sssh! this is a working library.

How America is like King Lear:

In casting off so cruelly the fruits of his body, his daughter Cordelia, he discloses the fantasy of disembodiment which lies at the heart of the most grossly material of powers. Lear believes at this point that he is everything; but since an identity which is everything has nothing to measure itself against, it is merely a void. Similarly, a nation which becomes global in its sovereignty will soon have very little idea of who it is, if indeed it ever knew. It has eliminated the otherness which is essential for self-knowledge. Eagleton, After Theory (182)

Morris Berman hits a similar note in Dark Ages America:

It seems clear enough that when you put money (or commodities) at the center of a culture, you finally don’t have a culture. Indeed, the Germans have a word to describe this type of situation: sinnentleert (“devoid of meaning”). America can strut and puff all it wants, but on some level, all of us know this (it struts and puffs because it is empty). Berman, Dark Ages America (77)

The latter analogy is particularly interesting from the perspective of a designer: like it or not, the discipline of design is entangled with the capitalist ethos. An unspoken, if obvious, role of design is to make the emptiness of so much commercial activity seem meaningful. The red campaign – a scam if there ever was one – is a cogent example: you can tell yourself when you buy those jeans with the red tag that you’re doing something for the people of Africa – but you should know better. The void does not disappear simply because you avert your eyes.

More on anti-theory (otherwise known as anti-thinking):

Since September 11, a number of anti-theoretical terms have been in vogue in the United States. They include [the aforementioned] ‘evil’, ‘freedom-loving’, ‘bad men’, ‘patriot’, and ‘anti-American’. These terms are anti-theoretical because they are invitations to shut down thought.…Theory – which means, in this context, the taxing business of trying to grasp what is actually going on – is unpatriotic.…This is a pity, since unless the United States is able to do some hard thinking about the world, it is not at all certain that the world will be around for that much longer. Eagleton, After Theory (223)

Eagleton’s definition of theory here bears repeating: theory is “the taxing business of trying to grasp what is actually going on.” In this context, theory is not esoteric or inaccessible, and it’s not relegated to the ivory-tower. It’s simply the way we need to be with the world, if we’re to have a world we want to be in.

What is thus called for is long-term study and thought, in an effort to come up with a serious alternative to global bourgeois democracy – blueprints for a better time, perhaps, and for another place. “What radicals need right now,” says de Zengotita,¹ “isn’t action but theory.” Berman, Dark Ages America (329)

Put another way: when you’re rolling down a hill and picking up speed, digging in your heels or grabbing at twigs isn’t likely to slow your descent. But if you take the time you have to consider how you got to where you are – and you shout it at the top of your lungs – you just may avert someone else from suffering a similar fate. Neither the critic nor the protestor is immortal; but the critic’s words will outlast the protestor’s flags.

1. Berman is quoting Thomas de Zengotita from a 2003 article in Harper’s Magazine. ↩

Furthermore –

…fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. Berman, Dark Ages America (5)

If fundamentalism is a textual affair, then it relies on revealed truths, not discovered ones. Revealed “truths” refuse to be interrogated and resist all but the most myopic of interpretations. Democracy hinges on an educated and capable citizenship to engage in a discourse about the nature of their government; it needs reason, not revelation.

Berman on secular culture versus tribal culture (or, Pynchon in the morning versus Pynchon in the evening):

One of the best portrayals of these polar opposites occurs in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, especially V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the literary structure resembles a funnel. The narrative structures begin with a completely anomic, open-ended, scientific world, in which everything that happens is random and nothing has any relationship to anything else….But just as the reader can’t take it anymore…Pynchon begins to reveal that all of these random people, objects, and events are actually part of a hidden web of connections. As he draws the net tighter and tighter, the relief initially felt by the reader – that of being out of the anomic world – turns into a claustrophobia…there is no where to hide. By the end of the story, the reader is faced with two horrendous, and totally opposite, paranoias: the open end of the funnel, the world of the anesthésie, where (as in my apartment building) you could basically drop dead and nobody would notice; or the contracted end of the funnel, in which you don’t have a moment’s privacy, and where everything you do is everybody else’s business. Which would you choose? Berman, Dark Ages America (83)

I think we already made this choice and are now struggling with the consequences. Saramago explores similar themes in The Cave. The world of anesthésie always seems more terrifying (Saramago certainly thinks it is), but as one who has had no experience of the tribal alternative, I suppose I can’t make a proper comparison. Can’t we have the best of both? (Or is that too crassly American of me?)

But take a closer look at this passage: Berman is making a point about the extremities of human society with an example that draws on the structure of a novel. I’ve read Gravity more times than I care to admit¹, but I had never considered this particular reading. At first pass, all of Pynchon’s novels seem chaotic; but on subsequent readings, as you learn his methods and become familiar with the characters and themes (and the peculiar and lovely cadence of his writing), they transform from a mess of inexplicable events to a complex – and organized – pattern. It’s a bit like staring at a fractal for long enough to recognize the rhythm. So, for me, the secular to tribal path was not from the beginning of the novel to the end, but from the first reading, to the third (and fourth and fifth).

1. I’ve got three copies of Gravity’s Ranbow in my library, each one more dog-eared than the last, with one so tattered it’s being held together with a rubber band. ↩

Here, then, is the critic’s eye turned towards something which would ordinarily be ignored, with revealing results:

“Family Feud” would seem the most straightforward family show on television.…And yet, in fact, it isn’t the familial bond that wins the prize on “Family Feud,” but the family’s successful self-erasure. Each of Dawson’s questions is a test of sameness, its answers based on tallies of “one hundred people surveyed,” well ahead of time, by the show’s producers. A “correct” reply is therefore not the smartest, but the least inventive answer, matching an alleged “consensus” expertly defined and validated by the show itself. Thus the irresistible appeal of “Family Feud” is also the attraction of TV, which tells us endlessly what “we” believe, thereby using our supposed group sentiments to reconfirm its own authority¹.…For all its seeming family pride, then, each group that plays on “Family Feud” does not come on to manifest its own discrete identity, but rather struggles to get rid of it. Miller, Boxed In (54)

This is why we talk of TV as being “mind-numbing”; why, after watching it, you can feel sapped or empty, or, like the narrator in Fight Club, even violent. By addressing “Family Feud” critically, Miller reveals the “truth” of it (there’s that word again). And he reveals his own perspective, namely, that television’s depression of our individual identities in the name of commercial success is a dangerous practice deserving of resistance. If we’re all unflinchingly in agreement, then the conditions for democracy have not been met; we have to be willing to assert our differences meaningfully if we’re to be effective citizens:

We retain the rhetoric of liberal democracy, but in concrete terms this supposed democracy gets enacted as the commodity culture, in which freedom of choice really means Wendy’s versus Burger King. Berman, Dark Ages America (73)

The first – and arguably most important – step towards resisting this phenomena is to bring it out from the shadows; that is the critic’s role.

1. Emphasis mine. ↩