read a bit of his memoirs. Really interesting guy, Herbie Hancock. And by the time this came out, he had already made this quite successful turn into producing sort of semi-electronic and funk and hit, even hip-hop influence records.

He's widely understood to have been one of really the one member of that great. generation of the sort of 50-60s jazz musicians who really sort of engaged with the sonic qualities of hip-hop in a creative way and he had a huge amount of commercial success doing that. I think this is the album from which his great hit, sort of instrumental rocket came, but we're not playing that. The album itself, produced by Bill Laswell, actually, was called Future Shock and this is the title track. This is an amazing track.

and I highly recommend you just turn this off and go listen to the whole track if you have a moment. It's Herbie Hancock, Future Shock. There's really two things that happen to kind of the project of modernism and the avant-garde and their aesthetics of shock. One thing that happens is from the 1930s in the Soviet Union and in the broader communist universe, led by the Soviet Union. There's a kind of reaction against modernist shock aesthetics. the idea of socialist realism, the idea that art in all media

should be easy to understand by the masses and should promote quite simple socialist messages kind of replaces any endorsement of avant-gardeism. And then what happens after World War II is there's a big project by sections of the American elite, really, to kind of institutionalise modernism. So James Joyce, James Joyce's unity is literally banned in Britain until, I think it's banned until the 60s.

You can only get like Samisdak copies. You can get books about it are published, but you can't buy it. James, but Ulysses becomes canonized as like the great work for 20th century English fiction in American literary departments in the 1950s. And the Museum of Modern Art in New York takes on this really key role in terms of canonising all of these artists from the foes to Picasso as great exemplars of modernism. And so a particular idea of the avant-garde as shocking. in any sort of social political way

sort of gets taken over, it gets routinized, it gets professionalised, but also it loses its kind of political efficacy for a lot of people. So by the 1960s already, you can say for a lot of people,

you know, for a lot of people, that that idea of that avant-garde is kind of over, I would say it's not really, I mean, the counterculture, I don't think the counterculture really does particularly want to shock people. I think the counterculture does things like promote free love and drugs,

which he knows that bourgeois society will find shocking. But it doesn't, that's not, it's like, it's objective. Maybe that's not true. Maybe the idea of freaking out the squares as a necessary part of, like, countercultural practice is something which is there in the discourse of the counterculture in the late 60s. But on the other hand, you can look at people like Andy Warhol, who were kind of responding to the institutionalisation of modernism

by producing what we might call the kind of proto-postmodern art. But again, I think Warholz does still want to shock people, actually. I think he just thinks it'll be more shocking to see a picture of an advert on a gallery wall than to see some weird piece of formal experimentation. And then the 70s, I think, is this sort of pivotal moment in this history of the aesthetics of shock. Because on the one hand, punk really represents this kind of apogee of this idea, which you can trace all the way back to Arthur Ambeau. They're like shocking the bourgeoisie is a cool thing for artists to do.

I mean, one of the questions which is raised by cultural critics in the mid-70s is whether the bands like the Sex Pistols have any objective other than just to shock people, whether they're really, they're just trying to sell records to 14-year-olds who want to shock their parents by swearing a lot on television or whether they really have any kind of political or cultural objective. And the 70s is also the era when people like the British, like cultural, entrepreneur Mary White House and the moral majority organization in the United States make their bid to kind of turn back the tide of what they see as too much sex, too much

swearing, too much acceptance of same-sex relationships on TV in particular, all those things they sort of regard as shocking. What happens in the 1980s, which I think is really pivotal for our moment and is one of the many ways in which I think we're sort of still in a historical cultural phase, the phase which used to be, and probably still should be, called post-modernity, which is kind of really sort of starts in the 80s in a way. This isn't long 90s, maybe this is really long 80s. What really starts happening in the 80s is really after the defeat of people like Mary White House and the moral majority, as it becomes clear that, particularly around issues like sexuality and race, basically if the liberals have won, I partly through a kind of alliance

with the left, that is becoming normative across society, that actually women should be allowed to have their own lives and not just be men's property, that same-sex relationships are fine, that mixed-race relationships are desirable and fine, etc., then shock starts to become something, it's that the right rather than the left try to use as their sort of their kind of core aesthetic. So a really key phenomenon of 80s through to kind of mid-90s American political culture is the rise of what came to be known as the shock jocks, these talk radio DJs, who would give voice to extremely right-wing opinions on a whole, particularly on the range of social and cultural issues. These were key participants in what was already called by the end of the 90s in

