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.