Identity Politics as Courtier Politics

Every year I make a New Year’s resolution to avoid politics, and every year I fail.  And now again.

I am not a Ron Paul supporter (for reasons that will go unexplained for now, though if anybody wants to ask, feel free).  One can’t help but notice the following though.  Here is what’s reported in a news story about Ron Paul:

Paul explained that while he supports the fact that the legislation repealed the notorious Jim Crow laws, which forced racial segregation, he believes it is the government, not the people, that causes racial tensions by passing overreaching laws that institutionalize slavery and segregation. Today’s race problems, he said, result from the war on drugs, the flawed U.S. court system and the military.

“The real problem we face today is the discrimination in our court system, the war on drugs. Just think of how biased that is against the minorities,” he said. “They go into prison much way out of proportion to their numbers. They get the death penalty out of proportion with their numbers. And if you look at what minorities suffer in ordinary wars, whether there’s a draft or no draft, they suffer much out of proposition. So those are the kind of discrimination that have to be dealt with, but you don’t ever want to undermine the principle of private property and private choices in order to solve some of these problems.”

And here is the headline given this story on the front page of The Huffington Post:

Ron Paul Slams Civil Rights Act

In other words, Ron Paul, whatever his faults, makes a reasonably nuanced argument about the role of the state, its legislation and its military adventurism, in jailing and killing wildly disproportionate numbers of minorities.  From this fact, and it is fact, he concludes that the role of the state as such should be minimized, even if that means minimizing the expansion of state powers ostensibly intended to aid the minorities being incarcerated and exploded by other branches of government.  For Paul, the power of the state is a blunt and brutalizing instrument that cannot solve social problems but only manipulate them for its own aggrandizement.  This conclusion may be false, but it’s neither absurd nor dismissible, and certainly not with the easy epithet implied by The Huffington Post‘s headline, “racist.” Especially not when Paul is one of the only relatively mainstream political figures even raising the issue of America’s seemingly infinite and infinitely destructive supply of wars.

The purpose of identity politics is to stabilize the status quo by dispensing some of its spoils to select and elite minorities.  The minority elites (the talented tenth) and their majority partisans then uphold the current hegemony by claiming that challenges to it are challenges to the minority groups it has retained with its patronage.

This maneuver can be confusing in its current form because it no longer asks representatives of minority groups to assimilate to cultural norms.  On the contrary, such representatives, in accord with the ethical postulates of official multiculturalism, play up their supposed “difference,” often pretending to be much less normatively bourgeois than they actually are so that they can look a lot more like the authentically oppressed.  By these means, radical attacks on Obama or on liberalism are transformed in discourse into attacks on, for instance, blackness and black people.

Melissa Harris-Perry is the reigning master of this ideological gesture, but Ta-Nehisi Coates (at the utterly atrocious warmongering piece-of-shit Atlantic Monthly) has done his part in a more serious, rigorous, and ultimately dangerous way by deploying identity politics to replace WWII with the Civil War as liberalism’s endlessly justifying, sanctifying-through-violence, empire-for-liberty “good war.”  Coates: “White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.”  You have to hand it to the man, that is one inventive way to demean anti-war sentiment in our war-besotted late-empire phase. Will the dangers posed by those racist white peaceniks never end?  Just a few years ago, before Bush went into Iraq, we were told that anti-war activists would have let Hitler win.  And now the Confederacy too!  Will they stop at nothing?

The funny thing is that Ron Paul probably is a racist, in the old-fashioned sense even.  But the proverbial broken clock is right twice a day, and Paul is right that it is the modern liberal state imprisoning and killing absurdly large amounts of people of color.  For that, and not for any racist sentiment he expresses, he must be suppressed.

On Christopher Hitchens

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”

Except for the youngsters, it can’t really be Hitchens people are mourning.  One wants to say (one wants to adopt Hitchens’s characteristic ultra-Anglo phrasings) that it is rather the whole “low, dishonest decade,” to quote a poet he actually liked rather than a Catholic priest.

I grew up on Hitchens.  Along with Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, John Leonard, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, and James Wood, he taught me–and not only me–what it was to write in and for the world, to be a writer, as opposed to a scholar or a poet: to have an audience with whom you could conspire to assume certain things and to whom you could explain serious but recondite matters in a slightly heightened and knowing voice, to make sophisticated jokes that had the intimacy of a confidence, to take for granted a living relation between the demotic and the elevated, the concrete and the abstract.  It wasn’t what he wrote that matters; what he wrote is mostly negligible and probably won’t survive very long.  But the register in which he wrote is one of the imperishable glories of liberal civilization, and I can almost understand his extremism in the defense of it.

Being 19 years old when the Twin Towers fell, I had to come of political age in the dark heart of the Bush years.  9/11 had the opposite effect on me as it so memorably had on Hitchens.  Eight or nine days after the attack, I joined a ragtag group of no more than 100 dirty hippies (I’ve never been of this persuasion) in marching self-righteously around the Cathedral of Learning chanting witless slogans from John Lennon songs in protest of whatever it was (we weren’t sure yet) Bush would do to Afghanistan.  And I don’t take this action back, nor do I regret it, despite the naivete of all that went along with it.

But there were problems and inconsistencies.  I had and have no sympathy whatsoever for bin Laden and his gang–they were (probably) a rogue U.S. intelligence paramilitary jockeying for position rather than any kind of tribune of the oppressed.  But before they attacked Manhattan, I had heard from only one source that something had to be done about Afghanistan, and that source was the Campus Women’s Organization.  How could this not give me pause when Laura Bush claimed that America’s war was on behalf of women?  There was something oddly left, then, about Hitchens’s supposed defection to the right, which many of us meditated on frequently, having enjoyed, just months before 9/11, his brief against Kissinger as serialized in Harper’s.  (Add to my youthful puzzlement that in the same months before 9/11 I was being taught to read James Joyce–a not-inconsiderable teaching–by Hitchens’s close friend, Colin MacCabe.)

By the time Hitchens sharpened his pen to make war on Iraq, I was as against America’s wars as could be (even to the point of undertaking activism, which doesn’t suit me), all the while dimly wondering if the man didn’t sort of have a point.  A decade later, I have concluded that he probably did.  The army of Enlightenment is one and indivisible.  There may have been strategic differences between Afghanistan and Iraq (Obama’s celebrated distinction between smart wars and dumb wars captures this), but a moral difference?  I suspect not.  A communist, it’s been said, is just a liberal in a hurry.  So is a neoconservative.  But what is the destination, and is it worth traveling there, down the bombed-out road, past the stream poisoned with depleted uranium, within earshot of the screams of the tortured?  To find out, you’d have to read better and more profound writers than Hitchens.

But Hitchens, though by no means a great writer, should be read, by the young anyway.  He followed his logic where it led and accepted the consequences of his position.  That makes him worth more than most of the academic leftists or think-tank rightists who were at different times his colleagues.  His ethic of non-compromise, something valuable and necessary and altogether missing from postmodernity, is reflected in the irresistible worldliness of his prose, to which I here pay tribute.

Nothing is more despicable to me than a tone in political writing of perennial surprise, full of false modesty, theatrical qualifiers, italicked revelations, startled quips, and moralizing sighs.  Such a style is nothing short of an insult to those who have always known what this world was (“the less deceived,” to quote the inevitable Larkin).  But this wide-eyed, wounded-bird sarcasm is the way everybody writes now: can a contemporary internet liberal write a sentence that doesn’t both absolutely moralize and yet also begin with an “Um”?  In the face of such passive-aggression, I’ll take Hitchens’s genuine aggression.  But, and at the risk of sounding unworldly, I’d have hoped for a better choice.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A very bad movie, in an all-too-typical way.  Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

The film focuses on Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman who flees from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains that is led by an enigmatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). Lucy (Sarah Paulson), Martha’s older sister, receives a call from a pay phone one day from Martha, asking her to come and get her. Martha, who has been missing for two years, slowly begins to assimilate into her sister’s family, but her increasing paranoia leads her to believe that Patrick and his cult may still be watching her every move.

This summary leaves out only two elements of the film: 1. the cult’s actions, according to Martha’s memories at least, center around Patrick’s rape of its female members and also include the systematic robbery and sometimes murder of wealthy families who live nearby its farm; 2. Martha’s sister has married a well-off British architect, and most of Martha’s post-cult conflicts are with him as he preaches to her a gospel of success, while she clings to a belief seemingly instilled into her by the cult, namely, an anti-materialist approach to life.

At the level of form, the film is cliched in its arthouse aesthetics: interminable takes, little to no score, clipped dialogue punctuated by long silences, incidental sound played way up, and all of the above in service to the all-important “telling detail” (“Admire how the director captures that tiny droplet of urine running down her leg!”).

This formal approach effectively empties the film of any content.  Drama requires conflict, and there is conflict neither between the characters themselves nor between the confident director and the meaningless material.  The director’s gaze is too cool to allow us to see him as anything other than the easy and a priori master of all he surveys.  As for the characters, they have no conflict because they stand for nothing.  For example: we are never told in any detail what the cult believes.  Its leader, Patrick, makes vague New Agey  speeches that don’t add up to much.  Though Patrick is bookish, the audience is allowed to see the cover of exactly one book in his possession; said book, in a shameful act of near-slander on the part of the filmmakers, is written by Ivan Illich, as if the Catholic anarchist philosopher is just the thing for a murdering rapist to read!  In any case, once we see that Patrick is little more than a cruel criminal, a one-dimensional villain, the beliefs of the cult become morally and politically irrelevant, since no beliefs could justify rape and murder.

This neutralization of the cult at the level of theme makes the film a defense of the status quo in ways its makers probably did not intend (though who knows?).  When Martha’s brother-in-law smugly rails at her for having no career goals and for not being interested in money, the film offers no countervailing ethics.  At first, looking at the early shots of Lucy and her husband’s vast and loveless vacation home, empty and bare-walled according to the spartan aesthetics of haute design, I thought that the film would present the cult as a locus of competing values.  But once the cult is shown to be merely the predatory gang of a deranged thug, the audience has little choice but to identify with the good bourgeois couple or else to identify the film as propaganda on its behalf.  This film thus neatly reverses the entirely superior Melancholia in forcing us to side with the well-adjusted and wealthy sister.

There is another reading of Martha Marcy May Marlene that makes itself available, though, one enabled by the cool camera eye and its pitiless and incuriously clinical long takes.  We could regard the whole narrative as nothing more than the object of our distant, unmoved, complacent, anthropological gaze.  We may be invited to snicker with superiority at the actions of all the characters, since we, sane as we are, are above action, above thought, above even feeling.  Perhaps the best response to the behavior of everyone depicted in this narrative, killer and killed, fanatic and criminal, lost girl and rich boy, is to make a series of sarcastic and knowing quips.  Maybe the only audience filmmakers can imagine for an art-movie these days is one comprised of–to borrow a term–gawkers.

