I thoroughly enjoyed John Crowley’s latest book, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, though I don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s an amazing work of literary impersonation. Crowley’s conceit is to give us a supposedly lost manuscript of Lord Byron — his only novel, a semi-autobiographical Gothic romance — together with the circumstances of its loss and rediscovery. Crowley’s text has several layers: Byron’s novel itself (written in what is, to my untrained ear at least, a convincing channelling of Byron’s voice, style, and sensibility); a series of annotations on the text, by Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (his only “legitimate” child, whom he never saw post-infancy, and who grew up to become Charles Babbage’s collaborator upon the Difference Engine, and arguably the first person to conceive the possibilities of computer programming); and an exchange of emails, dated 2002, among the people who discover and decipher the manuscript (which Ada had encrypted to preserve it from her mother, Byron’s estranged wife, who would otherwise have destroyed it).
The novel’s puzzles and collections of fragments give pleasure; recurrent themes of estranged fathers and longing daughters, of exile and reconciliation, are worked out in the book’s various parallel layers; and Crowley offers something of an apologia for Byron, against feminist charges that he was a misogynist, together with a quite poignant reconstruction/celebration of the life of Ada Lovelace (one recent biography suggested that her fame was unmerited, but Crowley argues for a more generous look at her potential, squelched as it was both by restrictions on women in the 19th century, and by her early death). All in all, though the Byron novel is briskly entertaining, it’s the parts about Ada, together with the 21st-century plot involving a woman’s (partial) reconciliation with her own father (a filmmaker exiled from the United States for Polanski-esque reasons) that have the most emotional weight. Lord Byron’s Novel is finally a trifle in Crowley’s oeuvre, an elegant, seemingly effortless performance rather than a plumbing of the depths, but that’s OK. It gives us something to ponder while we wait for the final volume of Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy.
I thoroughly enjoyed John Crowley’s latest book, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, though I don’t have all that much to say about it. It’s an amazing work of literary impersonation. Crowley’s conceit is to give us a supposedly lost manuscript of Lord Byron — his only novel, a semi-autobiographical Gothic romance — together with the circumstances of its loss and rediscovery. Crowley’s text has several layers: Byron’s novel itself (written in what is, to my untrained ear at least, a convincing channelling of Byron’s voice, style, and sensibility); a series of annotations on the text, by Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace (his only “legitimate” child, whom he never saw post-infancy, and who grew up to become Charles Babbage’s collaborator upon the Difference Engine, and arguably the first person to conceive the possibilities of computer programming); and an exchange of emails, dated 2002, among the people who discover and decipher the manuscript (which Ada had encrypted to preserve it from her mother, Byron’s estranged wife, who would otherwise have destroyed it).
The novel’s puzzles and collections of fragments give pleasure; recurrent themes of estranged fathers and longing daughters, of exile and reconciliation, are worked out in the book’s various parallel layers; and Crowley offers something of an apologia for Byron, against feminist charges that he was a misogynist, together with a quite poignant reconstruction/celebration of the life of Ada Lovelace (one recent biography suggested that her fame was unmerited, but Crowley argues for a more generous look at her potential, squelched as it was both by restrictions on women in the 19th century, and by her early death). All in all, though the Byron novel is briskly entertaining, it’s the parts about Ada, together with the 21st-century plot involving a woman’s (partial) reconciliation with her own father (a filmmaker exiled from the United States for Polanski-esque reasons) that have the most emotional weight. Lord Byron’s Novel is finally a trifle in Crowley’s oeuvre, an elegant, seemingly effortless performance rather than a plumbing of the depths, but that’s OK. It gives us something to ponder while we wait for the final volume of Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy.
We’ve had to wait something like twenty years for George Romero’s Land of the Dead; but now it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be happier. The film is a worthy successor to Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) (which three films I wrote about, long ago, in my book The Cinematic Body).
Though the “living dead” films take place in chronological order — each seems to take place a few months or years after the previous one — they explore different realms of social experience. Night is about the implosion of the American (white, middle class) nuclear family; its crude, low-budget visceral shocks (which revolutionized horror filmmaking in general) are grounded in the collapse of patriarchal authority into a kind of grovelling hysteria. The sexual and social “revolutions” of the 1960s were not so much rebellions against a tyrannical paternal despot, or against the rigid repressions of suburban family life, as they were carnivalesque revelations that the emperor had no clothes, that the patriarchal tyrants were toothless, and the suburban hypocrisies nothing more than a thin veneer of stage decor. So the nuclear family holed up in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, until the child-turned-zombie avidly consumes her parents; the impotence of the father is echoed by the clownishness and impotence of the larger-scale authority figures viewed on television during the zombie siege. Meanwhile, the ravaging zombies outside present a darkly humorous vision of hippie communalism (the preferred refuge of the children of the white middle class). And the movie’s ostensible theme of survivalism is totally undermined by the cynical conclusion, when the film’s only sympathetic character — a black man who has managed to make it through the night unharmed by the zombies — is shot dead by a redneck sheriff’s posse.
Of course the “rebellions” of the 1960s went nowhere — though they are still the object of vilification by the far right and the fundamentalists to this day. But hippies and campus radicals from middle-class backgrounds grew up to be yuppies, and their influence on the larger culture was mostly a matter of an easily saleable “lifestyle.” Once the social upheavals of the 60s had passed, consumerism turned out to be the real winner. So it’s entirely appropriate that Dawn of the Dead takes place largely in a shopping mall: which the zombies are attracted to because it was the place of their happiest moments when they were alive, while the four living characters who hole up inside it alleviate their sense of being besieged by living a fantasy of commodity abundance and frictionless shopping and consuming. The invasion of a paramilitary bikers’ gang looking for loot puts an end to this bourgeois idyll, but not before the exorbitant lust for commodities has been established as the ruling passion of living and dead alike.
Many fans of the earlier films found Day of the Dead disappointing, but to my mind it’s as brilliant and as vital (if that’s the right word for a film about the dead) as the rest of the series. Day is the most philosophical of the “living dead” films, which is part of what I love about it, but which may be part of what turned many viewers off. As befits a film from the Reagan 1980s, the focus shifts from consumerism to the military/scientific complex; it takes place, not in a brightly lit mall, but in a hellishly claustrophobic underground bunker. Pathologically macho soldiers try to keep the zombies at bay, while scientists futilely try to discover the cause of the zombie plague, or else try to “tame” the zombies. The film is relentless in its deconstruction of military authoritarianism and scientific claims to supreme authority (indeed, Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Days Later is entirely indebted to Day in its latter half, when — just as in Romero’s film — the military saviors of civilization come off as worse than the monsters they are trying to fight). Day of the Dead ends up combining a kind of Stoic fatalism (as the few sympathetic living characters do escape the zombies, but in a way that is pointedly fragile and contingent) with a greater sympathy for the zombies than ever before, as they embody a kind of inchoate, but plaintive and oddly innocuous desire, in contrast to the twisted viciousness of the characters who stand for social order.
