universitas

: the whole, Latin

Buzzing from a day of demonstrations and a couple of dark IPAs, I must write just a few thoughts to free them from my mind, and hopefully avail sleep:

1. Public education is imperative in any democracy. An educated public is necessary for participatory government. Obvi.
2. “Education” must be robustly conceived, rather than conceived as preparation for a vocation. A full life – and full qualification to participate (if desired) in self government – means a fully developed capacity to critically interpret the world, to morally reason, to appreciate aesthetics and music and rhyme, and rhetoric, as much as numbers. A full life, and a fully active mind, requires the humility of curiosity, the acknowledgement of things one has yet to learn, the drive and modesty to seek the information and testimonies to fill in the gaps in one’s knowledge. Not everyone will want to take advantage of this education, but everyone must have the opportunity to, in order for the ideal of democracy to survive (in this and my next point, I paraphrase an excellent essay by Wendy Brown, Political Science professor at Berkeley, in the current issue of Representations).
3. The privatization of education at all levels threatens both of these things – first, by making quality education inaccessible to vast portions of the population without the incurrence of significant, possibly debilitating (and almost assuredly compelling, in ways I will not analyze here) debt; and second, by infusing the university with neoliberal rationality that urges departments to assess their scholars according to business-speak metrics, KPIs, student turnover, etc. Scholarship gets increasingly specialized in parallel to the specialization of work in the marketplace, or follows the dictates of corporate interests funding particular research initiatives; conversation in academia narrows and grows defensive; students are seen as revenue sources keeping an unstable system temporarily afloat.

These are three of the reasons why we striked, today. Additional reasons include the brutality of police last Wednesday against unarmed, peaceful students (despite the Chancellor’s double-negative designation of the students, faculty, and staff as “not non-violent,” ie some ambiguous, specious category between violent and peaceful) and the dumbfounding cluelessness of the administration in response to these events. The fact that former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass was one of the many individuals whose ribs were met with police baton helped generate contrition, or the performance thereof, by the administration, but the Chancellor’s shameful excuse for his initial defense of the police action did nothing to quell the passions stirred against him (this defense amounted to: I was in Japan, and so I did not watch the YouTube videos and did not know just how atrocious the campus violence against unarmed students was – cut me a break).

Today’s actions of course are not an end in themselves. I left Sproul Plaza sometime after 10pm, buoyed home on my bike by the fading strains of drum music and excited chatter, recollected chants, and some of Robert Reich’s incredibly simple, and powerful, observations about the strange illogic of popular rhetoric defending the privatization of education: we hear simultaneously that we cannot afford to educate the public, and that the US is the world’s richest country. We could add to this simply observed contradiction some specific irrationalities of California: we are the only state that does not tax oil extraction, we stick to a 1970s era cap on property taxes, and we pour more money into our prison population, per inmate, than into our education system per student. An easy comparison to the unsatisfying logic of this system exists in the administration’s defense of police violence against an “unsafe, unsanitary” encampments: defend public safety by breaking the ribs of unarmed students.

But to my point: today is not the end. We need a future containing more than protests and strikes. There are some clearly repairable flaws in California’s education system, and some flaws that require quite a lot of careful, serious thought to repair. For this difficult work ahead, let’s be thankful that we have a history of worldclass education behind the minds of the men and women (and students) who can undertake the mission.

in conclusion: sometimes democracy gets in tents.

oakland agonistes

My first feeling, after locking my bike to a handrail and stepping onto the straw-strewn southeast corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment, was excitement of the same breed as a child’s sudden lifting of spirit and emotion when stepping onto the midway at a county fair. There was music! Candles! The magical alchemy of tents and recklessly “irrational” dreams! I gravitated, as one does, toward the nearest long line of people, expecting to see that they were queuing for the food I’d heard had been donated by local businesses and people (like Lupe Fiasco!). But I stepped closer and saw that the line was for silkscreen prints that said “Hella Occupy Oakland,” “we are the 99%,” and “system sucks,” against a gorgeous skyline of bank buildings surveilled by a helicopter. It was protest merch. It was free, sure, but otherwise internally consistent with the commodity ethos of the broken system we were united in opposing, right? I wanted one, and could picture it on my wall beside my Flaming Lips poster, in some near-future all but identical to the present. The poster would be my souvenir to show off to out of town visitors, or to reference when I grow up and tell younger people about the glorious nonrevolution.

The Occupy movement, as I see it (with a gaze admittedly narrowed as I please), is an effort at iconoclasm. The kids and union workers and retired hippies and bereaved darkskinned mothers of unjustly incarcerated or routinely harassed nonwhite boys are all secular Miltonians, or Augustinians, or Calvinists. We are looking to expose and destroy the idols of global late capitalism, the false divinities of acquisition, profit, speculation, individualism… We want to smash the golden icons of Mammon. But, like all iconoclasts (Marxists included), we’ve run into the risk of knocking down other people’s idols in order to erect our own.

The career of John Milton, poet and iconoclast, offers a useful point of reference. He grew increasingly worried that his poetry would itself become an idol, and his fear of idolizing language motivated a gradual evacuation of lyrical beauty from his long poems. In terms of imagery and sensuousness of language, his late poems Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes seem authored by someone other than the poet of the Fall from Eden, the poet who wrote about “that one talent which is death to hide.” I exaggerate a bit, but compare the final words of Paradise Lost :

The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitarie way.

to those of Paradise Regained:

Thus they the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and, from heavenly feast refreshed,
Brought on his way with joy. He, unobserved,
Home to his mother’s house private returned.

The same intelligence, and something of the same rhythm, is discernible behind both passages. But the music is entirely different. The earlier work is arguably more pleasant to read, and we close the poem with an image of Adam and Eve, hand in hand, yet solitary (emblem of the first marriage), embarking on separate lives of shared discovery. The later work closes not only with pared-down and non-musical aesthetics, but with the frank denial of imagery: Christ is himself unobserved, retreating from the public.

Milton’s two last poetic works are thematically centered around the issue of idolatry, but Milton knew that stirring rhetoric against Dagon, a favorite god of the Philistines, and lyrical opposition to the images of worldly splendor and knowledge and power with which Satan tempts Christ in the wilderness, might itself become the improper object of adoration rightly directed toward God. How can an iconoclast break one idol without, at the very least, feeling some pride in his hammer? The difficult irony of the iconoclast’s position is well illustrated at the end of Samson Agonistes, when Samson’s father proposes erecting a statue to honor the son who has just brought a stadium down upon the heads of thousands of Philistines in the midst of paying homage to Dagon, killing himself (heroically? terroristically?) in the process. That Samson’s father wants to erect a statue honoring the iconoclast is an ironic disappointment, to say the least, and a pointed comment if you remember your Scripture, according to which no actual political change follows Samson’s jihad. The Hebrews who will theoretically pay tribute to Samson’s valiant suicide will still be enslaved to the Philistines for some time.

