Fly Away Home: Anthony Toth’s Pan Am Glam

October 29, 2009 — Ylajali Hansen

Pilot, back, I need my squadron
I was flying before D-Day
Now I’m warning you of falling
I’ll tell you when you’re going down.

– Gary Numan, “The Aircrash Bureau”

The Hindu epic the Ramayana includes among its many wonders the “pushpaka vimana,” a splendidly ornamented and plush flying machine — the pimped-out ride of the devas, you might say. The invention of Viswakarman, architect of the cosmos, the pushpaka vimana becomes the coveted object of the treacherous Ravana, also known as Dasagriva (“The Ten-Headed”).

And who could blame Ravana? The stately appointments and nimble performance of a craft like the pushpaka vimana are enough to turn anyone’ head (indeed, even all ten of them at the same time). “The fabled vimana had pillars of gold,” the Ramayana reads:

its arched doorway was made of vaidurya [either diamonds, emeralds or lapis lazuli] and padmaraga [rubies]. Nests of pearls covered its dome, and inside were trees of the most pristine strains, which bore ambrosial fruits in every season. The ship of the sky assumed any form its master chose, and it flew anywhere in the three worlds at his very wish.

The original (100 series) Boeing 747 passenger jumbo jet was a glorious machine in its own right, a contemporary approximation of the pushpaka vimana of ancient Hindu myth. What it lacked in deluxe features — it certainly had many, but nothing like pillars of gold, doorways encrusted with precious jewels or an orchard of succulently fruited trees — it made up for in sheer size. Among the world’s most recognizable aircraft, its body reached over 231 feet, and its tail alone dwarfed a five-story walk-up in Brooklyn. The total wing area was larger than a basketball court. When pressurized, it carried a ton of air. 3,400 pieces of baggage could fit snugly in the cargo hold located below 452 passengers sipping vodka martinis, happily masticating Salisbury steak and calmly leafing through the in-flight magazine. And the entire global navigation system weighed less than a modern laptop computer.

My first time on a 747 was simultaneously a terrifying and wonderful event. It was a Lufthansa flight from New York to Frankfurt, and I was all of three years old. I can only remember that they served steamed peas to all the children on the flight and that sometime between the in-flight movie and the last twenty minutes before landing I got lost. My parents, distracted by one too many free bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream, neglected to notice that I had left my seat and wandered into first class, where I encountered a gouty older man who, because he resembled Santa Claus, seemed like he might know where my parents were located. I asked, interrupting his meal of chicken or fish (I couldn’t tell which), only to have him tell me that, in fact, he didn’t know where my parents were, or even who they were.

It was at that precise moment that I was struck by the sheer immensity of the machine in which I was hurtling through space. It seemed quite conceivable that I’d never see my parents again. I felt like Pip, the young ship’s steward of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, who upon falling into the great, blue sea is driven mad by its seemingly infinite expanse. Tears welled up in my eyes, threatening to spill onto my cheeks, but the timely intercession of a friendly flight attendant in a smartly tailored blue uniform spared me the embarassment of a lost-child’s scene-making. The attendant herded me back to coach and into the arms of my by then drunkenly ebullient mother.

A glorious machine indeed, that luxury liner of the sky that goes by three simple numbers. So glorious, in fact, that one Anthony Toth decided to recreate the 747-100’s first-class cabin in his garage. According to an article appearing in the October 26, 2009 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Toth “has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, California. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found on board: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.” Mr. Toth’s visitors, who call frequently to enjoy all the perks of high-class travel without the … er … travel, can enjoy “beverages from the long-defunct airline’s glasses, served with Pan Am logo swizzle sticks and napkins, plus salted almonds sealed in Pan Am wrappers. They can even peel open a set of plastic-wrapped, vintage Pan Am headphones and listen to original in-flight audio recordings from the era, piped in through the armrests.”

Mr. Toth, who is a global sales director for United Airlines, has spent more than twenty years on his unique project, traveling the world to find Pan Am memorabilia in such places as airplane graveyards in the Mojave desert and scrapyards in Bangkok. Though his accomplishment is certainly astonishing, approaching that of the great architect Viswakarman’s own, it does upon further reflection disturb me a bit.

