Special Report: Nostalgia for the Superego (w/Sam Binkley)
Matthew sits down with Sam Binkley, Professor of Sociology at Emerson College in Boston to discuss his 2007 book Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s.
We cited this very helpful work as we dug into the sociology of conspirituality for our own upcoming book. Here’s a thumbnail of Binkley’s argument:
The 1970s ushered in a period of “getting loose” in relation to the body, work expectations, family relations, and political allegiances. This happened as the great moral and political questions of the 1960s deflated without resolution, even as they enshrined looser social mores around sex and finding meaningful work. The cultural yearning for structural change found its home in the project of the self, facilitated by an accelerated consumerism that expanded the conflation of agency with consumption. Getting Loose characterizes this inward turn as a retreat from the terrors of revolutionary freedom.
Show Notes
Getting Loose — Binkley
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Hey everybody, Matthew here with Nostalgia for the Super Ego, a special interview with Sam Binkley, professor of sociology at Emerson College in Boston.
We'll be discussing his fascinating and prescient 2007 book Getting Loose, Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s, and we'll be talking about how the Great Self Project got a little bit weird.
Some housekeeping before we get going here.
You can find our bonus feed on Apple Subscriptions and on Patreon.
You can find us individually on Twitter and collectively on Instagram and you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
It drops on June 13th.
And I'd just like to note that we're getting some really nice endorsements for it like this one from Anna Merlan, author of Republic of Lies.
A thoughtful, deeply empathetic exploration of an often disturbing convergence.
As fear, paranoia, and suspicion continue to seep into the New Age health and wellness worlds, Remsky, Beres, and Walker are uniquely positioned to be our guides into what they call the, quote, sparkling but flimsy, unquote, answers that conspirituality represents.
Okay, so friend of the pod, historian and author of Fit Nation, Natalia Petrozzella, put me on to Sam Binkley's 2007 book, Getting Loose, Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s, and it's really helped my understanding of some of the cultural and political drivers at play during the globalization of the economy that we study, which is New Age spirituality, yoga, and wellness.
Now I'll open with a summary technique that I learned from Mark Csikszentmihalyi when I took a course from him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Our weekly assignments from him, beyond the research essays, were to summarize any journal article we read in 25 words and any book in 100 words.
And this was one of the best tools I ever learned for my own reading comprehension.
Highly recommended.
So here's Binkley's book in 93 words.
The 1970s ushered in a period of getting loose in relation to the body, work expectations, family relations, and political allegiances.
This happens as the great moral and political questions of the 1960s deflate without resolution, even as they enshrine looser social mores around sex and finding meaningful work.
But the cultural yearning for structural change finds its home in the project of the self, facilitated by an accelerated consumerism that expands the conflation of agency with consumption.
Getting Loose characterizes this inward turn as a retreat from the terrors of revolutionary freedom.
So, here's my discussion with Sam Binkley.
Two important professors from the City University of New York played an important part in the intellectual shaping of Getting Loose.
One of them was a guy named David Harvey, and he wrote a book called The Condition of Post-Modernity.
And he's kind of celebrated with having introduced a conversation about capitalism, which differentiated between two different moments of capitalist development.
One of them was Fordism, and the other one was post-Fordism, right?
So, my book is kind of about that transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy.
A Fordist economy is one based on, you know, control, manufacture, and the production of nearly identical commodities.
And post-Fordism is very much about the loosening of that structure, that we have these more, sort of, You know, informal organizations that are producing very differentiated, symbolically differentiated consumer goods based not around, you know, the usefulness of the product, but based around the symbolics, the lifestyle statement of the product.
So what's funny, David Harvey and his book, I think, really provided the kind of backbone to that.
But the other guy, another CUNY historian, well, not a historian, a sort of political philosopher named Marshall Berman, wrote a book called All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.
It's a book that takes a line from the Communist Manifesto and elaborates it into a broad celebration but also critique of this cultural event we call modernity.
Um, and as a young graduate student at the New School, I was successful in roping Marshall Berman into being on my dissertation committee.
And I made several trips up there on the subway where I could sit in a Starbucks with Marshall Berman and talk about this book, which was amazing, and it's an amazing book to me, and how he understood modernity in terms of these twin moments of, you know, explosive optimism, explosive transformative momentum, you know, my God, we're going to reinvent everything, you know, everything that is solid melts into air, you know, these institutions called universities are suddenly
Malleable.
We can suddenly change them if we want to.
Or these other institutions called factories, we can remold them.
So is that a gloss on Marx in the sense that is Marx originally speaking about part of the process of alienation from the means of production that at one point you know why or how you were making something and what your connection to it in terms of time expenditure and that through the alienating processes of capitalism that you lose that, that it slips through your fingers?
Well, I mean, for Marx, writing in the Communist Manifesto, as read by Berman, it was about the euphoria, the excitement of being thrown together into this new cosmopolitan space where you can transform things.
Things that had been for centuries held to be solid were suddenly malleable and melting into air.
Things like institutions like religion and so on.
And the excitement of that was what Berman wanted to write about.
And Berman had a foot in the 60s, because that's where his experiences were formed.