America, by the end of the 80s in America, the culture wars. And I think the shock jocks, you know, people like Howard Stern and kind of other sort of contemporaries, you know, with their kind of flagrant misogyny at a time when liberal feminists. was becoming normative across the wider culture, they really anticipate the kind of aesthetics of the old right in the 21st century. I mean, they really are the template. In fact, I think the shock docs actually anticipate Trump's whole political persona. And I think to a large extent, I would say,

maybe up until very recently, maybe right up until the present, I would say the aesthetics of shock has come to be more associated with kind of reaction reforms over the past few decades. So I've talked about the shock jocks. But you could also think about, you know, you could think about the way in which various kinds of extreme metal, for example, use the kind of aesthetics of shock. But if they're associated with any kind of politics,

it's usually a politics of the far right. But not always. There is like left-wing extreme metal. There are left-wing extreme metal fans. But tendentially, you can think about gangster rap. You know, people were rightly, like really shocked by gangster rap when it first emerged as a form. And I would say, right, up until quite recently,

I mean, it's still the case today that in forms like trap and like mumble rap, the desire to produce a kind of discourse which is shocking to ordinary sensibilities, including ordinary left sensibilities, is an important part of what people are trying to do. But it's usually done for the purposes of asserting a kind of reactive claims, especially by men, on a kind of power and authority, which they see being encroached upon by kind of liberal feminism. So I think that's really interesting to think about.

We've talked about the cosmic right. We've talked about the kind of the right-wing appropriation of certain kinds of avant-gardeism on the show before. But I think the real turning point is the 80s. And it's this turning point that happens because it seems like the long project of modernism and then the project of a kind of radical revolutionary modernism in the 1920s has become completely exhausted,

partly because capitalism and even Hollywood have appropriated so much of what was powerful about it. Let's hear a piece of music that caused a sensational outrage, a real shock when it was first performed, but which within a few decades came to be so heavily canonised that it featured in a Disney movie, not just as a normal soundtrack, but as a kind of object that inspired the animation in it.

This is Igor Stravinsky, the Right of Spring. Eagle Stravinsky was a composer, a Russian composer, but when this was composed, when it was first performed in 1913, he was in Paris. Stravinsky at the time, I guess he would have been in his early 30s when this first came out, and it was performed by the Ballet Rus, well-known, sort of Russian-trained ballet company that was performing in Paris at the time. and so the music was accompanying a dance performance. And the right of spring was at the time considered to be very experimental in terms of its not using very traditional musical forms. It was quite atonal and discordant in places. There's a lot of kind of jagged energy. If you compare it to the ballet music of the previous few decades, certainly.

The performance actually caused, it caused a riot. The story is supposed to be, I think, that when it was performed, when it was first performed, there was two big factions in the audience, as there normally would be at a ballet performance. There was this kind of upper middle class to upper class, very conservative faction, who wanted to just see elegant people dancing to beautiful and unchallenging music. And then there was this like bohemian crowd in who preferred to see something a bit more innovative.

And the responses of the two parts of the crowd on that night was so polarised that they started fighting each other. So yeah, this is really, really is a kind of extraordinary event in the history of, you know, music. and modernism. But just a few decades later in the 40s, it would be one of the central pieces of music featured in the Walt Disney film Fantasia,

which we don't know. Fantasia is basically a set of unconnected animations, all of them inspired by and using the music of some bit of European classical music. I mean, we use that term classical. We mean the European orchestral tradition. I always like to be a bit pedantic about this and point out that properly speaking classical music,

It's like Haydn and Mozart. It's not really the generation before or after. But you know what I mean. That Disney film Fantasia, I would say, is absolutely a part of the American elite ideological project of sort of canonising and appropriating European, sort of high art and including elements of the avant-garde into a sort of depoliticised idea of liberal modernism and liberal modernity.