What is disturbing is not so much the almost Aspergers-like obsession with which he collected, since his was a child, every bit of Pan Am detritus cast off over the last thirty years, but the fact that his obsession has recreated a minute feature of our recent past which in light of recent economic and social developments seems so totally bygone as to be almost unrecognizable. When Pan Am started, the WSJ article reports, it “became the first U.S. airline to fly internationally, and in the 1970s, the first to fly Boeing 747 jumbo jets. Pan Am was once synonymous with international jet-setting, with upper-deck dining rooms and flight attendants decked out in crisp blue uniforms, high heels and white gloves. First-class travelers were served out of silver-plated martini pitchers. A parade of linen-covered food carts made its way down the aisle at dinnertime.”

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Friendly skies: a fetish for first-class air travel in the 70s.

In his nostalgic compulsion to simulate first-class airline travel during a particular decade, Mr. Toth bears a striking resemblance to another collector who preceded him by a century — the archivist and critic Eduard Fuchs, whom German theorist Walter Benjamin immortalizes in an essay (JSTOR) bearing his name. Much like Fuchs, Mr. Toth stands as an example of the collector as “historical materialist,” which Benjamin characterizes thusly:

The historical materialist must abandon the epic element in history. For him history becomes the object of a construct (Konstruktion) which is not located in empty time but is constituted in a specific epoch, in a specific life, in a specific work. The historical materialist explodes the epoch out of its reified “historical continuity,” and thereby lifts life out of this epoch, and the work out of the life work. Yet this construct results in simultaneous preservation and suspension (Aufhebung) of the life work in the work, of the epoch in the life work and of the course of history in the epoch.

Pan Am’s financial woes started in the seventies with the advent of skyrocketing fuel costs, and the 1989 bombing above Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, delivered the knockout punch, bringing about the end of the airline’s “specific epoch.” But the demise of Pan Am was not simply a matter of a series of unfortunate events. Rather, its demise coincided with certain economic and social shifts that made it impossible, had the airline survived, to continue on with its white-gloved flight attendants and silver-plated martini pitchers. Certainly some of these changes were good: The price of airline tickets went down after deregulation and the introduction of cut-throat competition between the airlines. But the business of flying suddenly became quite antagonistic, with airline employees grown surly because of ill-treatment by their once-grand employers and disheveled passengers packed into smelly, ill-maintained machines that more resembled flying buses than the proud, gas-guzzling behemoths of yore. With the introduction of a type of dirty, market-friendly democracy came a sort of acedia, a wan techno-nihilismin with which airline executives content themselves as they watch their industry fall to pieces. Those linen-covered food carts may have been reserved for the elite, but they also belonged to a world that was still forward-looking.

It seems now, in our post-9-11, post-regulation world, in which an ebbing social surplus has been diverted straight into Wall-Street coffers, that we’ll never see those days of sexy progress again. The most we can hope for when we travel is that some TSA agent doesn’t ask us to partially disrobe, or to throw away our favorite pomade because, to them, its some potentially dangerous liquid, or ask us to unpack our dirty underwear in front of strangers. We hope that our flight is no more than two hours late (because we accept that it will be two hours late) and that no one on the preceding flight has urinated in our assigned seat. We hope that plastic composite fuselages really are safer than aluminum and that a bankrupt airline will nonetheless attend to every loose rivet.

But as long as we can fly from San Diego to Denver for under $200.00, everything’s right with the world, isn’t it? Even if we have to charge that $200.00 at 29.9 percent interest.

Around Mr. Toth’s hobby one senses an air of melancholy. His garage he has transformed into a cenotaph to a technological optimism whose final death throe came when the Concorde was decommissioned in 2003 (futuristic supersonic flight is now a thing of the past). Perhaps Mr. Toth, an employee of United Airlines, chose to render immortal the glittering past of a defunct competitor because that competitor died an innocent’s death of virginal purity, never having sullied itself in the trenches of the fare wars. No, Pan Am’s eopch is one of crystalline integrity and specificity, like a beautiful insect trapped in amber, into which the materialist historian Anthony Toth seeks to breathe life into once more — at least until his condo is foreclosed on.