So I wanted to do the same thing he did with, you know, the industrial proletariat of the 19th century.
I wanted to do it for hippies.
Right.
And I wanted to talk about their moment of modernity and how everything was euphoric and transformative, but also terrifying.
Because my God, what have we done?
We've totally dismantled everything that gave us security in our lives.
A couple of years ago, that didn't bother us, but now it does.
And we're beginning to wonder, what is the existential basis for our lives now that we've trashed every institution there is?
And that's where the narrative of getting loose comes in.
We don't really know what the universe is about anymore, but we know that we are part of a of a process, a narrative, a story which we're telling ourselves about self-improvement.
We are becoming better human beings because we are loosening ourselves, right?
We are doing away with self-constraint.
And then the world feels a bit more stable when it can be told in a narrative form.
My real romance is probably with Michel Foucault.
Right.
And some people know him, some people don't, some people Probably dislike him.
There's a lot of complex opinions on Michel Foucault, but I think that's probably been the planet that I've been in orbit around for a very long time.
There's a lot of Foucault in the background of Getting Loose because Getting Loose is really
about the formation of the self and how consumer capitalism had to invent these techniques of the
self, as Foucault would call them. I picked up the thread of that and I carried it on to another book
which came out about eight years later and that was Happiness as Enterprise,
an essay on neoliberal life.
And I had, at that time, picked up on a series of lectures that Foucault gave on neoliberalism, which were translated a few years earlier and then became all the big sensation, and now they're being criticized by some other people.
But that was the theory, was how can we look at neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism is a moment, again, of capitalist development, which says that the individual has to be responsible for themselves, and the individual has to look upon themselves as a form of human capital.
You know, what am I worth?
How can I exploit my own value?
How can I exploit the value of my environment?
And so on.
So I wanted to take that and apply it to a different empirical So, I didn't look at the 60s, I looked at much more contemporary self-help literature focused on happiness.
Martin Seligman is thought of as one of the sort of the gurus of the new positive psychology movement, and there are many others, and it's still quite prominent and quite influential, and some of us have been trained in happiness techniques and so on, right?
And my argument is that this whole, you know, technology of happiness is a vast, complex Neoliberal method by which we are trained into perceiving our own emotional states as resources to be exploited.
Well, resources to be exploited, but also to be controlled, to be managed, to be responsible for.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
I mean, the argument is made, you know, why should I want to be happy?
Well, you should want to be happy because you can earn more money if you're happy, right?
Well, that is an absurd kind of reasoning.
Yeah, I have only really thought about the governmentality of that and the self-surveillance of that in negative terms, actually.
I haven't thought about the neoliberal happiness project as being the promise of another technique of earning.
I mean, it's right there.
You know, follow your bliss as an instruction is exactly that theme.
But yeah, but to phrase it so starkly that whatever happiness you can generate is actually doubly good because you can exploit it is a very creepy thought.
I mean, it probably once was the case that states of happiness were thought to be ends in and of themselves. That if you can become happy, that's
a wonderful thing. But now it's reversed and happiness, you know, emotional states are instruments
towards other goals.
To me, that was a fascinating development.
With the themes of getting loose, you described a kind of paradox or contradiction that as
everything solid melts into air, that there is a sense of overwhelming existential freedom
as, you know, institutional relationships begin to stretch and become a little bit more porous.
And as people start to wonder, like, why, who am I working for and why?
And on this podcast, we study paradoxes and contradictions all day long.
And the central one is this dynamism between conspiratorial thinking that emerges in right-wing politics and a kind of progressive wellness utopianism that we've seen accelerated during the pandemic and beyond.
And to sort of tie, you know, your books to our project together a little bit, the thing
that I first thought when I or I couldn't get out of my head when I was reading Getting
Loose was this contradictory scene that came up for me in remembering how Swami Satchitananda
opened the Woodstock Festival in 1969, because it's both a moment of aspirational freedom,
but there's something else going on in the background that is quite restrictive and reactionary.
And how this appears is that he's sitting on stage in front of this cow pasture full
of hippies in various states of undress.
And they've you know, it's I don't know if it's rained yet.
I don't think so, not at the beginning.
But they've got their eyes closed and they're rocking back and forth and he's chanting OM and I believe probably he's, I can't remember the mantra he does, but there's this sense that he's communicating something liberatory.
And if you look a little bit more closely, he is sitting in a perfectly orchestrated line, choreographed line, with his devotees, perhaps some of them are ordained into his order.
They're in white garments.
Some of them are sitting very erectly in lotus posture, which is an amazing sort of combination of looseness and tightness.
So, the paradox is that nobody in that field or very few people in that field know where he's coming from.
He is bringing some kind of orientalized version to them of peace and freedom and looseness.
But actually, where he comes from is, you know, some of the roots of early Indian nationalism and its You know, impulses towards disciplined physical culture and its desire to train and purify the body in order to be, you know, a noble sign of the emergent body politic.
And so there are these two things going on during that simple chant that are very contradictory.
And so I'm just wondering if a scene like that tracks with some of the contradictory impulses of the 70s that you've researched.
It's a fascinating proposal, and it's one I haven't thought much about.