Marxist scholars, iconoclasts of a different sort, have run into a closely related problem. The fetishization of the commodity gives way (for the few who engage in the critical dialogue) to a fetishizing of labor, perhaps, or “history,” the “historical process,” the “proletariat,” or revolution itself. Ideologies supplant ideologies, fetishes, fetishes. Perhaps the process is dialectic, and moving somewhere, but even this seems inadequately consoling when the intellectual dialectic is happening within confined walls, when it is merely the product of monastic exertions by academic Marxists.

Ah, but now, some iconoclastic spirit has infected the streets and squares of cities around the world! Israelis have been camping in Habima Square in Tel Aviv since July, in protest to rising housing costs and declining social services. The indignados in Spain continue to vent their indignation and visions for radical, transparent democracy, five months after the first day of protests coordinated in cities across their country. And Liberty Plaza/Zuccatti Park has captured imaginations around the world….

The capturing, or enslavement, of imagination is, in fact, one of the primary charges that any iconoclast makes against the idols. Plato, on poetry: “The greater the poetical charm of [poems], the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.” Augustine, on spiritual idols: “There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things,” and “he is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies.” The threat posed by idols, or ideologies, is that we enslave ourselves to the picture or sign of something that we either do not understand, or that does not in actuality exist. Our believing and adoration gives the thing existence – an idol is itself nothing, but it attains captivating power and may as well exist to those who mistake the idols for the real thing. This is the link between the iconoclasm of the theologians and the iconoclasm of 19^th and 20^th century Marxist (and Nietzschian and Freudian) demystifiers: all equally aim to liberate the minds of humans serving (or neurotically repressing and replacing) imaginary, false deities. Marx, on the effect of the “fetishism of commodities”: “To [the producers], their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”

It was perhaps inevitable that today’s Occupy iconoclasm would assume a spectacular form that makes it resemble the idols that earlier iconoclasts smashed. We are the Society of the Spectacle, to a degree that far surpasses that of the pagans, gentiles, and Catholics whose icons were gleefully destroyed in prior centuries. Spectacle has been hugely useful to the revolutionary currents of the last ten months, in the West and in the Middle East. YouTube videos of police brutality contributed to the ends of regimes, and in our modest American proto-revolution, such videos have spurred an upwelling of international moral support for the encampment in Oakland and the movement in general. Facebook, ever spectacular, is an organizing tool. Walking around Occupy Oakland, or perusing its website and Facebook group page, you understand that the protesters embrace the spectacular power of branding, although they/we are discovering that branding only gets a person so far when she doesn’t have a product. If, as certain detractors maintain, we don’t know what we stand for, are we slaves to the signs we brandish? What does “we are the 99%” signify, tangibly, beyond the realm of semiotics and in the real world of what Marxists call “praxis,” the world of men, women, and children who work, get sick, educate themselves, go grocery shopping, fall in and out of love, and so on?

The product is ourselves, we say, and the movement. We are building a world, we are experimenting with real democracy, a truer democracy than has ever existed, because it incorporates the voices of women and people of color and homeless, landless human beings. We have General Assemblies and Working Groups, speak-outs and teach-ins, gift economies. We are the product, but not the product as conceived in a capitalist exchange economy, and people who don’t understand or who harp about how we don’t have a coherent “message” are simply listening at the wrong frequency. We could demand that tax loopeholes close, and that capital gains be taxed, and that subsidies to certain industries (oil, coal, corn) end, and be replaced by investment in innovations in green energy, transportation infrastructure, diversified organic farming (for example…). But we want a deeper, structural revolution. We want an ideological purging, a shakeup of the way Americans view ourselves, our values, our labor and bodies, the way we view the world’s resources and the populations of other countries. We want to retain the wonderful gifts of capitalism, sure, but not at the price of the enslavement of factory workers in distant countries and farm workers in our own country; not at the price of rampant home foreclosures and stifling student loan debt; not at the price of devastated ecosystems, unprecedented mass extinctions, and clusters of trash floating across hundreds of miles of the Pacific.

Above all, perhaps, we want to recover the agency and intimacy of a less abstract and rationalized world.

We fear, and sense the risk of, falling into immanence. We fear, and sense the risk of, our movement petrifying as yet another idol. We know we’re dangerously close to fetishizing the act of protest itself – we feel the telltale tingling in our bellies as we walk past bongo drummers and candlelight memorials, and as we listen to stories of rage and pain that move us to almost-cathartic tears. But we reject catharsis. We must reject accepting the Occupy Movement as an opportunity for SWAG and photo-ops for a posterity systemically identical to the present.

We need the courage and the intelligence to imagine something truly new, and to plot the route by which to gain this new horizon. It might require compromise. It will certainly require work. But great courage, intelligence, wisdom and effort are necessary in order to ensure that, if we manage to bring down the Temple, we do not die in the rubble, and posterity does more than remember us with a statue.

Figurally Epic: Novels and the Digiscape

In an essay published in the New York Times last year, Jonathan Franzen rhetorically asked, “Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?” The statement radiates the tone of hyperbolic anxiety we’ve grown accustomed to in premature proclamations of the “death of the book” in the age of new media. Novels are still being read – and written – at historically high rates, after all. But Franzen’s rhetorical question still raises a legitimate issue. It would be nonsense to dispute that literary culture is undergoing a phase change as it adjusts to the proliferation of new forms of creative expression and aesthetic experience. As D. N. Rodowick observes in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the new media, “the culture of the book” will not “simply disappear, though its forms may change,” and “its dominance has been displaced” (69). It is worthwhile to wonder what the place of literature is, or should be, in what Rodowick calls “the age of the figural,” the post-historical, “increasingly dynamic and nonlinear discursive universe” (46). Although Rodowick worries that the emerging figural discourse of new media might engender either a “utopia” or a “nightmare,” he nonetheless appears to appreciate the displacement of the book, and with it, the tyranny of logocentric signs, in favor of a Deleuzian culture of “becoming.” It is in this philosophical frame that we ought to consider Franzen’s question: digital forms of expression not only compete with more traditional forms of literature to the latter’s desperate economic disadvantage, but – more significantly – they compel us to rethink the supposed value of the models of thought, knowledge, and production around which the “culture of the book” has been based. New media challenges the assumed value of literary forms like the novel in philosophical as well as financial terms, but, conversely, a careful consideration of the novel provides a critical frame for understanding the cultural values at stake in the transition into the age of the figural.

As theorized in 20^th century literary criticism, the novel is the literary form that structurally and linguistically refuses the sort of logocentrism that is also rebuffed, according to certain accounts, by new media. Mikhail Bakhtin described the novel as an intrinsically “polyphonic” and dialogic literary form, a textual space that integrates disparate voices and sets them into a relation of what he called “interanimation,” rather than a contest for dominance that would eventually organize the voices hierarchically. A work is “novelistic” if no single voice – such as the author’s – subsumes the others, and if the work’s “languages” circulate in an endlessly shifting dialogue. Bakhtin’s definition of the novel is clearly exacting, and it excludes many of the books a publisher would call a novel; he even took issue with some of the elite stars of literature, such as Tolstoy, whom he considered overly didactic. A true “novel” for Bakhtin is indeterminate, open, “a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality” (Bakhtin 7). It encourages, or perhaps even demands, the practices of reading advocated by post-structuralists: writerly readings, in which the reader dances and plays with the weave of signifiers. And in this way, Bakhtin’s conception of what makes a work “novelistic” suggests that the novel is a distinct materialization of Rodowick’s “figural” concept; a Bakhtinian novel, too, is “ever permutable – a fractured, fracturing, or fractal space, ruled by time and difference,” and a novel might be said to “[know] nothing of the concept of identity” (Rodowick 46).