Of course, Stravinsky himself, is not really a kind of example of an artist who was a revolutionary, who was then thought of as not revolutionary. Stravinsky wasn't a kind of politically radical figure in his own right, but still it is really interesting that this text, if you like, this object, this piece of art, like, I mean, much like James Joyce's Ulysses, we mentioned on the show, James Joyce was a political radical, when, within a few decades to being seen as shocking by conservative,

elite conservatives to being completely canonized by particularly by the American cultural establishment. All of this stuff has got me thinking about, okay, well, if we think about, you know, the contemporary landscape, like where does shock, where does shock sit? And one way of thinking about it is, you know, we've seen this in the 20th century, but it's quite stark now, like the commodification of shock, right? How the absorption of certain kind of shock aesthetics and slogans start being taken in into advertising. But in, you know, and that can be a whole conversation in itself, like a really interesting topic. But more specifically, I'm guess I'm interested in how this interfaces with the attention economy and, you know, patriarchy more specifically, and how basically algorithms are creating a situation of exposure to more shocking and very often misogynistic and sexual content is driving the clicks, right, and making people money. Yes, they want us to be shocked all the time. Outrage is what flows. Yeah, exactly. Outrage is what flows. And it's really, you know, when we were talking about your modernity and modernity arriving and people's lives changing dramatically, you know, I believe that that can be mapped

onto what is happening today because you have a situation where in Britain, as a tiny example, but 18 to 21-year-olds, there's like 79% of them have seen pornographic content. Often the first time they've ever seen people naked or any kind of, you know, sexual situation is seeing sexual violence, like really extreme stuff, like women being shocked. I'm physically wincing. I'm literally, I am experiencing shock. I know that's true, but when you say the statistic, I just literally physically experienced shock. Understandably, and I'm not surprised. You know, the percentage of young people, you know, under the age of 16, that their first, their first understanding of anything sexual is basically seeing a woman being like gang raped on TikTok or something is like,

it's a huge number. So we have to think if children are being exposed to this kind of shocking content now, and we're talking about millions of children around the world, like what kind of person does that produce tomorrow? And I think this is a huge, huge reality that I believe the left should be thinking about, right? It's really, I don't know why there isn't a lot more on this. And I think it's producing a new kind of person in terms of what is being experienced as like shock on the internet. So, you know, this I suppose we could do a whole episode on, but I want to focus more specifically on one of the things that I talked about in the beginning, which is how shock, Jeremy, you said that you're feeling shock, you know, right now when you're hearing the

statistic. And I guess I want to think about it in terms of like the architecture of like what happens to the body when you go through shock in everyday life. And that might be through seeing something shocking on a screen that's creating clicks or it might be, you know, as you're walking down the street. So specifically to get back at three twats who sexually harassed me yesterday, I'm going to talk about what happens in the body and kind of intellectualize it for the purposes of understanding shock in this way. So I think we'll start by thinking, you know, on the body, on the person. We can think of shock as some kind of interoperative. interruption, right? There's a paralysis of action in a sense because of the collapse of a social script.

What do I mean by that? I mean as like if you are, which, you know, women, women will know this very well. If you are a woman moving through, you know, a normal everyday space or I suppose like a man, the equivalent is perhaps like, you know, getting threatened or getting punched or something, which I don't have experience of. So I'm going to talk about it from a woman's experience. if you're moving through a kind of normal, everyday space, as I was yesterday, going to work, you know, a train, whatever, and then you are kind of sexually harassed, what's happening there is that the rules are currently are suddenly shifting, right? And what was neutral kind of becomes charged in a way, right? So you are rewriting a subject in a case of sexual harassment to an object, okay? So there creates a situation of power dissonance. Normally in the world, as we move into the world, you expect vulnerability to have some kind of tracking with age, status, or physical dominance in a way, I suppose.

But what harassment does is it scrambles that logic. And this is the architecture that I'd like us to kind of think about, right? So the fact that I was objectified and sexually harassed by 318-year-olds is part of part of what intensifies the shock because there's nothing that I, in me as a embodied, as a person with an intellectual mind and like being 45 years old and having all of this intellectual capacity and kind of social status can do about that because I'm reduced to an object because I'm female, right? So what that does is it exposes in a way how deeply gendered entitlement runs, you know, because these could have been my students. They harassed me in

Arabic and I understood exactly what they were saying in my case. And it overrides the kind of hierarchies that would you normally assume would protect you. So on a bodily level, what does this create? And this can be thought about in different examples. But I'm going to talk about sexual harassment specifically here, is it creates a freeze response. And this, of course, is related to what we were talking about earlier economically, this idea of disorientation. And what happens when you're disoriented and you're taken out of context and like I said, the neutral becomes charged and there's a collapse of the social script is that your nervous system is kind of is trying to catch up with what's happening, but you lose your voice and your movement is stalled, which is why women will say all of the time, you're unable to respond to the situation because it is so shocking and you get angry later, etc. and all of this stuff. So there's a gap between the event and response. And then other things can obviously come in like, you know, shame, etc. So I think what's interesting is to think about shock in terms of publicness and where it kind of sets you in terms of a performance where, you know, your body's made visible, I guess, in the sense of like sexual harassment without consent. And then, of course, what's really interesting to think about, and we talked about this a little bit economically, is this idea. of the aftershock, right?