Land of the Dead is both simpler and more expressionistic than Day: it takes place almost entirely at night, and both the cinematography and the gory special effects have an elegance that goes beyond anything Romero has done before. In Land, as befits our globalized, post-9/11 world (though Romero’s screenplay was apparently mostly finished before 9/11), social class, and indeed class warfare, comes to the foreground, after having been an implicit subtext in the earlier films. Romero’s hometown of Pittsburgh is a bastion of humanity against the zombie hordes — just as America today paranoiacally imagines itself as a fortress of “freedom” barred against the Muslims and Mexicans who are always trying to batter their way in. Internally, post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh is almost a parody of rapacious capitalism (though it must be said that “actually existing capitalism” in America is rapidly approaching this terminal parodic state): the ruling class live lives of elegance in the exclusive gated high-rise of “Fiddler’s Green”, while the masses outside scrape by day to day, more or less at a subsistence level, with sex, drugs, violence, and gambling as their only amusments. Add to this a psychotic Bushite dictator (played, inevitably, by Dennis Hopper) whose two main passions are an all-out drive to make the rich richer, and a refusal ever to negotiate with “terrorists”; and the muscle he uses, a cadre of mercenaries who have no ties or loyalties, except (to a limited extent) to one another. Meanwhile, the zombies are treated more sympathetically in Land than they even were in Day: they start to evolve, and develop a sort of memory and intelligence, an ability to plan and to coordinate their actions. They become, in fact, a spontaneously self-organized swarm (they have a sort of leader, but his role is exemplary and inspirational, rather than having any sort of authority). And when they break into the city, it’s as if the proletariat — or more accurately, Negri’s “multitude” — had finally arisen to demand restitution and justice. This zombie invasion is intercut with infighting among the city’s cadres: John Leguizamo starts a self-serving rebellion, because he’s pissed of at not being amply enough rewarded for doing Dennis Hopper’s dirty work. (Hopper will never allow Leguizamo into Fiddler’s Green, because he’s “street,” and even worse, Latino). Simon Baker, the film’s nominal hero, is sent by Hopper to squelch Leguizamo (it’s sort of an offer Baker can’t refuse, though he plans to hijack the process for his own selfish ends anyway). (The fabulous Asia Argento also plays a small but key role). Not to give too much away, or get involved in the minutiae of the plot, but the various strands merge in brilliantly satisfying ways. What makes Land noteworthy, aside from the tightness of its construction and (as I’ve already said) the delights of its (dare I call them understated?) gross-out special effects, is the way that class comes to play a central role — and other oppositions, particularly that between the living and the dead, tend to dissolve or fall away. Is there any American filmmaker working today who is as politically cogent as Romero, and at the same time as affectively powerful, and as committed to pulp/”low” culture values?
We’ve had to wait something like twenty years for George Romero’s Land of the Dead; but now it’s finally here, and I couldn’t be happier. The film is a worthy successor to Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) (which three films I wrote about, long ago, in my book The Cinematic Body).
Though the “living dead” films take place in chronological order — each seems to take place a few months or years after the previous one — they explore different realms of social experience. Night is about the implosion of the American (white, middle class) nuclear family; its crude, low-budget visceral shocks (which revolutionized horror filmmaking in general) are grounded in the collapse of patriarchal authority into a kind of grovelling hysteria. The sexual and social “revolutions” of the 1960s were not so much rebellions against a tyrannical paternal despot, or against the rigid repressions of suburban family life, as they were carnivalesque revelations that the emperor had no clothes, that the patriarchal tyrants were toothless, and the suburban hypocrisies nothing more than a thin veneer of stage decor. So the nuclear family holed up in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, until the child-turned-zombie avidly consumes her parents; the impotence of the father is echoed by the clownishness and impotence of the larger-scale authority figures viewed on television during the zombie siege. Meanwhile, the ravaging zombies outside present a darkly humorous vision of hippie communalism (the preferred refuge of the children of the white middle class). And the movie’s ostensible theme of survivalism is totally undermined by the cynical conclusion, when the film’s only sympathetic character — a black man who has managed to make it through the night unharmed by the zombies — is shot dead by a redneck sheriff’s posse.
Of course the “rebellions” of the 1960s went nowhere — though they are still the object of vilification by the far right and the fundamentalists to this day. But hippies and campus radicals from middle-class backgrounds grew up to be yuppies, and their influence on the larger culture was mostly a matter of an easily saleable “lifestyle.” Once the social upheavals of the 60s had passed, consumerism turned out to be the real winner. So it’s entirely appropriate that Dawn of the Dead takes place largely in a shopping mall: which the zombies are attracted to because it was the place of their happiest moments when they were alive, while the four living characters who hole up inside it alleviate their sense of being besieged by living a fantasy of commodity abundance and frictionless shopping and consuming. The invasion of a paramilitary bikers’ gang looking for loot puts an end to this bourgeois idyll, but not before the exorbitant lust for commodities has been established as the ruling passion of living and dead alike.
Many fans of the earlier films found Day of the Dead disappointing, but to my mind it’s as brilliant and as vital (if that’s the right word for a film about the dead) as the rest of the series. Day is the most philosophical of the “living dead” films, which is part of what I love about it, but which may be part of what turned many viewers off. As befits a film from the Reagan 1980s, the focus shifts from consumerism to the military/scientific complex; it takes place, not in a brightly lit mall, but in a hellishly claustrophobic underground bunker. Pathologically macho soldiers try to keep the zombies at bay, while scientists futilely try to discover the cause of the zombie plague, or else try to “tame” the zombies. The film is relentless in its deconstruction of military authoritarianism and scientific claims to supreme authority (indeed, Danny Boyle’s excellent 28 Days Later is entirely indebted to Day in its latter half, when — just as in Romero’s film — the military saviors of civilization come off as worse than the monsters they are trying to fight). Day of the Dead ends up combining a kind of Stoic fatalism (as the few sympathetic living characters do escape the zombies, but in a way that is pointedly fragile and contingent) with a greater sympathy for the zombies than ever before, as they embody a kind of inchoate, but plaintive and oddly innocuous desire, in contrast to the twisted viciousness of the characters who stand for social order.
Land of the Dead is both simpler and more expressionistic than Day: it takes place almost entirely at night, and both the cinematography and the gory special effects have an elegance that goes beyond anything Romero has done before. In Land, as befits our globalized, post-9/11 world (though Romero’s screenplay was apparently mostly finished before 9/11), social class, and indeed class warfare, comes to the foreground, after having been an implicit subtext in the earlier films. Romero’s hometown of Pittsburgh is a bastion of humanity against the zombie hordes — just as America today paranoiacally imagines itself as a fortress of “freedom” barred against the Muslims and Mexicans who are always trying to batter their way in. Internally, post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh is almost a parody of rapacious capitalism (though it must be said that “actually existing capitalism” in America is rapidly approaching this terminal parodic state): the ruling class live lives of elegance in the exclusive gated high-rise of “Fiddler’s Green”, while the masses outside scrape by day to day, more or less at a subsistence level, with sex, drugs, violence, and gambling as their only amusments. Add to this a psychotic Bushite dictator (played, inevitably, by Dennis Hopper) whose two main passions are an all-out drive to make the rich richer, and a refusal ever to negotiate with “terrorists”; and the muscle he uses, a cadre of mercenaries who have no ties or loyalties, except (to a limited extent) to one another. Meanwhile, the zombies are treated more sympathetically in Land than they even were in Day: they start to evolve, and develop a sort of memory and intelligence, an ability to plan and to coordinate their actions. They become, in fact, a spontaneously self-organized swarm (they have a sort of leader, but his role is exemplary and inspirational, rather than having any sort of authority). And when they break into the city, it’s as if the proletariat — or more accurately, Negri’s “multitude” — had finally arisen to demand restitution and justice. This zombie invasion is intercut with infighting among the city’s cadres: John Leguizamo starts a self-serving rebellion, because he’s pissed of at not being amply enough rewarded for doing Dennis Hopper’s dirty work. (Hopper will never allow Leguizamo into Fiddler’s Green, because he’s “street,” and even worse, Latino). Simon Baker, the film’s nominal hero, is sent by Hopper to squelch Leguizamo (it’s sort of an offer Baker can’t refuse, though he plans to hijack the process for his own selfish ends anyway). (The fabulous Asia Argento also plays a small but key role). Not to give too much away, or get involved in the minutiae of the plot, but the various strands merge in brilliantly satisfying ways. What makes Land noteworthy, aside from the tightness of its construction and (as I’ve already said) the delights of its (dare I call them understated?) gross-out special effects, is the way that class comes to play a central role — and other oppositions, particularly that between the living and the dead, tend to dissolve or fall away. Is there any American filmmaker working today who is as politically cogent as Romero, and at the same time as affectively powerful, and as committed to pulp/”low” culture values?
