Every power structure needs a façade: a cover for strife and contradiction, a story that provides firm and straightforward answers to complicated questions. We long for simple solutions, but these are often based in sweeping, false generalizations. Shiny and alluring, the façade of power structures blind us when control of our lives is seized and overtaken.
"Over & Over the Rainbow” is an exhibition that examines the crude seams connecting this false façade, a thin veneer of nothing, to its true contents. It exists in the gap separating what is promised, marketed, and consumed, from a trauma-ridden reality. This is the arena of action for the exhibition artists: the chasm between what is and what could be, between promises and broken promises, between longing and disappointment. Tackling this challenge, there were artists who chose to delineate the boundaries of this arena, revealing its scarred underbelly, while others transformed it into their private playground, constructing new and replicated identities from scraps of damaged tissue and thus unfolding new, incredibly intimate anti-tales. They trace the gap between personal identity and those identities dictated from on high by hegemonic systems.
Once Upon a Time
Structured as a fairytale, the exhibition invites visitors to walk a winding road and meet along the way various characters and supernatural elements. At the exhibition’s core lies the intrinsic relationship between the forces of neoliberalism and the structure of fairytales - the ancient practice whereby dominant world powers make use of an established structure while emptying it of content.
The fairytale basic plot structure dovetails perfectly with the packaging of neoliberal ideas, where an ordinary man may rise up to take control of his own destiny, shape his own future. This power stems from the same forces that inspire religious faith, belief in miracles, sects, nationalities, and in the idea of free democracy – regardless of their weak foundation in reality. It is driven by the human need to constantly strive for gratification, control, and enlightenment. Fairytales are founded on the most basic tenet of man’s ability to change himself, his life, and his environment - but only with the aid of external, supernatural elements that come in the shape of technology, fantastical beasts, magical objects, and special powers. The tale’s hybrid structure, allowing it to be adapted across different times and places, fits well with the malleable nature of neoliberalism.
The fairytale utopia is transposed from the domain of “once upon a time” and pasted onto the “here and now”, creating the belief that miraculous change is possible for everyone. But this utopia is sheer fiction, an idea we foster from infancy to maturity in the hopes of transcending our very real mortality.
Beginning with History’s End
On November 9 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and the world was about to be irrevocably changed. Stretching across 155 kilometers, the partition that stood for 28 years and split Berlin, Germany and the world in two was no longer a substantial enough barrier for the masses who breached it. Within moments the Cold War’s most emblematic image had been smashed into concrete fragments taken as souvenirs. That same year, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History?[i], arguing that liberal democracy now stood unchallenged and would soon be adopted universally as the only viable model of government. This controversial essay turned into a symbol of the time, the early germination that would one day evolve to globalization. Fukuyama depicted liberal democracy as the culmination of the evolutionary process - from now on it was only a matter of time until the rationality of the human race ushered in a new era of world peace based on common financial interests[ii].
According to this notion of liberal democracy as the ideal regime - “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution”[iii] – the link coupling democracy and the free market is the most fundamental and significant principle at the core of global redemption through neoliberalism[iv].
Neoliberalism eludes clear definition. On the one hand, it is a political-economic policy, an ideology that stands for corporate favoritism, privatization of public sectors and overall reduction of state power. On the other hand, neoliberalism is also a form of governmentality, meaning the reaction of individuals to the repertoire of techniques, practices, and justifications employed to control them, and which they employ to control themselves. Neoliberal regimes maintain a direct correlation between citizen welfare and people’s ability to live according to market principles, encouraging them perceive themselves as units of production, marketing and maximization.
However, neoliberalism is not only a pseudo-scientific, fundamentalist, economic ideology. It is also a “structure of feeling”, as Raymond Williams defined it, a compound of meanings and values that we actively live and feel. As the word “structure” suggests, neoliberalism is rigid, yet it permeates the most subtle and delicate aspects of daily life. The neoliberal emotional structure is not merely an ideology, nor is it merely an economic or rational perspective, but rather a combination of the three.