Is that what happens, you know, cognitively in your head is kind of replaying the moment, questioning your response, recognizing, I suppose that there's a broader pattern, which comes, which then brings with it all sorts of different kind of emotions. And it's not just about the incident, right? So it's about the other thing. So I am angry at the fact that, you know, three 18-year-old squirts are making, like, have taken my time away from doing other things that I want to do in my life because I'm just so fucking angry that this can even happen to me. And of course, this is the example of women

everywhere. So I think these are interesting themes to be thinking about. They do map in other arenas of life, obviously not just misogyny. But, you know, we have to, we have to appreciate that with women, when you're experiencing this stuff over and over and over again, it's often the way that shock is related to kind of disbelief, like how is this happening, that kind of takes away one's voice. And this then got me thinking about power, of course, which I've mentioned, but also things like when is shock used specifically to dominate? And of course, what it is with sexual harassment. And I think the most stark example of that is something like flashing. There is some kind of pleasure taken by shocking the person in front of you directly, right? And that's, I guess,

the most stark example, but not the only one, because I've mentioned, you know, my experience yesterday. Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to how that happened to you, Nadia. It happens all the time. Exactly, yeah. Happens all the time. And you remember them.

So I remember the first time I was ever grabbed in the street when I was coming back from university. It's like the trauma doesn't leave you. And the part of the anger and the frustration is that it sits with you. That's part of a thing. It's like, I wish I could forget, but you don't. because it is so shocking that this can happen to you because the norms are flipped. Shock causing a paralysis or the ability to act

is like it really relates to all of these the conceptions of shock we've been talking about, but personal shock and the social shock bit like, you know, Nermi Klein is talking about and the shock doctrine, etc., these sorts of things. But the other one was this shock can produce an isolating effect because you would say, well, why is nobody responding to this? And there's this thing, the bystander effect, basically,

which is that as soon as one person responds to something, say somebody's lying in the street, etc. Lots of people will walk by, look, wonder whether they should act. As soon as one person acts, then everybody stops and acts, basically. Do you know what I mean? There's a shift towards collectivity involved in, like, getting the conditions for action. Do you know what I mean?

Yes, if there isn't a perception of danger. So, interestingly, this happened to me yesterday. On Monday, I also had an incident where I was being insulted on the train. So there was a guy on the train who was, he was playing some kind of like trap background music on his speaker. And he was insulting every person who came onto the train, like rapping it effectively. And, you know, somebody asked me later, I did go, I got off the train and I complained and it turned out two other women had complained because I was called like a fucking slag or something by him. And then somebody asked me, why didn't you just film him? And I thought, fucking hell, I would never do that because I don't know what this person is capable of, you know.

And, like, violence is something that disciplines me, like, 100%. I mean, I'm sure it's not just women, but definitely for women, the threat of violence. If it wasn't for the threat of violence, shit, man, I would respond in, like, so many other cases I would get involved if I didn't think there was a potential that I would be attacked. Collectivising things dissipates the threat of violence to some degree. But, like, I think the bystander effect also comes into play with other things which people might find shocking, I just somebody collapsed on the street, etc. And then people, if somebody's in a suit and they collapse in the street, everybody stops basically. Somebody's like just wearing clothes,

you might wear in the streets and they collapse, everybody walks past. But I was just trying to get at, like, there's something there about like the need to move to like a collective response to shock. Do you know what I mean? And how do you, how do you precondition yourself to respond to shock in a particular way, I think is like one of the other questions that we might want to go on to when we think about how do we incorporate shock of the various kinds, basically, and the political uses ever that the right, I suppose, has put shock to, how do we respond to that, basically? How do we incorporate shock into a left politics is probably where we might want to go from there? Yeah, definitely. But I think in order to be able to discuss that is

kind of important to understand, like, the reasons why you wouldn't respond to shock. You know, whether it's on a person level or on a political level, in a sense, because if you are acknowledging the change in the norm or the kind of that something is being flipped, it affects your worldview. And it's much easier, you know, to go to Netflix and scroll on your phone, right? So there has to be some kind of buffer in terms of talking about shock absorbers. And hopefully this is where we'll get to, like talking about the political stuff, is where understanding. like what people have to lose, right, by acknowledging the shock in a sense. So I guess maybe that's one way of getting into like how do we build shock absorbers on the left in a sense. I mean, a lot of things that people seem to feel quite negative about with regard to the present, they do, they partly have to do with this sense that we sort of paralysed by being on the internet.