According to this description, it would seem that new media is the apotheosis of this rather idealistic characterization of the  “novelistic.” But the particularity of the novel form gains clarity in György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel, which argues that novels are epics for a skeptical age, literary attempts to give expansive and intensive representation to the condition of being human, but undertaken under the quintessentially “modern” shadow of the expectation of failure For Lukács, the novel hopelessly takes up the project once undertaken in confidence by epics, when the world still appeared to meet “the soul’s inner demand for greatness, for unfolding, for wholeness,” and “beauty [was] the meaning of the world made visible” (30; 34). But, as Lukács and many others tell the story, modernity wrenched us from that innocence, and artistic enterprise transformed from a revelation of beauty and order, into a compensatory effort to produce a sort of beauty and order otherwise lacking in the world. The novel is not unique for undertaking this ultimately insufficient aesthetic effort to combat what Lukács calls the “disintegration and inadequacy of the world;” what distinguishes the novel is the fact that the disjuncture between aesthetic desire and material reality is itself the formal principle defining the genre: “in the novel [metaphysical dissonance] is the form itself” (38, 72). Novels are born of a constant, unresolved tension between the literary artifice that strives for totality, and the abundance of particulars that enliven its characters and narrative. Novels emerge in the opposition between form and content, architecture and detail. They provide “epic” contours for the worlds they represent, and yet they cannot contain these worlds, spurting surpluses of sensuous, untidy detail and the polyphonous voices that can never be resolved into one tone. This dissonance between form and content reflects the metaphysical dissonance between human ideals and worldly actuals, and according to Lukács, only the novel enacts this dissonance in its very form.

Perhaps the novelist’s ambitions to create an incompletely total, closed world are incompatible with an allegedly posthistorical, postideological worldview. If the novel was the epic for modernity, it is appropriate to wonder if the “posthistorical” or “figural” age demands a new form of epic. The figural age might demand a narrative aesthetic whose formal principle lies beyond knowing and affirming that the totalizing epic project is doomed to fail. Novels, in other words, may have lost what Lukács would call their “historico-philosophical” currency. Creative products emerging from the figural do better than express a “novelistic” indeterminacy, because the scene of their appearance is too heterogeneous to accommodate even briefly the outmoded idea of totality. Taken together, the myriad voices of the networked masses perhaps amount to a sort of trans-media, authorless, digital epic, continuously written and rewritten, without any possibility or ambition of unity or conclusion. We are all sculpting the contemporary digiscape (to invent a term in the spirit of Appadurai’s “Disjunctures”), writing our human story in uncombinable different languages and registers, a heteroglossia better suited to the real variety of experience than the novel ever was. And yet, Lukács’ “metaphysical dissonance” has not disappeared in the age of the figural, so we must still ask if there is a narrative art form superseding the novel as the dominant aesthetic offering a compensatory “totality complete in itself” (Lukács 71).

An immediately obvious candidate for the role of the figural epic is television, particularly given the sophistication of cable and network dramas over the past decade. Well-made serial dramas are “novelistic” in many ways: they develop richly sketched characters, they unfold a “text” composed of disparate subjective voices in dialogue, and they attempt to produce an aesthetic totality. There is less space, however, in a scripted, vetted, studio-produced television show for the sort of messy “surplus” that both Bakhtin and Lukács posit as integral to the novel, and the medium is not inherently dissonant. Certain self-reflexive genres of television shows may enact a more “novelistic” performance of the limitations of the aesthetic, but such “dissonance” is not a defining formal principle of the medium as such (or, thinking with McLuhan, its formal “message”). We may not desire “dissonance” as the message of our media, but we ought to be critical of media that elide the fractures and permutations of the figural.

Another, more interesting, candidate for the designation of posthistorical, figural “epic” is gaming. Videogames, RPGs, MPGs and computer games with either abundant or practically nonexistent narrative respond to the epic impulse as Lukács broadly describes it. They offer a vision of totality, a closed and completed system, structured according to rules inscribed in code. And like novels, games hint formally at their own incompletion: they require a player, and the “totality” achieved through the player’s activity is unstable, temporally charged, constantly changing, and subject to whimsical subversion through uses not intended by designers. In games, totality is “systematized” according to what Ian Bogost has called the game’s “procedural rhetoric.” This coded organizing logic of videogames is not apprehended abstractly, as it must be in a novel, but rather is directly experienced, or we might even say performed, by the player.

Such enactment is clearly different from abstract apprehension, and the perceptive mode enlisted and developed by games (as well as television) is a major deviation from the mode engaged by novels. Marshall McLuhan’s discussion of “hot and cold” media might here clarify the stakes of this displacement of literary “epics.” McLuhan calls information-intensive media “hot,” and he argues that, “any intense experience must be ‘forgotten,’ ‘censored,’ and reduced to a very cool state before it can be ‘learned’ or assimilated” (24). There is much to be excited about in new media’s hotness, but there is still a value to the sort of understanding that requires coolness, reflection, and even interpretation. Interpretation is not the necessary enemy of the rhizome, either; it does not require hegemonic or patriarchal constriction of “knowledge,” and the novel seems to me to be an aesthetic form that uniquely unites the possibility of interpretation with the proliferation of interpretations – in other words, a novel still elicits interpretation as an act, but not with any singular telos.

I do not write this essay as a mournful apologia for a disappearing, or shrinking, creative form. Novels are not going to disappear, although as Rodowick and others have suggested, book-bound literary forms have been ceding their privileged position in culture for decades, and may yet drift even further from popular cultural practice, forming what author Benjamin Kunkel has called “islands and archipelagoes off the digital mainland.” The point that I have tried to raise in this essay is that we ought to pause a moment in these early days of our figural age, and consider, or reconsider, the sort of functions that creative works can fulfill. We ought to ask to what extent we still want or need the creative work performed by literary works, and to what extent that work can be accomplished in the newer media of the figural age. If we believe, with Lukács, that literary forms respond to the needs of their “historico-political” moment, we ought to ask what our needs are in this contemporary “fractured, fracturing, or fractal space,” and we ought to imagine and create productive works accordingly.

… in the age of digital reproduction

Rereading, once again, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” my natural impulse is to wonder how the essay might apply – with perhaps some emendation – to this age we might call the age of digital reproduction. How should we approach the central questions Benjamin raises, about a work’s “authenticity” and “aura,” and about its effect upon subjective perception, vis a vis digital creative products? But immediately it becomes apparent that we must ask another question first: what is a work of art? What does Benjamin consider a work of art, and is there any legitimacy to positing something like a Facebook page, or an eloquently written and illustrated blog, or a witty string of tweets, as a “work of art”?