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Imagined Communities: Rebecca Solnit’s Disaster Paradises

October 28, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

If I can claim to have had a political education, it certainly wasn’t of a systematic sort. This is not to say, however, that it was haphazard or inconsistent. Rather, politics in my family was kind of like an heirloom soup tureen that sits on a cabinet shelf  — unassumingly present, and ready to be taken out when the occasion called for it.

My parents were of the kind of progressives seldom seen these days — more yippie than hippie, more punch than crunch. The typical issues concerned them. They protested the Vietnam War and the panoply of social injustices, and didn’t trouble themselves too much with turning on, tuning in or dropping out. (My mother somehow managed to make it through the sixties without ever sampling pot. She truly didn’t inhale. Ever.) To this day my father prides himself on the fact that he first registered to vote with the Socialist Workers’ party. And, though he’s no one’s Bolshevik these days, he does preserve a bit of the old radical, albeit in a more subdued form. A muted Red, you might say.

My parents’ campus radicalism was curtailed by the arrival of a new member of the household in the person of yours truly. Parental responsibilities began to take precedent over political action. Day care trumped sit-ins; pediatricians stole the limelight from political activists. But such heady ferment was subsiding for the nation generally. I was born just as the sun was setting on acid rock but hadn’t quite risen on stadium rock — before Jefferson Airplane had fully transitioned to Jefferson Starship, you might say. And, as we all know, it wasn’t until 1984 that, after the prolonged midnight of the Ford and Carter years, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that it was indeed “morning in America” once again.

Morning always deals most cruelly with those who stay up late partying the night before, wishing away the dawn. For his part, my father still gets his political dander up at the very mention of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, my father was convinced, managed to ruin the United States by one deft and devastatingly effective rhetorical trick — getting the electorate, or at least a statistical majority of it, to believe that government was a Leviathan of the most antagonistic sort, interdicting individual citizens’ entreprenerial  impules and aborting prosperity.

There might be a note of rueful envy in my father’s pronouncement, a sort of grudging admiration for the Goldwaterian revolution Reagan managed to cement. After all, Reagan heralded from a minority, ultra-right faction of the Republican party, one which abode but uneasily the industrialist–patrician demesne the party had for so long been. Reagan’s ascendancy couldn’t help but awe radicals on the other end of the spectrum, being as it was an manifestation of their own political aspirations reflected in a glass darkly, one which took less than twenty years to realize.

Of course, Reagan and his cohorts commandeered the ship of state only with the intention of running it aground and dismantling it for scrap. And this is what galled my father particularly. If my political education, such as it was, had any sort of cornerstone principle, it’s that, as my father maintained time and again, government can serves as a bulwark against the predations of unfettered capitalism, if not as a mechanism of positive change. This conviction of course implies that government as an institution is in itself indifferent (were it a character in Dungeons & Dragons, its alignment would perhaps be “neutral good”), but in the hands of people of good will or ill becomes an instrument of that will.

Such a notion, I discovered later in life, was utterly demolished by the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault. His bald pate rose serenely above the froth of such fatuous political notions and stilled it. The very idea of government is an expression of power, and irremediably so, because power remains for Foucault immutably a priori. History properly recounted is, then, simply a matter of who’s exercising power and who’s having it exercised on them — or, to borrow one of Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek’s favorite jokes, which he himself lifts from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film To Be or Not to Be, a matter of who’s doing the concentrating and who’s doing the camping. On the world stage, actors and roles might change, but the mis en scène endures unaltered.

The white-hot fervor of soixant-huitard radicalism Foucault plunged into the icy bath of his analysis, and in so doing precipitated a second stage in my political development, a shift or Kehre from a rather orthodox Marxist stance to one perhaps best described as a sort of left libertarianism. My father brought me to an awareness of the state, and Foucault taught me to distrust it. And frankly, Marxists’ reliance on the state is a little too … well … total for me. One of the most brilliant (and cantankerous) Leftist critics of Marx, anarchist Murray Bookchin, puts the deficiencies of Marxian socialism best:

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappear with “democratic centralism,” a “revolutionary leadership,” a “worker’s state,” and a “planned economy.” On the contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation function all the more effectively if centralism appears to be “democratic,” if leaders appear to be “revolutionaries,” if the state appears to belong to the “workers,” and if commodity production appears to be “planned.” Insofar as the socialist project fails to note the very existence of these elements, much less their vicious role, the “revolution” itself becomes a façade for counterrevolution. Marx’s vision notwithstanding, what tends to “wither away” after this kind of “revolution” is not the state but the very consciousness of domination.