The conflation of left and right.
You know, Getting Loose was really about Um, not ideological conflation.
It was about appropriation and really how consumer capitalism appropriated certain themes, you know, and said, this is what you've been doing in this kind of countercultural subversive realm.
Um, I'm going to just sort of take that basic motif and I'm going to say, you know, you can get loose through our commodified products.
You can get loose through Apple computer, for example, or you can get loose through athletics or, or, you know, Things like that.
So that's appropriation.
What you're talking about is something a bit different because it's about an actual ideological continuity.
And, yeah, it's provocative.
You know, I mean, obviously, a lot of what happened in the 60s and 70s did connect with a lot of the kind of populism that we see today and a lot of very strident individualism.
I mean, there's definitely links that can be that can be explored there.
More broadly, when we think about mysticism, countercultural mysticism, when we think about the embrace of nature, you know, yeah, there's very clear links between those kinds of things and various fascist movements.
Heidegger was obviously a Nazi who had, you know, a philosophy that can be read on many different levels, but one way that he often gets read is, You know, almost on a theological level that he's talking about God, you know, being and God are kind of the same term in Heidegger.
And there's a broad sort of New Age reading of Heidegger, the Nazi, right?
So it's odd and it's very interesting how those two themes come together.
I would point out the differences though.
Some of the differences that stand between an easy reading of that continuity would be the ways in which getting loose, the kind of holism which getting loose assumes.
right? And the kind of self-discipline that fascism assumes.
From the outset, they begin in different places. They may wind up in the same place
later on, but holism meant let's break down the boundaries of the self and let's discover
the self's continuity with nature, the self's continuity with other subjects in our
environment, the self's continuity with itself, that there is no particular boundary between
the cogito and the body. These were the kinds of getting loose projects which I wrote about.
Fascists are not so interested in that. They're interested in reinstating boundaries,
boundaries that have been illicitly crossed by others, immigrants or hedonistic people that
have made us lose control of our desires.
You know.
And there's a Freudian reading of the fascist mind or the economy of fascist desire, which says, you know, we want strong superego.
We want to reinstate the hierarchy of the subject.
We want to subordinate the desires, the illicit desires of the id.
And in doing so, we want to consolidate the boundaries of the ego.
That's a very different economy that you find with the kind of eruption of impulse that we associate with the hedonism of the 1960s, which says, you know, the superego has always exercised far too great a role in our psychic organization, and we have to mobilize the forces of the id against the superego, because the forces of the id are actually much more benevolent than the Freudians, you know, initially thought.
This would be, you know, People like Reich, or people like Maslow, or people of the humanistic psychology movement would say a thing like that.
So, I mean, in trying to understand how, you know, a Hindu mystic opening the concert at Woodstock, you know, was laying the seeds, or I mean, you know, in trying to understand that overlap, I think we'd have to begin to think through how we went from these different psychic formations.
There's a story about a famous Iyengar student, a woman who went on to become beloved across America and with a huge platform of her own.
And she describes how, in the 1970s, the type of yoga that she practiced, she called flow and glow.
That, you know, it was in a church basement, that they would, you know, dim the lights, they would roll around and breathe deeply and stretch a little bit and, you know, do a few sun salutations.
And that was all great.
And then, somewhere in the early 70s, Mr. Iyengar comes to California and gives some sort of master class.
And, you know, he tells everybody to raise themselves up into a headstand and he keeps them up there for ages and then he walks around and he sees that something in her posture that he doesn't like.
And so he starts kicking her in the spine over and over again
while she's upside down, which is quite a dangerous thing to do actually.
And the way she's telling the story like 30, 40 years later is that this was the moment when I realized
that I had found my teacher.
This is when I realized that, you know, I had really just been kind of fooling around.
And so it's not about claiming that yoga was one way or another in the late 60s and early 70s,
but rather that two very different approaches to the body were available.
And there was kind of a fork in the road.
And the one that was more disciplinary, the one that was more militarized, the one that actually began to feed into the neoliberal notion of self-governance and self-discipline so that you
could become more productive if you did really good yoga.
That's the one that won out.
And so when this student let go of her glow and flow yoga and got some tighter fitting
clothes so that people could see exactly what her joints were doing so that she could make
sure that she was doing things correctly, that was a turning point historically where
a kind of reactionary conservatism related to the somatic fascism that these old yoga
guys grew up with in 1930s and 40s India where it asserted itself.
But it wasn't named it wasn't like understood it was just sort of it just entered into the conversation and then it became very marketable because as soon as you start telling people that they can really improve themselves really improve their bodies and their minds by doing this thing that becomes an exploitative a self-exploitative project.
Some of the kind of therapeutic experiments that were conducted in the humanistic psychology sort of self-actualization movement of the 60s and 70s and, you know, into the 80s, Think of Werner Erhardt in Est.
Much of that was, you know, it was the tyrant superego manifest in this kind of very performative way, you know.
I mean, there was this thing of, you know, berating the individual and breaking down the boundaries and destroying the ego in order to What exactly?
In order to force the individual to confront themselves as they truly were, maybe?
You know?