Benjamin’s essay seems primarily interested in visual art – paintings, photography, and film – though when discussing film he considers auditory elements of the perceptual process. He mentions architecture, and its tactile quality, but skips questioning the criteria for its “authenticity” in favor of considering the mode by which we perceive and experience the built spaces we move through. His discussion of literature and printing technologies’ effects on the question of a literary work’s “authenticity” seems a bit hasty or lacking to me, and I think this might be due to a distinction he makes elsewhere in his writing between the sort of authenticity sought in a literary work, and the sort sought in other works of art. In concrete art objects, authenticity and originality are related to the material history of the object, its uniqueness. But in more abstract and intellectual “objects,” like texts, the question of conceptual originality supersedes the question of concrete originality, or “aura.” Benjamin was a great collector of quotations, for instance, and if we are to believe Hannah Arendt’s Introduction to Illuminations, the impulse to collect quotations from sources as various as obscure 18C poems to contemporary newspapers was related to Benjamin’s sense of the originality of certain passages of text, which was in no way destroyed by these passages’ vast reproduction, nor even by the fact that such literary or journalistic texts were often designed for reproducibility. So, Benjmin’s essay’s preoccupation with “aura” really concerns some other “works of art,” works of which a question of authenticity may be asked in vague reference to corporeal, spatial and temporal experience.

But what about film, a medium whose particular instances he treats as art, in which an attempt to trace an “original” must disintegrate into questions about competing prints of film reels, competing “final cuts,” the actual film sets and actors’ bodies and experiences, the cameras and the “reality” that they penetrate, fragment, and re-present. Benjamin describes the destroyed “aura” of the actor, which is replaced by the commodity-enchantment of the cult of star personality. A key question – which seems to depart from the question of aura, but perhaps gains significance due to aura’s own departure from contemporary artworks – becomes the McLuhan-esque question of the way that the medium of film changes human perception (that, remember, is the “message” identical to the media, for McLuhan). Film broadens and deepens perception, revealing secret layers of “reality.” The film “close-up” discloses “hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera.” The film expands our sense of what is in space, of the near infinite details couched in everyday experience, and nuances of light, movement, sound and perspective. But the motion of film preempts simultaneous contemplation. The viewer may contemplate the film afterward, to be sure, but while watching an epic like Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, the viewer is passively along for the ride. A related, society-wide effect of media like film, and architecture in other ways, is the cultivation of an audience whose reception is constant, but distracted. The mass of the audience is attributed with some authority, due to the expertise it accrues through constant exposure, and becomes “an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”

Many fogeyish complaints about the age of digital reproduction make similar claims about children raised in environments of constant hyper-stimulation and distraction. On our blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, we are all examining ourselves and the portions of the world that interest us, but – many complain – we are generally absent-minded. We should put a little pressure on such claims, though, and Benjamin’s essay helps direct the application of pressure. Benjamin rehearses the standard, we might say elitist, lamentation that, while the connoisseur is absorbed by a work of art (lost in contemplation of it, and so on), the philistine masses absorb it, in distraction. But this reductive dichotomy of absorption by vs absorption of begins to look flimsy when we try to apply it to media products of the digital age, which demand a sort of participation – which are to some extent collaborative products of distracted examination and production.

So again, I ask: is a Facebook page a “work of art in the age of digital reproduction”? If we decide to give it that name, in surrender to the ambiguity of the terms and the necessity to improvise a lexicon with which to speak of these things, how do we then speak about a multimedia work of art with no inherent or necessary original spatial location? We might invoke Benjamin’s interest in the ritualistic basis of art, before it becomes either speciously self-justifying (l’art pour l’art, which Benjamin calls war…) or based on politics. There does seem to be social ritual involved, if not transcendent cultish self-hood. There is an emphasis on exhibition value (perhaps we could say there is a ritual of self-exhibition, which is an interesting revision of Benjamin’s genealogy of art from a basis in ritual to a basis in exhibition). The Facebook page is offered to an examining but absent-minded public, and yet the public is presumed to be anything but passive absorbers of the work. And we cannot speak of the “value” or “meaning” of the Facebook page without speaking of the network in which it attains value – and content. Relations within the Facebook network not only validate but constitute the expressive “products” of the site, the most obvious instance of this being, of course, the Facebook Wall.

Benjamin’s essay further urges us to ask what relation the work of art has to the marketplace, and this is a question where consensus is difficult to reach, when it comes to the internet. The introduction of “gaming” markets to social networks like Facebook, where real money is involved in an abstract way I confess I don’t fully understand, is worth considering. And of course, there are targeted ads, which target us, the audience, adding a personalized frame to whatever page we are looking at in a given moment (the paratext of targeted advertising would send Genette on quite a chase). What is the relation between the media, in such cases, and the marketplace? And we must not forget that the internet does cost money – the equipment costs money, and access requires certain economic and social privileges. As Canada and Egypt have recently reminded us, in different ways, the internet is tangible, controllable and billable. But what is its commodity? Time? Attention? Ego? Information? Expression? All of these things, and yet none, since none seems like a commodity, exactly…

In some ways I think Benjamin would have liked the internet. It’s a great sea for his “pearl-diving,” as Arendt characterized his obsessive collection of textual artifacts, and his arrangement of pieces of culture in a leveled, anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional ‘constellation’ (the evocatively named Arcades Project is the great testimony to this practice). The logic of the digital resembles the chaotic and idiosyncratic logic of collection, rather than the systematically curating logic of ‘tradition,’ in which an authority determines what to preserve and what to censor. The pace and de-materiality of the digital muse-um favor the ‘originality’ of ideas, not objects. But there are different kinds of collectors, and collectors may be sway to fetishes and illusions, the spells of society. Collection should not be a default, absent-minded cutting-and-pasting response to a capacious and cacophonous world. Rather, our engagement with digital works should be attentive, even if not systematic. Most of us cannot afford to be intellectual flaneurs according to Benjamin’s obsessive model, but one major lesson that seems portable from his writings to our present moment is the lesson of attentiveness. While celebrating the variety and originality of the new, we should try to remember to actually experience it, to whatever extent possible.

what is literature after history?

As you’ve probably gleaned from the internets, this is the Year of Reagan, that (anti)hero of American intellectual and political history. In fact, if we take Francis Fukuyama’s word, Ronald Reagan was the last POTUS of history-proper, as the end of the Cold War was allegedly also the End of History. Many intellectuals, of course, don’t accept that “history” has ended, nor that the great ideological debate (to end ideology itself) has in fact been resolved in favor of liberal capitalism – see my essays on n+1, posted on “the extended backseat” for a deep analysis of a certain coterie of lefty-intellectual-creative types insistent upon the contrary. Without a doubt, however, the character of current Western discourse is different from the character of the Cold War. But the consequences of that long period of mixed metaphors and deep anxiety persist, and it is well worth considering some of the conceptual shifts that continue to shape the way that we conceive of our humanity, our politics, and our communications. Of particular interest to me is the question expressed in the title of this paper: what is (or should be) literature ‘after history’? The question returned recently to me in rather stark terms when I read Walter Benn Michaels’ chapter “Posthistoricism,” in his book The Shape of the Signifier. Among other things, Benn Michaels argues that the “post-historical” world is the world post-ideology, the final ideological battle having been more-or-less laid to rest in 1989. The political disputes that characterize our present public discourse are of a different sort, Benn Michaels argues: rather than seeking to promote a universalizing ideology, our contests strive for the survival or dominance of local or particular cultures. All politics is identity politics, he writes, and even those most radical-appearing humanities scholars of the postmodern post-human (think of Judith Butler’s mantra that gender is performance or the “cyborg-manifesto” of Donna Haraway) accept this to some degree: “to choose between two different accounts of identity [physical or cultural, fixed or mobile] is already to have chosen identity itself” (Benn Michaels 29). Wary of totalizing ideological debate, we shift the debate to a matter of performance, of language or discourse – we do not want to convert others to a single “true” way, but we want to establish a right to diversity, to diverse perspectives and the possibility of finding a common tongue according to which to speak to each other.