Structures of domination remain such regardless of whether Peter’s running the show, or Paul. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

But what’s one to choose as an alternative? Bookchin naturally prescribes anarchism, but anarchism can seem an unpalatable option, conjuring as it does images of gutter punks and political assassins. Moreover, to choose anarchism is to condemn oneself to an eternal recurrence of defiant yet ultimately ineffectual gestures — smashing Starbucks’ storefront windows, U-locking one’s neck to sequoias, or what have you. Or so I used to think. This recent piece by Bill McKibben (gated), author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, has led me to reevaluate my somewhat noncommittal affinity (if this isn’t an oxymoron) for anarchism.

Appearing in the November 5, 2009  issue of The New York Review of Books, McKibben’s piece reviews journalist Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, which, as the title suggests, chronicles those moments when a cataclysmic event such as a fire or earthquake shakes the citizenry from its dogmatic slumber and forces them into novel way of relating. As McKibben puts it:

[Solnit] doesn’t long for disasters — they are, she writes, “most basically terrible, tragic, grievous.” But they are not just that. As she proves with inspired historiography, disasters often produce remarkable temporary communities—paradises of a sort amid the rubble, where people, acting on their own and without direction from the authorities, manage to provide for each other.

People’s responses to emergencies, Solnit insists, are quite unlike their popular representations in film and television. Seldom in such situations does one encounter mindless panic or a Hobbesian war of each against each, but, rather, quite the opposite. People take initiative, often revealing talents or virtues perhaps they themselves didn’t even know they had. Certainly such situations have their opportunists, profiteers and other scoundrels. More often than not, however, individuals taken to be villains under ordinary circumstances show themselves as heroes in extraordinary. McKibben relates Solnit’s account of financial executives, paragons of selfishness and class enemies if there ever were any, calmly handing strangers into stairwells as jet fuel burned just stories above or below them. (The disaster in question was, of course, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City.)

Calamity amity: disasters engender unlikely utopias.

Solnit’s thesis is that it’s safer to bank on people’s keeping it together in extreme circumstances than on their coming unglued — unless the people in question happen to be the power elite, that is. McKibben makes a special point of highlighting Solnit’s revelation that no disaster is quite so devastating as it is for the great and the good. The spontaneous cooperation which arises in emergency situations presents a direct challenge to their power, serving as a sort of object lesson of the latter’s superfluity. “Governments and their ancillary institutions like the Red Cross are well equipped to handle small disasters, and can be effective in larger ones too — the Asian tsunami of 2004 was one example, and Solnit describes Icelanders evacuating volcano-threatened villages, and the much-larger-scale example of Cuba, which has weathered an endless string of hurricanes (Katrina included) with minimal loss of life because of well-conducted evacuations,” McKibben writes:

But in many cases, the powerful do seem to come slightly unhinged. The existing order is “being tested at what it does least well,” while community groups are suddenly emerging to fill the vacuum. This leads to what a number of sociologists have called “elite panic,” which Solnit compares to the fear of Chinese emperors that they would lose the “mandate of heaven.” Think of the scorn with which the victims of Katrina greeted President Bush when he finally made his way to New Orleans. Think of the way his approval ratings slumped, never to recover. It is no accident that governments usually describe what they are doing in the wake of disasters as “reestablishing order.”

The order in need of reestablishing after disasters, it goes without saying, is the elites’ order, one replete with manifold modes of domination. But in the interim, before such order is reestablished, workaday folks glimpse the power that resides in them alone, one which the dominant culture typically short-circuits with its constant exhortations to earn and spend. It’s as if principles of anarchism — not theoretical anarchism, but a practical, functioning sort — are inscribed in the human genome. Indeed, if there’s anything to regret about disasters, its that the remarkable communities (Solnit goes so far as to call them “utopian”) which spring up during them are all too quickly folded back into the status quo. Yet, short-lived as these communities are, they endure long enough to make me believe that there’s something behind the stenciled graffiti I so often see emblazoned on walls, park benches and sidewalks: Another world is possible.