Tumbling with the Times

In our curatorial age, what can one do but join in?  Quotations, images, audiovisuals and aphorisms will now be found at grandhotelabyss.tumblr.com.  Longer essays will continue to appear here, at whatever rate I feel I can manage.

Melancholia

After I went to see Rachel Getting Married (my first mistake), I came home and read something about it on Gawker or Jezebel or suchlike (my second mistake).  I was strangely surprised at the reactions of the gossip class to the film: they seemed to sympathize with Rachel, the reasonably well-adjusted titular sister of Anne Hathaway’s addict anti-heroine who shows up and almost ruins the wedding with the forceful negativity of her person.  Believe me, I don’t romanticize addicts, having known my share, but at the same time sympathizing with those who are able, nay keen, to do sensible things didn’t even occur to me.  That’s what it means to be decadent, or, putting it less glamorously, what it means to be part of a decaying and parasitic class that produces nothing for itself.  Or does it?  More on that at a later time, but first let me hasten to the thesis of this post:

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia can be read as a remake of Rachel Getting Married that so weights the narrative toward the perspective of the depressive, the maladjusted, the fuck-up, that its narrative obliterates the entire earth to foreclose audience identification with those good people who would say, Life goes on, It is what it is, Take some responsibility, Have some self-respect, Life is what you make it, Why can’t you just be normal? etc. etc.  Or as the well-adjusted sister’s husband in Melancholia keeps saying of the behavior of the depressive sister and her downer mother: “Unbelievable!”  (This surely echoes the last line of another good Scandinavian anti-bourgeois drama, Hedda Gabler: “Good God!—people don’t do such things.”)

Melancholia comes in two parts, after a dazzling painterly overture showcasing the end of the film’s world.  The first part focuses on Kirsten Dunst’s Justine (named after Sade’s much-put-upon heroine of a novel I never finished reading and probably never will).  It is Justine’s wedding day, and her sister and scientist brother-in-law, who live in a manor on a golf course, are throwing her a fancy reception.  Even before she gets there, things get messed up when the extravagant stretch limo she wanted to arrive in gets stuck on the road.  When she does arrive, the reception is awkward.  Her divorced parents, who make mortifying speeches, are the quintessential 1960s couple: a lecherous father and a castrating mother, the perfect Boomer-narcissist pairing of the sexually-liberated man and the politically-liberated woman.  And yet, for all those who would accuse von Trier of misogyny, the militant mother, railing against marriage in general, seems to be the only one at the wedding who has the affect appropriate to it.

For Justine, like so many of the women on one’s Facebook wall, is an interesting girl marrying a perfect non-entity, a drawling and brainless boy who is furthermore the best friend of her smarmy employer at a public relations firm, where Justine writes copy even though she’d rather be an artist.  Her boss serves allegorically as the replacement parent, the money-man who exploits the children of the personal revolution as the revolutionaries wallow in their self-discovery.  This wedding is accordingly meant to ensure Justine’s future participation in the system: to usher her at last into the order of normality–jobs, kids, cars, and the rest.

But our female Bartleby would prefer not to, and so she doesn’t.  At first passively–by leaving the ceremony to pee on the golf course; by taking a bath in her veil; by re-arranging the displayed art in her sister and brother-in-law’s study–and at last actively–by rebuffing her new husband’s advances; by fucking (in effect, raping) her new co-worker; and by quitting her job–in a series of wryly amusing scenes she undoes her perfect day and resigns from the normal forever.

Melancholia‘s second part, focused on Claire, is on the other hand aggressively boring.  The flat low to the manic high of depressive affect, it returns a Justine, completely immobilized with sorrow and ennui, to the manor in the days before a planet named Melancholia is due to pass by the earth–or else to collide with it.  Claire’s part–the part of clarity–has little of the humor or narrative momentum of the first section, even when the apocalypse finally arrives.  I found the whole second half difficult to watch and finally unmemorable, even as Claire is progressively wrecked by the knowledge that her world, kid, golf course, van and all, are about to come to an end.  Justine gives a few speeches of gnostic prophecy, seemingly left over from Antichrist, about how life on earth is evil, but they’re unnecessary.  The point is clear enough: the melancholic is the true realist, and failure to conform with humanity’s brutalizing enforcement of its own illusory mastery over nature is paradoxically to be closer to that nature even as it annihilates you.

But it’s really not so clear, is it?  Von Trier knows his Freud well enough to know that melancholia means an ego-wasting inability to let go of the lost object, which in this case is life itself.  The melancholic is emphatically not a Buddhist or Stoic or monastic, one who has superseded her own attachment to the world;  instead, the melancholic actually loves the world more than those who are successfully able to mourn, to bury the dead, to get married, to go to work, to efface themselves in the name of perpetuating things.  The melancholic doesn’t discipline herself to turn away from the world; she remains in the world and brings it down by the force of her own abjection.  A Freud explicator explains it this way:

In melancholia, however, the libido withdraws into the ego and identifies itself with the lost object. This would make sense in ambivalent relationships where the love/hate relation to the object simultaneously wills it to stay and leave at the same time. This identification with the object can become dangerous when the melancholic desires the object to disappear enough to harm him or herself.

As at the wedding Justine at first brings the object (life/herself) down emotionally, but then she may bring it down in a more literal sense, as the planet Melancholia smashes the world (subject and object at once).  Justine’s nephew has a nickname for her, presumably premised on his fantasy that they will build an underground retreat together: he calls her Aunt Steelbreaker.  That is not the nickname of someone who passively resigns from the earth.

Which brings me around to Neil Simpson’s very good essay on the film, which asks about its relentlessly German aesthetic:

The clues are everywhere. The Kandinskys are unceremoniously dumped in this film, replaced by Brueghel the Elder and Millias. The strains of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde reoccur throughout, and the striking blonde and blue-eyed Dunst is seen riding horses through misty pine forests.

For Simpson, the film endorses German Romanticism’s hostility toward the Enlightenment’s mathematical/materialist order.  This is certainly true, but in light of Lars von Trier’s statement, “I understand Hitler….I sympathize with him a bit,” the reading will almost certainly have to be carried a bit further, toward a sense of the dangers that come when the Romantic melancholic, who would rather will nothingness than will nothing, bursts into some violent action in or on the world. The key scene for this reading of the film is the one in which Justine, in a fit of rage, assaults her beloved horse: a melancholic who acts–in effect, a revolutionary–may destroy what beauty actually exists.

If the planet Melancholia is the world-destroying force of a refusal to mourn-or-conform turned outward on the beloved world, then Justine’s ultimately feminized passivity is the therapy Lars von Trier ministers to himself to treat his sympathy for his Uncle Steelbreaker, Herr Hitler.  Better to be an artist than a politician.  Better to be Ophelia than Hamlet, who may in the end have toppled the state, as some observers hope our latter-day melancholic Bartlebys on Wall Street will do, but in so toppling it, do recall, he only cleared the way for Fortinbras (whose name more or less means “strong-arm”).  What, then, should a melancholic do if she should not revolt?  The question answers itself: he or she should make art.  Alongside that, as Antichrist‘s conspicuous concluding dedication to Tarkovsky might hint and as von Trier’s Catholic conversion attests, he or she could also turn to God.

To the extent that this is the film’s argument, I agree with it.  But I did not need to be punished into agreement by the nearly lethal pace of the film’s second half.  Will directors of serious films ever abandon this after-Auschwitz puritanism and trust the audience again?

Nick and Norah’s Escape from the Prison of the Flesh

In honor of Thanksgiving, a family-oriented film.  I posted this review-essay of the teen comedy/romance, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, on 11 Oct. 2008.  I later removed it from the site because I thought it seemed a bit frivolous, and was indeed written in a spirit of fun, though I do think the underlying point about gnosticism and crisis is a serious one. Below the original post, I add a few new thoughts.

The keyword in the title is “infinite.”  Eight years ago, Grant Morrison began the final issue of his sci-fi super-hero hypersigil saga The Invisibles with the words of a young woman in 2012, the year human consciousness will pass through some sort of singularity and emerge transformed.  “I grew up with the Gnostic straight-edgers,” she wrote, “anti-sex, anti-death ,we imagined ourselves to be perfect simulations. [...]  The universe [was] a program inside a Manichean murder machine.”  Now, four years until 2012, a teen film comes along that begins to make good on Morrison’s prognostications.

Michael Sera plays Nick, the only straight boy in The Jerk-Offs, a queercore band without a drummer.  He has recently broken up with his girlfriend Tris, a know-nothing, malicious bimbo.  Still hung up on her, he compulsively makes her mix CDs, though she resents his pitiful attentions and tosses them in the trash can at her Catholic school. There, her acquaintance Norah, the daughter of big-deal record producer Ira Silverberg, fishes the mixes out of the trash and fantasizes about Nick.  Serendipitously, she encounters Nick at a Jerk-Offs show while searching for a secret performance of his and her favorite band, Where’s Fluffy?  Meanwhile, Caroline, her pathologically stupid alcoholic best friend, gets fall-down drunk, and Tris shows up with her new boyfriend.  Norah, not realizing that Nick is Tris’s ex-boyfriend, pretends to be his girlfriend to deflect Tris’s mockery of her.  This makes Tris jealous, which motivates her to get Nick back, but Nick’s bandmates loathe her and devote themselves to setting up Nick and Norah.  They volunteer to take Caroline home so Nick and Norah can spend the night together, but complications ensue: a drunken Caroline gets lost and staggers and pukes her way through the city; Norah reunites with her ex-boyfriend Tal who seems only to be using her to get a record deal from her father for his anarcho-Zionist band; and Tris returns to reclaim Nick’s affections.  It all works out in the end, though, as our straight-edge hero and heroine escape the fools who would weigh them down.

Perhaps the quickest way to come to the point about this film is to evaluate how it treats its New York setting.  Not the seething, dangerous multicultural metropolis of seventies and eighties film, the city is a sedate archipelago for the cultural affairs of the privileged.  But this, which perhaps only reflects aspects of current reality, does not tell us enough.

We must first notice the complete absence of African-American culture. Black people turn up in a few token roles, but they are dismissed most thoroughly in the film’s non-diegetic indie soundtrack and its diegetic willingness to live without drums.  For when people call indie music “white,” they mean primarily that it lacks rhythm—and this film goes so far as to dismiss half of the rhythm section.  Without beats, music is too slippery to dance upon; it becomes ethereal, purely melodic, disdaining the body and striving toward the realm of the spirit as in nineteenth-century Romantic composition, before the Afro-Latin revolution in western musical convention.  Indie music generally, and this film specifically, attempts a flight away from that body, the color of which in acoustical culture is black.