The post-ideological post-historicism that Benn Michaels describes seems to be premised upon a conception of human subjectivity whose Cold War cultivation Paul Edwards provocatively describes in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. As I will explain in more detail a bit later, Edwards uses the term “cyborg discourse” to explore the development of the tendency to describe human psychology in terms that invoke computer metaphors. Benn Michaels critiques the way that “effect” has supplanted “meaning” in the posthistoricist theoretical effort to move, in Judith Butler’s words, “beyond all question of truth or meaning” (Excitable Speech 148). The “cyborg discourse” computer metaphor for subjectivity makes the performative alternative to “truth or meaning” possible; rather than ask what a word or idea truly means, we ask what it does, or how we “do” it. We respond to words not in their capacity as ideological propositions, but in a capacity akin to that of code, and we respond without reference to the abstract referential “truth” of the propositions. Such “posthistorical” discourse aligns strikingly well with the influential Cold War era theorist Marshall McLuhan’s articulation of his theory that “the medium is the message,” that the true “message” of a new media is its effect upon the way that we perceive the world, and that, in the “new” media of electric and automatic technologies, our “concern [is] with effect rather than meaning” (McLuhan 26).

Benn Michaels identifies the same trends of post-historicist theory in post-historical literature, where this “cyborg discourse” way of conceiving information-effect seems carried to its extreme, with frightening results. What McLuhan calls the “typographic” medium, which is governed by “principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality,” collapses into the “electric” message of new media in books like American Psycho, where the ice-pick replaces the pen, and physical violence is figured as a means by which to directly inject information (McLuhan 14). Benn Michaels likewise looks at cyberpunk literature like the novel Snow Crash, in which Edwards’ ‘cyborg discourse’ manifests itself in images of hackers affected by the same viruses that attack their computers. Human communication thus seems reduced to a matter of code, the registration of ‘effect rather than meaning‘: “the bodies of humans are affected by ‘information’ they can’t read; the virus, like the ice pick, gets the words inside you even if you haven’t read them” (Benn Michaels 68). Literature, for Benn Michaels, currently shows us a “world in which everything – from bitmaps to blood – can be understood as a ‘form of speech,’” but such a world, he reminds us, “is also a world in nothing actually is understood, a world in which what a speech act does is disconnected from what it means” (69). The word “understand” no longer suits the situation, for Benn Michaels, because an immediate – electric – comprehension of the “message” is the mode of contemporary media.

It is worth considering the way in which McLuhan’s ideas about electric media reflect what Edwards calls the “closed world discourse” of the Cold War. McLuhan is essentially a structuralist, drawing the question of media into the arena of structuralist theory inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure: “sequence yields to the simultaneous, [and] one is in the world of the structure and of configuration” (McLuhan 13). The same post-historicists who trouble Benn Michaels are descendants of structuralism and its inheritor, post-structuralism. (It would be interesting – elsewhere – to take up the task of looking at the interplay between Cold War era post-structuralists like Derrida and the Cold War discourse described by Edwards.) McLuhan’s description of the revelation of new media is, by standards of literary criticism, strangely anachronistic; clarifying his statement that we seek “effect” rather than “meaning,” McLuhan remarks that “effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement” (26). Not long after McLuhant wrote this, his French contemporaries would launch post-structuralism and a flat-out denial of the possibility of ever achieving a “total situation.” Meaning is endlessly deferred, for post-structuralists; signifiers do not reveal a “total situation,” but rather play, and dance, evading totality (though, as Benn Michaels’ work points out, there is strange correspondence between post-structuralist/historical theory and McLuhan’s closed-system structuralism – another subject worth further thought). McLuhan’s “world of the structure and of configuration” is a closed world, a final wave of structuralist thought describing – suitably – the technologies changing media during the Cold War.

Edwards’ book’s survey of the correspondence between technology and politics helps organize the concerns of Benn Michaels in terms that attend to the accuracy of McLuhan’s insight that media change perception, perhaps in ways that challenge the “typographic principle.” He describes the role of computers in the development of cyborg discourse and the Cold War conception of the “closed world” – the worldview that accommodated the “final” ideological battle, because it conceived of the world as a “total situation” in which a universal ambiguity like ‘freedom’ might become a politico-economic ideology. The “closed world” is the world in which a shifting metaphor of “containment” reigned, and in which the final, ultimate horizon rested in the fantasy of nuclear apocalypse. Computers not only served as tools meeting Cold War military demands for centralized analysis and control, but they further served as metaphorical symbols shaping public imagination in ways that complemented the conception of the Cold War. Computers make the idea of a closed world – globally interconnected and under surveillance – conceivable, both technologically and metaphorically. Intriguingly, the (post-historical, post-ideological) internet seems to reverse some of the centralizing forces of computers, opening the world, albeit in an incomplete and nontransparent way.

Computers also affected the conception of the human subject, leading to the field of cognitive science, in which the idea that “effect” could supplant the old question of “meaning” becomes coherent. Cognitive psychology, Edwards argues, arose in response to Cold War efforts to comprehend the human mind in ways amenable to perfecting the interaction between human and machine. He writes that “World War II weapons systems in which humans served as fully integrated technological components were a major source of the ideas and equipment from which cognitivism and AI arose” (20). The military impetus to continue developing such technologies persisted past WWII, and as integrated C³I systems became increasingly central to military interests, it became imperative to understand the human part of the system, to develop “a theory of human psychology commensurable with the theory of machines” (20). There was a clear demand for explaining human psychology according to computing metaphors (and, of course, researchers like Alan Turing remind us that there was a reciprocal demand for developing computing technology in imitation of human psychology). Hence, cognitive science explains the mind’s “internal-processes” and “information processing,” and the resulting interdisciplinary field of “cognitive science views problems of thinking, reasoning, and perception as general issues of symbolic processing, transcending distinctions between humans and computers, humans and animals, and living and nonliving systems” (19).

McLuhan’s privileging of effect over meaning seems nicely in sync with the Cold War evolution of the conception of the human mind. But questions remain besides the basic question of the accuracy of the conception of the human subject in “cyborg discourse,” and here I return to my primary, driving question: where does this leave literature? McLuhan is to some extent correct, after all, and the trends that Benn Michaels identifies in cyberpunk literature and books like American Psycho and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless seem to testify to some degree of cultural adoption of the Cold War closed-world cyborg discourse. A second strand of McLuhan’s work on media provides a nudge in what I consider a hopeful direction: his theory of “hot” and “cold” media.