Neoliberal culture emerged as a discrete emotional structure with the end of the Cold War. With the dismantling of the Communist Bloc, and thus the dissolution of the West’s most dominant “Other”, there was nothing left to stop the spread of Capitalism. Encouraged by this Western victory, neoliberal forces no longer made do with a radical agenda of privatization, reduction of state regulation and corporate favoritism, but now also sought to affect societal experiences, and establish influence, meanings, and values.
The Kingdom of Liberty
A philosophy being propelled to dominancy needs, of course, a conceptual apparatus to address drives and intuitions, values and aspirations. It requires a mechanism that allows it to be disseminated so seamlessly it feels perfectly natural, something beyond any flicker of doubt or misgivings. The mechanism of persuasion and inducement chosen by neoliberalism is the notion of liberty, the very same liberty threatened throughout the majority of the 20th century by Fascism, Communism and other dictatorial regimes. It is a liberty endangered by systems that exalted collective interests at the expense of an individual’s right to free choice. The history of neoliberalism makes clear there are no illegitimate means to obtaining liberty, including threats, disproportional use of force and terrorist tactics.
Liberty is certainly a constitutional right, but it is primarily and above all a strategy for dominance and control. When examining the concept of liberty through the prism of the free market, it emerges clearly as a sum of consumer choices and lifestyles, presumably acquired with the right products. We are controlled by liberty. We are educated, nurtured, and coerced into using our autonomy in ways that bind us to the free market. The right to liberty is the sole and exclusive right to one’s own life; it is the belief that we may never require the assistance or support of a social system larger than ourselves[v].
The notion of liberty has been limited to simply protecting private initiative, meaning true and complete liberty is a right reserved only for those free of economic and security concerns. Very little liberty remains for those who seek, in vain, to use their democratic rights to defend against the power of property owners. Neoliberalism enthusiastically promotes notions of democracy as a purely economic theory where citizens are merely clients consuming state services. Thus, economy and the scope of human existence are fused together, creating the very epitome of human evolution.
"Liberty” is aggrandized as the exemplar of states, but its contents are constantly recoded and rewritten. Currently, liberty’s main goal is to incentivize and promote a maximal use of knowledge. According to the hidden institution of self-entrepreneurship, any restrictions are automatically coercive and evil. This logic stands, despite the fact that within neoliberal society the very idea of liberty is inherently restrictive. You are permitted to use your knowledge insidethe social playground, while knowledge regarding the playground itself is expressly forbidden. Self-examination into the tendency to passively accept local or partial knowledge may lead you to question the ways in which market forces generate certain avenues of knowledge while obstructing any alternatives. Neoliberalism does not encourage meta-analysis delving into its guiding rules and principles. Such forms of critical thought, claims neoliberalism, are simply beyond our comprehension. And purely unnecessary, as the market itself serves as the supreme information processor, intrinsically irresistible in its omnipotence.
The dissemination and propagation of such an apparatus requires a bright and shining exterior. For us to submit to the neoliberal emotional structure, we need to have some familiar device, something that will both reaffirm the existing hierarchical order, while creating the illusion of an horizon that we may aspire to. This is where Cinderella, the Ugly Duckling, and Little Red Riding-hood come into the picture.
The Structure of the Fairytale
The history of fairytales is as old as that of language itself. Stories began with humanity’s first words, a tradition that helped us adapt and survive in the world, to come to terms with the arbitrary nature of existence and explain the inexplicable. Fairytale scholar Jack Zipes describes the fairytale as “a polygenetic cultural artifact that has spread throughout the world through human contact and technologies invented to bring about effective communication״[vi].
The fairytale carries immense power; the expression “once upon a time” tunes our ears and eyes to absorb the metaphors that we go on to replicate and modify in reference to our own lives, our own period. The plots of new fairytales are constructed by patching together new combinations of elements, or by transferring themes from one story to another. The storyteller’s gift is measured by his ability best utilize the themes he has chosen to rearrange anew, although they are all derived from the same, conventional repertoire. Thus, the fairytale functions as a meme[vii] of sorts, changing and transforming from one storyteller to another, continuously being told and circulated.