There are Jews in Nick and Norah, beginning with Norah herself, but the treatment of Judaism falls right into line with the film’s themes. Norah’s father is the wealthy culture-industrialist of anti-Semitic caricature, while her Zionist ex is, predictably, a smarmy money-grubber.  Thus all of the film’s Jews but Norah are attached not to the dancing body, like the African-Americans of stereotype, but rather to gross stuff like money and land. How does Norah escape this imputation?  Well, as she later tells Nick, her own favorite part of Judaism is the concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world.  While this phrase and concept have a place in mainstream Judaism, they have special significant within the neo-Platonic tradition of the Lurianic Kabbalah, in which tikkun olam refers to the rejoining of the divine sparks which have been lodged in the dross of this bungled world, created not by God, but through his withdrawal.  We must resist this world to reach to him.  Nick immediately understands, replying that “we are the broken pieces,” thus taking the entire story back to the Platonic myth of eros.  The only worthwhile Judaism this film will countenance, then, is one which pictures the world as a Manichean murder-machine and which encourages its devotees to become gnostic straight-edgers.

The film’s queer characters are ministering angels to our cute spiritual couple.  What else is a gay man in this kind of story but a quick signifier for pure Platonic love, love—even sexual love—without participation in nature and its reproductive cycles?  “Mirrors and copulation are abominable,” say Borges’s gnostic hieresiarchs, “for they multiply the number of men.”  It is through this aphorism that Nick and Norah’s gay guardian angels are best understood.

Perhaps no one gets the shortest end of this film’s stick than white women, represented by Tris and Caroline.  Pornified sluts addicted to all manner of consumption, filthy bodies who are vomiting when they aren’t binge drinking, or orally fixating on gum and sandwiches, or making out with strange men, they would drive any poor pure soul too unfortunate to be gay to be “anti-sex” instead.  When Tris wants to seduce Nick again, she caresses his soulful, spiritual head with her foot, the body’s lowest member, condemned to tread in the dirt.  Little wonder that he abandons her for his Kabbalist co-gnostic.

Finally, we learn that Kabbalists and Platonists do it better, at least with each other.  At one point, Tris taunts Norah with the knowledge that she (Norah) has never had an orgasm.  Tal, her greedy Jewish boyfriend, did not satisfy.  At the film’s literal climax, however, Nick brings her to orgasm in a heavy-petting session in her father’s recording studio.  Like good gnostics, our hero and heroine never even remove their clothes.  A microphone picks up Norah’s cries of jouissance, thus converting their love into pure electronic sound, pure spirit, which it always was anyway.  As you might well imagine, Nick and Norah go off into the sunrise after their wild night.  In the film’s only miscalculation, they kiss on the escalator down into Penn Station. Actually, they should have been going up and into the light, like Tim Robbins at the end of the similarly-themed but differently-genred Jacob’s Ladder.

In some ways, this film is just what one might expect in a period of civilizational calamity.  Gnosticism itself emerged as the Roman Empire declined, and Kabbalah became prominent during a period of medieval and early modern anti-Semitic pogroms.  Threatened communities and collapsing empires often seem to desire nothing more than transcendence, and often too they recoil in disgust from the materialism which they had enjoyed during their eminence.  There have been assertions that our own ruins will bring forth a renewed populist fascism; already a Marxist resurgence can be seen among intellectuals, with the Hegelians Zizek and Jameson achieving newfound fame.  But this film suggests that indie dissident youth won’t have it.  Grant Morrison, who foresaw this all, said that by 2012 they’d be hippies again, seeking cosmic consciousness and escape from the prison of the world.  What can a Hegelian offer the gnostic straight-edgers?  Hegel’s motto, after all, was, “Essence must appear!”  And they don’t want to appear, but rather to disappear—“completely,” as Thom Yorke put it. Tired of time and motion, space and bodies, sex and death, they wish to become angels.

And that was the original essay.  Three years later, how does its socially-predictive power hold up?  In one respect, my essay was symptomatic rather than prescient by routing of the religious critique through identity politics.  Before, during, and after Obama’s election, identity politics were hugely resurgent on the left (see here for the great internet example), and at the time I seemed to think that a focus on identity-categories marked with physicality by the supposedly dominant ideology stood opposed to gnosticism, which I took to be some kind of Euro-elitist idealism.  I stand corrected on this point: after three years of observing identity politics in action, I see that it is a hugely idealistic world-hating movement of mostly middle-class individuals to divest themselves of the secular filth of their complicity with the world as it is (the kyriarchy), a complicity now pejoratively and ubiquitously and often absurdly referred to as “privilege.”  Perhaps influenced by the reception of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was right about the figure of abjection that the white woman would become.   And what about the social movements since 2008, the Tea Party and, far more importantly, Occupy Wall Street?  What they think they stand for probably matters less in the end than the effects they will have.  In any case, time will tell.   

Imperial Ellen and the Army of Enlightenment

An Ellen Willis revival would appear to be underway, for reasons that are somewhat unclear to me.  A less cerebral Susan Sontag, a less scholarly Eve Sedgwick, a less witty Katha Pollitt, a less learned Marshall Berman, a less journalistic Naomi Klein, a less clever Laura Kipnis, a less psychedelic Howard Hampton…that’s how Willis always struck me back in the days when I eagerly read leftist polemic and pop-culture criticism.  If we restrict our comparison to today’s left-liberal feminist luminaries, such as Sady Doyle or Laurie Penny, then of course Willis is going to be ennobled by the juxtaposition, if only because she was actually literate, but since we are happily not restricted to Doyle’s wall of sarcasm or Penny’s Gaiman-to-Rowling repertoire of cultural allusions, I don’t honestly see why we should read Willis at all.

But there may be one against-the-grain reason, which is her imperial honesty.  Willis’s main polemical contribution to the feminism of her time was a psychoanalytic insistence on the foundational importance of sexual desire.  This was radical, I gather, in the milieu of journalistic and activist feminism, which retained the second wave’s Wollstonecraftian anti-sex stance even as academic third-wave feminism quickly appropriated and then, under the tutelage of Foucault, abandoned the idea that eros was at the core of human experience.  Richard Beck sums up Willis’s sex-radicalism by citing her collaborator Shulamith Firestone:

Maybe Shulamith Firestone—co-founder of Redstockings—put it best. In The Dialectic of Sex, she called Freudianism “the misguided feminism.” While Firestone disagreed with many of Freud’s conclusions (and premises and methods and attitudes), she recognized the real genius of his founding insight: “Freudianism is so charged, so impossible to repudiate, because Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: Sexuality. Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil.” But Freud and feminism diverged when it came to the family. Freud accepted the family as a given, the fixed foundation of modern life. Radical feminism, however, pushed past it, and tried to image other ways in which small groups of people might arrange themselves. Expanding on the work of Wilhelm Reich, Willis argued that children were damaged by parental condemnation of their earliest genital desires, and that these early humiliations caused not just personal but widespread social misery. Real sexual liberation, then, would entail liberation from the family as well, and it would also lead to widespread social upheaval. By extension, feminism cannot only work for economic and political equality (although it obviously must work for those things). It must also work to transform the whole fabric of social relations and personal experience. These are the truly radical, truly utopian ideas to which Willis devoted her life.

For Willis the origin of all social ills is the interdiction of desire.  All impulses to transcend the body are stigmatized as fearful false (un)consciousness by this theory, and moreover any pedagogy that urges such transcendence is implicitly labelled abusive.  It’s really difficult to see how this is anything other than the ethics appropriate to a consumer class living on other people’s labor while moralistically tut-tutting the violent means used to coerce that labor.  Why?  Because somebody sometime has to transcend desire if anything anywhere is to be achieved, for good or ill. This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have all the sex they want; it just means recognizing that assembling a piece of technology, learning a language, composing a symphony, defending a territory, or generating a theory are not necessarily much like having sex.  Desire is one part of life–a very fine part–but it does desire no dishonor to say that it’s not the whole.  Or even to say that it’s capable of sublimation or sublation into something transcendent.

Willis’s sex radicalism is Puritanism’s opposite face rather than its rational negation: both attitudes are obsessively fixated on desire, both expect too much from sex (the collapse of the social order on the one hand, and its secular redemption on the other).  Both sides are incapable of ever enjoying sex or recognizing its aesthetic or spiritual dimensions because both so need to politicize it by make it the absolute model, whether positive or negative, for all collective existence.

But give Willis credit for one thing: she was not naive about the consequences her politics entailed.  A politics that seeks to extirpate all obstacles to desire seeks to extirpate all obstacles to desire.  Let Willis herself say it, in a post-9/11 article bracingly titled “Why I’m Not for Peace” (.pdf):

My frustration, in other words, is not that we took action in Afghanistan but that we have not done enough.We should have fought the ground war and occupied Kabul; organized an international force to disarm the warlords, protect ordinary citizens, and oversee the distribution of aid; demanded that secularists be included in the negotiations for a new government and that basic women’s rights be built into a new structure of law. If this is “imperialism”—in the promiscuous contemporary usage of that term—I am for it: I believe it is the prerequisite of a stable peace.

Call me promiscuous, but I do believe that occupying a country, taking over its government, and rewriting its laws qualifies as “imperialism.”  And this is not to speak of extracting its resources or the labor of its citizenry, as Willis does not.  But isn’t imperialism justified if it means lifting populations out of theocracy and patriarchy?  If it is, then it’s going to rely on the movement of armies, the production of wealth by the empire’s populace to support its military, and the training of men and women to transcend not only their sexual desires, but even their very empathetic instinct not to squeeze a trigger.  (Willis had an answer to this objection, but it’s alarmingly vague and ultimately naive.)

All of which is to say that Willis’s sexual utopia is not for everyone: it’s not for the producers, who must generate the means to arm the war machine, and it’s not for that machine’s human constituents, who must be schooled not in the art of love but rather in the art of death, and it’s certainly not for that machine’s victims, who are like truants being herded by force into the school of desire.  Willis promiscuously uses the belligerent liberal internationalist’s favorite pronoun, “we,” but there will be no genuine “we” (no mutual lovers in the utopia of desire) until after the global revolution.  How will we know when the revolution is complete?  When the army of enlightenment has overrun the earth and leveled it to a flat, smooth plane on which desire can slide freely from object to object.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote very beautifully about such a revolution in his great poem Prometheus Unbound, and he didn’t shy from the verb “to colonize” or the noun “empire.”  In the following passage, a chorus of spirits rejoices at the destruction of all traditional authority:

Our spoil is won,
Our task is done,
We are free to dive, or soar, or run;
Beyond and around,
Or within the bound
Which clips the world with darkness round.

