Fintan O'Toole: The big question of the last decade is...

To consider what has happened to culture in the decade that is now closing, a good place to start might be with the famous last lines of one of the great 19th-century novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The book is a panorama of social and cultural transformation in a place that was then the epicentre of the epic changes known as the industrial revolution: the English midlands. Its central character, Dorothea, is, ostensibly, a failure – she makes the wrong choices and does not change the world around her as she had hoped to do. But Eliot’s conclusion offers redemption to her and to us as readers: “Her full nature . . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

This hymn to the “hidden life” is in some ways a culmination of the great revolution of modernity: the idea of the inner self – even the selves of obscure women – as a vast and deep space. Even more startlingly than in Middlemarch, this idea is dramatised in another of the great 19th-century fictions, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is in some ways the quintessential epic, dealing as it does with the world-shaking events of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. But Tolstoy gives equal billing, beside the rulers and generals, to a young woman of no importance, Natasha Rostova, and in particular to the inner emotional turmoil of her search for love. The astonishing statement implied by the whole shape of the book is that Natasha’s private emotions are just as epic as the Battle of Borodino, that “unhistoric acts” should matter to us every bit as much as historic ones do.

Unravelling

What does this have to with the way culture has evolved in the last decade? Rather a lot. The big thing that has been going on is precisely the unravelling of the idea of a “hidden life”. What does it mean in what Shoshanna Zuboff, in the title of one of the defining books of our time, calls The Age of Surveillance Capitalism? What does the systematic surveillance of our thoughts and desires do to art? What does it do to the distinction between private and public experience on which so much of western culture has been built? What does it do to politics?

Consider the defining dramas of the decade now ending and then of the one before that. It is a truism that one of the most striking things about contemporary culture is the rise of long-form dramatic storytelling through the multi-season serials created largely by subscription TV and streaming services. In the first decade of the 21st century, the flagship of this burgeoning form was The Sopranos. In the second decade, it was Game of Thrones.

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Obviously, they differ completely in genre, one a variant on the gangster movie, the other of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel. But they also differ just as greatly in their notions of the “hidden life”.

If you look at The Sopranos, you find a basic idea that is not all that far from a 19th-century novel or even from a Shakespeare play: the divide between the public and the private self. There is Tony the thug, the vicious Mafia underboss who imposes himself on the world around him and sustains his authority though the maintenance of a terrifying public persona. And there is Tony’s “hidden life” – both the banal family existence of a New Jersey suburban bourgeois and, even more deeply hidden, the life of Tony’s troubled unconscious mind with its repressed memories and buried traumas.

The motivations in Game of Thrones are obvious and all on the surface: power, lust, greed, domination, survival

The structure of The Sopranos is literally Freudian: Tony’s sessions with Dr Melfi are all about the attempt to unlock the cryptic puzzle of who he really is. And Freud in turn was the culmination of ideas about the inner self and its hidden life that had been building up for centuries. In that sense, the basic form of The Sopranos suggested a long-lasting cultural continuity.

Deep motivations

But contrast that with Game of Thrones. Where’s the “hidden life” there? Nowhere at all. The characters may have inner lives but nobody is really interested in them. We are not asked to think much about the deep motivations of anyone, any more than we would be in a premodern form such as the folk tale. The motivations are obvious and all on the surface: power, lust, greed, domination, survival. Men don’t have castration complexes – they are literally castrated. There are no incest fantasies – just incest. Instead of the Oedipus complex, the son (Tyrion) actually kills his father. Monsters don’t appear in dreams as symbols of secret fears – they are real. Freud is redundant because everything is out there, on the screen, in your face.

This shift is emblematic of something much larger: the assault on the private self by a new form of capitalism. There is a basic question that has hovered over western culture for centuries: who owns the “hidden life”? There have been two important answers, one political, the other cultural. The political one is that each of us owns our own hidden life – a big part of democracy is privacy, the idea that every citizen has the right to an autonomy that is rooted in his or her unique individuality. (This is why we vote in private.)

Joyce in particular made culture into a passion for the dark and dirty, concealed corners of consciousness

And the cultural one is that the artist owns the inner life, that only artists can allow us to know other people, not as they appear in public, but as they really are in the hidden depths of their selves. This is the great claim made by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the other modernists: I can immerse you totally in the underground streams of consciousness, plunge you into the flow of thoughts and sensations and desires that is running nonstop under the surface of that public persona called Leopold Bloom or Mrs Dalloway.

