Abstract
How might we orient ourselves toward the future of the human being? Jeff Lewis paints a convincing picture of societies that are not only characterized by long-cumulative effects of capitalism, penetrating technologies, rapidly expanding populations, and militarized forms of governance, but shaped by a dense atmosphere of knowledge systems and cultural mediations which represent this world as a place of perpetual possibility and immanent anxiety. Do our inherited practices for making sense of the world do justice to the complexity of the global problems we now face, and/or provide tools for making critically conscious choices in the face of powerful mediations that amplify our instinctive desires and fears?
In a new book offering a fresh perspective on these classical concerns, Jeff Lewis argues not only that many of our common cultural practices do not work to this effect, but that the cultural fabric of our very being—particularly in its “Westernist” forms—contributes to the intensification of the human crisis itself. By weaving threads of materialist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and evolutionary thought into studies of popular culture, global politics, and everyday life, Crisis in the Global Mediasphere: Desire, Displeasure and Cultural Transformation offers a sweeping account of the cultural development of contemporary crisis consciousness and its implications for practices of freedom.
On the surface, the book could be read as an extended adaptation of C. Wright Mills’ notion of “second-hand worlds,” an empirically fleshed-out version of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, or a variation on Roger Silverstone’s Media and Morality. In presenting cultural media as the “crucible of contemporary consciousness,” amplified by symbolic representations that are embedded within capitalism and themselves mediated through instincts of pleasure and pain, it deals with familiar critical concerns: capital, subjectivity, crisis, desire, media, politics, ethics, past, and future. In one sense, Crisis in the Global Mediasphere extends the debate in the established traditions of critical crisis thinking.
A careful reading, however, reveals that the book charts quite an original path as Lewis brings these sociological ideas into conversation with cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and evolution. Distancing himself from the concept of “the risk society,” he argues that modernity should not be regarded as the world-historical font of crisis that it is often presumed to be. Rather, he positions it as one of a number of significant moments in the Holocene epoch, or the 11,000 years or so of human experience that have followed from our species’ first socially interventionist adaptations to post-Pleistocene ecological change, and which have been characterized by various forms of ontological insecurity. The specificity of our present historical conjuncture is not that humans occupy a novel moment in social time, but one in which culturally evolved forms of negotiating desire and destruction have become amplified and distorted through their hyper-mediation within a new “pleasure economy,” where crises of virtually any kind can be symbolically reconstructed and displaced onto others.
For Lewis, however, this cause for alarm is not cause for alarm—at least, not of the sort that we encounter through the crisis industries of the global mediasphere. After all, he argues, apocalyptic narratives have been circulating since at least the emergence of the “agricultural” and “cyclic” religions. Rather, he argues that if we can understand the experience of crisis as an evolved dimension of the human condition that can be represented in a variety of ways, rather than as an extraordinary displeasure that must be displaced onto other people and environments, we may yet be able to live with integrity.
The geographical and historical scope of the book’s theoretical inspiration is both dazzling and dizzying. It offers a window into the deep and expansive cultural history of the role of crisis consciousness in mediating economic and social power, and invites a more textured discussion of its situated significance. We catch sight of this texture in the substantive chapters of the book, in which Lewis illustrates how culture itself is both a site and a medium of crisis. This is manifested ubiquitously in the on-going global financial crisis (Chapter Two) and relations of global inequality (Chapter Four), forms and representations of sexuality and love (Chapter Three), human relationships with ecologies (Chapter Five), and terrorism (Chapter Six). These are not sites of discrete forms of crisis as might be presumed from their dominant mediations, he argues, but the concrete “fulcrum upon which human groups battle for survival, pleasure and power” (p. 221). They are also key sites in which we make choices about how we live in relation to others—and when encountered primarily through the distorted lenses of the pleasure economy, they are media through which we legitimize the perpetual projection and displacement of our inevitable crises onto “others.”
The argument is complex; suitably so for the ambitious questions that Lewis is posing. It is precisely for this reason that we can hope some of the book’s more complicated arguments will continue to be elaborated. The analytical potential of the cultural evolutionary lens for theorizing contemporary experiences of crisis, for example, is not unconvincing, but it raises some interesting questions. Is the on-going global financial crisis really a “manifestation of the media and the ways in which our economy of pleasure and related knowledge systems have evolved”? (p. 92). Is it a manifestation of the destructive excess which was also represented in the allegory of the ancient Bantu “swallowing monster”? (p. 52). Does the cultural fantasy of excess and gratification really underlie representations of crisis across wide-ranging concerns about family, marriage, “girl power,” “masculine revivalism,” the rise of Viagra usage, ages of consent, and “alternative sexualities”? What does the concept of jouissance help us to understand about the deep historical origins of contemporary suicide bombing? What conversations between evolutionary, psychoanalytic, critical, and cultural theory have made this analysis possible? And how can we begin to reread our global world with a consciousness of crisis and an “ethics of courage and a fantasy of grace” in order to escape from a regime of cultural representation that seems to constitute the very air we breathe?
The fact that the book raises such questions makes it powerful. The vast range of empirical illustrations, even where these privilege breadth over depth of analysis, is what makes it especially useful. Crisis in the Global Mediasphere can thus be read equally as a sophisticated theoretical project and as a pedagogic demonstration of how we can learn to see the power of the mediated pleasure economy in our everyday lives, and then to “reread” this second-hand world in alternative and hopeful ways.