We’ll pass the eyes
Of the starry skies
Into the hoar deep to colonize;
Death, Chaos and Night,
From the sound of our flight,
Shall flee, like mist from a tempest’s might.

The “hoar deep” for Shelley can plausibly be read as an allegory of the unconscious from which all fear of unfettered desire proceeds.  “To colonize” it is to bring it into the light of rationality, which, given Shelley’s Platonism, is supposed to be the master of the soul, the rider in the chariot.  The superiority of Shelley (and, indeed, Freud) over Willis is their properly poetic sense that this is an inward journey before all else.  Shelley is a fine psychologist and a great poet, but thankfully no politician–and we have his second wife to thank for pointing out the dangerous dimension of his politics in Frankenstein.  Locating the “hoar deep” on the world map in order “to colonize” it with enlightenment’s army is a kind of category error, but one that may be endemic to all desire-based politics.  Imperial Ellen, in any event, is not a trustworthy guide to this territory.

Twilight Aesthetics

Every year or two, a new Twilight movie, and every year or two the same endless debates on narrative and ideology.  I appreciated Sarah Blackwood‘s defense of the newest against feminist charges that it glamorizes bad or even abusive relationships:

So, in the weirdest sense possible, the Twilight Saga is a pragmatist’s text; which is just another way of saying that while Stephenie Meyer doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in challenging or reshaping gendered realities, her ability to evoke what it’s like to have a gender in the world — for Bella, for Edward, for Jacob — makes these novels surprisingly insightful on a number of issues feminists still have trouble addressing.

Replace “feminists” with any political partisans, “gender” with any socio-political identity, “the Twilight Saga” with any work of literature or film, “pragmatist” with modernist, and you have a reasonably sophisticated theory of art as mimesis.  To wit: the basic task of an artist is to construct a work that represents, with more or less depth and complexity, some aspect of reality, in order that the audience may respond in one or more of the following ways:

1. by experiencing a defamiliarization of the ordinary (which may manifest–in unpredictable ways–as awe, reverence, disgust, fear, erotic arousal, political anger, etc.) caused by encountering it in the transfigured, charged circumstances of the aesthetic object;

2. by feeling psychic relief, and hence probably profound attachment to the aesthetic object, due to the representation of aspects of their lives that had previously gone unrepresented;

3. by rethinking, though the mediation of the aesthetic object’s intricate arrangement of experience, their previously held beliefs on the experiences so represented.

This aesthetic theory assumes the following standard of quality: that work is superior which so invests its mimesis with the organized representation of experiential complexity that it demands all three responses from the audience–first by appealing to it with affective surprise and psychic relief (responses 1 and 2), and then by troubling it with contradictions and difficulties that call forth response 3.

Straightforwardly bad art never even arouses response 1; simplistic art never gets beyond response 2; too much experimental and avant-garde art, or else directly didactic political art, bullies its right-thinking audience into response 3 or its simulacrum without first securing their genuine holistic attention via responses 1 and 2, and thus renders itself even more disposable than Twilight.

The advantage of this art theory is that it combines the best of the two basic aesthetics, classicism (any theory that assumes art to represent reality) and romanticism (any theory that assumes art to recreate reality).  While my theory leans toward the classical–it assumes reality’s priority to its representation–it includes the romantic by insisting on the artist’s originary shaping power (which I value far more than convention’s shaping power) over the material he or she seeks to organize and by allowing for the audience, after being provoked to thought and feeling by the work, to act on the provocation and alter the world.

For a Common Culture?

I.

As neoliberalism crumbles, its most sacred ideological pillar seems to be tottering: the unabashed good of “diversity,” or cultural–as opposed to economic–equality within the nation-state.

It appears that people won’t share unless they feel they have a profound background in common with their neighbors; concomitantly, an overemphasis on cultural diversity–on the national background’s break-up by group–seems paradoxically to lead to a toxic form of Other-obliterating individualism.

So Alexander Stille recently wrote in the New York Times:

Removing the most blatant forms of discrimination, ironically, made it easier to justify keeping whatever rewards you could obtain through the new, supposedly more meritocratic system. “Greater inclusiveness was a precondition for greater economic stratification,” said Professor Karabel. “It strengthened the system, reinvigorated its ideology — it is much easier to defend gains that appear to be earned through merit. In a meritocracy, inequality becomes much more acceptable.”

II.

I was raised by immigrants to be an individualist capitalist.  My family would regard socialism, if they could understand it, the same way Nietzsche regarded it: as a lamentable regression to the peasant commune they fled the impoverished hinterland of southern Europe to escape.  And I grew up and was educated among people whose families had escaped other countries with the same individualist thoughts in their heads–lands including, for example, Vietnam, where the threat of peasant communism was more than just a notion explored in The Genealogy of Morals.  Ah, the long conversations I had in high school with a certain Mr. Vu about what he and I would do when we ruled the world!  He’s now in the field of business, with an MBA from Johns Hopkins, and Facebook characterizes his political views as “libertarian.”

This country was built by people who wanted, by and large, to aggrandize themselves in ways the various Old Worlds didn’t allow.  America’s vicious, vulgar elitism is the opulent daydream of the subaltern.  We live in the Land of Cockaigne.  This is why criticizing said elitism sounds, well, terribly elitist, even to me, who should know better, because I think of my old peasant grandmother: she lived a hard fucking life so that I could eventually read Nietzsche, even if she doesn’t and can’t grasp that that’s what she was doing on any but an intuitive level.  I was supposed to have a better life than she had.  Everybody else can go to hell.

And yet.  The kind of pluralism that allows the (“talented tenth” of the) Italian and the Vietnamese (and the lesbian and the Mormon and the Muslim and the African-American and the deaf wheelchair-user and all the rest) to mingle among the remnant of the old elite at and around the top of the economic pyramid no doubt allows some to live large, but also fails to produce much worth living for.

Diversity promotes the leveling of culture to the plane of polite taste–”Doesn’t that dashiki look nice on you!” and “I do enjoy palak paneer!”–while exsanguinating culture of any of its positive content.  The only drama in our society comes from perceived slights to group sensitivities; this is why the word “racism,” for instance, can now be used to describe a lack of black fashion models on catwalks or the precisely polemical deployment of a concept like “wage slavery.”  We wear the dress, eat the food, play the music, and demand respect in the office, but not one of us any longer believes in the gods.  As the ubiquitous Slavoj Zizek has tirelessly pointed out, belief in the gods–and by “gods” I mean to denote something like “transcendent values,” while by “belief” I include not only a mental state but a form of everyday practice–is the position banned by neoliberalism.

By the same paradoxical logic that leads cultural equality to produce jealous individualism, material equality seems to make cultural individualism, as opposed to subgroup belonging, far more possible.  That is, under the current regime, your individualism is that of an economic unit while your cultural identity is defined by what group you belong to.  Under a regime of material equality, cultural nationalism becomes less relevant because group membership ceases to be a precondition for economic inclusion; consequently, individuals are free to become as eccentric as they wish.  Common culture–widespread belief in the gods–allows the individual a meaningful field of action; a broken culture pays off the individual in return for submerging him or her deeply within a subgroup denied the ability to act at all.  That most pleasantly odd of postcolonial theorists, Declan Kiberd, puts it aptly:

After the mid-twentieth century, that common culture was replaced by the creation of specialist elites.  Democracy was no longer seen as the sharing in a common fund of textual knowledge, but as providing access to this or that super-educated grouping.  No longer was the prevailing idea that anyone bright enough could read and understand Hamlet or Ulysses, but that anyone sufficiently clever could aspire  to become one of the paid specialists who did such things.  Today’s social movements aim at the inclusion of gifted souls in the dominant structure rather than at the revolutionary transformation of social relations.

Kiberd slips strategically at the end of this passage into the Marxist lingua franca of the utopic English department–his own bitter satire on cosmopolitics, I guess–but he is, let there be no mistake, describing a form of conservatism.  My social-climbing relatives can’t read or understand Hamlet or Ulysses, but even they would understand that.  Now there’s no ladder to climb, maybe they’ll become conservatives too.

III.

It’s hard to see history as anything other than cyclical.  Contraction follows expansion, liberalization follows restriction, destruction follows creativity.  Yeats:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!

When there is too much civilization–too much diverse meritocracy, too much technocracy, too much cultural leveling, and not enough consolations that are anything other than private–one begins to feel a terrible hunger to experience “the desolation of reality.”  Like hard men entre deux guerres, we sit sullenly in the glare of the cabaret and envision a grand fire.  The fire will be the expansionist individual’s final apotheosis, and then material, as opposed to cultural, equality will be restored.  In the rubble, we can all look each other in the eye again because we no longer have anything to defend.  And then we will have the pleasures of building together.

It would be nice to think that we have learned enough to accomplish such a historical task without violence this time, but then learning is not necessarily living.  Every generation, in rebelling against its parents, may have to make its grandparents’ mistake all over again, if only to taste what they tasted on its own tongue.  And if they tasted blood?

Unfortunate Fall

One of the sorrows of the present moment is that one almost feels ashamed to be an atheist.  That would have grieved my fourteen-year-old self, freshly sprung as he was from Catholic school and accordingly flush with Satanic pride.  Nowadays, I would much rather talk to a priest than to Richard Dawkins.  A priest and I would come to different conclusions about life’s problems, but at least the priest, unlike Dawkins et al., understands that those problems exist and are not some bullshit hallucinated by crafty Papists and Mohammedans.

(Funny how very traditionally English middle-class and Protestant these cosmopolitan atheists all are.  You would be forgiven for imagining it’s just the old Victorian bigotry dressed up in new garments.)

For instance, Salman Rushdie in a recent interview says that religion is “all nonsense.”  All nonsense!  Well, then, no need to bother with that, is there?  Better not even to think about it, eh, sahib?  Such a statement represents a complete cultural regression–with all our iPads and Twitter feeds, we knowers are actually stupider than people were in about 1850.  In 1850, you had artists, philosophers, and scholars who certainly thought that the propositional metaphysics of Christianity was false, but not that it was all nonsense.  I mean, really, “all”?  Dante?  Milton?  Aquinas?  All of that?

Against “Anti-Pornography”

I don’t know whether it’s nature, nurture, or some occult combination thereof, but my experience in today’s America tells me that men’s pornography is visual and women’s pornography is narrative. Since the monotheistic West (in which I include the Muslim world) is iconoclastic, the visual is stigmatized as itself pornographic no matter its content.

