The New Idiocracy: Laying the First Strata of the Cretinocene*

‘The work of art is thus a challenge to the performance of a like act of evocation, through imagination, on the part of the one who experiences it.’

– John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934: Penguin, 2005, p.?285)

‘Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.’

– Carlo Maria Cipolla, ‘The first basic law of human stupidity’, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1976)

The idiocracy is taking hold of the western world. In culture, in politics, in the media, in public discourse – especially the discourse enabled by social media and online news –, that which is idiotic, cretinous, pointless, mindless, irresponsible, and simply stupid is grabbing the reins of power and is orienting humanity down a new path that some say is taking a direction away from enlightenment and towards darker, more ignorant, stupider times. The economic historian Carlo Maria Cipolla in his The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is somewhat less nuanced when he considers the rise of idiocy in a country’s population to be a potentially ‘destructive power’, so that ‘the country goes to hell’, the immediate corollary of which is that civilisation itself could be threatened. The rise of idiocy may, however, open up new opportunities, a new social discourse, and may introduce a new kind of artistic expression, even a new aesthetic of imbecility, a new aesthetic that is superbly explored by the performance artists Sarah Cassenti and Hélène Defilippi in Les idiotes, a varied series of live performances in which they show that whatever course world history may take in the future, idiocy will certainly play an increasingly determinant role.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), the economist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes two brain functions by means of which people reason. These he calls ‘system one’, a heuristic, ready-reckoning system, and ‘system two’, a system that applies slower logical reasoning. He attributes many human reasoning errors to his ‘system one’ jumping to wrong conclusions when ‘system two’ should instead be taking control – a form of idiocy by default. The psychologist Olivier Houdé takes Kahneman’s work one step further in his book L’Intelligence humaine n’est pas un algorithme (‘Human Intelligence Is Not an Algorithm’) (Odile Jacob, 2019) by attributing a form of intelligence to a third system that inhibits Kahneman’s ‘system one’ whenever the latter veers from the path of reason. The intelligent are thus able to use Houdé’s system to stem the flow of idiotic thoughts before they form and cause real damage to themselves and to others, while as a consequence idiocy can conversely be attributed to this system’s failure to tame and subdue the cretinisms and imbecilities in all their forms to which humanity is characteristically and dangerously prone.

Through a growing multitude of connected devices and appliances, internet access is now virtually omnipresent; any good, any service, any years-old acquaintance, any obscure piece of knowledge can be summoned in an instant. It can be argued that these technological advances and the resulting ubiquitous access to immediate satiety of every kind is actually causing, rather than otherwise, human intelligence to be drowned by a new relentless tsunami of digital cognitive overload that is eating away at the time people normally need to prevent imbecility from taking hold – the time needed to inhibit Kahneman’s heuristic ‘system one’, namely the time needed for critical thinking. The obvious consequence is that fake news, conspiracy theories, outrageous propaganda, mindless consumption spread like wildfire, and the tentacular idiocracy continues its global power grab.

Take the case of mindless consumption: even more so today than in Geroges Perec’s 1965 novel Les choses (‘Things’) – a work that explores the existential vacuum resulting from the pointless accumulation of goods –, we can purchase ourselves into the transitory serotonin boost that acquisition brings; but here again we are sucked into a world where the idiocracy rules, and a few late-night and possibly drunken clicks of a mouse will summon to our doorsteps all kinds of useless objects. Once more Kahneman’s heuristic ‘system one’ and Houdé’s ‘inhibitory system’ both fail, and our critical thinking is blown away by the cognitive overload of shopping websites and the boundless temptations of their ‘others have also bought’ sections. And the objects we buy – the electronic talking fish, the solar-powered dancing flower – will inevitably become, sooner rather than later, the first strata in landfill of a new geological epoch that adds to the radioactive fallout and microplastics of the Anthropocene: this is the Cretinocene, fossilized idiocy that will become humankind’s lingering legacy.

Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, argues that we are governed by shadowy and disturbing forces. She observes that much of what we do online is the result of behaviour modification on the part of the technology giants, and suggests that we are edged towards their generally mercantile goals through their intelligent design. She goes on to conclude that they mine not just our data but also our behaviour as ‘behavioural surplus’, which can subsequently be used to feed us all kinds of direct or subliminal cues to drive us, by means of advertisements or otherwise, to their comportmental destinations. But as she puts it in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile, 2019, p.?201), these companies intended from an early stage that ‘highly predictive, and therefore highly lucrative, behavioural surplus would be plumbed from intimate patterns of the self.’ These ‘intimate patterns of the self’ are, however, nothing other than their prized cretinisms that are our impulsive purchases or our seemingly random clicks on ‘like’ buttons in social media. Omnipresent et omniscient connected digital media, the instrument of Zuboff’s modern ‘surveillance capitalism’, thus strips us all of our cognitive functions, strips us bare – a mise à nu – in a self-reinforcing downward spiral to universal absolute idiocy, which few can escape. We would therefore stand mentally (and as we shall see, physically) naked in front of the digital overload that is inexorably taking over human lives.

In his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, 2014, p.?203), the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that in a possible ‘post-transition Malthusian state’ of the future, this mise à nu or stripping of our outer physical layers will be complete: when the digital transition has run its course, and the majority of the human population will live with minimal income while the economy is run by algorithms, many may find that the only way to survive would be as ‘minimally conscious brains in vats, oxygenated and nourished by machines’. As in the 1999 film The Matrix, human perception and action will thus take place only in a simulated world; but unlike the Matrix’s vision, this world will probably be closer to the manufactured neoliberal ideal of the perfectly bronzed bikini-clad bodies and the immaculate sun-bleached tropical landscapes of Second Life or Love Island, with social interaction reduced to the most banal platitudes and the most vacuous, basal, and stupid physical situations. This can only be idiocy – and perhaps also the historical determinism of Marxian dialectical materialism – taken to its ultimate logical conclusion.

Lars von Trier’s quite different vision of idiocy as shown in his 1998 film The Idiots is that of release from everyday responsibilities of life. This results in a form of empowerment, where the characters’ blatant imbecility becomes an enabling feature that allows them to perform, by virtue of their apparent erratic and infantile behaviour, transgressive acts that fall outside ordinary social norms. Whether idiocy is feigned or real remains intentionally ambiguous, and idiocy thus slips into the domain of personal choice rather than that of a condition – a situation that may seem even more pertinent today than when the film was made over twenty years ago.

The interdisciplinary performance artists Sarah Cassenti and Hélène Defilippi have explored almost every aspect of the new aesthetics of idiocy in their work, taking a very perspicacious, intelligent, and inspired look at the human situation, from the strip-mining of human reason and dignity by a globalized digital idiocracy to the new ‘empowerment’ that idiocy brings to the ritualized mores of western societies. In their performances they often represent the laying bare – the mise à nu – of the human psyche in the most literal way, their nudity exposing humanity’s bare idiocy, in the raw objectivization of the physical form, in the concretization of the helpless or denuded body, in the cretinization of volition or the voluntary act. But most importantly their work represents a highly original, courageous, new, and welcome aesthetic in performance art. May it be the recipient of much deserved recognition, with the exception, it should be hoped, of a Darwin Award.

Jonathan Mori

May 2019

Copyright ? 2019 Jonathan Mori

* Originally commissioned by Les idiotes, Hélène Defilippi and Sarah Cassenti, to be published as a bilingual introduction for their 2020 retrospective catalogue.