The first thing that gets you about M.T. Anderson’s “young adult” science fiction novel Feed is the narrator’s voice: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. We went on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break. Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, ‘I’m so null,’ and Marty was all, ‘I’m null too, unit,’ but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them…”
And so on, for 300 pages. It’s the tone that does it. Feed isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s dead-on as an act of linguistic impersonation, or possession. No actual living teenager is this vapid and unreflective — in fact, even the most conformist, consumerist, trendy, and outwardly unreflective teens turn out to be filled inside with anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty, and a paralyzingly exacerbated self-consciousness — but Anderson has channeled instead the Platonic Idea, as it were, of the privileged and pampered male American teen, at least as the media (or better, Entertainment Capitalism) would want him to be.
In the future world of the novel, all of television, computers, mobile phones, and the Internet is available, interface-free, through a neural-interface chip implanted inside your head at birth. (At least, that is, if you are in the 73% of the American population that can afford it). It’s all a continuous feed: AOL-chatting with your friends, hearing music, watching comedies and dramas, getting the news if you are interested (most people aren’t), looking up words you don’t know and facts about any subject — and above all, getting those constant exhortations to buy, with ads that are context-sensitive and tailored especially for your own particular preferences. Fashions are continually changing, so there’s always something new to get, especially if you are an affluent, post-literate teen with an ample monetary flow and lots of time on your hands, since there’s so little you actually have to do.
Perhaps all this is obvious and predictable, but it’s almost uncanny the way Anderson captures the sense of the flow, the immersion in multimedia, the eternal Now in which everything is always changing, but for that very reason there’s this absolute monotony, since the mere fact of meaningless change is the only thing there is. Ernst Bloch’s unfair characterization of Bergson — “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was” — is an accurate description of the endless, kaleidoscopic “feed” that Anderson describes. How the genuinely New is actually possible in such circumstances — which is Bloch’s great question, as well as Bergson’s (though Bloch, with an ungenerosity that is quite unusual for him, refuses to concede this in Bergson’s case), and Deleuze’s, and above all Whitehead’s — is not directly addressed by Anderson’s novel.
Instead, we get satire that turns to tragedy. The narrator’s girlfriend attempts to revolt against the Feed. Her rebellion is quite tentative and uncertain: this is exactly right, because the whole point is that neither she, nor anyone else in the world of the novel, has any sort of external perspective to bring to bear on the Feed, precisely because it subsumes everyone and everything, translates whatever you encounter into a matter of mere/sheer commodity consumption. Nonetheless, however timid and incomplete her rebellion is, it is enough for the Feed to destroy her: both mentally/metaphysically/morally, and literally/physiologically. The book’s greatest accomplishment is to convey the full creepiness of this destruction, while/although the narrator himself remains utterly incapable of understanding it, or her. An unreliable narrator is one thing; but a narrator who is reliable as to the facts, but uncomprehending as to their import, is far more painful and disturbing. (Affect cuts deeper than epistemology). The resulting, slightly queasy, feeling of combined immersion and alienation is what makes the novel more than just a clever commentary that any NPR listener, or snob who refuses to watch TV, could approve of. It leads, instead, to a sense of complicity: the realization that I cannot pretend to be somehow superior to, or even external to, the object of my critique.
The first thing that gets you about M.T. Anderson’s “young adult” science fiction novel Feed is the narrator’s voice: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. We went on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break. Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, ‘I’m so null,’ and Marty was all, ‘I’m null too, unit,’ but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them…”
And so on, for 300 pages. It’s the tone that does it. Feed isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s dead-on as an act of linguistic impersonation, or possession. No actual living teenager is this vapid and unreflective — in fact, even the most conformist, consumerist, trendy, and outwardly unreflective teens turn out to be filled inside with anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty, and a paralyzingly exacerbated self-consciousness — but Anderson has channeled instead the Platonic Idea, as it were, of the privileged and pampered male American teen, at least as the media (or better, Entertainment Capitalism) would want him to be.
In the future world of the novel, all of television, computers, mobile phones, and the Internet is available, interface-free, through a neural-interface chip implanted inside your head at birth. (At least, that is, if you are in the 73% of the American population that can afford it). It’s all a continuous feed: AOL-chatting with your friends, hearing music, watching comedies and dramas, getting the news if you are interested (most people aren’t), looking up words you don’t know and facts about any subject — and above all, getting those constant exhortations to buy, with ads that are context-sensitive and tailored especially for your own particular preferences. Fashions are continually changing, so there’s always something new to get, especially if you are an affluent, post-literate teen with an ample monetary flow and lots of time on your hands, since there’s so little you actually have to do.
Perhaps all this is obvious and predictable, but it’s almost uncanny the way Anderson captures the sense of the flow, the immersion in multimedia, the eternal Now in which everything is always changing, but for that very reason there’s this absolute monotony, since the mere fact of meaningless change is the only thing there is. Ernst Bloch’s unfair characterization of Bergson — “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was” — is an accurate description of the endless, kaleidoscopic “feed” that Anderson describes. How the genuinely New is actually possible in such circumstances — which is Bloch’s great question, as well as Bergson’s (though Bloch, with an ungenerosity that is quite unusual for him, refuses to concede this in Bergson’s case), and Deleuze’s, and above all Whitehead’s — is not directly addressed by Anderson’s novel.
Instead, we get satire that turns to tragedy. The narrator’s girlfriend attempts to revolt against the Feed. Her rebellion is quite tentative and uncertain: this is exactly right, because the whole point is that neither she, nor anyone else in the world of the novel, has any sort of external perspective to bring to bear on the Feed, precisely because it subsumes everyone and everything, translates whatever you encounter into a matter of mere/sheer commodity consumption. Nonetheless, however timid and incomplete her rebellion is, it is enough for the Feed to destroy her: both mentally/metaphysically/morally, and literally/physiologically. The book’s greatest accomplishment is to convey the full creepiness of this destruction, while/although the narrator himself remains utterly incapable of understanding it, or her. An unreliable narrator is one thing; but a narrator who is reliable as to the facts, but uncomprehending as to their import, is far more painful and disturbing. (Affect cuts deeper than epistemology). The resulting, slightly queasy, feeling of combined immersion and alienation is what makes the novel more than just a clever commentary that any NPR listener, or snob who refuses to watch TV, could approve of. It leads, instead, to a sense of complicity: the realization that I cannot pretend to be somehow superior to, or even external to, the object of my critique.
In Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl, the ideal commodity is an absence: a product that promises everything, precisely because it is nothing. This product is called diet water or Litewater. It’s “an artificial form of water… that passes through the body completely unabsorbed. It’s completely inert, completely harmless,” and has no effect on the body whatsoever. It doesn’t actually quench thirst; but as a result, it also doesn’t add to the drinker’s weight, and doesn’t make her feel bloated. If you still feel thirsty after a drink of Litewater — and you will — all you have to do is “buy more.” Consumers needn’t worry about the consequences of imbibing; they “can drink all they want, guilt-free.” Litewater is the ideal commodity, then, precisely because it “is, in its very essence, the opposite of consumption. Consuming [it] is like consuming nothing at all.” This means that it is a figure of pure desire, scrupulously detached from any use or need. All it does is make sure that circulation continues: the circulation of money through the economy, and of fluids in and out of the body. Litewater is the perfect product for a world beyond scarcity, beyond irony, and beyond guilt. No matter how abundant it becomes, the demand for it is never satiated.
We shouldn’t take the story of Litewater as merely a satire on capitalism’s incitement of “artifical desires.” For of course all desires are artificial, in the standard social-constructivist sense that they belong to culture rather than nature, that they aim for something more than mere subsistence, and that they are irreducible to “reproductive strategies” or other forms of biological need. We should therefore say, together with Philip Pullman, that “nothing is natural any more, and nothing is artificial. It’s a false dichotomy, and we should forget about it.” In fact, when people denounce capitalism for instilling artificial needs or desires, what they are really objecting to is not artifice, so much as wastefulness. This sort of criticism ought to give us pause, however. For the drive to reduce or eliminate waste is itself intrinsic to capitalism, and only to capitalism. Only managers and neoclassical economists are obsessed with “efficiency.” As Bataille pointed out long ago, part of what makes capitalism unique is that it is the only socio-economic system in human history to regard waste as “shameful,” and the only one whose ruling class refuses the otherwise universal “obligation of functional expenditure.” Of course there is sumptuous waste in capitalism nonetheless: mostly in the form of what Veblen (with his own curious aversion to waste) called conspicuous consumption. But it seems misguided to reproach capitalism for wastefulness, as if the problem with it were the abundance that it provides, rather than the scarcity that it counter-produces in order to rein in and control this abundance.
The language of capitalism is the language of desire, and utopia, and salvation. And that is the secret of its success. The market always leaves us unsatisfied; but for this very reason it always gets us to come back for more. In the last analysis, there is no arguing against desire. Leftists won’t get very far by urging people to live within their means, or by telling them to settle for what they need instead of what they want. We should leave such exhortations to the Federal Reserve Bank. But also — and this is the most difficult part — we won’t get away from the logic of commodities and the market by appealing to utopian yearnings and hopes of redemption. For these longings are the very ones that motivate us to go shopping. They have been subsumed, all too successfully, within the circuits of consumption. The only way out is the way through. The only answer to capitalist desire’s constant cries of “more!” is to up the ante still further, as in Blake’s aphorism: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.”
It is therefore only by embracing the logic of capitalist (and specifically, post-Fordist) aestheticism that we can hope to open a path ‘beyond’ it. The best guide in these matters is Andy Warhol, who wrote that “buying is much more American than thinking… Americans are not so interested in selling — in fact, they’d rather throw out than sell. What they really like to do is buy — people, money, countries.” The supply-side way of encouraging people to buy is beauty, style, or more precisely cool. When leftist critics denounce the market’s promotion of style over substance, when they deplore, as Stuart Ewen does, “the cycle of waste upon which the market is built,” they are missing the point that this wastefulness is not a bug, but a feature. It’s flexible accumulation’s answer to the dilemma of overproduction. Without it, the whole system would come tumbling down — and not in a way that would lead to a change for the better. We need to be wasteful, to throw things out, in order to clear room in our closets for new stuff. And we need to change our fashions, and upgrade our gadgets, as often as possible, in order (as Virginia Postrel puts it) to “reinvent ourselves, emphasizing and developing previously unknown or subordinate aspects of our personalities.” Far from creating scarcity by diverting resources, conspicuous waste is our only exemption from the ruthless reign of Malthusian scarcity, Darwinian struggle, and “the discipline of the market.” A visit to the mall puts beauty into our otherwise blighted lives.
The thing to remember is that, even when we strive to resist the commodity’s allure, and the ubiquitous domination of the marketplace, it is only in the terms set forth by the commodity itself that we can do so. We must say of the commodity what Derrida says of metaphysics: “We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” The Situationist strategy of radical negativity and absolute refusal is a self-congratulatory self-deception, or at best a show of empty bravado. Like it or not, the situation that we face today is the opposite of the one described by Audre Lord: for it is only with the master’s tools that we can possibly hope to dismantle the master’s house.
In Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl, the ideal commodity is an absence: a product that promises everything, precisely because it is nothing. This product is called diet water or Litewater. It’s “an artificial form of water… that passes through the body completely unabsorbed. It’s completely inert, completely harmless,” and has no effect on the body whatsoever. It doesn’t actually quench thirst; but as a result, it also doesn’t add to the drinker’s weight, and doesn’t make her feel bloated. If you still feel thirsty after a drink of Litewater — and you will — all you have to do is “buy more.” Consumers needn’t worry about the consequences of imbibing; they “can drink all they want, guilt-free.” Litewater is the ideal commodity, then, precisely because it “is, in its very essence, the opposite of consumption. Consuming [it] is like consuming nothing at all.” This means that it is a figure of pure desire, scrupulously detached from any use or need. All it does is make sure that circulation continues: the circulation of money through the economy, and of fluids in and out of the body. Litewater is the perfect product for a world beyond scarcity, beyond irony, and beyond guilt. No matter how abundant it becomes, the demand for it is never satiated.
We shouldn’t take the story of Litewater as merely a satire on capitalism’s incitement of “artifical desires.” For of course all desires are artificial, in the standard social-constructivist sense that they belong to culture rather than nature, that they aim for something more than mere subsistence, and that they are irreducible to “reproductive strategies” or other forms of biological need. We should therefore say, together with Philip Pullman, that “nothing is natural any more, and nothing is artificial. It’s a false dichotomy, and we should forget about it.” In fact, when people denounce capitalism for instilling artificial needs or desires, what they are really objecting to is not artifice, so much as wastefulness. This sort of criticism ought to give us pause, however. For the drive to reduce or eliminate waste is itself intrinsic to capitalism, and only to capitalism. Only managers and neoclassical economists are obsessed with “efficiency.” As Bataille pointed out long ago, part of what makes capitalism unique is that it is the only socio-economic system in human history to regard waste as “shameful,” and the only one whose ruling class refuses the otherwise universal “obligation of functional expenditure.” Of course there is sumptuous waste in capitalism nonetheless: mostly in the form of what Veblen (with his own curious aversion to waste) called conspicuous consumption. But it seems misguided to reproach capitalism for wastefulness, as if the problem with it were the abundance that it provides, rather than the scarcity that it counter-produces in order to rein in and control this abundance.