The heart of the fairytale is its structure, far more than the characters and protagonists it depicts. This is what etches the story into our personal and collective memory. Its central image is not the protagonist but rather the journey. The particular identity of the hero is of little importance and is often reduced to a single attribute, such as place in the family (boy/girl, eldest/younger sibling), or social standing (king, miller). In many cases, even their names are disregarded if not entirely omitted.
Over the centuries, the fairytale dissemination apparatus has grown, expanded and become ever more evolved with new technological advancements. Stories passed on for generations, with storytellers playing a key performative role, were now anthologized, printed and distributed in millions of copies, screened in cinemas and broadcast on TV. The more innovative such modern dissemination practices, so were fairytales tamed, sterilized, and purged of alternative contexts to better affirm power structures of the day. Tragic endings were replaced with happy ones, and the improvised details produced by storytellers for their individual audiences were now the mass-produced, replicated images of Disney.
The market-based Western approach to life tells us that we must try and transform our lives into a fairytale, to use the story to reinvent ourselves. However, just as with fairytale heroes, this system grants little significance to our particular identities. This fact is camouflaged by slogans that idealize liberty, individuality, and entrepreneurship. The miraculous transformation that is at the heart of every fairytale explains not only the endurance of fairytales throughout the years, but also the appeal of the fairytale structure to hegemonic powers. Moreover, it can clarify how the unrestrained absorption of this structure coincided with the promotion of ideas like “new world order” and “globalization”.
Neoliberalism’s assimilation apparatus exploits the utopian core of the fairytale, and creates alternatives, utopian or dystopian, for the present world. It promises harmony in a hectically changing, war-ridden world, and it does so to generate profit. Cinderella becomes the princess that she has secretly always been, Jack slays the giant, Aladdin marries the king’s daughter – and all with help from an external force. The method itself remains the same. In happy endings, the protagonist changes only location and standing, moving up to a different caste in an unchanged, intact order.
No Line on the Horizon
The yearning for a horizon, the imaginary convergence of earth and sky, stands as an image for the meeting place of history and future. From the standpoint of 20th century Western culture, the horizon is the triumph of democracy, whose principles form part of human nature, and the desire to reach it the reason for many of this century’s conflicts and wars. Toward the end of the century, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed we had finally conquered it, but what does “breaching the horizon” mean? Where must we direct our passions next? Fulfilled redemption is a troubling state. “Utopia now” cannot exist.
Desire is an empty thing. It is a sense of lack. Its content is negative and absent, and its only positive aspect is that it motivates action. The lack is itself the motive; it shapes consciousness that strives toward the unattainable by virtue of its unattainability. It is an aspiration not for what exists, but for what does not – it is the long gaze toward a far horizon. The assumption that liberal democracy is the ultimate horizon also leads one to understand that, once universally attained, history will collapse into an existence of equality for all and constant gratification. Our horizon has therefore been exchanged for a closed-circle orbit, impossible to advance in, break through and where movement is effectively devoid of meaning.
But did history really come to an end? It seems, more than anything, that the main impact of breaking through the horizon has been a severe impairment to our capacity to imagine alternatives to the current order. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall the world has undergone the dot- crisis, the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center, and the 2008 financial crisis – and yet we still adhere to the principles of neoliberalism. By now it appears so natural to us that it has begun to function as a golden hammer (“…it is tempting…if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”). We cannot imagine any tools or attitudes that can replace strategies that have been tried and failed.
The world peace of common economic interests never materialized. No new Middle East came in lieu of the old one. The disparities in global division of resources have worsened immeasurably. The neoliberal machine fails everywhere it is implemented, and yet it still seems natural and irreplaceable. It is marketed to us in its glossy packaging, presented in a subtle matrix of false images, in paltry simulations of real life branded with false names such as “free market”, “growth,” and “globalization”. All of these generate and entrench our blind and desperate faith in a system that promotes the interests of only a tiny class within the population by transferring credit from sovereigns to the hands of business corporations.
