Cultural Meltdown
Coming from the Imprint Academic stable's steady stream of fascinating offerings, this breathtaking little book was a veritable roller-coaster of a read for this reviewer, and it is a book which is destined, I believe, to provoke very extreme reactions from pretty much anyone who reads it. In his earlier book Cultural Collapse (Free Association Books, 1994), Weatherill explored the ways in which increasing riches and abundance creates inner weakness, impoverishment and loss of control, along with a penetrating psychoanalytic commentary on such critical cultural issues as relationship breakdown, sexual abuse, hard porn, addiction and violence; and this current book can be seen as a robust deepening of those and related themes.

I have, alas, never met Rob Weatherill, but from reading this extraordinary book I imagine him to be radical, uncompromising, and brilliantly intelligent - someone who habitually thinks outside of many boxes (often all at the same time), and with whom one could chew the fat about the woes of modernity (and postmodernity!) for many a stimulating hour. Perhaps the nearest comparison to Weatherill's quarry is in the work of the prolific Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek, has also tried to explore the place of therapy culture within the ever-more ubiquitous thrall of globalising market economics. For Weatherill, as the book blurb tells us, therapeutic solutions to our problems proliferate in the free market, to the precise degree that there are actually no solutions... - thus leaving therapy as our 'last great illusion'.

This book is essentially a polemical, sometimes darkly pessimistic essay-cum-pamphlet about modern culture, which raises as many, if not more, questions than it answers. Certainly, anyone looking for a detached, carefully reasoned analysis of contemporary culture will be disappointed and will likely wish to look elsewhere; but for those who enjoy engaging with brain-stormingly apocalyptic polemic that at times seems to teeter on the brink of indiscriminacy in engaging with its manifold quarries, then this book really is an absolute must, and not to be missed on any account. At times, so breathless did the unfolding text leave this reader that I found myself wondering just how much 'tongue in cheek' there might be in Weatherill's racy anti-modern/post-modern narrative. It tends to put the reviewing reader in a quandary: is this a book of almost studied mystification and rhetoric (merely the latest target, perhaps, for the 'intellectual imposters' critique of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont), that lapses into self-indulgent incomprehensibility in the spirit of writers like Lacan, Baudrillard and Levinas, who have in part inspired and informed it?; or is it a brilliantly conceived critique of the malaise of hyper-modern culture in Late capitalism? My strong (impeccably postmodern) hunch is that it is probably a mixture of both. In the case of psychoanalysis and therapy, for example, I agree with Weatherill in many of the criticisms he makes of therapy culture, yet he often expresses these criticisms in such an extreme, uncompromising way that there seems little space left for subtlety or nuance in exploring the arguments.

I often found myself floundering to understand the intricacy of the argument - and then being at something at a loss to know whether I just didn't possess sufficient of an understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and postmodern style and rhetoric, or whether Weatherill was just getting so carried away by his own (indulgent?) polemic that the argument lapsed into a kind of blunder-bussing incoherence. But repeatedly, just as I was losing interest, he would come up with a magnificently expressed insight about the machinations and contradictions of modern(ist) culture to enthuse me and re-engage my waning interest and attention. As we move increasingly towards a postmodern condition in which readers are conceived as actively creating the texts which they read, perhaps the truth-status of a published work will become less important than the creative disturbance and 'de-centring' effect which it has upon the reader. In this sense, Our Last Great Illusion is undeniably successful. It might even be that the author has quite deliberately written the text from a place of disturbance and anomie which reflects the deep, almost unspeakable malaise of modern culture - a 'liquid' reality that it is almost impossible to grasp, as he keeps reminding us.

Divided into just four chapters, three broad themes for me stand out in the book. Its primary target is therapy culture, and the way in which therapy has inscribed itself into modern consciousness, with all the attendant individual and cultural concomitants. For example, we read that, 'even before the client comes into the consulting room, he/she has signed up, allowed themselves to be assigned to a sign system with a worldview which... has been devastating to a whole range of social institutions and relationships, not least the family, the church, police etc...' (original emphasis) - phew! Second and relatedly, the book offers a wider critique of 'modernity', technologism and the ideologies of late capitalism, with which I personally (along with many if not most Network readers?) have a great deal of sympathy - though as already stated, the thread of the argument (if there is one) is often difficult to follow. Thus, for example, we read how 'time may be running out. Learning has been outstripped by our technological development and our tendency to produce multiple problems', with technology being 'awesome, inhuman, rendering humanity homeless in ever increasing numbers' (p. 33).

Third and finally, there is a great deal about the changing nature of intimate family relations (linked with the 'death' of the symbolic father and the Oedipus complex), the possibly irreversible changes to subjectivity resulting from technological change, and modernity's appallingly distorted, even pathological understanding of 'freedom' - all of which I found compelling and convincing; and - if Weatherill is anything like right - terrifying for the future healthy evolution of human consciousness. His Chapter 3 is a goldmine of devastating insight into the parlous state of modern technological culture, and social and familial relations, which resonate strongly with many of my own experiences as a Steiner teacher and critical commentator on modern schooling systems. His critique is part sociological, part psychoanalytic, part philosophical, and always political - no fence-sitting here! Thus, for example, we read that 'increasing fragmentation, acceleration and immediacy are essential to disperse the excessive affects unleashed by the end of Oedipus. The time is one of restlessness, irritability and rage on the edge of futility' (p. 59). And a bit later (and this is especially relevant to Steiner educationalists), 'Once everything is known about childhood, that is the end of childhood' (ibid.). I would highly recommend Chapter 3 (pp. 49-74) as highly enlightening and thought-provoking reading for everyone who has concerns about, and is striving to understand, the rapidly degenerating state of modern social formations.

My ultimate assessment of the book is, alas, one of disappointment - with Rob Weatherill having missed a wonderful opportunity to formulate a coherent and carefully structured critique that would speak to a far wider popular audience than the rather rarefied circles of Lacanian psychoanalysis and postmodern cultural studies. It is, of course, a rather dubious procedure to criticise an author for not having written the book that the reviewer would like to have read; but in his future writings, I for one would love to see Rob Weatherill cast these highly complex and subtle arguments about the parlous state of modern culture in a more accessible way such that they feed into the wider public debate that our deeply troubled times so urgently need.

Richard House, Ph,D., SMN, Counsellor, Steiner Waldorf teacher, and author of Therapy Beyond Modernity.