Bio-Política & Bio-Poder

The brilliant Adam Curtis returns with his new psychological-political documentary 'SHIFTY', showing 'how over the past 40 years in Britain extreme money and hyper-individualism came together in an unspoken alliance'. It's a fascinating and destabilising account, mixing - or perhaps 're-mixing' he'd say - the psychological and the political, monetarism and individuation, self-help and Thatcherism, the culture of the self and the loss of self. As he notes, 'there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978. The new individualism that rose up ate away at the foundations of political democracy.'

This interview, with Frieze magazine, sums up a lot of what the new series is about:

Sean Burns: I’ve always felt that your filmmaking is driven by the idea that the conditions of the past contribute to the mess of the present. Could you speak to how Shifty engages with the political landscape of 2025?

Adam Curtis: I didn’t start making it just because of the political landscape, but because of the broader landscape – how people are living and feeling today. There’s a pervasive uncertainty, an overwhelming feeling that those in power lack any real vision for the future, that they’re just kind of flailing. They might try out good ideas, but they don’t seem to have a clear sense of why.
And they know that we know that.

Underneath all that, I sensed a kind of melancholy. Those of us who lived through this period experienced something that was equal parts exciting, extraordinary and horrible – and, somehow, we’ve ended up here, in this uncertain place. We can’t see the future and we constantly replay the past to ourselves. That’s where I started: with a sense that something is ending.

I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978. The new individualism that rose up ate away at the foundations of political democracy.

SB: ‘Shifty' explores this theme of rampant individualism. At times, it seems as though you’re critiquing the cultural emphasis on self-improvement and self-care.

AC: I don’t think I’m critiquing it: I’m trying to trace the waystations individualism passed through during this period. One thing I was very aware I needed to do – since I grew up in that era – was to show it was both exciting and frightening. We still don’t fully understand the dimensions of the change that occurred, both outside and within us.

Toward the end, where the series takes a darker turn, I wanted to show that being a self-contained individual – someone who believes that what drives you comes from within rather than from what pompous elites tell you – can be incredibly liberating and exhilarating when things are going well. But, since the late 1990s, when things aren’t going well, that same individualism can leave you feeling very lost and alone. I try to suggest in this – and it’s a difficult area, because you’re dealing with people’s real worries and anxieties – that, when there’s a sense you can no longer change the world outside or put mass pressure on lawmakers, you inevitably turn inward.

SB: It feels like we’re in a heightened moment of the condition you’re describing and, at such times, the body is one thing people feel they can control.

AD: That’s often all you have left to control – which doesn’t mean it’s wrong to do so, something that lots of anti-wellness people go on about. If you can’t change anything else, you may as well try to make the thing you do have control over better. But I’m trying to point out something subtler: yes, that is power, but it’s only one kind of power. What you have lost is the countervailing power against the forces outside of your body, which may also have a negative effect on it. I’m an optimist; I think people will begin to realize that it’s not wrong to turn inward, but there are other things as well.

SB: You often move between broad, expansive narrative segments – such as Stephen Hawking’s research into the galaxy – and more specific, personal stories. Could you speak to the interplay between the micro and the macro?

AC: A lot of factual history, whether on television or in writing, tends to fixate on a particular genre. Political history is always about high politics, which is why it’s often boring. I wanted to show the interplay between political events and what was happening inside our own minds. We were transforming and experiencing a shift in how we saw the world while the world was being transformed by massive shifts in power.

The reason I’m interested in Hawking is that there is a parallel between him and Thatcher. They were both people who really believed that rationality – in Thatcher’s case, the logic of money – could make a better world. She didn’t like the fuzzy ideologies of socialism or a planned economy. Hawking I saw as a tragic figure who really wanted to find a unified theory of the entire universe. He sought to achieve that through the rationality of mathematics. As I gently show in the films, it often led to absurd ideas, of which his wife was the best critic.

SB: A recurring spectre in Shifty is the danger of technology – particularly surveillance technology – when it falls into the wrong hands. It feels as though we’re at a critical moment with the advent of AI.

AC: I have a problem with talking about AI because absolutely no one knows what it’s going to be. It’s a blank screen onto which we project our dark fears or techno-optimistic fantasies. I think two things about AI: the person who writes the first line of code is the ideologist. There’s nothing neutral about AI.

The other thing I know is that – rather like we’re still obsessed with the Beatles – it’s obsessed with the past. AI haunts us with our own dreams, fantasies and the absurd drunken things we’ve said one night. It mashes them up and plays them back to us like a weird avalanche of phantasms. From a political point of view, we’re waiting for someone to show us how to escape our obsession with the past. One of the things this age might suddenly realize – and I’d be out of a job – is that it’s time to stop looking back and replaying the past, and to build something genuinely new.

Read the full Frieze interview here: https://www.frieze.com/article/adam-curtis-interview-2025

Or the series itself is available own YouTube or the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002d2jv/shifty

Can Psychoanalysis Fight Capitalism? A recent paper argues that psychoanalysis can aid left-wing political struggles as “preparatory work for revolution.”