For McLuhan, information-intensive media are “hot.” Media are hottest when they first arrive on the scene, and they inundate us with sensation; we are fully immersed and yet passive, unable to achieve any degree of detachment necessary for deliberate participation or comprehension. As McLuhan argues, “any intense experience must be ‘forgotten,’ ‘censored,’ and reduced to a very cool state before it can be ‘learned’ or assimilated” (24). Perhaps the violent imagery of Patrick Bateman “writing” into women’s bodies with an ice pick, and cyberpunk representations of hackers registering the effect of code without conscious “understanding,” are phases inevitable as literature senses the neighboring hotness of the new media. Literature recognizes the threat posed by new media to the typographic model – the sequential, interpretive, reflective model – and in response, literary products ironically represent non-literate information-exchanges. But there is still a value to the sort of understanding that requires coolness, reflection, and interpretation. McLuhan provides an intriguing image of the way that the total “message” of new media is “traced and retraced, again and again, on the rounds of a concentric spiral with seeming redundancy” (26). Every vision in the age of “electric speed” contains the whole spiral, he writes, “if one is prepared to ‘dig’ it” (26). The language reminds me of the Modernist literary project (loosely contemporaneous with Cubism, which McLuhan seems to appreciate); Virginia Woolf once called her process a process of “tunneling,” an attempt to interpret human experience that is far from lineal (even if still restricted, alas and happily, to the lineal typographic form). Perhaps a Modernist-cyborg-”green world” could be the contemporary project of literature: an alternative to the closed world of ideology, and yet an alternative that (unlike those identified by Benn Michaels) still bears interpretation. But interpretation could follow the non-ideological “green” model, a model of a swelling spiral extending across the still-magical natural and technological worlds of our present moment, and occasionally digging (or dipping) into that “rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights […] that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner” (Woolf in The Waves 255-256). The “cool” phase of the digital world might witness literate and non-literate efforts to represent McLuhan’s almost Spinozan recognition that, in our (post)modern perception, each particular represents/is the whole, but with the qualification that this whole is constantly – and with apparent magic, to those of us raised to be literate and lineal – growing more complex.

redirection

hello! i have obviously let the blog slide. my excuse/explanation is that last semester was really tough, but inspiring, and i’ve set up a sister-site to host some of the writings that came out of it. the pieces are longer and more elaborate than what i’d post on a blog, hence the other site. if you’re interested, check out the “writings” page on “The Extended Backseat” for some short fiction pieces inspired by daily news headlines, as well as academic essays on topics like n+1 and Tropic Thunder. Mark Greif of n+1 (and the decisive voice of hipster anthropology) said that the third essay, “Dialectics Standing Still,” brought tears to his eyes (but of course, as he carefully added, “melancholy leftists” tend to grow misty-eyed about the dialectic)

hopefully i’ll have more to say, here, in the near future. i’m taking a class on new media that should yield (and impel) quicker, more immediate intellectual responses…

A requiem

Walter Benjamin contrasts two approaches to living with time: the gambler’s efforts to kill time, and the flaneur’s storage of time. The former seeks to pass time, to hurry through it, to compress and fling it onto the craps table and wake up several hours later. The latter absorbs time, lengthens it, suspends it and derives energy merely from the fuel of feeling time progress through his or her body, or feeling himself or herself progress through the sensual body of time. The flaneur does not hurry, nor wish for hours to hurry.[1] This alleged contrast between the gambler and the flaneur elicited one of my familiar, instinctive recollections of Lynn and Anne, the characters of the novel I have decided to bury today.

Lynn and Anne are depressed, gambling flaneurs, who wander New York and their own memories in a manner both sustaining and shunning the hours’ ticking, methodical progress. They are sad women. They are confused women. They do not know why they live, nor how they ought to. One sells sexual access to her body, in an attempt to punish herself and also to force herself to return to her body. The other starves herself, an act which is again punishment, and also a desperate bid to flee her body. They both wish to kill time, to rush through the waking hours and return again to dreams of some other place and way of life, and yet they also wish to lengthen time, to suspend it and discover its pace again, in order to reinhabit their lives. And so they wander in desperate, high-stakes flaneurie, through New York City on a single day layered by a market crash, a Presidential campaign, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, romance, sexual violence, the prospect of graduation and “adulthood,” troubled friendships. They meet at the end of the day at a party, where nothing happens except for a conversation.

That is a fleeting snapshot of the thing being buried today. I’ve lived with these two women and their New York for two years now, and I love them. I love – and resent – the other characters, who appear through their memories and their encounters that day. I want others to be moved by them as I am, by their flaws and their moments of grace. By the surprising empathy of the prostitute, and the college student’s neurotic deconstruction of an AM New York horoscope. By the infiltration of songs, films, books, and theories into their ostensibly private subjective lives. I want others to know them, and live with them, and see the non-fictive world according to a light somewhat shaded by the dreams and disappointments of these apparitions.

I wrote the damn thing, so of course I am biased. It’s an old and hackneyed analogy, but I do feel as though the book is a stillborn baby, whose impossibility pains a parent who’s irrationally convinced of her progeny’s potential to share something important with the world.

And there is accusation in their appearance as I read Walter Benjamin. They know that my own negligence and weakness are responsible for the umbilical chord’s swivel and constriction around the throat of the novel that would give them life. I have known them, but it seems now that the world never will, and I have been an irresponsible hostess…

I’ve known their mortality for awhile now. So perhaps the novel was not stillborn, but born premature in some back alley where no nurse could help the proud DIY-mother-lunatic. The dead child, the novel, has been in a persistent vegetative state for months now. I’ve grown accustomed to the partial excuses that come with partial mourning, and now it is time to make sense of the mixture of total, irredeemable loss, the final knell dispatching hope, and the relief. Because – maybe – I will now move on. I don’t know what I’ll move on toward – and this nebulousness of the future is surely a part of my unwillingness to withdraw the feeding tube earlier (perhaps all creative works should have Living Wills – or else be shoved into the cryo freezer after a certain provisionary-last effort is made). But for whatever reason, the rejection that greeted me from my email this morning seems like it may be the definitive one. It is time, now, to shift the stillborn child into the cryogenic freezer. In my perversity, my love, and my pride, I know I cannot let Lynn and Anne and their world go fully.

But this is a sort of burial nonetheless, and it’s time to figure out who I am now. And where, and why, and how. I’ve started a new project.

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[1] There was a tentatively-proposed third way of experiencing time, or temporal life, but I’ve forgotten it, and The Arcades Project is big and heavy and I’ve left it in my locker (yes, I have a locker now, and again).