Concealed corners

This changed the definition of culture. In the mid-19th century,Matthew Arnold (echoing Jonathan Swift) wrote that "culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light". Joyce in particular (and this is why he was so controversial and disturbing) made culture into a passion for the dark and dirty, concealed corners of consciousness. It was about the sheer anarchy of the mind, the way the secret self is forever breaking the bounds of propriety and jumbling up things that are supposed to be separate: sex and politics, religion and desire, weighty thoughts and snatches of music hall songs.

Postwar 20th-century culture took this further. If the self is an unruly rush of sensations and perceptions and memories and desires, does it really exist at all? How can something so inherently unstable be said to have a continuous life? Is the public persona, with its claim to precisely such continuity and stability, not therefore innately inauthentic, a mere convenient lie? This fear had been around for centuries, but it could be calmed by the idea that God is always perceiving us, and that our selves were always underwritten by their connection to the divine presence. But take God away, as so much of postwar culture did, and the fear is unbounded.

Still, this very dilemma was a rich source of cultural energy: you can make a lot of novels and poems and movies and dramas and songs out of the attempt to reconcile the public and the private selves. You can have a lot of fun (as David Bowie and Lady Gaga might tell us) with the notion that if there is no fixed self, you may as well wear lots of different masks and change them at will.

But something new has arrived in the last decade. There is a whole new answer to the question of who owns the hidden life. It is not the individual citizen. It is not the artist. It is Google and Facebook. Zuboff compares Google's sudden claim on the inner self to the acts of conquest in a previous age, when a conquistador claimed physical territory on behalf of a distant sovereign. This "startling invasion and conquest" begins, she writes, with Google's declaration of ownership: "We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individual rights, interests, awareness or comprehension. On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual's experience for translation into behavioural data."

Direct challenge

This is a direct challenge to the claim that art has made in the modern world: that it was for the artist that human experience was raw material free for the taking. Art made this claim on the basis that it alone could translate that inner experience into public meaning. Now, Google and Facebook claim that they can take ownership of the raw material of the hidden self and translate it, not into public meaning, but into behavioural data that generates vast private wealth. In this great psychic landgrab, the hidden self is no longer hidden. It is a valuable ore to be exposed and strip-mined.

Trump may have a lot in common with Tony Soprano, but his presidency is pure Game of Thrones

This has political consequences. It takes away the notion at the heart of modern democracy that there are public and private selves and that there is a line between them. Think, in this regard, of the shift from one US president to another. Barack Obama was very explicitly in control of his private self. Before he ran for president, he published a classic memoir, Dreams from My Father, which is like a late 19th or early 20th-century bildungsroman. It is the story, as he himself chooses to tell it, of how his self was formed and shaped. And his conduct in public office was a constant reassurance that he was at all times in control of that private self, that it was a fixed and stable thing. He was literally self-possessed.

Think then of Donald Trump. He proposes no private self at all. Or rather, his public self is what a private self used to be in modernist fiction – an endless stream of impulses, rages, reactions and free associations. There is no hidden Id – the Id is completely out there, tweeting itself in real time, unrestrained by decorum or shame. Trump may have a lot in common with Tony Soprano, but his presidency is pure Game of Thrones – there is no mystery of motivation. It's all on the screen in lurid technicolour: all the greed, all the lust for domination, all the sadism, all the anger.

So how does art respond to this invasion of its territory? By re-staking its claim to the private self. It does not seem accidental that perhaps the most resonant cultural image of recent years has been the dramatisation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is all about the defiant survival of a private self even in a culture that seeks to exterminate it.

Striking trends

There are two striking trends in the culture of the last decade. One is the re-emergence of the modernist exploration of the secret self through the use of a highly wrought language that resists being turned into behavioural data. Think, in the Irish case, of startling novels that trace the extreme fragility of the female self while defiantly bringing it to life: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing or Anna Burns’s Milkman. Another is the re-emergence of the personal essay, a form that, in the early stages of modernity, was crucial to the notion of the autonomous, private self. Think, again in the Irish context, of books such as Emily Pine’s Notes to Self or Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations, which occupy a knowingly paradoxical ground. They give up privacy by telling us very intimate things – but the very act of giving it up is a statement that it still exists and that it still belongs to the individual and the artist.

Perhaps this paradoxical ground will be where the cultural battle of the next decade is fought. Because we are at the start of a new age of capital in which private experience is being appropriated on a vast scale as a form of wealth, private experience itself is now a very public business. The “hidden life” will have to be a public and political issue. The “unhistoric acts” of the private self will be one of the big subjects of our unfolding history.