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An Ever-Living Fire: All Things Change Until Nothing Remains

October 27, 2009 — Henry Brulard

It is always vindicating to hear the flush and to watch the old, the moribund, the bloated, sink and spin away forever into the dark, distant sewer of history. But sometimes it is worthwhile to look up and notice just who or what is holding down the handle. Or at least that used to be the case. At one time historical events seemed to have causes, whether in the form of great men like Napoleon, Stalin, or Reagan, or as well-defined forces such as class conflict, imperialistic urges, or unfettered greed.

But now it often seems as if the handle is simply flushing itself, over and over again.

If American banks, universities and newspapers are failing, it is merely the result of an ill defined “progress,” a force out of our, or anybody’s, control. For now, at least, we seem to require the continued existence of the banks and universities, but the newspaper, a nuisance that once left our fingers smeared with disgusting black ink, is a different story altogether. Though the failures of particular large-circulation newspapers have often been the avoidable result of poor management decisions, the institution as a whole seems to be doomed.

Earlier this year Clay Shirky, NYU Professor and Futurist (though not F. T. Marinetti’s sort) explained why (more recently, Shirky has reaffirmed his views of the newspaper’s inevitable fate) that was so: complacent in its monopolistic excess, the newspapers find themselves unable to mount any defense to the drastic deleveraging of information made possible by humming hordes of air-cooled server banks. And so, the general, large circulation newspaper, formerly a civic institution, has been doomed by an outdated economic model and become a modern impossibility. As Shirky has it, not only is the newspaper’s fate foretold, but we should not even try to save it:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

So this is what real revolutions are like. Of course, unlike the protestant reformation or other past revolutions, the never-ending information revolution does not involve an ideological or social struggle, but the important project of liberating information from its chains. Change comes, and it will continue to come. Shirky seems to have forgotten the omelet from Lenin’s old adage: it is enough now to simply break some eggs.

Just poo-poo it: technophobes foul fair future prospects.

For Shirky, the only possible response to change is a certain amount of damage control. We should round up the innocent and shepherd them out of the building, so that we may better enjoy our view of the inferno. Never mind who started the fire, or whether it can or should be stopped. Those who question change are motivated either by fear, naivete, or, even worse, self-interest. They are the real villains.

Nicholas Carr, perplexed by Shirky’s bizarre history lesson, and his refusal to predict what would succeed the newspaper presented a thoughtful analysis of what he termed Shirky’s “accidentalism” earlier this month:

Accidentalism is a theory of convenience. It is, it seems to me, a fantasy version of history conjured up to support a popular and largely faith-based ideology, an ideology built on the belief that our new digital media landscape represents a great human advance over all that’s come before. Accidentalism provides an easy way to denigrate and dismiss the past: Oh, our poor, benighted forebears: they never even realized that all they held dear was merely accidental. “Accident,” I hardly need point out, is a word with negative connotations. Those to whom accidents happen are victims. Every time we pick up a printed book or newspaper, the Accidentalists imply, we turn ourselves into victims of technological accidents.

Accidentalism, in other words. provides the perfect backdrop for the liberation mythology promoted by many of the web’s most ardent proponents, which is built on the idea that old technology put us in chains and new technology is breaking those chains. In order to underscore (and place beyond debate) the societal and personal benefits of the web, they feel compelled to paint a weirdly dark caricature of the past, portraying those human beings who had the misfortune to live before, say, 1990 as passive and enervated, victims of an (accidental!) media complex that circumscribed and diminished their lives and thoughts. One need not be a fan of old-school mass media to see that this picture is a clumsily rendered fake.

Carr’s analysis seems to be on the money. Accidentalism as posited by Shirky seems to be little more than an alibi for a destructive deference to progress and technology. If all past technologies have been an accident, there is little or nothing that we can do to shape the future. The future itself begins to seem like a car accident that we will witness during tomorrow’s commute. Our job in such circumstances is not to attempt to understand it or try to change it, but to, as the saying goes, “deal.” Now that the former revolutions which held the promise of some greater good have given way to a state of permanent revolution for its own sake, we must “deal” with that too.