Hence to represent a women visually is “objectification,” in the lexicon of our ethics. But to represent anything visually is to make of it a contemplated object. All art is–not “objectification,” the word is too tainted–let us say “objectivization.”

Until women’s narrative pornography (“Take me now, Heathcliff-Rochester-Edward-etc.!”) is equally stigmatized by the magistrates of contemporary offense, I’m going to continue to see concerns over visual or specular pornography as part of monotheism’s ongoing war on aesthetics.

We Hope That You Choke

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

–Yeats, “The Scholars”

This interview with Alan Moore unexpectedly illuminates a conflict over whether or not Geoff Dyer’s satire on academic writing in the New York Times was a just critique or a typical piece of anti-intellectualism.  Moore  discusses the economic circumstances that led to the replacement of the initial writers of super-hero comics, who were mostly professional pulp or sf writers with those recruited from the ranks of the fan base who were willing to work for less:

These were real writers. I’ve got the greatest of respect for those men of pulp tradition who endlessly spewed out ideas for a penny a word on ridiculously tight deadlines. What happened in the mid-’60s is that those writers who had created the vast majority of DC’s superhero characters had all redefined them after the original creators had left. Around that time, I understand that a group of these creators noticed that they didn’t have medical insurance or pensions, even though they were doing most of the work. So they went to the heads of DC to address this and suggested that maybe they should form a kind of union to negotiate with the publishers on an equitable level. At which point, the publishers told them they were fired.

[...]

And one of the things that strikes me most about superheroes as they currently stand, is that these are heroes, as the term implies. These are people who stand unflinchingly against tyrants and oppressors, who protect and support the underdog, who are fearless and noble in everything that they do. I’m starting to feel that the most significant part of the superhero makeup is that part which is not talked about, the fact that these triumphant paragons are being created by an industry of people who are frightened to ask for a raise, the rights to their work, and, especially after seeing what happened to Gardner Fox and the others, to form a union.

[...]

I’m not expecting the writers and artists of the industry to go out and struggle with Galactus, should he turn up suddenly and threaten to eat the world. Of course I’m not. I’m just asking them to show a little bit of ordinary human courage. I think that if they had done that, then the industry would probably not be in the state that it is.

The overlap with radical academia is striking and it explains why a lot of people in English and comparative literature departments, such as myself, will not rouse ourselves to defend academia against such attacks as Dyer’s, even if it’s a somewhat easy joke and comes from a source as disreputable as the Times.

Moore is essentially and rightly accusing the inheritors of the super-hero tradition of being a bunch of yes-men that Batman or Superman would probably have beaten up in the interests of truth and justice.  Super-hero comics don’t differ too much from their precursor literary traditions–from the visionary imaginings of poets and novelists who wanted to add something to reality as well as representing it.

Now, as the Yeats poem with which I’ve prefaced this post indicates, the cognate complaint that scholars are dried-up traducers of the tradition they curate is an old one (and Yeats, who died the year after Superman was born, was no stranger to heroic fictions).  But the charge took on a new aspect starting in the ’70s and ’80s, when the radical new techniques of reading and interpretation coming out of France and, to a lesser extent, Germany promised to offer something far more revolutionary not only than prior scholarship, but also far more revolutionary than the left wing of the literary tradition itself–more radical than Dickens or Shelley or Woolf or Joyce or Douglass or Whitman.

I’m sure you’ve heard all these claims.  Deconstruction would unmask the ruses through which language secured our assent to spuriously totalizing conceptual schemes, post-structuralist psychoanalysis would liberate desire in language through the frustration of hierarchical signification, Foucauldian genealogies and the New Historicism would reveal the constructed prisons of discourse that contained social rebellion, queer theory and third-wave feminism and postcolonialism would show all identities to be coercive impositions upon a mobile ensemble of infinite desires and performances, Bourdieu’s sociology of taste and the Marxist approach to cultural studies would enable us to understand the very categories of art or literature to be self-interested inventions of vested social interests bent on perpetuating their privileges.  Etc. and ad nauseam.

How grotesque, then, to find that these ultra-radical critiques were penned by a pack of vile hypocrites overseeing an extraordinarily exploitative and cynical labor market.  Somehow when they were writing their Marxist critiques of Percy Shelley they forgot to lift a finger against the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the overproduction of Ph. Ds, the waste and uselessness of academic publishing, the truly anti-intellectual pace and scale of academic professionalization and credentialing, and all of the other problems that currently bedevil the humanities. I’m not saying they would have succeeded had they put up a fight, but none of the radical academics I know–and I know my share–have even tried to do anything.  They took their tenure and ran.

Lord, what would they say / Did their Karl Marx walk that way?  Like the second generation of super-hero writers, the post-68 academics were a bunch of out-of-touch enthusiasts fouling their nests in open defiance of their stated principles.   To add insult to injury, they spent their time superciliously condescending to dead writers who had, in fact, whatever their politics, generally lived much braver lives than most “radical” professors.  If I am not inspired to defend the intellectual class, this is why.  Where were they, after all, when their own next generation needed defending?  They were exactly nowhere: they were on paid sabbatical scolding George Eliot for not having read Foucault, and as far as I’m concerned they can go straight to hell.  Clear enough for you?

Like What, Fred?

Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

—Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic

I keep seeing this passage from Jameson’s recent tome quoted on all the Left blogs (and even on my Facebook friends page!) as an example of how Jameson really can write, or is, in fact, a master stylist.  To wit, Benjamin Kunkel, in the venerable London Review, quotes not this exact passage from Valences of the Dialectic but an adjacent one, and then goes on to say:

In such a passage it’s possible to see a few things. One is as much evidence as a few lines could offer for placing Jameson among the important American writers of the age tout court.

Now I am not one of these brisk, no-nonsense people who goes on about how funnily those literary theorists write.  Most literary theory is bad as most human cultural productions are bad–I invoke Sturgeon’s Law, in the parlance of science-fiction fandom–but if you scratch an anti-theorist, you’ll usually find a full-on aesthetic/literary reactionary: sure, now they’re railing against Jameson or Spivak or Sedgwick or whoever as defilers of the canon, but give them half a brandy snifter and they’ll be tearing down Shelley and Rousseau and Woolf and Melville next.

(My implication, as you can probably see, is that most theory is just the latest episode in the history of Romanticism–note that Jameson’s “diseased eyeball” revises Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” from Nature–and is, like Romanticism in general, quite a mixed proposition.  But let’s save that for another time.)

I cannot, though, allow this praise for Jameson’s nonsensical sentence to stand!  I haven’t read Valences, but I have read a lot of the work of “America’s greatest Marxist critic,” and I consequently have some sense of both his ideas and his style.  Jameson compels attention through the vast scope of his historical storytelling.  A defender of narrative thinking, he structures absorbing Bildungsromane which feature grand abstractions–modernism, say, or romance, or historicity–as their protagonists, rising and falling and changing with the historical dialectic like a time-lapse bud.   I happen to think that the content of much of Jameson’s theorizing, insofar as I understand it, is wrong or misleading.  But since I, unlike him, privilege the aesthetic over the epistemological, I will allow that he’s fun to read.  As Woolf once said of novelists, so we might say of Hegelian theorists: you come to them not for sentences, but for chapters.

This particular sentence is an especially painful case.  Let’s have it again:

Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

The trouble begins with the second “like.”  “We” are like a diseased eyeball that perceives flashes of light when we are reminded that Utopia exists.  Okay, I’d have gone with “as when” if I had made the whole comparison a dependent clause, but I can accept this.  But the second “like” clause is a dangling modifier: “we” are not like “those baroque sunbursts” by the logic of the overall analogy; no, “we” are semi-tautologically like our world, while Utopia is like the sunbursts.  He has his own stupid metaphor backwards.

(How does a sentence get all this praise, when it has a dangling modifier that muddles its meaning?  Talk about the cultural illogic of late capitalism.)

But enough grammar; look at the sense itself: being reminded that Utopia exists is like what happens when a “diseased eyeball”–and I suspect it’s this chunk of grotesquerie floating in the slow, turgid flood of Jameson’s prose that has people so impressed–perceives flashes of light.  Does that mean that being reminded that socialism is a possibility is like having symptoms of oncoming blindness?  Or is it the other way around: the light indicates the lifting of blindness?  But if so, why are the flashes “disturbing”?  A strong believer in the idea of the political unconscious would note the traces of anxiety in the morbidly unclear metaphors that attend the bourgeois professor’s revolutionary recommendations.

As for those “baroque sunbursts,” I’ll be charitable and assume he must be referring to something he referenced earlier, maybe from one of those sci-fi novels he likes so much.  Because otherwise I don’t have any idea what he means–the sun’s rays are always in this world, are, in fact, a constitutive part of it.

Aestheticizing readers can relish the ambiguity and ambivalence, if only it weren’t produced by bad syntax, but I don’t think I’d mount the barricades on the basis of this.  Remember when Marxist writing was muscular?  Worldly?  O call back Trotsky, bid time return!  No wonder I’m a Tory Anarchist.

An Essay in the Old Feminism

Joyce part 2 coming within a day or two…

The following will offend some, perhaps most.  But I want to see what it looks like laid out as an argument.

(Nabokov famously told some tyro that he would never be a real writer if he didn’t know the names of trees.  I think that’s stupid, but then I’m not a nature-lover.  My version would go like this: “You’ll never be a real writer if you don’t say horrible things just to hear how they’ll sound.”  I doubt the author of Lolita would disagree.)

In the new Jonathan Franzen interview, he has this to say:

I started writing Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancée, and I think it’s ­significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred of them known, and that I steered away from that voice—because of our relationship, because of an intense relationship with a woman. Which now seems to me emblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try to have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy writing, however brilliant and masterful, was neces­sarily subordinate. It’s worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to various female writers—Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few—than I do to Pynchon.

Most of the radical feminist energy since the sixties has gone toward vindicating women’s traditions and ways of being.  This would have been deeply shocking to the early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, and to some extent even up to Virginia Woolf.  Their complaint was that male-run society, which confined women to the home and to the heart, robbed women of history and tradition.  The crime of men was withholding the universal from women, not oppressing women by denying the validity of their particular marginalized viewpoint.  The marginalized viewpoint, with all its attendant partiality and resentment, was the very evidence of women’s oppression.  Hegel’s wishful and abstruse fairy tale about how the slave knows more than the master had not yet become conventional wisdom (i.e., pious absurdity) on the political left.  (And there were better masters in Wollstonecraft’s day too.  The great patriarchal writers she contended with were Milton and Rousseau.  We contend with, well, you can fill in the blank.)