The language of capitalism is the language of desire, and utopia, and salvation. And that is the secret of its success. The market always leaves us unsatisfied; but for this very reason it always gets us to come back for more. In the last analysis, there is no arguing against desire. Leftists won’t get very far by urging people to live within their means, or by telling them to settle for what they need instead of what they want. We should leave such exhortations to the Federal Reserve Bank. But also — and this is the most difficult part — we won’t get away from the logic of commodities and the market by appealing to utopian yearnings and hopes of redemption. For these longings are the very ones that motivate us to go shopping. They have been subsumed, all too successfully, within the circuits of consumption. The only way out is the way through. The only answer to capitalist desire’s constant cries of “more!” is to up the ante still further, as in Blake’s aphorism: “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.”
It is therefore only by embracing the logic of capitalist (and specifically, post-Fordist) aestheticism that we can hope to open a path ‘beyond’ it. The best guide in these matters is Andy Warhol, who wrote that “buying is much more American than thinking… Americans are not so interested in selling — in fact, they’d rather throw out than sell. What they really like to do is buy — people, money, countries.” The supply-side way of encouraging people to buy is beauty, style, or more precisely cool. When leftist critics denounce the market’s promotion of style over substance, when they deplore, as Stuart Ewen does, “the cycle of waste upon which the market is built,” they are missing the point that this wastefulness is not a bug, but a feature. It’s flexible accumulation’s answer to the dilemma of overproduction. Without it, the whole system would come tumbling down — and not in a way that would lead to a change for the better. We need to be wasteful, to throw things out, in order to clear room in our closets for new stuff. And we need to change our fashions, and upgrade our gadgets, as often as possible, in order (as Virginia Postrel puts it) to “reinvent ourselves, emphasizing and developing previously unknown or subordinate aspects of our personalities.” Far from creating scarcity by diverting resources, conspicuous waste is our only exemption from the ruthless reign of Malthusian scarcity, Darwinian struggle, and “the discipline of the market.” A visit to the mall puts beauty into our otherwise blighted lives.
The thing to remember is that, even when we strive to resist the commodity’s allure, and the ubiquitous domination of the marketplace, it is only in the terms set forth by the commodity itself that we can do so. We must say of the commodity what Derrida says of metaphysics: “We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” The Situationist strategy of radical negativity and absolute refusal is a self-congratulatory self-deception, or at best a show of empty bravado. Like it or not, the situation that we face today is the opposite of the one described by Audre Lord: for it is only with the master’s tools that we can possibly hope to dismantle the master’s house.
What can you say about a science fiction novel that begins with a first-person account of a 16-year-old girl masturbating with her gun? Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (in print in UK only, alas) counterposes a present-day story in which gangs of teenage girls fight gun battles in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall (called the “maul” in a New Jersey accent), with a far-future story in which sperm is a precious commodity because most males have been wiped out by the “Y-plagues” (genetically engineered designer diseases — originally manufactured, we are told, by men rather than women — that target the Y chromosome). The present-day story is crazed and exhilarating, as teen girl gangs — versed in the poetry of brand names above all else — trash the cosmetics counter at Lord and Taylor, lock hostages into the oven at California Pizza Kitchen, and hide weapons caches in the prom dress display at Laura Ashley. The future story is grimmer (or at least, less of a high). It involves a society where the routinization of the “society of the spectacle,” and the commodification of all aspects of existence, is correlated with a suppression of male aggression, so that the restoration of testosterone-fueled stupidity, oafishness, and gratuitous violence comes across as something that’s potentially liberating for both genders. Both plots are messy and turn back upon themselves: the riot-grrl rampage eventually metamorphoses into a surreal video game, while the future-world plot starts out as claustrophobically self-enclosed, but mutates as it spirals outward, eventually junking plot closure in favor of a logic of accelerating contamination and infection. In both cases, what happens on the level of narrative structure mimics what happens to the characters within the narrative: so the book explodes conventional gendered identities from both ends. I’m not quite sure where Maul leaves us, at the end of its wild ride, but the book is great both for its extremity, and for the way it deliberately, almost cruelly, chafes at the wounds of gender in our “post-feminist” and ultracommodified era.
What can you say about a science fiction novel that begins with a first-person account of a 16-year-old girl masturbating with her gun? Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (in print in UK only, alas) counterposes a present-day story in which gangs of teenage girls fight gun battles in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall (called the “maul” in a New Jersey accent), with a far-future story in which sperm is a precious commodity because most males have been wiped out by the “Y-plagues” (genetically engineered designer diseases — originally manufactured, we are told, by men rather than women — that target the Y chromosome). The present-day story is crazed and exhilarating, as teen girl gangs — versed in the poetry of brand names above all else — trash the cosmetics counter at Lord and Taylor, lock hostages into the oven at California Pizza Kitchen, and hide weapons caches in the prom dress display at Laura Ashley. The future story is grimmer (or at least, less of a high). It involves a society where the routinization of the “society of the spectacle,” and the commodification of all aspects of existence, is correlated with a suppression of male aggression, so that the restoration of testosterone-fueled stupidity, oafishness, and gratuitous violence comes across as something that’s potentially liberating for both genders. Both plots are messy and turn back upon themselves: the riot-grrl rampage eventually metamorphoses into a surreal video game, while the future-world plot starts out as claustrophobically self-enclosed, but mutates as it spirals outward, eventually junking plot closure in favor of a logic of accelerating contamination and infection. In both cases, what happens on the level of narrative structure mimics what happens to the characters within the narrative: so the book explodes conventional gendered identities from both ends. I’m not quite sure where Maul leaves us, at the end of its wild ride, but the book is great both for its extremity, and for the way it deliberately, almost cruelly, chafes at the wounds of gender in our “post-feminist” and ultracommodified era.
Commodities aren’t just objects in the world that we – detached, autonomous subjects – would apprehend from a distance. Rather, commodities, as animate beings, are somehow already inside us, molding us from within, present before we are there to respond to them. Parasites. Brands “provide their customers with little epiphanies – moments of recognition that put images, sounds, and feelings on barely perceptible desires” (Douglas Holt). This is not to say, crassly, that advertising “manipulates” us by creating “artificial” desires. It’s much subtler than that: it is only in the space of advertising and branding that I can recognize and express my desires in the first place. Saussure says that “psychologically our thought – apart from its expression in words – is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. . . Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” Whether or not this is true for language in general in relation to thought in general, it is true for commodities in relation to our desires. Inchoate, “barely perceptible” strivings only take form, only get articulated, when they are embodied in the “images, sounds, and feelings” provided by commodities, advertisements, and brands. Our commodified desires are indeed arbitrary, in precisely the way that Saussure says linguistic signs are arbitrary. But there is no natural, non-arbitrary, uncommodified desire, just as there is no “private language” (Wittgenstein), and just as there is no “state of nature” prior to human sociality.