I would give Carr’s critique a broader scope. There is nothing new or revolutionary in Shirky’s view of history as calamity and accident. Indeed, George Orwell noted a similar strain of thought sixty years ago:

There is a theory which has not yet been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last. One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret police forces and so forth, because these are the price that has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even imperceptible. If you object to dictatorship you are a reactionary, but if you expect dictatorship to produce good results you are a sentimentalist.

In Orwell’s day, Progress came with the promise of liberation and revelation. Whether it was secular or divine, history seemed to have a purpose. The catastrophic gradualists of Orwell’s day — Orwell was critiquing an essay by Arthur Koestler — claimed that the hardship and disaster of Stalin’s purges and the atom bomb were merely unavoidable stops on the way to a better future.

We have since demystified history, carefully taking if from the hands of god or the proletariat to rest it safely in the bosom of religio-scientific “market forces.” But in the process history began to seem not more rational, but less so. The old teleological history that had as its perceived goal redemption or liberation, is replaced by a version of history that allows only for more of the same. The market is somehow larger and more mysterious than God, the Proletariat, or even progress. And what are we, or any individual, compared to the market? Subsumed into it universal and all-encompassing will, we are merely data points. Occasionally, through stock ownership or consumer purchases, we get to take part in its mysteries, but never too great a part.

The catastrophe that Shirky is defending is nothing so terrible or bloody as Stalinist purges or the growth of nuclear arsenals. But Shirky has also abandoned any prospect of good coming from this change. Though we never know quite why, we must struggle always forward. Shirky can no more look over the wings of the angel of history than you or I or the president can. And so the new form of prophecy can tell us nothing more than what Heraclitus already knew 2,500 years ago:

This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be — an ever living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. (Fragment 29)

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Dialectics at a Standstill: The Pioneer Cult of the Left

October 26, 2009 — Rob Horning

Consumer culture sucks. What do we do about it? There we confront a problem, as it often seems as though “late capitalism” is ingeniously constructed to transform any action we may want to take into a consumer choice, thus reinforcing the system we may have set out to undermine.

Since we have been raised within consumerism, we are susceptible to interpreting our gestures from within it, from the perspective that suits its continued vitality, that assures its reproduction. We are indoctrinated by it, down to the level of how we ascribe the motives behind our actions to ourselves, and how we define values like “freedom.”

In fact, the dynamism of capitalism is assured by the way it generates discontent (social, personal, industrial, technological) that it can recapture as innovation. When we grow to dislike the vulgarized lives afforded to us by consumerism, we can contrive solutions based only on consumerist premises — better choices, more convenience, more “diversity,” better and more comprehensive markets, stronger personal brands, more-thorough demographic data.

Is this a doom unique to those living in consumer societies, or does it derive from the philosophical underpinnings of the analysis sketched out above? A dour fatalism seems inescapable when you begin with the materialist view of consciousness — the idea that, as Karl Marx famously put it in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

This view is haunted by hermeticism. Its logic suggests a sealed system, perfectly reproducing its own necessary conditions, requiring an outside shock (a “rupture,” an “event”) to disrupt it, just as it requires an implausible series of meteor strikes to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. (One of Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent ideas is that in Western pop culture, it is easier for audiences to accept a world-destroying disaster than to begin to conceptualize a way of life that could replace consumer capitalism.) If you accept that consciousness is shaped, and to some extent determined and circumscribed, by the socioeconomic gestalt, then who can come up with the strategies for breaking that totality? Who can stand outside of their own determined consciousness to assure the purity of their own motives and the rectitude of their analysis? We may be conditioned to view our problems in ways that preclude them from being remedied — much as we remain perpetually dissatisfied once we believe in advertising’s promises of complete fulfillment.

Another way of putting it is that our sense of what is possible is strongly shaped by cultural  traditions. In her defense of “cultural libertarianism” in this Reason essay, Kerry Howley discusses the obstacles to the changes capitalism is wreaking in China:

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

Capitalism has always proved very effective at revealing doors where walls were thought to be in hierarchical agricultural societies, as China’s current transformation suggests. But what ideology can reveal the doors in the fortress of consumer capitalism. Or if you prefer, the prison-house of language with which it has become synonymous, as consumerism has become a matter of branded identity mongering.

: capitalism finds doors in any wall

Powerless to resist: capitalism finds doors in any wall.