I think Wollstonecraft would see the literary politics implied by Franzen’s feminism to be deeply patriarchal–it represents, in the last American President’s sole felicitous phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectations.  Franzen says: If you’re as smart as Thomas Pynchon, you can’t have a relationship with a woman, either as a lover or as a writer.  Doesn’t this commit the novelist to the belief that women aren’t capable of or interested in being as smart as Thomas Pynchon?  That they are too gentle for cynicism, too pure for explicit talk of shitting and fucking, too emotional for complex literary structures or political philosophies, too interested in soap opera to care about the aesthetics of prose?

(I take no position on the relative merits of the writers Franzen discusses, by the way.  I’d rather read some of the women than Pynchon too, but not because they’re women.  And what about the female avant-garde in this conversation?  Gertrude Stein?  Mina Loy?)

You may be thinking that Jonathan Franzen does not represent feminism.  But Franzen’s remarks are the fruit of very influential feminist thinking in the academy.  Two landmark texts, still often cited, are Nina Baym’s “Melodramas of Beset Manhood” and Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs.  These critics argued for a restoration to the canon of sentimental literature and a disparagement of male writers’ claims to the universal, the disinterested, the aesthetic, or the sublime; domestic woman realized that all art was propaganda, and so should we.  If Wollstonecraft wanted to be allowed to join Milton in the empyrean, these thinkers wanted to drag him down to the kitchen where the women were forced to toil.

But what if we restored the older feminism?  What would that entail?  It would entail upending Franzen’s and contemporary feminism’s hierarchy of value.  It would involve genuinely egalitarian male writers like Franzen saying (rather high-handedly!) to female writers, especially now, when western women enjoy conditions of freedom that Wollstonecraft could not have imagined and would not have desired, when they are getting more college degrees than men and are effectively in control of the literary market, when, in short, they can no longer claim reasonably to be an oppressed minority insofar as they are middle-class, the following:

“You must take responsibility for the seriousness of your ambitions.  Because your foremothers were unjustly confined to shallowness and frivolity is all the more reason not to celebrate shallowness and frivolity in the present.  I will not condescend to you by vowing to ‘read more books by women’ if they are dull, or insult you by inflating the aesthetic value of past works grievously limited by the confined conditions of the women who made them.  And anyway, there are so many precedents for female achievements on the very highest literary level, before post-sixties ideologues, stung by the collapse of their ill-conceived ideals, demanded that we not speak of height at all since equality meant holding everyone down.  I will not pander to you by writing below my or your intelligence or by falsifying my feelings in conformity with what I imagine to be your girlish preferences.  In return I ask that you not seek to bind me because you feel that you’ve been bound.  And as for the chains in your mind–no one can unlock them but you.”

Josipovici vs. Joyce 1

Obviously, I don’t think there can be too much discussion of Gabriel Josipovici.  I first started reading his work about six or seven years ago, probably after hearing about him from This Space or its prior incarnation.  I’ve read four of his books–Goldberg: Variations, The World and the Book, The Singer on the Shore, and What Ever Happened to Modernism?–and browsed around in a few others–On Trust, The Lessons of Modernism, and others–and I mean soon to get around to more of his fiction.  I even published professional reviews of two of his books (including the most recent) in literary journals under my own name, which I fear I must continue to guard on this blog.  I’ve got The Book of God sitting my shelf, just awaiting the moment when I decide to read the Bible properly.  (I did the New Testament in a college course, but never really the Old.  You’ve probably heard the joke that describes my religious education: We don’t read the Bible…we’re Catholic!)

All of this is to say that I consider myself an admirer of and an ally to Josipovici’s project of preventing us from using literature to lie to ourselves about either our freedom or our constraint.  As I’ve said, I don’t see that “modernism” is a meaningful or useful name for this project, but why quibble about labels?  His is a refreshing voice to someone like me, embedded in delusionally right-wing America, in a delusionally left-wing institution, the English department.

Right and left are irrelevant in America, a civilization whose politics are wholly exhausted by a violently fascistic metaphysics of identity, from the American exceptionalist imperialists to the white nationalists to the feminists to the ethnic nationalists, all of whom determine ethical and aesthetic questions on identitarian bases.  In this context, I am cheered by Josipovici’s insistence on the radical isolation and fragility at the basis of experience and of action, which provides a way of thinking about art and, indeed, life that does not reduce them to the spurious set of selfishly constructed conceptual categories that carve up our days.

Josipovici’s humanist anti-humanism or anti-humanist humanism derives from our very frailty, and the understandably hysterical “rage for order” that results from it, the conviction that the world must not be wholly humanized, that some contact, however unrepresentable, to an exterior of our constructs must remain available to us via the arts.  Whereas all sociologies of art cruelly foreclose that prospect, insisting with orthodox Marxism and other variants of naive Romanticism that the world is what men and women have made.  (I read Josipovici’s work as radically and rigorously anti-Marxist, unlike what’s called anti-communism [i.e., liberalism or neo-liberalism or libertarianism], which is simply the Marxist historical narrative with a different protagonist and a different culminating victory.)

All that said, if Josipovici is going to attack James Joyce, well, those are fighting words.  In fact, I confess, I generally regard Josipovici’s refusal to credit Joyce as an evasion of the kind that Harold Bloom talks about–a fear that the precursor has seen everything already, had all the grand visions, emptied the universe of originality.  Josipovici’s response to this anxiety, like that of his hero Beckett, is what Bloom calls kenosis:  making wry arrangements of the meager leftovers while pretending that they were all there was to the vision in the first place–reigning in hell rather than serving in heaven like some punningly grandiose Joyce-mongering magical realist or post-modern novelist.

This, of course, isn’t how Josipovici sees it.  Mitchelmore quotes his 1978 review of Hugh Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices (Kenner, by the way, is brilliant, but not necessarily to be trusted about Joyce, whom he reads through Poundian and Eliotic lenses):

No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a ‘style’. ‘The True Sentence, in Joyce’s opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.’ Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the completed work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there is a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kakfa and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every ‘letting go’ has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

It’s not that this is exactly wrong, but that it’s not to the point.  An evasion of the point, you might say.  I will explain why in part two of this post…

Bloomsday Notes

And you who wrest old images from the burial earth! The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting.

–Ulysses, “Wandering Rocks”

My father was once playing with his pet cat, and he made an observation that crossed Montaigne with Hobbes: “If I were smaller than this cat,” he said, “She’d kill me and eat me.”  I have come to the same conclusion about all human groups, classes, nations, and races.  That is, my decade spent on the political left has convinced me that all revolutions would return us to the starting point: with privileged and disprivileged classes and groups.

The inevitability of human hierarchy would be tolerable if the wielders of power were frank.  For this reason, I’ve always found the political right refreshing: “We want power and we should have it and we’re going to use it to benefit ourselves,” they say, only claiming that others should support them because they’ll be benefited by accident (since this is largely false, I am not a political rightist either).  But the left pursues power in the guise of humanitarianism and utopic universalism.  Intellectual and activist identity politics is a game of discursive revenge: because the straight white man set himself up as the neutral universal, the unmarked category, he must be ruthlessly marked at all points within the discourse of identity politics.  Hence the “circular firing squad” character of leftist infighting, where everyone fights to be more marked, more disprivileged.

(I say “he,” but in practice, the straight white woman is actually the most reviled figure in identity politics, because she gets to leverage her ambiguous post-feminist social position as both advantage and disadvantage, able to be seen as both a strong G. I. Jane and a vulnerable campus rape victim.  Post-1960s, with the white man indelibly marked as “oppressor,” middle-class white womanhood is the most flexible, subtle, supple identity in modern western society, the new universal.  All that female novel-reading and novel-writing, 300 hundred years worth, was training for this.  Consequently, there are whole activist communities on right and left–the men’s rights movement, the radical women of color or “womanists”–whose entire purpose seems to be tearing down white womanhood.)

All this marking of identities is supposed to produce the ultimate left-wing goal: the most oppressed and exploited among us will recognize the degree of their disenfranchisement and liberate us all by destroying the hierarchy from the bottom up, thus freeing everyone above them as well as themselves.  Here are Marx and Engels in 1848, electing the proletariat to the role:

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

That, of course, did not work out, so other identities were proposed as the universal liberator.  Here, in 1978, is the Combahee River Collective, nominating the black woman for the job:

We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Somehow I don’t think that will work either.  Men and women, black and white, gay and straight, organize themselves as groups in order to attain power, not to destroy power relations.  We will never destroy power relations, anymore than birds will stop building nests or cats killing mice.  Because I’ve stopped believing in the strange fiction that, if one social group wins its social struggle, it will liberate us all, I have ceased to care which group wins.  Hence, I can no longer describe myself as being on the political left.

The most we as humans can do, the only privilege, is to escape group identification for as long as we can, in order to attain the pleasure and relief of acting for its own purpose, rather than for the purpose of pursuing power.  I don’t scorn the pursuit of power because I find it immoral–it’s too late for that; rather, I find it inevitable.  But it is coarsening; it blunts the fine distinctions and nuances of life, and destroys the intricate beauty that already exists.  It turns a subtle personality into a droning ideologue or pulpit-pounding moralist.  It exterminates those ways of life those that stand in its path.  It uproots the forest, it razes the old city, it leaves tank treads in the trackless desert.  It destroys the church building because it hates the church ideology, and if the fresco falls, then so be it.  It has no time for the purposeless pursuit of thought and feeling for their own sake, an activity I will call “art.”  Walter Pater, in The Renaissance, writes about the necessary complicity of political indifference with the aesthetic sensibility:

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico’s saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna’s Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

What does this have to do with Bloomsday, the feast day of modernism, Joyce’s pagan replacement for the holy days of the liturgical calendar?  What is Ulysses actually celebrating?  Pater’s influence on Joyce is a clue.  As is the restriction of the novel-epic’s action to a single day, declining to worship the modern god of progressive History, as Joyce’s Marxist scorners from Radek to Lukács to Moretti have noted.  Ulysses is the utopia of the refusal, a long day, the longest, in which politics are held at bay by the act of paying attention to everything from the sound a cat makes to the development of English prose.  The closest thing we get to a moral is Bloom’s declaration in the pub, which is incoherent and somewhat stupid on purpose–because it is blessedly apolitical:

- Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

– What? says Alf.

– Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

It’s tempting to spin this into an ideology, its own form of power politics where the sensitive Blooms of the world take over and make us all into gentle half-artists, or to Christianize secular Bloom’s statement as agápē, or, in the Latinate English of Joyce’s erstwhile Church and mine, charity.  But I think instead Bloom’s “love” is what I called “art” above.  That Bloom is an artistic mediocrity perversely proves the point: you don’t have to be a Pater or a Joyce to make your great refusal, to enter into pointless sympathy with the world.  And I think that is the best that can be hoped for in this wretched world.