So, I mean, there was a lot of this kind of very intense playing out of, you know, the degradation, in a very military sense, you know, the degradation of the therapeutic subject through these very intense regimes.
Yeah, under the premise, through the premise of getting loose, through the premise of opening up, through the premise of becoming more expansive.
Yeah.
And the sense that this is going to help you in the long run.
You know, I mean, I think that there was a sense, I'm not really a fascist.
I'm pretending to be one in order to help you come to terms with your own inner fascism.
That's what, you know, new age therapeutic stuff is all about, right?
Like, it's not really beating somebody up.
It's pretending to so that we can work through the stages together.
It's like, you know...
Performative non-fascism.
Yes, yes.
But that's also what a sergeant would say in the military, you know, like a real fascist sergeant would say, I'm doing this to help you discipline yourself better, you know.
So that's the point.
Maybe there's some point of conflation that we can find there, you know, between 70s New Age reinventing the self and this kind of, you know, crypto-fascist element.
Well, here's something else, which is that there's a, I think there's a generational thread going on as well, because I think when you talk about the fascist drill sergeant who's saying, I'm doing this for your own good, that echoes, you know, Alice Miller's study of corporal punishment, and I'm doing this for your own good.
And all of that research that was done and how, you know, public schooling practices, especially corporal punishment within early 20th century Europe are like really have to be looked at with regard to the kind of sadomasochism that emerges in the militarization of that period of those periods.
And the thing that really sort of set me down this rabbit hole of paradox, I've told this story in the podcast before, but it was realizing that The yoga teachers that I was learning from were old enough and were coming from a time and a place in which performative demands in physical education were extreme and that they included corporal punishment.
And then I started reading a little bit more about the lives of people like Iyengar and Joyce and Bikram Chowdhury and all of these people that went on to be very like Abusive teachers who were lauded as being sort of tough saints and angels.
And I realized that the sort of the discipline that well-meaning and aspirational yoga enthusiasts were gravitating towards to open themselves up and to get loose in some way.
Was also, in some ways, an echo of a form of bodily discipline that could include corporal punishment, including the sort of the manipulations of postural adjustment, for example.
We see the same thing with Joseph Pilates and his manipulation of clients.
I'm reading your book and I'm thinking about how so many people want to become so open and so adventurous and they want to have an unlimited self and yet they are also kind of allowing these echoes of bodily control to percolate through the disciplines that they that they are developing. And it's not just yoga and it's
somatics, it's also Earhart. And I've got this new way of thinking about
language, but I'm also going to be like a bastard as I grill it into you during this workshop. These
comments are really interesting and they're prompting me to rethink a tendency that I've
observed in the way that a lot of new age practices get read, sometimes through the light of
a book that Michel Foucault wrote called Discipline and Punish.
Yeah.
Bye.
You know, and Foucault, one of his most famous books and one of his most famous arguments is that, you know, the body is subjected to these panoptic means of control.
And the body, and he looks at things like the training of the French infantry in the 18th century, you know, became increasingly precise, like stand with your rifle exactly three inches from your elbow at this point and so on.
Now, why were they doing this?
They were doing it to enhance a sense of the control of the body.
Yeah.
Right?
And being subjected to a visual interrogation that the sergeant would come along and say, you know, your strap is three inches over from where it's supposed to be.
Like, there's no point.
Who cares if the strap of your pouch is over there?
It's the fact that it can be observed.
And that brings the body under a sort of a regime of control.
And can we just pause for a moment for the listeners and explain the term panoptic, because I think that's extremely important.
Because all of the physical disciplines that you begin to talk about or that you examine in Getting Loose are also communicated, not only through like, you know, manuals and books, but also through visual media.
So that, you know, photographs become a primary way in which people study something like yoga.
And so, if the body can be examined through photographs, then the practitioner is going to examine themselves in the mirror.
But how does that relate to the notion of the panoptic?
Well, so Foucault had a theory about institutions in modern society, that they're subjected to constant, constant ongoing practices of surveillance.
And he had this notion that even when you're not directly being looked at by an expert, an expert of human life, even if you're not directly being looked at by a doctor or a criminologist or a psychiatrist, you feel the implicit gaze of those people on yourself.
And you practice that gaze upon yourself.
And you listen to your own thoughts and you say, gee, I may be neurotic.
Or you look at the impulses that you have when you're shopping and you think, gee, I may be abnormally criminal.
So we're constantly registering, monitoring ourselves through the internalization of a gaze which emanates from everywhere and nowhere.
Everywhere and nowhere, according to like Bentham's principle, that you could actually set up a prison where the guard tower is in the center, but it is obscured by one way glass so that you don't really know whether somebody is in there or not.
And they can have a clear slight sight line into every cell.
and everybody who's in a cell knows that there's a possibility
that they're being observed or surveilled at any given time.
And that in itself, whether there's a guard in the tower or not,
is enough to keep everybody under control.
So there's a constant ongoing sense of being looked at, even when the person, even when the looker has been removed.
So then we do the looking ourselves.
Right.
Well, I'm curious to see if something like Pilates or these extreme forms of yoga that we've described, you know, which also concentrate on the body as something that can be regulated, have a similar effect.