Frederic Jameson’s Tea Party

Frederic Jameson is increasingly a big part of my life. Though he was a professor at Duke, I never got closer to him there than when I took a course with his wife (incidentally, that was the course during which my obsession with prostitution began). We spoke of him often in classes, as though he was the ghost in the rafters, spying upon our own fetishes, our cute Duke recycled paper notebooks, our expensive worn clothing, our less-than-innocent celebration of glossy icons of pop culture. Gloss, in general, as we understood, substituted itself in for depth, proper historical socio-economic perspective, and the conditions necessary for “praxis” (that’s the fancy word for taking action, what a corporate jargonist might call the moment when “rubber hits the road,” “at the end of the day”…). But in England, the Marxist theory seems dominated by Terry Eagleton and the British and European contributors to The New Left, and my vague (mis)understanding of Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernism took a backseat to the Brits’ preferred approach to literary studies – a less theoretical, more classically historical and biographical approach. Well, Jameson’s back in my brain here in Berkeley, and I think I might finally understand both the substance of (one of) his arguments, and the significance.

In the first essay of the book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, one of Jameson’s central points is that we now live in a cultural and critical mood, a “cultural dominant” as he calls it, that strips us of political agency. Jameson describes postmodernism as a “cultural dominant” in which the individual is severed from history, stranded amidst the littered wreckage of cultural imagery, iconography, flashy images and surface textures that dazzle and titillate, but also confuse and scare. We are adrift in “hyperspace,” a globalized capitalist system, in which the power of capital pervades all that we think and do, to such an extent and in such various ways that we are unable to identify the ways in which we are implicated in a violent political and economic system. We sense that we are stuck in the web of multinational capitalism, and we sense that there is something about this system that exceeds any of our own, individual agency, and this is unnerving. From this situation of severance – of detachment from history, from the sources of our commodities, from a solid sense of where and who we are – emerges an intuitive fear, paranoia, and the fodder of conspiracy theories. On the Left, we became accustomed to crying out against Halliburton and Blackwater, the Cheney influence, McDonald’s and Walmart, BP, industrial farming, diamond mining, Rupert Murdoch, and so on… Jameson, I believe, would think that, as legitimate as many of the localized concerns of progressives may be, this concentration of political energy misses the point. The point is that we are all always complicit, and “even overtly political interventions… are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.” The point is that our concerns need to broaden. The point is that they cannot, as we are embedded too deeply in the system to see it fully.

For Jameson, the cultural critics are particularly complicit. The postmodern critical turn has been a denial of essence, a presumed “depthlessness” in the human subject that matches the depthlessness of a society built upon pop imagery. We take “positions,” we “perform” identities, we do not have an inner “being” that makes itself outer through expression, however incomplete. Not only would no one hear us, if we were to find the words of our lament, but there is no actual “we” inside – there is no “inside” inside – and it is thus that contemporary modes of critical thought might effectively neuter us, and strip us of the agency (illusory, perhaps) necessary to political action, or praxis.

So, thanks to pop culture, to the absorption of art by commerce – the absorption of everything cultural by the tentacles of multinational capital – and its attendant theories, we’ve lost our coordinates.

It’s from this diagnosis that Jameson reaches his description of the medicine we need. He’s not sure if such a medicine can be concocted and administered, but he describes it thus:

• An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system… the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.

These are a lot of big words. His point is that art must recover politics, and that “political art,” if it can exist today, ought to adopt the ambition of giving us back our sense of place. Art ought to help map us, politically, socially, multinationally, historically. It ought to return us to a sense of agency, and a comprehension of our present coordinates, the space from which our agency might begin.

As I was reading the Jameson text in particular, my mind kept returning obstinately to one of my own critical anxieties: I feel perpetually nervous about theories that seem to privilege an urban, educated, aesthetically-engaged subject. The image on the cover of Jameson’s book is Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, and he does a fantastic job turning that image into a symbol of the postmodern predicament he’s describing, the glossy, eerily dead, flat yet fully-revealed x-ray art. But, however normalized “art” allegedly is by culture, most people do not think of Andy Warhol on a regular basis. Most people do not live in the alienated cityscape Jameson describes, in which architecture is a central figure in his description of the postmodern lost-ness. Lots of people live in suburbs, and still do believe in “depth,” in “essence” and “expression” in the old, romantic sense – the sense in which my inner being is transmuted into something outer through speech, writing, song, touch… And perhaps most crucially, in connection with Jameson’s argument, most people still do believe in a sort of history, and a sort of essential Americanness, in particular.

So, spurred by my instinctive anxiety that Jameson’s theories were more relevant to Andy Warhol than to the average American, and that, therefore, my own critical mind is being shepherded down a different track than I want it to be, I decided to try to run Jameson’s theories through a recent political movement and its productions – because, as most people would agree, the Tea Party movement is propelled through spectacle, through elaborate, affected productions. What I found through this sort of experimental application of theory is that much of what Jameson describes as the postmodern mythological/ideological position seems to be taken for granted by those leading the Tea Party movement, as an initial premise to be usefully deployed to promote the party’s political missions. So in the Tea Party phenomenon, I’d argue, we witness a dangerous effect of the postmodern condition, the obverse of Jameson’s hopeful call at the end of the book’s first essay – we are witness to cognitive mapping, but not the sort that Jameson hopes to see.

A recent and very vivid, to my mind, example happened last weekend, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech. On this anniversary, between 50,000 and half a million people – depending on whose estimates you take – gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for what was called the “Restoring Honor Rally.” It was a distinctly religious event, with the political aspects slipping in more insidiously; and of course, the overt presence of religion and the presumed link between religion – mostly Christianity (though there were representatives of other faiths) – and a certain kind of American “honor” is a big part of the political message borne by the Tea Party. The political tenor was most inescapable, though, because the main speakers were Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, two figures whose political careers are entirely sustained by their special skills of provoking all sorts of politically charged “intensities,” as Jameson would say. Not thoughts, and not even feelings or affects, but sharp, darting, euphoric and hysterical intensities. The postmodern sensible register accommodates these, rather than affects that would require substantial depth and psychological coordination.

The event was rife with strange historical discontinuities – the date and the place obviously evoke memories of King’s speech and a whole movement that was very strikingly different, I think it’s fair to say, from the contemporary Tea Party movement. But history, the Tea Partiers recognize, is not a really dependable part of the cultural mode. It exists in fragmented images, glossy images and soundbytes disconnected from narrative, and so I think that productions like the Rally last weekend both further sever the connection we have with what I’m going to uncomfortably call “real” or “actual” history, and also capitalize on that disconnect. They take the fragments, they tint them new shades, and they rearrange them. They remap us. They give us a new story and a new focal point at which to direct paranoia and the sense of conspiracy.

The symbolism of the place and date is just one example of the manipulation of historical “simulacra,” as Jameson would call the severed icons of “pastness”. As I mentioned, the rally was about restoring a sense of religious purpose to American politics. Beck’s own presence was confusing, as he seemed to be attempting to be a conduit of Martin Luther King Jr’s spirit, and yet he has himself been a problematic figure in contemporary American racial politics. And he offered a very strange narrative of history, a unique picture of the American story. He declared that “The story of America is the story of humankind,” and he proceeded to offer a bizarre narrative that linked Moses, the Pilgrims, and the Native Americans, as “god’s chosen people.” He invited two Native Americans into view, and a pastor alleged to have descended from folks on the Mayflower offered a prayer. So the production was a pastiche of culturally and historically resonant – and discordant – images, swept into the illusory coherence of a new map that is spurring a very potent political-evangelical movement.