was paralyzed by the excessive information. That is a kind of idea that's been around since the 60s. Alvin Toffler published his famous book in 1970 called Future Shock. I think Neil Postman, that's Neil Postman, who was a very famous kind of antique technologies of cultural critic. I think he said, I don't think he'd lie about it. He said he actually, it was him and her colleague coined the term a few years earlier, the early 60s.

I mean, it's interesting because Toffler is this guy, he's this really weird figure in a matter, this author of these kind of mass market paperbacks that he was described as a futureologist, but they're often, they're doing a sort of kind of conjunctual analysis a lot of the time. They're sort of, you know, trying to synthesise a range of observations from like technology and economics and culture

about stuff that's going on in the world. And Toffler said, you know, everybody, people were suffering in FutureShop, basically, the pace of change, the accelerated pace of, modernisation had got past the point where anybody could really react to it, or anybody could deal with it. Just as an anecdote, in 2000 AD in early Judge Dreads, there's this effect known as Futsis,

people who suffer from future shock and they just go mad and go postal, basically, called Futsis. So that's at the late 70s, early 80s. So, like, yeah, it was definitely in the air at that point. I mean, for me, it's still the case today that, you know, my own definition of post-the-condition of post-modernity is, that it is what happens really, especially with the defeat of communism, when the aspect of the experience of modernity and modernisation, which is produced by, which is really produced

by capitalism for 100 years, which is the sense of constant accelerating change outside anyone's control, kind of overtakes the other aspect of modernity, which is the fact that governmental institutions and science and democracy and eventually socialism, like, seem to create institutions through which people can collectively control the direction of change. And so that idea of future shock does sort of relate to that. But of course, part of the context for future shock is the disappearance of communism as a possible solution to the question of, how do we acquire some sense of collective control in this era of rapid technological change and development. I think basically, collectivity is so important here. You know, it seems to be so

central because I'm listening to you guys talk and I'm just thinking well I don't know that there is a way that one can buffer oneself against the shock that is embodied that is experienced whether it is economic or whether it is because of sexual harassment or whatever the task is like what are the structures what are the connections that need to be put into into place for there to be a resilience to be able to bounce back from that and I can't see how you can't see how you can do that without collectivity, but also, but then I guess the question is how, how do you intervene into the everybody's, well, not everybody obviously, but a lot of people have bought the, you know, the, I've drank the individualism Kool-Aids, like even as rhetoric, even if not

in practice, you know, and I just can't help thinking about things like, you know, public dining. And again, I'm going to come back to canteens and just things that like actually physically bring people together so that they can kind of share stories of their experience of, you know, capitalism or misogyny or the fact that all of their kids have been, you know, shocked because they're watching porn or whatever. Like there has to be, you know, a way to, again, focus on collectivity as a way to deal with, you know, economic shock and all these other kinds of shocks we're having to deal with. This is yet another argument for consciousness raising groups.

And it's yet another argument is yet more evidence that the will, Women's liberation movements, pioneering of consciousness raising groups, which were partly precisely that. They were partly precisely a way of enabling women, by sharing their experiences, to sort of, you know, to become in a kind of a good way, sort of resilient to the outrage is a patriarchy. And also, I mean, also to become shocked by it as well, actually. It's going to develop, cultivate a sense of outrage and its injustices.

But also, like, to survive it. That's a model which arguably anticipates some, set of things that we all need now. I think you're on to something, though, because I think one of the conceptions of shock that we've got is like this overwhelming of our ability to, like, be able to process this flow of information, basically, either because there's so much of it,

like, you know, as in, you know, the shock of urban living, etc. Or because, like, they're just unexpected information is coming along at too rapid a place to process. You know, so the only solution is to increase your ability to process that information, either by anticipating, having contingency plans set up, or by collectivising the analytical process, basically, collectivising our ability to sort of work through what's going on,

do you know what I mean? You build shock absorbers into the left in that sort of term by making the resort to something which looks a bit like consciousness-raising groups, the automatic response to shocking events, do you know what I mean? I wrote an article around like shock and how shock quite often gets mobilised

