Grand Hotel Abyss

M. John Harrison (brilliant author, in case you don’t know, of The Course of the Heart and Light) wonders what comes after postmodernism. He writes in his comments section:

I’m only saying that pomo’s had its day as the Great Interrogator, time to look for the next one. Anything that opposes itself to a seamless theory is bound to look, at first, like a return to one of the many competing theories it has selected as its patsies; & pomo, like all the paradigms which preceded it, has many clever rhetorical patches for every possible kind of puncture. It’s been almost as busy in that respect as the Catholic church. At the moment it’s in its predictable Maoist phase, horror of the counter revolution–bound to happen, given that most of its adherents are in their 40s. All paradigms have a vested interest in claiming that they can’t possibly be replaced except by a return to some kind of demonised old days. That’s essentially a threat. But things move along despite it. Who knows what shape they’ll take ?

The reminds me of something Roger at Limited ,Inc. wrote a few weeks ago about people who had truly followed the examples of Foucault and Derrida. When I read that, I wondered what it must be like to be of a generation that experiences Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault as liberating. For me, I only experienced that material as a body of settled dogma to be genuflected toward and then ignored as far as possible.

But there are phases within phases. Postmodernism has been steadily ending and something has been steadily taking its place over the course of the last decade, but it’s difficult, I think, to perceive, unless we impose a somewhat artificial regime of connection among all levels of culture.

The end of postmodernism comes in the mid-to-late ’90s, when it dissolves into mysticism. Remember the ’90s? When Roma Downey was touched by an angel every week just as Mulder and Scully assiduously pursued the truth “out there”? At the same time, Grant Morrison received his communication in Nepal from the fifth-dimensional entities who unveiled the mysteries of spacetime to him while Alan Moore entertained a visit from the demon Asmodeus. And don’t think this is some merely low-culture matter: the gnostic black madonna brought the girls back to life at the end of Toni Morrison’s Paradise too, and the great novel of the decade, DeLillo’s Underworld, culminated in the visions of Sister Edgar and the miracle of Esmerelda. And academia witnessed the elevation of Walter Benjamin, the Marxist who found his revolution in a gnostic theology, to near-saint status.

After this ascension of the spirit, the turn of the millennium clapped like disapproving thunder in every realm: the swaggering macho neo-Hegeleninism of Zizek in academic philosophy, nu-metal and rap metal in pop music, the rise of Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis ultraviolence in comics, and in politics, most obviously, the phony declaration of war between the neoconservatives and their enemy-ally Islamic warriors. After the goddess-worshipping faux-pacific wisdom of the ’90s comes a masculinist stance of violence for its own sake, with or without reference to some telos which will obviously never be arrived at. And now I think people are sick of this, sick of the wars, sick of the posture.

Where do we find ourselves culturally now? Is there any text I could point to that might suggest where we’re headed next? I think there is. Going back to the ’90s, we can find something new coming in texts as disparate as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the (admittedly very conservative and not really to my taste) novels of Michel Houellebecq. And now we have the pop philosophy of John Gray and the artpop music of Joanna Newsom. What is it on the horizon? I think it’s a kind of neo-paganism, not in the key of goddess-worshipping boosterism, but one rather that embraces a Homerically tragic sense of life coupled with a pro-pleasure attitude. The Real is acknowledged as that which will eventually bring the darkness down over one’s eyes. In the meantime, one’s creativity is to be cultivated and ethical standards, but not necessarily global or natural ones, are to be maintained. I’m not necessarily advocating this, though I find it attractive, and I find that its crytpo-Saidian Tory Anarchism comports better than a more ideologically-frought rebellion with my own preference for socialism in economics, anarchism in politics, sex-and-gender radicalism in culture and a certain classicism in aesthetics.

Well, anyway, that’s my best guess. And go read IOZ’s post of yesterday for a good example of what this looks like as an honest-to-goodness first-rate poem: “The Defeatists”.

(Caveat: I said already my scheme was artificial, and of course, for example, Gaiman could be subsumed under pomo mysticism just as Benjamin could work his way to some kind of neo-paganism and Houellebecq could be an instance of the new millennial violence. This is just a little exercise in cultural diagnosis, not to be taken too too seriously.)

My life has only just ceased to be scored by the insectoid hum of news helicopters. I sit here typing a mere and disconcerting ten blocks from the televisual catastrophe I suppose you’ve all been enjoying.

People here in the land of “Minnesota Nice” are certainly enjoying it: I’ve never quite experienced the peculiar giddiness, the high spirits and festiveness that enters a population in a moment of public calamity. I was reporting this last night to a friend who called from Chicago to check in, and we concluded that if this was the psychological state of Minneapolis, then Baghdad must be a laugh riot. Nobody went to work today, and everyone rushed, camera in hand, to the site of the disaster, hoping to snap that perfect shot. I, unemployed, walked by but did not pause, so firm is my integrity.

The response of the liberal blogosphere and commentariat has been coordinated and strong. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that this country is physically disintegrating, and the occurrence of this collapse in a city rightly renowned for its quality of life and public institutions ought to be a startling reminder of the price of endless foreign wars, disestablishment of the public sphere and a sick fetish for sports stadiums.

Oh yes, we have the stadium problem here in Minneapolis. It reminds me of my vanished youth in Pittsburgh PA, where the government put the prospect of two new stadiums to a referendum. The voters, looking around them at a city many parts of which were and are coming to resemble something out of the old Second World, rejected the measure. The city swiftly implemented what they called Plan B. Plan B was, “Fuck you, we’re doing it anyway.” Things are no different up here. I say, if you want to privatize something, privatize sports in all its aspects.

Speaking of privatization, we already see the old shell game being played. Tucker Carlson today advocated having all bridges sponsored by corporations! What a trick: defund public infrastructure, wait till it falls apart, when it falls apart blame government inefficiency, then hand everything over to private interests.

Where, by the way, are all of these super-efficient corporations of neoliberal mythology? Corporations are in my experience vast, grey, faceless, wasteful and arbitrary bureaucracies, dehumanizing and inefficient beyond the wildest dreams of Lenin. (Hence my preferred phrase: Corporate Stalinism.) Enough of this bullshit.

Anyway. A commenter on The Nation’s blast against defunded infrastructure accused the left of not coming to terms with the fact that one cannot have everything. I may not be public-spirited; I may not even plan to vote for Barack “Invade Pakistan” Obama or Hillary “Don’t Say You Won’t Nuke ‘Em” Clinton or any other member of that wretched party; I may want to vomit when Senator Amy Kloubachar says that bridges should not fall down in America, thus implying that it’s just fine and what you’d expect for bridges to fall down in Peru or Indonesia; I may even be some kind of anarchist. But surely, surely, we mustn’t despair so much that we cannot even imagine a collective effort to ensure that the very ground does not fall away from beneath our feet.