The movement seems to be a malady of postmodernity, and to exhibit many of its symptoms. But it also exploits these symptoms and gathers them into its political agency, its “praxis.” Whether the movement is deliberately corrupting history or whether it is simply (ha!) symptomatic of the cultural dominant, it is a phenomenon that shows at least two things. First, people don’t like the postmodern condition. People prefer depth, and narrative, and history. This is no surprise – the artists, however implicated in commerce, may recognize and promote the glossy surface play of signifiers, but most of us (and even the artists, when they let their self-conscious guards down) like to feel as though things have meaning and substance. We want ourselves to exist, as meaningful and layered and effective subjects. But at the same time, Jameson is correct to point out that the average person is somewhat lost in a sea of contradictory and glossy, depthless positions. Images, fetishisms – we are tangled in a web of broader horizons than our eyes can see, and so anyone who offers an antidote, real or absurd, gains cultural power.

Jameson argues for progressives to become engaged in remapping cognitive coordinates and enlightening the contemporary subject about the whole web in which he or she is tangled, and I’d say that examples from the other side of the political spectrum charge this task with a new urgency. Cognitive mapping is underway already, and we’ve got to get our asses in gear, to stop apologizing about making any sort of claim at all, to stop qualifying our arguments (I know I’m a damned hypocrite! A new sort of irony without hope, they say, is postmodern), to stop flailing in disorder where we’re stuck in the spider’s web. We need to get to work.

twat.

He’s one of those people you interact with casually, pleasantly, whenever you see him, but about whom you know nothing real. You have your imaginary narrative account of him, of course. You have a story that explains his haircut, a story that explains his solitude, a story about his distant relatives and his distant best friend, with whom he talks by Skype once a week. Even if you have not fully articulated his stories to yourself, they’re there, buried and murmuring in your intuitive responses to his jocular, cursory greetings when you pass on the sidewalk. And when he tries to kill himself, the stories you’ve not quite refined discharge and overwhelm you with their debris. You feel draped in his loneliness, and his regrets, and his bitterness, now as you recall his smile. You remember the flick of his eyes away from yours and toward the person behind you, the unsettled glances that always seemed to search endlessly for something else, something beyond what the present offered. The story of his life now seems sharper and darker, he’s fallen out with someone important to him, he’s isolated himself, he drinks a lot because acute awareness holds the world in too painful a clarity. The stories were all there, entwined tightly behind the jocular smile and the unsettled glances.

Or rather, there were no stories, but that same sea of impressions, regrets, successes and failures, dreams, tragedies and triumphs that swims inside everyone. Virginia Woolf wrote that “on the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow,” some story-teller you listen to when you need to heal, and who helps you shunt pain into a story. There are no real stories, no neat designs displaying signs and motives, and yet you steady yourself by reevaluating the expressions in his eyes and attributing narrative.

This feels very different from when you love the person who tries to kill himself. Then you might have already grieved, again and again, with and for the person. You might be familiar with the paralyzing darkness into which he has sunk. Perhaps you, too, feel the ground slip, suddenly becoming quicksand, as sadness engulfs you and your love. The pain you feel then, when suicide intervenes, or flashes its confusing figure over your perspective, is entirely different from the unexpected pain of recognizing suddenly and too late a stranger’s despair. The guilt is different. The helplessness is different. The shade that drops between you and the world falls from a different place inside you.

When you only distantly know the person who tries to kill himself, everyone you only distantly know looks sadder. And more delicate. Everyone is in danger of slipping suddenly through the ground, that uncertain mixture of quicksand and earth.

I cried this morning when a stranger called me a twat. Twat, for any Americans reading who don’t know, means roughly the same thing as “cunt,” but Brits use it more liberally than we use the “c-word.” Perhaps it’s more like “vag,” the fratboy epithet, equally casual, and casually patriarchal. Anyway, I’d done something stupid on my bike, cut a corner unnecessarily, the kind of traffic violation you’re driven to by boredom and impatience and that poses neither threat nor advantage. I briefly inconvenienced this angry stranger through my senseless recklessness, and so he called me a fucking idiot. Then, more loudly and angrier, he yelled TWAT. He turned a corner and continued to glare at me over his shoulder, blazing completely disproportionate hatred. I’d cut a corner on my bike. I’m not a fucking idiot. I have a twat, I suppose, but I’m not identical with it. Twats don’t pedal bikes and write blogs and cry capriciously, and I’ve never quite understood what that variety of anatomical synecdoche even means.

I didn’t cry because of some instinctual agreement with the hateful stranger. I cried because he made me hate people, for an instant. I cried because he made me think of the unstable sand that we all seem to stand so tenuously upon, balancing with deliberate concentration, careful not to make sudden weight shifts lest they stimulate the disintegration of our earth. The shout of a stranger can catch you off guard and make you wince just enough to lose your foothold, I thought. How dare he? How dare he scream at me? How careless, how reckless, how senselessly dangerous. My earth is holding, but he couldn’t have known that it would.

But maybe my careless, reckless, senseless and unlawful crossing was cruel in a way I hadn’t imagined. Maybe it seemed to demean him, and by guiding my bike in a path that briefly inconvenienced him I had made him feel his smallness. His negligibility. I was a careless, selfish stranger, whose urge to save a minute of riding time eclipsed his figure. In my defence, I hadn’t thought I’d be in his way. I hadn’t thought he’d have an opportunity to roll into the intersection I was cutting across. I’d thought his light was solidly red. Sure, I’d considered the possibility that it might change, and had determined that since he was on another bike and not behind the wheel of a car my risk was low, in case I’d miscalculated the timing of the traffic lights. So I had accounted for him synecdochically, seen him as a bike and not a person who might write a blog, cry capriciously, or Skype once per week with a distant friend.

I’m not a fucking idiot, and I’m not a twat. I’m just another asshole.

We carry our lives forward with the stories we tell, the distorting and healing, ennobling and simplifying stories, and I’ve started telling myself a new one in the wake of the recent reminder of latent despair. Not the one that came from the angry biker-man. The reminder from the other man, about whom I’m afraid to ask. It’s a story – another one – about the sort of person I’m going to try to be. I’ll keep exchanging causal pleasantries with strangers and acquaintances, and less casual conversations with friends and loved ones and anyone else enlisting me in the tricky business of communication. I’ll listen better. I’ll restrain my own unsettled glances, when I’m talking with people I do or do not know well, people I do or do not quite like, and I’ll commit to whatever shallow or profound moment we’re sharing. I’ll look people in the eye. It’s not my responsibility to build anyone a more stable platform to stand on. I know this. But I can look people in the eye while they find their footholds, and I find mine. And I can obey traffic signals.

Like Zombies Clawin’ For His Brains

(or anything that infotains)

In this video from a live-show of This American Life, Joss Whedon shares some awesome directors’ commentary from “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” weighing in on some of the issues I tried to raise with my “Author 2.0” posts. Thank you, Ira Glass.

(And for anyone clamoring for some words of mine to pick, pick, pick apart, hopefully I’ll soon start blogging again. Life in Oxford has been busy, and I blame my lapse on a volcano, an election, and a dissertation)