Burroughs tells us that language is a virus. But he adds that, specifically, “it is the human virus“: the mutation that makes us what we are, the otherness that separates us from the apes. Language is not, as Steven Pinker would have it, an “instinct”; for, as a viral supplement to our genome, it makes us into beings who no longer act according to instinct. And much the same can be said about commodities. Today, consumerism – like language itself – is universal: not that it is intrinsic to human nature, but precisely because it is not. Not all cultures are consumerist ones, and not all economies are centered on commodities. But consumerism is a powerful vector of infection, and the commodity is a virus that quickly spreads wherever it is introduced. No culture, no economy, is immune to it. At best, Burroughs says, the human virus is a peaceful symbiont: we’ve had “many thousands of years of more or less benign coexistence” with it. But today it is “once again on the verge of malignant mutation.” The commodity form really started spreading in the eighteenth century, which for Burroughs was the last time when a utopian alternative was still possible. But in the last few decades it has raged across the world with renewed virulence, a “virgin soil epidemic” of incalculable consequences.
Consumerism has entirely overwritten the programming of the human soul. This means that it is both inessential to human nature, and inextricable from it. In other words, consumerism follows a Derridean logic (which isn’t all that far from a Burroughsian one). Derrida defines the supplement as being both extraneous and necessary. It is entirely superfluous, and yet it somehow plays a crucial role, by standing in for something that – in its turn – is supposed to be essential, but that is nonetheless missing. The supplement is merely a substitute, but it is one for which the original – the thing for which it substitutes – cannot be found. Derrida, commenting on Rousseau, cites writing (a substitute for the supposed full presence of speech) and masturbation (a substitute for the supposed full presence of sex with a partner) as examples of the supplement. For it turns out that even the most earnest and spontaneous speech is riddled with the same gaps and indirections and rhetorical slippages and ambiguities as writing; and even the most complete and satisfying sexual intimacy is less a perfect communion than it is the mere contiguity, in space and time, of two solipsistic orgasms.
Today, shopping at the mall follows the same supplemental pattern. It’s one of the most satisfying things that we do, and yet there is always something empty or fake about it. This is because shopping is ostensibly a utilitarian activity, whose purpose lies outside of itself: acquiring goods for subsequent consumption. And yet we enjoy the experience of shopping – of buying things, or even of looking at them without buying, checking them out, trying them on, moving from one possible purchase to the next – more than we do the act of actually consuming the goods we’ve bought. Everyone knows, as James Twitchell puts it, that “people buy so they can shop, not shop so they can buy,” and that “the purchase of goods may be incidental to the experience of shopping.” Once I’ve gotten the stuff home, its value is exhausted. Now that I have it, I no longer desire it. What excites me instead is the prospect of going shopping again. Andy Warhol had the right idea. At the end of each month, he’d pack all the stuff he had bought into a box, and ship the box to permanent storage in a warehouse in New Jersey, never to be opened again.
Commodities aren’t just objects in the world that we – detached, autonomous subjects – would apprehend from a distance. Rather, commodities, as animate beings, are somehow already inside us, molding us from within, present before we are there to respond to them. Parasites. Brands “provide their customers with little epiphanies – moments of recognition that put images, sounds, and feelings on barely perceptible desires” (Douglas Holt). This is not to say, crassly, that advertising “manipulates” us by creating “artificial” desires. It’s much subtler than that: it is only in the space of advertising and branding that I can recognize and express my desires in the first place. Saussure says that “psychologically our thought – apart from its expression in words – is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. . . Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” Whether or not this is true for language in general in relation to thought in general, it is true for commodities in relation to our desires. Inchoate, “barely perceptible” strivings only take form, only get articulated, when they are embodied in the “images, sounds, and feelings” provided by commodities, advertisements, and brands. Our commodified desires are indeed arbitrary, in precisely the way that Saussure says linguistic signs are arbitrary. But there is no natural, non-arbitrary, uncommodified desire, just as there is no “private language” (Wittgenstein), and just as there is no “state of nature” prior to human sociality.
Burroughs tells us that language is a virus. But he adds that, specifically, “it is the human virus“: the mutation that makes us what we are, the otherness that separates us from the apes. Language is not, as Steven Pinker would have it, an “instinct”; for, as a viral supplement to our genome, it makes us into beings who no longer act according to instinct. And much the same can be said about commodities. Today, consumerism – like language itself – is universal: not that it is intrinsic to human nature, but precisely because it is not. Not all cultures are consumerist ones, and not all economies are centered on commodities. But consumerism is a powerful vector of infection, and the commodity is a virus that quickly spreads wherever it is introduced. No culture, no economy, is immune to it. At best, Burroughs says, the human virus is a peaceful symbiont: we’ve had “many thousands of years of more or less benign coexistence” with it. But today it is “once again on the verge of malignant mutation.” The commodity form really started spreading in the eighteenth century, which for Burroughs was the last time when a utopian alternative was still possible. But in the last few decades it has raged across the world with renewed virulence, a “virgin soil epidemic” of incalculable consequences.
Consumerism has entirely overwritten the programming of the human soul. This means that it is both inessential to human nature, and inextricable from it. In other words, consumerism follows a Derridean logic (which isn’t all that far from a Burroughsian one). Derrida defines the supplement as being both extraneous and necessary. It is entirely superfluous, and yet it somehow plays a crucial role, by standing in for something that – in its turn – is supposed to be essential, but that is nonetheless missing. The supplement is merely a substitute, but it is one for which the original – the thing for which it substitutes – cannot be found. Derrida, commenting on Rousseau, cites writing (a substitute for the supposed full presence of speech) and masturbation (a substitute for the supposed full presence of sex with a partner) as examples of the supplement. For it turns out that even the most earnest and spontaneous speech is riddled with the same gaps and indirections and rhetorical slippages and ambiguities as writing; and even the most complete and satisfying sexual intimacy is less a perfect communion than it is the mere contiguity, in space and time, of two solipsistic orgasms.
Today, shopping at the mall follows the same supplemental pattern. It’s one of the most satisfying things that we do, and yet there is always something empty or fake about it. This is because shopping is ostensibly a utilitarian activity, whose purpose lies outside of itself: acquiring goods for subsequent consumption. And yet we enjoy the experience of shopping – of buying things, or even of looking at them without buying, checking them out, trying them on, moving from one possible purchase to the next – more than we do the act of actually consuming the goods we’ve bought. Everyone knows, as James Twitchell puts it, that “people buy so they can shop, not shop so they can buy,” and that “the purchase of goods may be incidental to the experience of shopping.” Once I’ve gotten the stuff home, its value is exhausted. Now that I have it, I no longer desire it. What excites me instead is the prospect of going shopping again. Andy Warhol had the right idea. At the end of each month, he’d pack all the stuff he had bought into a box, and ship the box to permanent storage in a warehouse in New Jersey, never to be opened again.
Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was a thinker quite famous in the 1960s, but who seems to be little spoken of today. The very thing that made him popular in his time — his optimistically apocalyptic view of a liberating, Dionysian revolution in Western culture — means that now he is thoroughly out of fashion; indeed, the changes of the last forty years or so have made his sort of approach and writing almost entirely unthinkable. But it is precisely because he is unthinkable and untimely, that Brown is worth another look today.
Brown’s first major book, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), offers a close reading of Freud and psychoanalysis as the vehicle for a radically revisionary look at the human condition. In the 1950s, Freudianism was at the height of its prestige and influence in the United States; but the “Freud” people read (by “people,” I mean the public at large, and the intellectuals, as well as the psychoanalytic community itself) was a very conservative and normative one, the upholder of patriarchy and heterosexuality, the advocate of the necessity of repression, the therapist of strengthening the ego, in order to hold “monsters from the id” at bay.