Weinberger vs. Josipovici

A friend of mine once disparagingly said that a work of academic literary criticism should be re-titled Some Books I Like, implying that the text’s argument was a sham concealing the author’s real intention: to make a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.

Since then, I’ve decided that Some Books I Like is probably my favorite genre of literary criticism.  It beats the hell out of the reigning method in English departments today: sociological nihilism, or the reduction of all authors and texts to chips in a simplistic game of historical explanation.  This method finds its inspiration in the ubiquitous Pierre Bourdieu, a paradigmatic man of resentment whose smug scientism masks his rage against forms of enchantment and charisma that he cannot master, and finds its reductio ad absurdam in the aliterate mapmaking of Franco Moretti, a cultivated and intelligent European decadent whose fine crypto-Catholic contempt for the world and the imagination disguises itself, absurdly, as Marxist materialism.  At least these two are fun to read, in their way, but their successors are truly dire.

To my theme: In the New York Review of Books (and behind their paywall), Eliot Weinberger accuses Gabriel Josipovici of having written not a book that seriously proposes to answer the question What Ever Happened to Modernism?, but instead a set of disparate reflections about some books he found compelling.

Weinberger vs. Josipovici basically represents an intra-modernist dispute between a Poundian who aspires to the unification of past and present through a poetics of the historical image (that would be Weinberger) and a Kafkan who finds history to be a ruse of authority masking the more painful existential dilemma of each individual’s radical singularity or solitude (that’s Josipovici).

I actually find both of these views persuasive on different days of the week; in general, I prefer to read criticism by Poundians, who can tell us interesting things about the Tang Dynasty, the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, the Albigensian Crusade, etc., etc., and fiction and poetry by Kafkans, who do not burden us with mere facts as they limn the raw problem that is simply waking up in the morning.

Given my pluralism, I don’t have a dog in the Weinberger/Josipovici fight.  I appreciated Josipovici’s  book for what it was: a series of essays on why he likes certain books and not others, in addition to an overall essay on the sorrows and pleasures of secularism.  Weinberger is right as far as it goes that Josipovici’s historical explanation is overly broad and his concept of modernism overly narrow, but he can’t accuse Josipovici of not defining his terms.  I think with books like this that it’s best to grant critics their premise and then take their practical critical reflections for what they’re worth, rather than quibbling about boring -ism words, which are usually impossible to define with any precision.

(I do wish, as an aside, that critics would invent more critical categories rather than just manipulating the imprecise ones that exist.  It’s clear enough that Josipovici is only really interested in one current in what’s called modernism or even modernity.  I would have liked the book better had he given that a name instead of insisting on his own definition of modernism, which just makes him an easy target for the historicists.)

Let’s look at two paragraphs from Weinberger.  First, and most disappointingly:

Certainly the lingering reverberations from the Reformation and the French Revolution, the belief in artifice, and the questions about art and self and language are all strands. But it is astonishing that his is a Modernism without the rise of the city, with its factories, crowds, and anonymity; without the devastation of the Napoleonic and First World Wars; without the ideological ardors of communism and fascism, the thrill of speed, the new symbolic language of the telegraph, the international voices of radio, mass migrations, the representational “reality” of photographs and the collapse of time in film montage, anthropological investigations of tribal cultures, or the beauties and terrors of industrial products. His is a Modernism that has no place for one of its rallying cries, that of the enthusiastic William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Again, I concede Weinberger’s last point, which is that Josipovici doesn’t think certain “modernist” works are modernist, based on his special definition of the word. But who cares?  This is pedantry.  What I hate about this paragraph is its heap of narrow-minded historicist cliches that have grown ever more moldy since Walter Benjamin  became trendy.  The city!  The telegraph!  Radio!  Cinema!  Anthropology!  Psychology!   Spare me!  This is the stuff of the New Modernist Studies, and its thesis is pretty much the opposite of Josipovici’s: it holds that people became enchanted all over again at the remarkable new stuff that the turn of the century threw at them.  Modernist Studies really amounts, in my experience, to a form of techno-determinism that Josipovici, with his care for the fragile autonomy of the singular artist, explicitly rejects in his book.  He insists that new media and new technology allowed for a rediscovery of pre-modern forms and pagan insights, but also that they certainly did not cause new art by making artists envy them or unconsciously but mechanically shaping aesthetic decisions.  And if that is what happened, then Moretti is right: we might as well not read the greatest literary works at all.

(To digress, there’s also the problem of specialization.  I’ve noticed that modernist experts are often going on about the newness of the city–think of Mrs. Dalloway or The Waste Land.  But then so are Victorianists–think of, well, Dickens.  And Romanticists talk about the newness of the city too–or haven’t you read Blake’s “London”?  But then again, your eighteenth-century experts can produce Moll Flanders or some Swift poems to show how new the city was in the Enlightenment.  Wait, though, because your early modern specialists start talking about city comedy and coney-catching ballads and other indications of new Elizabethan urbanity.  Come to think of it, I once read a review of a new translation of the epic of Gilgamesh that talked about how that very ancient poem was all about the novelty of city-living.  It appears that the city never gets old.)

Another paragraph:

In fact, these supposed hallmarks of the Modernists may be found at almost any moment in history. If his worldview were not so obstinately Eurocentric—even the entire Western Hemisphere has only two exemplars: the faux Englishmen Borges and Eliot—Josipovici would have found China, to name only one, full of his kinds of Modernists. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, 2,500 years ago, were talking about the inadequacies of mere words, of a language beyond words. Classic novels such as Golden Lotuses (The Plum in the Golden Vase) or The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) played games of illusion and reality with the reader as complex as any in Cervantes. And the innovations that he finds in Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich—placing the observer in the scene of nature, and the realization that “vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and that though vision may be the goal it does not subsume life but is only one moment, one experience, within life”—seem applicable to nearly the entirety of Chinese poetry and landscape painting.

This rhetorical ploy is really getting old: anybody European or American or “white” or “western” who doesn’t mention any or every other human culture is Eurocentric, and so is implicitly racist and imperialist.  Such a standard is rightly never applied to writers understood to be outside “the West” (when will these Chinese writers stop writing about Chinese people and Chinese history and Chinese literary traditions?).  Thus I could turn it around on the accusers: they assume a kind of Euro-supremacy wherein the western writer is a universal subject, potential master of all traditions.  Moreover, note Weinberger’s eminently Poundian choice of foreign culture to adduce here: China.  His Sinophilia is as American as apple pie.  Finally, it never occurs to good cosmo-liberals that this desire to always be going abroad, seeking out new frontiers, is itself one manifestation of the imperial mentality.  Why should Josipovici be ethically, politically, or argumentatively required to mention Chinese literature and painting?  Its influence on the European traditions that matter to him was relatively negligible.  Josipovici writes about the history and culture of Europe because he lives there and not in China.  Is this so unreasonable?  In any event, Josipovici does not treat Europe or the West as a unified or continuous culture.  His study emphasizes the modernists’ rediscovery of occluded western traditions in the classical and medieval periods, traditions that in their anticipation of modernism were as foreign as Chinese civilization to a Londoner of 1910.

To conclude: I like Weinberger’s essays, but this one is banal, cliched, and moralizing.  While I would have preferred to see Josipovici frame his book less polemically, since I don’t think his historical and artistic generalizations are all that tenable, it nevertheless performs the work of good criticism: it gives the reader an intellectual and affective impression of what it would mean to appreciate the works the critic appreciates.  Of course, the reverse works too, when the critic persuades the reader to disesteem the work; but Weinberger’s critique of Josipovici is too pedantic to be so effective.

For more on Weinberger’s review, see This Space and Conversational Reading.  This Space also has the best summary review/defense of Josipovici’s book online.  My favorite negative review, though it was quite controversial, is Amelia Atlas’s; I agree with her detractors that she’s unfair to Josipovici, but, at the end of her piece, she makes the best possible case for the realist tradition in the novel, a tradition I too esteem equally with what Josipovici calls the modernist.

Tree of Life

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. There is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born.

—Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Tree of Life is my first Terrence Malick film.  I tried to watch The New World once, on a small TV screen, but it wasn’t going to happen.  So I repaired to the theater to get the widescreen experience of his newest work.

Intellectually, I want to defend Malick’s audacity in showing at length the surface of the sun, asteroid collisions, dinosaur interactions, undersea life, and the processes of cells and arteries. He scales up and scales down toward the beginning of the movie before he finds his temporal and biological focus, the growth and adolescence of young Jack in a 1950s Texas suburb, caught between his religious, sainted, beautiful mother, who counsels him to follow the unselfish path of grace rather than the capricious way of nature, and his tough, resentful, overwhelming father, who teaches him, sometimes through violence, how to transcend himself neither by nature nor by grace, but by will.

The film is largely saved from schematism by Brad Pitt’s performance as the father.  Pitt never lets the man be just a bully or tyrant, though he is that, because he also projects his charisma, his ambition, his thwartedness, his tenderness.  You see that the truly terrible thing about having him for a father or husband would be your genuine desire to meet his standard, to please him, even to protect him.  One reviewer speaks in our pallidly hysterical social-worker ethical parlance about the father’s “domestic abuse,” but all we see him do is lock one kid in a closet and hit another in the mouth; in the only scene where he lays hands on his wife, she hits him first and he restrains her till she agrees to stop.  If anything, I’d imagine the film plays down the era’s lower threshold for physical violence.  No, the real problem the father poses to his sons is the partial truth of life’s ruthlessness that he incarnates.  Malick is no sentimentalist and no moralist: the dinosaurs he shows us also tested each other through violence, and the asteroid that wiped them out wasn’t on the path of grace.  Malick and Pitt are able, in short, to inhabit, albeit critically, the father’s position.

The role of the mother is weaker.  In fact, what struck me about the film’s historical setting was how much of a difference the feminist and sexual revolution has made in people’s actual lives.  I grew up in a much more co-ed world than the one Malick depicts.  When we went on childish treks in the woods, there were always boys and girls both, and the kinds of advice your parents gave you, and what forms of experience they represented, were not neatly divided according to their gender, as it was, or was supposed to be, which can amount to the same thing, in the 195os middle-class domestic retrenchment.  Given the stricter gender binary of the ’50s, given that your mother represented one kind of world and your father another that would displace the first, the overtness of the film’s Oedipal themes rings true.  But the idealization of the mother seems to represent Malick’s perspective as well as Jack’s.