I mean, it's an argument that I've come across and I've always been a little bit,
oh, well, that's not really what Foucault meant and that's not really what these practices are like.
But as we begin to explore the connection between the new age stuff of the 60s
and then the more kind of right wing appropriation of that, I'm kind of being won over a little bit
to say that maybe there is something in just the sense of possessing a highly regulated body.
You know, I keep talking about Mr. Iyengar, I should say, just one couple of biographical details.
He is born in 1918.
He grows up incredibly ill and in dire poverty and then he's taken under the wing because of an intermarriage situation within his extended family by one of the progenitors of the modern yoga movement whose name is Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.
He's actually a strong man.
And it seems that in many ways he's a little bit of a sort of a freelance bullshit artist, too, with regard to the reconstruction of medieval yoga techniques.
It's not quite clear where he gets his material from, but he's very, very persuasive and he gets good jobs in various places, especially for the Maharaja of Wadiur, who's a very liberalizing and forward-thinking potentate in Mysore at the time, before this is pre-independence.
And Iyengar comes to develop a kind of yoga that he believes saves his life, that drives him, pulls him out of sickness.
It gives him a sense of confidence.
It's a yoga of survivorship.
And he presents his yoga in a kind of, you know, medical gaze, encyclopedic format through a famous book called Light on Yoga, which has 600 plates in it, where the most famous photograph is him standing in mountain pose looking like he's Being examined by, you know, a French lieutenant in Foucault's description, right?
But I studied his yoga in the 1990s and early 2000s and the instructions got down to what direction were the hairs on your shin moving in as you assumed the posture.
Which muscles were engaged and not engaged?
But down to just micro-movements.
Could you feel the skin moving in the correct direction?
And Iyengar's justification for this was that if you could pay attention to even the hairs on your skin, that you would have access to your full vehicle of god-vesselhood.
That somehow waking all of this stuff up would allow the vessel to be filled with the divine.
But he didn't really speak in theological terms or mystical terms that much because he was spending too much time talking about where people's big toes were.
And what I found was that this only really made sense in terms of what it was actually doing to me when I started reading things like Discipline and Punish and understanding that I had actually become hypervigilant about my body in a way that was very uncomfortable and I think quite neurotic, that I was always worried about whether I was Standing up perfectly straight.
I was always watching myself.
And so I've been trying personally to figure out, well, if that is a, if that is a, you know, not an uncommon phenomenon, what did that do to the politics of people, to the embodied politics of people who thought of themselves as being, you know, progressive and holistic?
when you know what they really practiced was basically trying to control themselves in some sort of
perfect postural way.
Just you know your thoughts made me think of this very very conspicuous term mindfulness. Yeah, exactly.
You know it's a direct appropriation from some vaguely no one really knows what you know Eastern mysticism.
Oh, you know, we're going to practice mindfulness now in our corporate session, you know.
Yeah.
So, yeah, mindfulness.
You know, interesting.
You know, we have two points of reference, really three.
One is the mysticism.
The other is the fascist.
And the third one is capitalism.
And how capitalism produces commodities, it also appropriates labor.
Frederick Taylor, who evolved this notion of scientific management, which is about the hyper-control of the worker in the work environment, would have loved the notion of mindfulness.
That's exactly what he tried to cultivate, which was the attention of the worker to the manufacturing process.
So, it's interesting how mindfulness, you know, gets appropriated and transformed in certain ways and applied to different purposes.
If you regard yourself as, you know, essentially a material to be exploited, as human capital to be developed and then exchanged, yeah, you have to, you know, do what any good worker has to do.
You have to transform that material before you can bring it to the market.
So, to transform it, you have to pay attention to it, you have to be mindful of it.
So, you know, what might have started off within the Eastern mysticism as this kind of, you know, awareness of the tendons of, you know, of the body, of the muscle composure, becomes this kind of, you know, you have to be aware of this in order that you transform it into its optimal form as a commodity.
So, yeah, I think that's really interesting.
You know, one place we can think of to separate out sort of the New Age mystical from the fascist appropriation is the problem of pleasure and pain.
Yeah.
My limited experiences of yoga suggest that there is actually tremendous pleasure in yoga.
I mean, it's a hedonistic practice.
Is that a fair characterization?
It really depends.
This is back to the question of, you know, were we attracted to flow and glow?
Then did we feel as though somebody had thrilled us spiritually when they kicked us in the spine?
I keep referencing him, but I'll just say it again.
There's a passage in our upcoming book or a chapter in our upcoming book where we collate many of the statements that Iyengar made about the necessity of pain.
And how pain is your guru.
And it's just extremely strange.
There's also a way in which pain and pleasure within modern postural yoga are conflated in an almost eroticized way that is Reminiscent of the kind of discourse that we might find in the communities that practice BDSM, but without the same kind of clarity about why one is there or why one is doing what one is doing.
Yes, there can be extraordinary pleasure in yoga and you're also going to run into many, many yoga teachers who say this is a very uncomfortable practice because you're dealing with your own impurities and the way in which your ignorance has twisted your bodily form into ways that have to be ironed out.