But Brown reads Freud entirely differently, and from the hindsight of today, much more richly and insightfully. For Brown, Freud is the discoverer of the richness and plenitude of the unconscious mind, and the critic of just how narrow and restricted our conscious, “civilized” experience is. (Brown makes almost the same sharp criticisms of “ego psychology” that Jacques Lacan – unbeknownst to him — was making in France at the same time; though Brown could not be more different from Lacan in most ways, the two of them share a rejection of normative and normalizing approaches to psychoanalysis, and a commitment to taking seriously the speculative and philosophical dimensions of Freud’s texts). Brown emphasizes the role of desire, as against cognition, in how we relate to others and find our place in the world; he insists on the centrality of the body, and the need to understand Freudian mechanisms like repression and sublimation, and introjection and projection, in corporeal terms; he takes seriously such uncomfortable Freudian notions as the castration complex, anality, and the death instinct.
Brown is revising Freud, and using him to change the world, not just reverentially interpreting him; but he makes clear where he is following Freud, and where he is criticizing him, or extrapolating from him, or going beyond him. Basically, Brown draws radical conclusions from Freud’s admonition that the difference between neurosis and mental “health” is at best a matter of degree, and that everything we see in the minds of neurotics is present universally, in everybody’s psyche. Freud is very close to saying we are all neurotic; and Brown insists on this conclusion. Pushing further with something that Freud only said tentatively, Brown extrapolates these results from the individual to society in general: we can psychoanalyze cultures just as we can individual people, and trace social history just as psychoanalysis traces individual histories. Doing this, Brown says, we are led to the conclusion that society itself is neurotic; that human history in general is the history of a mass neurosis; and that psychoanalysis will never “cure” individuals unless it can radically change the society whose neurotic structure mirrors the individual’s own.
For some Freudians, changing society would mean a bit more openness about sexuality, and more liberal toilet training practices for small children — both of which have in fact happened in the time between the 1950s and today. But Brown scorns such reforms as petty, and says they don’t get at the main issue. Brown sees the denial of the body, the reign of repression, and deformations of desire as major structuring principles for all of Western culture, perhaps for all of human culture. The problem goes back to the basic psychological development and organization that for Freud take place in early childhood: the displacement of the “pleasure principle” by the “reality principle,” and the genital organization of the psyche. 20th century sex radicals like D H Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich in fact left sexual repression intact, Brown says, because they maintained the primacy of the orgasm and of genital sexuality. Brown calls instead for a return to polymorphous perversity, the state in which the entire body is eroticized, rather than there being a specific, specialized sexual function.
More generally, Brown mounts a remarkable attack upon the very notion of sublimation, which for Freud and orthodox Freudians was the goal of psychoanalysis and the one potential way out from neurotic suffering. Freud defines sublimation as the turning of sexual and aggressive impulses toward “higher” and more socially useful goals (I redirect my compulsions, and take control of them to become an artist or a politician instead of a neurotic); but it’s notorious that Freud has a very difficult time explaining what sublimation really is, and just how it works. Brown seizes upon this difficulty to argue that sublimation is largely a bogus category, and that it is not a substitute for repression but a continuation of it by different means. The very idea of sublimation — moving from something “lower” to something “higher” — involves stunting the potentialities of the body, and setting up a hierarchy between mind and body, or even a total Cartesian separation of mind from body. For Brown, a radical desublimation is the only way to go: a return to the wisdom of the polymorphously perverse body, a rejection of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment; an acceptance of death as part of life, instead of our dread of death which ironically turns life itself into a living death.
My summary of Brown’s argument doesn’t do justice to its richness of detail and depth of conception; not to mention the powerful insights that crop up along the way, particularly with regard to Freud’s notion of anality, which Brown discusses in great detail in relation to Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther, and the “Protestant ethic” at the base of capitalism.Life Against Death is both broad and deep, and it is astonishingly original. It argues passionately for utopian, apocalyptic, and eschatological speculation, as our only hope for “solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble.” Brown doesn’t have the sardonic sense of the hopelessness of the human situation that his contemporary William Burroughs does; but even to my cynical eyes, Brown does something almost as valuable: he makes a radical alternative to The Way Things Are thinkable, entirely tough-mindedly, and without turning to the sappy, saccharine, and zombiefied visions of all too many utopians, New Agers, and champions of Human Potential.
I have less to say about Brown’s followup volume, Love’s Body (1966), because it strikes me as a much less powerful and interesting book. Brown here draws much more on ethnography and myth, in addition to psychoanalysis, and he strives for a fusion of the pagan/Dionysian with a radical Christian mysticism. (This latter is noteworthy, because it calls upon potentialities in Christianity that are far different either from the “liberal theology” of Brown’s day or from the heavy fundamentalism that is the main face of Christianity in America today. Brown’s emphasis on the joyousness of the Resurrection, on the “resurrection of the body,” is diametrically opposed to the sadomasochistic body hysteria/disgust of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ). Brown also moves from the formidably learned and argumentative discourse of Life Against Death to a more poetic, more willfully fragmentary style of writing. Love’s Body is short on any concrete discussion of how we might get from here to there, from civilized repression to redemption in the body of Dionysus/Christ, but it’s ferociously visionary in a way that stands as a reproach to more timid social, cultural, and religious theorists.
Brown published two subsequent books: Closing Time (1973), which I haven’t read, but which is apparently an arrangement of citations/fragments from Vico’s New Science and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; and a much later collection of essays, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992), where among other things he takes stock of the relations between his own thought and that of some of the European poststructuralists (Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri) whose work came later (or, in the case of Bataille, of whom he was simply unaware when he wrote Life Against Death and Love’s Body). It’s an interesting comparison; while Brown’s mysticism is in some ways very American (it certainly goes back to Emerson, among other sources), there are deep affinities there as well (an insistence on the libidinal nature of economics and politics, an interest in Spinoza, a critique of the metaphysics/negativity of Desire and its replacement with a more affirmative emphasis on multiple pleasures/potentialities of bodies).
All in all, I find Norman O. Brown an inspiring writer: inspiring because of the joyous activity and originality of his own thought, which can only encourage us, his readers, to be similarly daring and adventurous in thinking outside the prisonhouse of our reigning ideologies. However, in more specific terms I am not sure how useful he is; I mean by this that I don’t really see how his particular theories and insights can be “put to work” today (well, at least, not by me). Such is always the problem with utopian thought, or with thought this sweeping, foundational, and broad: when you’ve diagnosed the neurosis at the root of all of human history, you are unlikely to have particular suggestions for dealing with the particular hell we are living in today, the hell of unfettered global capitalism, and unfettered religious fundamentalism. But I shouldn’t be churlish. Brown understands, and teaches us, that critique by itself is sterile, and will do nothing unless accompanied by imagination, and practices of metamorphosis.
Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was a thinker quite famous in the 1960s, but who seems to be little spoken of today. The very thing that made him popular in his time — his optimistically apocalyptic view of a liberating, Dionysian revolution in Western culture — means that now he is thoroughly out of fashion; indeed, the changes of the last forty years or so have made his sort of approach and writing almost entirely unthinkable. But it is precisely because he is unthinkable and untimely, that Brown is worth another look today.