An Open Ending
We need a horizon to strive for, and we must therefore ask ourselves how to subvert this power that eliminates our horizon, replacing it with consumerism. It is not enough to expose the manipulation; we must also grapple with an understanding of how people of different classes and beliefs can work together to create social norms and codes that could evoke a sense of cohesiveness and common identity.
In other words, we need to recognize how to harness again the potency of fairytales, appropriated by market ideologies for their own interests, and use it to give meaning to life.
The return to fairytales is a source of hope, it is a promise that the helpless can overcome obstacles, outsmart witches, and deceive giants. It is necessary to give listeners back the power to reshape stories, respond to them, change them. We must retrieve the power to weave the fairytale together along with the storytellers.
Using fairytales in such way is an act of resistance. It is an act that does not yield to prescribed notions of meaning, eventually overcoming the numbing, oppressive use of this notion that is has become. Our times call for storytellers that are at once actors, agent, and interpreters, salvaging elements of fairytale and rearranging them from the capitalist system – and thus turning them against Capitalism itself. They may readjust, update, and make changes as they please, opposing the hegemonic abuse of the fairytale by market or state powers warping its weave to preserve established forces through use of advanced technologies. The contemporary storyteller must have vision and imagination, a capacity to doubt and a commitment to an ongoing engagement with cultural tradition.
We must reclaim the ability to tell fantastic, innocent, singular tales to be replicated, developed, and changed with each time.
Fairytales help to generate a narrative of self. They interlace the threads of our relationships and make life a social endeavor. Contemporary tales must address those things that transcend the unknown; they should not be limited to the arena apportioned us by the capitalist notion of liberty. Only radical departure from that set field can bring about profound changes. Neoliberalism has been the dominant revolutionary power of the past three decades. It is a power that serves nothing but itself, but even it cannot defend against the innate storyteller within each one of us, and that every heart is a revolutionary cell.
Ran Kasmy Ilan
[i] Fukuyama’s article was first published in 1989 by journal National Interest. In 1992 he later expanded this idea in his book The End of History and the Last Man, describing history as directional, and its direction as progress, and ascribing to the belief that the liberty offered by liberal democracy, as it emerged from the French Revolution, will eventually be adopted by the entire world.
[ii] A local Israeli adaptation of Fukuyama’s ideas can be found in Shimon Peres’s book The New Middle East, published in 1993.
[iii] Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. The Free Press
[iv] The forces that brought neoliberalism to its hegemonic position began long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The erosion of the Keynesian welfare state, the advancement of technologies, and the efforts of the Chicago school had all been steps along the way, but the end of Cold War has made it possible to accumulate wealth on multinational, supranational, and post-national scales.
[v] This form liberty has since been expanded beyond individuals, and recent years have brought about the legal recognition in the rights of corporations to liberties derived from individual rights. This lends a note of irony to John D. Rockefeller’s words, displayed in the entrance hall of Rockefeller Center in New York: “I believe in the supreme worth of the individual”. There are extreme contradictions between the rhetoric of neoliberalism and its practices, being a system that favors private initiatives and ownership over planning and control, concepts it repeatedly attacks as enemies of liberty. A society built on ownership restrictions and regulation of profit and debt is perceived as an oppressive society that cannot be called free. Liberty that comes about as a result of regulation is condemned as slavery.
[vi] Zipes, J. (2006). Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (pp. 14)New York: Routledge.
[vii] The term meme was coined in the 1970s by ethnologist and biologist Richard Dawkins, denoting a self-replicating cultural evolutionary unit. Memes are behavioral commands stored in our minds and other databases, and transmitted by imitations and replication. They function similarly to coded genes in DNA molecules. Internet memes are one example for this kind of viral replication of text and images.
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