to prevent people thinking about things. It was written in the aftermath of the 2011 riots, basically. And one of the things that happened there was there was this big prohibition of thought. Cameron is saying, you know, if anybody who analyzes the riots and thinks about why they might be caused, they are basically sympathising with the riots and, you know, we should condemn them, etc. And like one of the effects of the riots was this great,

a sort of like shift towards conservative, sort of habitual sort of modes of thought, basically. Do you know what I mean? So it was the Broome Army and Cupcate fascism was the phrase that was going around at the time. You know, this resort to the familial and the familiar sort of idea. You know, if we're going to prevent that, and you know, that is related to like the way that Benjamin is thinking about about how the shock of like, you know, urban living leads to the constellations of consumption and these sorts of things. One of the things that we can be certain about about the future is we're going to have

an increasing rate, an acceleration in and increasing the scale of shocks and emergencies, basically. That's part of the effect of climate change is the increase in extreme weather conditions and also other things such as zoonotic transmission of diseases, etc, causing things such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the sorts of things that are going to happen at an increasing rate. So it's like this problem of like, how do we deal with those, basically both the psychological problems of shock that come from our inability to be able to process information fast enough or process a new situation fast enough, but also like just the material preconditions of life, basically. That's the other shock absorber you have to build into, is to insulate our social reproduction

from the built-in vulnerabilities of capitalism, basically. So that's part of it, is that you have to try to, we have to try and gain some sort of control over social reproduction at a distance from the demands of capital. Like, in some ways, that's what Keynes is. Isamist, do you know what I mean? And in fact, Keynesianism is a response to the shocks of the 1930s, basically. There's all sorts of other ways in which that can play out, you know, so that's part of that. The radical abundance sort of approach is that you sort of building some shock absorbers into the left by taking control over some areas of economic activity, as many areas as possible. I mean, there's still an interesting question here, which refers back to one of my favourite themes, which is stoicism. because there's a question as to,

there's always a question as to, well, to what extent do we want to be, like, immune to shock? To what extent do we not want to be shocked? Because on the one hand, I think, we can't not be shocked still by things like the genocide in Palestine. And I think it's sort of important

to understand that. Like, on a certain level of pure strategic calculation, of a kind which we are often quite keen, I am often quite keen that we should try to operate on. Like it's true, like as some, I've seen some sort of, you know, revolutionary communist critics in the States say, you know, the whole movement against the genocide and Palestine, like around the world, like has been totally ineffectual.

Like, it's not clear we've saved one Palestinian life with all our demonstrations and outrage. But to me, it clearly is really important still on some level, like just for the project of staying human, that we remain shocked by that. But on the other hand, like I do, I have often found myself thinking over the past sort of 20 years that part of consciousness racing is getting to the point

where you're not surprised that capitalism deliberately produces precarity. You're not shocked that, you know, you're not, you shouldn't, no one should be shot by the total collapse of the university system because people like me were saying this was going to happen 25 years ago. And maybe it is about control. Maybe it's a question of maybe what it takes to be kind of effective and to survive in all these contexts is to have some way in which we can like collectively have some control over our kind of our own kind of ecologies of shock, if you like.

I mean, I think a lot of the time, I think a certain kind of politics of outrage in relation to capitalism and colonialism and militarism and their depredations is unhelpful because it just, it never gets you past square one. It never gets you to the point of strategising on the basis of the assumption that, of course, that is what all those systems are going to keep doing. And on the other hand, yeah, it's the question is, well, how do you maintain? that posture without just descending into a kind of cynicism, just a sort of cold cynicism. I think it's a really important task.

I don't think have a clear answer, but I think it's helpful for us to at least have in mind those questions, like when we're trying to survive this world, I think. In a way, though, that's just, that's like a restatement of, like, this dual attitude to shock that, like, runs through both avantathearten and then into, like, revolutionary movements, which are associated with avant-garde, how to avoid shock causing paralysis, basically,

and political paralysis and disorientation, but how to also mobilize the affect of shock in order to push us out of our habitual patterns of thought and to estrange us from the world as it is and to make it not seem natural, do you know what I mean? The way you do that is, perhaps, is that we have to, a little bit like the boxer who trains his body,

so there's automatic responses to put up the boxing gloves and protect himself, etc. perhaps we have to train ourselves that the automatic reaction to like shocks that come along etc is something that looks a little bit like consciousness raising groups basically getting together and collectively analysing the situation and working out how to act together something like that