Brown’s first major book, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), offers a close reading of Freud and psychoanalysis as the vehicle for a radically revisionary look at the human condition. In the 1950s, Freudianism was at the height of its prestige and influence in the United States; but the “Freud” people read (by “people,” I mean the public at large, and the intellectuals, as well as the psychoanalytic community itself) was a very conservative and normative one, the upholder of patriarchy and heterosexuality, the advocate of the necessity of repression, the therapist of strengthening the ego, in order to hold “monsters from the id” at bay.
But Brown reads Freud entirely differently, and from the hindsight of today, much more richly and insightfully. For Brown, Freud is the discoverer of the richness and plenitude of the unconscious mind, and the critic of just how narrow and restricted our conscious, “civilized” experience is. (Brown makes almost the same sharp criticisms of “ego psychology” that Jacques Lacan – unbeknownst to him — was making in France at the same time; though Brown could not be more different from Lacan in most ways, the two of them share a rejection of normative and normalizing approaches to psychoanalysis, and a commitment to taking seriously the speculative and philosophical dimensions of Freud’s texts). Brown emphasizes the role of desire, as against cognition, in how we relate to others and find our place in the world; he insists on the centrality of the body, and the need to understand Freudian mechanisms like repression and sublimation, and introjection and projection, in corporeal terms; he takes seriously such uncomfortable Freudian notions as the castration complex, anality, and the death instinct.
Brown is revising Freud, and using him to change the world, not just reverentially interpreting him; but he makes clear where he is following Freud, and where he is criticizing him, or extrapolating from him, or going beyond him. Basically, Brown draws radical conclusions from Freud’s admonition that the difference between neurosis and mental “health” is at best a matter of degree, and that everything we see in the minds of neurotics is present universally, in everybody’s psyche. Freud is very close to saying we are all neurotic; and Brown insists on this conclusion. Pushing further with something that Freud only said tentatively, Brown extrapolates these results from the individual to society in general: we can psychoanalyze cultures just as we can individual people, and trace social history just as psychoanalysis traces individual histories. Doing this, Brown says, we are led to the conclusion that society itself is neurotic; that human history in general is the history of a mass neurosis; and that psychoanalysis will never “cure” individuals unless it can radically change the society whose neurotic structure mirrors the individual’s own.
For some Freudians, changing society would mean a bit more openness about sexuality, and more liberal toilet training practices for small children — both of which have in fact happened in the time between the 1950s and today. But Brown scorns such reforms as petty, and says they don’t get at the main issue. Brown sees the denial of the body, the reign of repression, and deformations of desire as major structuring principles for all of Western culture, perhaps for all of human culture. The problem goes back to the basic psychological development and organization that for Freud take place in early childhood: the displacement of the “pleasure principle” by the “reality principle,” and the genital organization of the psyche. 20th century sex radicals like D H Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich in fact left sexual repression intact, Brown says, because they maintained the primacy of the orgasm and of genital sexuality. Brown calls instead for a return to polymorphous perversity, the state in which the entire body is eroticized, rather than there being a specific, specialized sexual function.
More generally, Brown mounts a remarkable attack upon the very notion of sublimation, which for Freud and orthodox Freudians was the goal of psychoanalysis and the one potential way out from neurotic suffering. Freud defines sublimation as the turning of sexual and aggressive impulses toward “higher” and more socially useful goals (I redirect my compulsions, and take control of them to become an artist or a politician instead of a neurotic); but it’s notorious that Freud has a very difficult time explaining what sublimation really is, and just how it works. Brown seizes upon this difficulty to argue that sublimation is largely a bogus category, and that it is not a substitute for repression but a continuation of it by different means. The very idea of sublimation — moving from something “lower” to something “higher” — involves stunting the potentialities of the body, and setting up a hierarchy between mind and body, or even a total Cartesian separation of mind from body. For Brown, a radical desublimation is the only way to go: a return to the wisdom of the polymorphously perverse body, a rejection of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment; an acceptance of death as part of life, instead of our dread of death which ironically turns life itself into a living death.
My summary of Brown’s argument doesn’t do justice to its richness of detail and depth of conception; not to mention the powerful insights that crop up along the way, particularly with regard to Freud’s notion of anality, which Brown discusses in great detail in relation to Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther, and the “Protestant ethic” at the base of capitalism.Life Against Death is both broad and deep, and it is astonishingly original. It argues passionately for utopian, apocalyptic, and eschatological speculation, as our only hope for “solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble.” Brown doesn’t have the sardonic sense of the hopelessness of the human situation that his contemporary William Burroughs does; but even to my cynical eyes, Brown does something almost as valuable: he makes a radical alternative to The Way Things Are thinkable, entirely tough-mindedly, and without turning to the sappy, saccharine, and zombiefied visions of all too many utopians, New Agers, and champions of Human Potential.
I have less to say about Brown’s followup volume, Love’s Body (1966), because it strikes me as a much less powerful and interesting book. Brown here draws much more on ethnography and myth, in addition to psychoanalysis, and he strives for a fusion of the pagan/Dionysian with a radical Christian mysticism. (This latter is noteworthy, because it calls upon potentialities in Christianity that are far different either from the “liberal theology” of Brown’s day or from the heavy fundamentalism that is the main face of Christianity in America today. Brown’s emphasis on the joyousness of the Resurrection, on the “resurrection of the body,” is diametrically opposed to the sadomasochistic body hysteria/disgust of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ). Brown also moves from the formidably learned and argumentative discourse of Life Against Death to a more poetic, more willfully fragmentary style of writing. Love’s Body is short on any concrete discussion of how we might get from here to there, from civilized repression to redemption in the body of Dionysus/Christ, but it’s ferociously visionary in a way that stands as a reproach to more timid social, cultural, and religious theorists.
Brown published two subsequent books: Closing Time (1973), which I haven’t read, but which is apparently an arrangement of citations/fragments from Vico’s New Science and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; and a much later collection of essays, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992), where among other things he takes stock of the relations between his own thought and that of some of the European poststructuralists (Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Negri) whose work came later (or, in the case of Bataille, of whom he was simply unaware when he wrote Life Against Death and Love’s Body). It’s an interesting comparison; while Brown’s mysticism is in some ways very American (it certainly goes back to Emerson, among other sources), there are deep affinities there as well (an insistence on the libidinal nature of economics and politics, an interest in Spinoza, a critique of the metaphysics/negativity of Desire and its replacement with a more affirmative emphasis on multiple pleasures/potentialities of bodies).
All in all, I find Norman O. Brown an inspiring writer: inspiring because of the joyous activity and originality of his own thought, which can only encourage us, his readers, to be similarly daring and adventurous in thinking outside the prisonhouse of our reigning ideologies. However, in more specific terms I am not sure how useful he is; I mean by this that I don’t really see how his particular theories and insights can be “put to work” today (well, at least, not by me). Such is always the problem with utopian thought, or with thought this sweeping, foundational, and broad: when you’ve diagnosed the neurosis at the root of all of human history, you are unlikely to have particular suggestions for dealing with the particular hell we are living in today, the hell of unfettered global capitalism, and unfettered religious fundamentalism. But I shouldn’t be churlish. Brown understands, and teaches us, that critique by itself is sterile, and will do nothing unless accompanied by imagination, and practices of metamorphosis.