I don't know whether there is a pocket of purely pleasure-seeking yoga enthusiasts left anywhere.
I don't know whether they just sort of like hung up their baggy pants in 1969 and that was it.
I haven't met any.
Even though there are yoga organizations that really value a kind of hedonism, but I don't think I've encountered a yoga community in which the value of pain is not also highly elevated.
Yeah.
Well, of course, fascists love pleasure, even though they don't ostensibly talk about it.
You know, fascists, I mean, I mean, the Beer Hall Putsch was a place that began in a in a beer hall, you know, where you drink, you get drunk.
And of course, you know, Nazis.
We're rapists!
I mean, I mean, I mean, the notion of, you know, illicit pleasure, like, we're going to take the pleasure that you owe us, but we're going to do it underneath the radar.
Right.
You know, it was, you know, and actually we're hooligans.
I mean, I mean, and a certain kind of debauchery was considered, you know, something that you were entitled to, had been, you had been robbed of by a liberal state, but you were going to seek some sort of vengeance against that.
Right.
But of course, fascists also highly valued Pain inflicting on the body because it was a kind of a military culture.
This is the kind of pain that might be inflicted on you in the battlefield.
Therefore, we will sort of inoculate you against that pain by subjecting you to a rigorous training and so on.
So they all had places for pleasure and pain.
Somehow they may have articulated on some level and the pleasure of painful yoga became You know, it adopted the same logic as the pleasure of a severe military drill.
But no drill sergeant would ever say, you know, stretch your rifle out like this, it'll feel so good in your bicep.
He would never say anything like that, right?
Right, right.
But it's implied, maybe somehow, that there's this other pleasure that you'll be entitled to if you do this, if you do this correctly.
You can legitimately rape if you conduct yourself as a good fascist soldier.
You will be free, you will be uninhibited, you will be released from your social mores, and you will live as you were meant to live, would be the promise.
And all of those things, I think, probably imply pleasure.
I'm starting to trace a line between your two books a little bit, and it feels like the workflow is just in very simple terms, bullet points, that we go
through a period of forwardist economy that maybe ends close to the beginning of the 60s
and that begins to loosen into post-forward, but then the co-optation and the appropriation
of those loosening aesthetics and ways of thinking about products and lifestyles into a
kind of commodification culture.
And this promotes both a feeling of freedom And the feeling of being bound by a growing sense of well, you've got to be in control of yourself.
You have to now that you have all of this freedom, you know, nobody's looking out for you and you know, we're actually going to take away social safety nets as well.
And so you're really going to be on your own.
So there's this kind of it feels like.
We move from regimentation to resistance to the commodification of resistance to the, you know, sort of self-governance of feeling as though, well, we are now in control.
As loose as we are, we're also going to have to buckle down and get tight and work really hard because nobody's going to come to save us.
Is that does that feel like a does that feel like a sort of a mid-century to late 20th century thread that works?
It's a very interesting characterization.
You know, we're going to have to get really tight about getting loose, you know, or we're going to have to have to pursue it with some very precise methods.
Because if we don't, then we will cease to be productive.
And the thing that actually made us worthwhile or made us wealthy as subjects was the continued sort of productivity of our economies.
Yeah.
Because we couldn't drop out for long.
We couldn't drop out forever.
We couldn't sit on that Woodstock Hill for another weekend.
It was three days.
It had to be three days and then we had to go home and do something.
One important thread here is the notion of sort of the collapse of moral authority.
And what happens when the moral authorities, you know, civic mindedness or religious authorities or what have you, you know, when they when those disintegrate, what is life like?
Well, I mean, life can be like many things, but it tends to seek alternative authorities, however we might conceive them.
Or, you know, the self becomes the authority that had previously been displaced.
So the self's got to do a lot of work.
The self's got to really be able to convey that authority because without any authority
at all, we have this kind of economic state of existence.
I was talking with my colleague Julian in another interview or before another interview
about how we have this phenomenon of all kinds of getting loose enthusiasts in the 1970s
traveling on probably newly minted credit cards or whatever, maybe some of them had
trust fund money or whatever.
And, you know, they talk about Go taking buses overland through Europe all the way across the Hindu Kush and winding up in in in northern India and beginning to study yoga.
And these are people who don't have jobs.
They have frayed social connections.
They have sometimes alienated themselves from from from their own families.
Maybe the money is still flowing in, maybe it's not, maybe they've been cut off.
But they wind up not only studying this potentially liberatory set of arts, but also a very disciplined set of practices from people who they adopt as new parental figures.
You know, I think about, like, the person who, I can't remember what Don Draper's kids are named in Mad Men, but I'm thinking about them, you know, traveling to India in the 70s, because that's where one of them would have wound up, and how, you know, they're trying to get away from the profligate, depressive, you know, alcoholic father whose Fordist world has dissolved, and they have not become open, they have not become loose.
But then going to find a kind of, you know, paternal or rigid structure somewhere else, not only in yoga practices that will make them stand up straight, because they didn't really want to do that in phys ed class in the 1950s.
But also that they are finding these almost parental figures that are extremely, extremely conservative, where the gender binaries are really rigid.