I’m not just making a feminist point here.  Quite the opposite really, since modern vernacular feminism continues, probably inevitably, to trade in many ways on the nineteenth-century feminist idea that women are somehow special or ideal or more moral or more fragile than men–not just different, which may be true to an extent, but better.  (It’s hard to remember now, but domestic ideology was an early form of feminist critique, even though the feminists’ second wave successfully if erroneously redefined it as a creation of “patriarchy.”)  If Malick did grow up in world more segregated by gender, then he has less access to the ways in which women are as complex as men.  For instance, just as the father both feels a resentment at his children for leading him away from the life he wanted and a genuine grandeur in his sense of ambition for them, just as his brutality is mixed in charismatic ways with his aestheticism, so I would imagine that a real woman like the mother would also combine lofty and ignoble traits.  Her religiosity, for instance, would sometimes manifest itself as a passive-aggressive, moralizing way to control these unruly men.  Some complexity does get through.  One of the father’s judgments against the mother is that she “turns the boys against” him.  We never see her do this consciously–in words, for instance.  But we do see her flirtatious aliveness when the boys are teasing her.  They gratify her with a playful form of innocently fleshly attention that she seems no longer to get from her husband.  But in this, she follows, and represents, the path of nature rather than of grace.

Which returns us to the question of the film’s insistence on the cosmic perspective and the geological clock.  Again, I want to admire Malick’s daring, but it feels forced.  Ponderous.  Lacking a sense of the ridiculous (more about that momentarily).  It’s as if a novel’s narrator paused in telling the story to remind the reader that this is Serious Stuff, about God, Life, Love, Sex, Death, etc.  Which novelists sometimes did and do, but when they do, we call it not art-house or avant-garde but middlebrow and kitsch.

This complaint may be churlishness or fastidiousness on my part.  More importantly, does the cosmic perspective allow for grace?  Does cinema allow for grace?  It strikes me that perhaps grace is invisible, un-representable.  It certainly isn’t much evoked by Malick’s ambiguous ending, where everybody seems to go to heaven, or something.  Maybe grace in the film is in the making of it.  When we see grown-up Jack as an architect oppressed by the artificiality of the city, we follow him as he makes plans and deals with money-men, all the while complaining about modern greed and shallowness.  In short, he may be an architect in the film, but allegorically he’s stands for the filmmaker.  And the filmmaker’s version of grace is to tell the tale, without blame, without complaint, without judgment, without compromise, but only with attention.

The interludes in space or under the ocean might be lapses in attention.  They are complicit in the film’s greatest absence, which is, as I said, any sense of the ridiculous.  A central scene sees young Jack enter a neighbor’s house and steal a dress of hers.  It’s strongly implied that he masturbates into it, because he works hard to get rid of it.  This scene is portrayed like the Fall of Man itself, which it is in some way meant to evoke.  Come on, one wants to say, this is funny, this is Portnoy stuff, and what makes it ridiculous, and therefore aesthetically important, is its power to suggest that our desires are incommensurate with our aspirations.  For Malick, though, this mismatch is a tragedy, not a comedy, and I assume he thinks it calls for a striving toward some transcendent awareness.  Hence his hallowed portrayal of the mother, who is–these affective responses are unprovable, but worth noting–beautiful without exactly being sexy.  Sex is the fall into nature: as the father would say, it decays the will; as the mother would say, it turns us away from grace.

Our particular brand of health-moralism these days calls on us to scorn this devaluing of sex as old-fashioned proto-fascist priggishness, unhygenic for boys and girls.  At the end of the day, I suppose I respond that way too, at least by reflex.  But it’s worth trying to inhabit Malick’s perspective since he’s insisting on spiritual questions that health-moralism (or “biopolitics,” as the academics say) not only can’t deal with, but likes to pretend aren’t really questions at all.

Personally, I was far more offended by Malick’s Koyaanisqatsi-lite anti-urbanism than by his anti-eroticism; that kind of city-hatred is always associated in my mind with totalitarian romantic nationalism–the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge–which I fear and despise.  But even here, the film is more complex.  What is a city but the apotheosis of human will–the father writ large, in all its mingled brutality and love?  But to see this takes not will, not desire, but grace.

Chesterton’s living Church, like one’s living relationship with one’s family, is a source of endless instruction.  Malick’s attempt is to make a movie–which is by its nature more like a city than a tree–that goes to the root of life.  It’s backhanded praise to admire the ambition more than the result, but then we live in a time that worships results and defines ambition in strictly quantitative terms.  I don’t believe in Chesterton’s Church and I can’t believe either in large parts of Malick’s Tree, but neither will I dismiss them as pernicious idealisms best consigned to the dustbin.  The film, from the epigraph forward, evokes the problem of Job.  If we think that problem has gone away just because we have science or progressive politics or some such, then we’re a lot stupider, and therefore more dangerous, than the idealists we scorn.

Forget YA

Meghan Cox Gurden on whether or not YA novels are too rough:

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

[...]

At the same time, she [a bookseller] notes that many teenagers do not read young-adult books at all. Near the end of the school year, when she and a colleague entertained students from a nearby private school, only three of the visiting 18 juniors said that they read YA books.

The reason many teenagers do not read the types of YA fiction Gurden discusses is that it’s full of headline-grabbing and chimerical “issues” that adults like to have moral panics (or, as Gurden has it, “care”) about.  The adults then rationalize and colonize more and more of actual teenagers’ experiences based on the phony information gleaned from trashy novels.  If teenagers want to learn about sex and drugs and violence and racism and the rest of it, they should learn not from some pious middle-class middle-aged scribblers full of “concerns” for their “problems,” but from writers who don’t have some statistically-troubled teen in mind.  The problem is not that kids are reading about these things, but that they’re being encouraged to read about them in sanitized form.

(I’m tempted to say something like, “Real writers don’t consider their audience.”  That wouldn’t stand up to history; even Shakespeare had James I in mind for Macbeth, probably worse than writing to teens.  But I do think that after the Romantics, after the Moderns, real writers don’t consider their audience, due to the general collapse of public metaphysics that secularization brings about.  “We all live as we dream–alone.”)

When I was a teenager, I never read things officially directed at teenagers, and neither did anybody else I knew, because that was one way to ensure that you were being lied to.  Instead we read Shakespeare and Faulkner, Hemingway and Joyce, Alan Moore and Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and Grant Morrison, Steinbeck and John Irving, Keats and T. S. Eliot, none of whom were advertised as just for teens, though some surely are, and none of whom wanted to save me from whatever overblown sex-and-drug problems the media cooks up to distract parents from the fact that the real threat to their children is a war-exsanguinated economy administered by crazed ideologues and coarse louts.

Now for the real question: why do so many adults read YA books?  Probably a mix of delusional nostalgia, declining literacy, and, of course, public-spirited concern for the welfare of “our children.”  Also, identifying with put-upon kids is a way of remaining a victim all your life.  Those bullies, you know, they’re still out there.  But what do I know?  I still read about Batman.

Who Cares If the Author is a Goddamn Fascist?

A few weeks ago, I had a mind to write a post defending Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s superb All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, which I recently read and loved–for its comic audacity, its loopy lyrical rhythms (as if Miller were writing dirty poetry in some old French verse form that required repeating lines at intervals), its gargantuan self-parody, its quick slides into sentimentalism.  It reminds me of novels written before people knew how to write novels: like Don Quixote, the first ludicrous grotesque self-mocking super-hero story.  Once writers like Flaubert and James and Conrad got into novel-writing, they provided the form with economy and architectural sophistication; everything in a novel would henceforth have an organic motivation–it must, said Conrad, “carry its justification in every line.”  Ironically, Miller, along with Alan Moore, was the one who brought this kind of aestheticism into comics in the first place with their truly novelistic “graphic novels” of 1986.  In All-Star Batman, Miller undoes all that, as if James, late in life, decided to explode like Cervantes instead of composing novels of increasing involution.

While browsing in the library, I discovered Batman Unauthorized, a Dennis O’Neil-edited anthology in which Geoff Klock, author of my favorite critical work on comics, How to Read Super-Hero Comics and Why,* writes the pro-Miller essay I wish I would have written.  You can preview it at Google books: “Frank Miller’s New Batman and the Grotesque.”

Klock treats the matter aesthetically, as I think is wise.  I used to believe (around the time of the film 300) that it made sense to go after Miller for what Klock honestly labels his fascism, but now I do not care.  I used to be a good little grad student who subscribed to Gramscian and Frankfurt School theories of hegemony, ideology, etc., which blamed comics like Miller’s for promulgating imperialist, right-wing, sexist, fascist views in society.  In fact, comics’ favorite censorious critic, Frederic Wertham, believed in such stuff; he was not a right-wing moralist but a left-wing psychoanalyst.

But I now think that art needs no defense.  Even if it did, I’d say that we should have fascism in our art so we do not perish of it in our politics.

What could be more ironic, indeed grotesque, than to watch good liberals tear themselves apart over whether or not they should continue to read V. S. Naipaul since he made his sexist remarks?  They don’t seem to realize two things:

1. Naipaul lives to offend them.  They are the people his remarks are directed to.  He wants them to freak out, to question themselves, to get all offended and self-doubting.  That’s why his remarks are so thoroughly stupid: Jane Austen is not, as he claims, sentimental; in fact no canonical female novelist (with the only partially-canonical exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe) is sentimental.  As for women’s literary talent, Middlemarch is the greatest novel in the English language, and Mrs. Dalloway the greatest English novel of the twentieth century.  But this is to fall into Naipaul’s trap by arguing with him.  If he were making remarks to a right-wing group, he might have had to justify himself with rational claims–conservatives love plenty of women novelists, including Austen and Eliot, along with Willa Cather and increasingly Zora Neale Hurston, whom they’re coming to recognize as one of them.  But to offend liberals, Sir Vidia’s only interest, he just needs to spout off.  Read Naipaul’s books, ignore his remarks; they’re a bit of social game-playing, and why should you, good liberal, play his game?  The politics of being offended and morally pure cannot consciously deal with realpolitik.  Which fact Naipaul uses as a weapon.

2. This brand of culturally right-thinking liberalism, which gets all exercised about the conservative views of good writers or the troubling tropes of popular media, exists to screen from view the monumentally conservative realpolitik that American liberals support in practice.  What is more right-wing: enjoying the hell out of the books of Frank Miller and V. S. Naipaul, or voting for a President who bombs the fuck out of Libya, Afghanistan and Pakistan?   Increasingly, I notice that cultural conservatives have less appetite for military adventurism against people of other races and religions than do purist liberals who won’t allow un-PC authors to taint their bookshelves.  After all, there’s a word for moral purism when it’s found in international relations: imperialism.

*My second favorite critical work on comics is Peter Y. Paik’s From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe.  Some of the points made above are borrowed from Paik’s lucid critique of the academic left.  The blogs of both Klock and Paik are well worth a visit.