I have longed to slap Heather Locklear for many years. This is due in no small part to her portrayal of Amanda Woodward, a hard-as-acrylic-nails Lady Ad Executive on 1990s prime-time youth soap Melrose Place, a program which, at the time of its broadcast, could not be lawfully avoided.
Amanda Woodward was made of spite and capital and could very well have been the product of a motel union between Alexis Carrington of Dynasty and General Pinochet of Didn’t You Kill All Those People in a Stadium fame. I disliked her very much.
It is not essential that you have seen the naked horror of Amanda, although, I can recommend the spectacle as a future sick pleasure. All you need to understand is that she was a lady to whom the idea of personal wealth was indivisible from personal value. If you are younger than me, think of Julie from The O.C.
If you are older than me, think, of course, of Dynasty’s Alexis. If you are better read than me, just imagine Madame Bovary. But I, in the meantime, am delighted by this opportunity to use the work of Heather as a means to describe a particular kind of Stupid. With Heather/Amanda as our guide we will chart the birth, youth and disappointing midlife of the idea of the ‘individual’ from its Enlightenment origins to the present day.
From Locke to Locklear, if you will. Yes. You’re right to groan. That was fucking awful. But not as awful as the prelude to the sort of orchestral nausea one feels when thinking rigorously about the idea of the ‘individual’.
The Individual. Yes. It’s a difficult idea. But I don’t want you to get too panicky because we’re not coming over all What Even Is Me here. We are still going to exist by the end of this chapter and so will Amanda, Alexis and Julie.
But what we might do is strip the idea of the individual down a bit. It’s off with the power suits, and back to the Enlightenment, to a time where ‘self’ as we know it was being slowly born.
To stare at the idea of the individual and examine what seems so natural for evidence of life might seem a kind of madness.
It can be. There are those sufferers of personality or mental disorders who report feeling a loss or a fragmentation of the self and I imagine this must be horrifying. Even the mere thought of the existence of the self is enough to bring me out in hives. I can only imagine that Aristotle with his Soul or Descartes with his Cogito or Sartre with his Being were all absolutely covered in sores by the end of their formulations.
Fortunately, not everyone is a wuss like me. Staring at the self to see if it eventually stares back continues to be a key task for many great thinkers and scientists of the mind; if you really want your head screwed on the topic of Do I Exist?, head immediately to the work of Thomas Metzinger, who combined philosophy and neurology in his 2009 theoretical horror show, The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. This work shreds all shreds of scientific evidence for self, consciousness and ego. Personally, I couldn’t finish it as I found it at least as twice as frightening as Amanda.
A Short History of Stupid by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer is published by Allen and Unwin and available now.
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