So there's just this For as much getting loose as there is, there's also all of these internal signs that, oh, people are really scared of that at the same time, and they really, really want, in some ways, in some instances, to reconstruct the conservative boundaries that might have kept them safe at one point.
nostalgia for the superego. Yeah. You know, I mean, I mean, we've overthrown the superego. We've
embraced this kind of experiential moment of, you know, loosening the self emotionally and
hedonistically and sensually and so on. And then we, I mean, they probably at certain points,
some of them in different patterns, different places, discovered this, this sense that they
had banished the superego prematurely and they wanted to reintroduce the superego.
Charles Manson is probably part of this conversation.
Right.
You know, Hannah Arendt talks about fascist leadership in terms of the ability, sort of, the transferring of the functions of the superego from an internal voice into simply the embodiment of an external figure.
Right.
You know, and how Hitler really assumed that.
He became the superego, and therefore anything that you did that was in response to his will was already approved by the superego because he was the superego.
Right.
So the complete subordination of psychic functions, you know, to this outside figure is typically a rather dangerous development.
I think, yeah, these are what cults are made out of.
Right.
And there was a proliferation of cults, you know, in the wake of that historical moment, which many of them, I believe, still exist in one form or another.
Well, yeah, it's almost as if I feel like your tracking of looseness can be juxtaposed with the building of A kind of stream of cultic history within, you know, during the 70s and 80s that maybe functions as a kind of series of pressure valves around these new freedoms, right?
And also the pursuit of this nostalgia for the superego that you mentioned.
But then there are other points of blowback and maybe as we head towards the end here, I wanted to ask you about something that comes up in relationship to the freedom of the 1970s that really kind of haunts our beat as we study the conspiracy theorism of recent years and phenomena like conspirituality and QAnon.
That something like really important starts to happen in the 1970s.
And I wonder if it is in part a reaction formation to getting loose.
And that's that the satanic panic begins to percolate.
And that comes through films first, and then it comes through, you know, sort of compromised and intrusive psychotherapeutic movements that are based on like very flawed assumptions about how memory works.
And I'm wondering if you see events like that as signs that social freedoms are on some level terrifying, that they become scenes of horror, actually, that once you let Dionysus out of the bag, that everybody's going to pay the price.
I would say that a lot of what happened in the early 1980s reflected that sense that, you know, we have exercised this permissive Culture for a long time, and as a consequence we've released forces which are going to destroy us, which is precisely the superego's anxiety about the emancipation of the it.
That these forces will destroy the ego itself, but I will protect the ego.
I will intervene and protect the ego against these destructive forces.
You know, the Rolling Stones made an album in the 60s.
Um, satanic majesties, satanic themes were woven throughout rock music for a long time.
It wasn't until, you know, 15 years later that it became, oh my God, uh, you know, Motley Crue are worshiping the devil and things like that.
So, you know, it's definitely an interesting moment is that, you know, we, we, we have to, um, uh, recognize the dangers of the forces that we've unleashed because, you know, they are, they are in fact quite, quite dangerous things.
And the answer that people begin to, aestheticize and reach towards and it continues to this day it's like so unusual the the because the satanic panic is kind of enshrouded by this um catholic revanchism it's it's people are looking towards priests to do exorcisms and they're you know wondering about how
You know, praying and, you know, worshipping the crucifix can possibly restore some kind of order or meaning to the chaos that's ensuing.
And again, it sets the terms for the reintroduction of a strong superego.
Like, now you really need me.
You know, you disavowed me and look what happened.
Like, I'm going to come back and save you by domesticating and sublimating those forces that, you know, whose sublimation it was my job to do originally anyway.
Right?
Right.
So, yeah.
In terms of what we're having now, in terms of QAnon, I am at a loss to explain some of this.
But I don't know.
I don't see a lot of superego operating within Trump.
Because you've really leaned into the nostalgia for the superego, When I think about how Q is posited as a deep state operative who is bringing control to the American moral universe by helping Donald Trump behind the scenes.
That is a super egoic archetype, but the context in which it's conveyed is endlessly ironic, shitposty, you know, transgressive.
There's nothing...it's like we have a form of Like, reactionary conservatism that is really about mood and affect and irony and, you know, sort of, and rebelliousness.
And it doesn't really interest itself in restoring order.
It is very disruptive, actually.
And so there's something different there that somehow maybe it's the sort of crowning point
of the society of the spectacle that the superego no longer actually acts as an organizing principle,
but rather its meanness and its harshness is just a kind of energy that fuels the next
cycle of the spectacle itself.
You know, a really interesting essay written a very long time ago by Jean-Paul Sartre that
I find helpful in understanding a lot of this is his essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, where he
talks about sort of the psychic dynamic of fascism on an existential level, you know,
as being about the sense that, you know, the liberal state was never legitimate and therefore
our barbarism is actually the only legitimate.
force, you know, our unruliness, our delinquency, our violence is the only moral force left
in the face of this fraudulent force.
So yeah, I mean, you know, talking nonsense is something that fascists do pretty comfortably.
Is this the essay in which he talks about the talking nonsense?
Because I've come across a number of instances in which I think an essay from that era is quoted where he's talking about, you know, what you don't understand, dear liberal, is that the fascist knows he doesn't have to make sense.
Yes, that's precisely it.
Okay, right.
Yeah.
And you're lost if you think that somehow you're going to debate with him.
Because that's exactly it.
Yeah, because that's not what's happening here.
Right, right.
My incoherence is my authenticity, because the laws of reason never really describe anything meaningful anyway.
So the more incoherent, and you know, like Hitler's speeches are drenched in cliches, and they're drenched in paranoid ranting and all these Utterly incoherent statements, which, of course, were very popular at the time, kind of like Trump and Trumpism.
Right.
You know, no one, no one is going to keep, like, like the notion that Donald Trump lies.
Like, why?
Like, that's not offensive to his followers.
That's actually an affirmation of his understanding of the nature of power.
Power is brutality.
That's what it is.
And a lie is that same dynamic of brutality carried out on the level of language.
So lying and distortion and fraudulence and nepotism and all the things that he's done only validate him in their
view because he truly understands the nature of life and power and history.
So I'm wondering if this is a good place to end because now it's occurring to me that, you know, Trump got loose.
Right.
You know, he comes up through Studio 54.
He does every drug he can find.
He doesn't have to really, I mean, I guess he can play at getting loose.
I don't think he goes through a period in his life where, you know, he tries to expand his consciousness or reconfigure how he views his sexuality or whatever.
Right.
But he does come up through a period of explosive and expansive hedonism.
Right.
In which he shows no real kind of moral center in development or, you know, in the past or in the future.
And so I'm wondering about what happens when if If the project of getting loose also allowed people to unleash their most selfish and dominating tendencies as a form of self-expression,
Well, you know, that's what people say about the 70s and the 80s is that, you know, hedonism in the 60s had a moral value to it.
This was the liberation of the self.
And then, of course, as the years played out and, you know, it turned into Studio 54 and it turned into, you know, I mean, two really good movies on this topic.
Boogie Nights, of course, is a great movie about the 70s and hedonism And the other one is a more recent film, Licorice and Pizza?
Don't know it.
Well, it's kind of a retread of Boogie Nights.
But anyway, two great 70s films about, you know, the moral vacuum at the heart of 70s hedonism.
And yeah, linking Trump with that.
I mean, people forget that Trump really was a product of the 70s and the 80s.
You know, he was And I remember hearing Trump say that he's always lived his life as if he were in the military.
Really?
What part of your life was that?
Because he was precisely a product of that culture.
Yeah.
You know, the film that stands out for me as a kind of denouement to the era of Getting Loose is The Ice Storm.
Really, the only thing that I can remember is whoever the main teenage character, the main teenage boy character is.
Christine Ritchie.
Yes, exactly.
How they are walking through the neighborhood after the ice storm has knocked out all of the power to whatever the I guess it's a suburb in Connecticut or something like that.
And and this is after the key party where the local Couples have all, you know, gone home with each other and partner swapped.
And there's this feeling of, now what?
Oh my gosh, everything, nothing is working.
And the very infrastructure that has kept our society orderly and well lit at night and perhaps safe, that that's not here anymore.
And yeah, so I wonder, I always wonder about that kid walking home I'm looking for the hopeful stories too, right?
Because I think that's where, for me, that's where your book left me was, oh, what was
he going to do?
And I'm looking for the hopeful stories too, right?
Yeah.
So what are the most hopeful stories that you have heard about, you know, maybe that
kid who feels like the 70s, you know, left them with a kind of scorched earth that they
had to recreate something from?
Like, what's your favorite figure that emerges from that landscape?
I mean, there's a lot of things I'm fond of.
I don't think there's anything that I think has the solution to the problem.
I'm notoriously bad at actually recommending solutions or positive alternatives to almost anything.
I'm lucky if I can even manifest a critique.
I mean, I think that there really isn't a robust critique in Getting Loose.
There is more of a critique in the Happiness Book.
I'm actually capable of saying this thing is damaging to our existence.
But to point out that something is damaging is not the same thing as being able to say, here's a better alternative.
Better alternatives, I'm not strong.
I'm a Gen Xer, you know?
I mean, I don't have a very well developed political imagination, really.
In terms of being able to actually picture better worlds?
I mean, yeah, it's very difficult to do that.
I mean, really, I mean, these days, you know, we try to hang on to the shreds of democratic civility, which we think might be, you know, rescued.
And by the way, I don't know when this podcast will be made available, but, you know, tomorrow is the midterms.
Exactly.
You know, here in the United States, and it's not looking good.
So I mean, I mean, just I'm hoping to hang on to, you know, a political discourse where
people can actually make sense and be congratulated for it.
You know, you know, we could we can soften I mean, no one even talks about preventing
They talk about softening the damage or, you know, avoiding the worst parts of climate change.
I mean, I think many people of my generation felt that we were unique for lacking the political imagination of the 1960s.
Even just lacking it, I mean, we're just trying to hang on just to postpone the worst kinds of disaster.
That's what stands in for political imagination these days.
Sam Binkley, well hopefully this conversation will draw much appreciation for how we've been able to look at some problems, and that will be something.