The fantasy, popular among the Soviet Communists and the Stalinist left of yore, of establishing Marxism as a science with “iron laws” was in part a hopeful effort  to resolve this epistemological conundrum and make the scurrilous subjectivity of any particular Marxist irrelevant. Their ambitions, their frailties, whether their dialectics can break bricks — these things do not affect the immutable social laws of class struggle. But it’s sufficient to consider Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy more closely to see the problems inherent in that.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

This base–superstructure model has been subjected to a fair amount of criticism: it’s an unstable dichotomy; it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins; base and superstructure have a mutual influence on each other, so the base can’t be regarded as the “real” final determinant. The concept of identity laid out here is also slippery.We have a particular “form” of “social consciousness” that arises out of the relations we “inevitably” find ourselves enmeshed in, even before we we discover our will. But these forms derive from the superstructure as opposed to the base, and the superstructure may be buffeted by various ideological crosswinds, which Marx enumerates a few sentences later. The forms of social consciousness, then, seem far less “definite” than the base from which they ultimately derive. They are relational, in process, even as the base is static, since the base allows for a complex interplay of social relations within its fixed system.

Marx continues:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

Here we see the call for a disruptive technological force from outside the system which “sooner or later” — who can tell when? — will change the means of production and “the whole immense superstructure.” Thereby it will change fundamentally the subjects fashioned within it, breeding a special kind of implacable discontent. Those blessed with this new subjectivity will then commence the “social revolution.” But Marx himself recognized how difficult identifying the change would be; his gesture toward the clarifying power of “natural science” in the following passage is nullified by his catalog of the various sources of ideological obfuscation.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

We don’t see the transformation change directly, nor do we experience it emotionally — what we register are ideological tremors, easily subject to being rationalized away or even turned to the status quo’s account. Reactionary behavior and retrenchment are born alongside revolutionary consciousness, and we can’t tell from within the conflict which it is that animates us. We don’t know which flag we are fighting under.

Marx, taking a transcendental view here, didn’t worry about the psychology of the actors in the revolutionary drama. It didn’t matter what they thought was happening; destiny in the end would unfold, and their behavior would be interpreted after the fact. Whatever they happened to think they were doing at the time won’t signify.

Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

So we simply wait for the productive forces correlated to the old order to exhaust themselves as material conditions go on maturing. But this sort of fatalism has always been deeply unsatisfying to those who are able to see the injustices in the existing system and are inflamed with the desire to change things. If we “increase the contradictions” between the old ways and the new, can we accelerate the old social order’s destruction? More important, though, how are we to know whether the “injustices” we are seeing belong to the new order or the old one? Marx tended to assume history was synonymous with moral progress, but that was always a Hegelian leap of faith. “Heroic capitalism” was succeeded first by fascism and then by our current neoliberal order.

Gramsci attempted to solve the false-flag problem by positing a class of organic intellectuals who would be animated not by the hegemonic ideology of the status quo but by an oppositional, emergent ideology of the new righteous order to come. The Soviets attempted to fashion this “pioneer cult” through straightforward indoctrination in the primary-education system, a cultural revolution from above. Hence, the Octoberists, a mandatory youth group for all nine-year-old Soviet children. Their song is still pretty inspiring:

We are active kids — we are Octo­brists! You, Octo­ber, don’t for­get -  com­mu­nism is there yet.
We are coura­geous  kids — we are Octo­brists! We are liv­ing our life like our heroes — full of light!
We are dili­gent  kids — we are Octo­brists! Only those who like to work get suc­cess­ful in this world.
We are truth­ful  kids — we are Octo­brists! Never shall betray a friend — that’s the point we defend.
We are happy  kids — we are Octo­brists! Our songs, our laughs and dances are to share in equal stances.

But the spontaneous emergence of theoretically orchestrated organic intellectuals is no less problematic. How organic are they, really? Any self-awareness of their importance would seem to nullify them — prompt their coöptation — yet without self-knowledge, they can’t possibly coordinate social action. They remain the passive minions of historical forces, calibrating the foreordained passing of the old ways for the new.

O, pioneers:

O pioneers!: Soviet youths schooled in revolution.

And what of their fellow travelers? Could their attempts to recognize their own culpability for the status quo itself be ideological, a misrecognition useful in marginalizing and neutralizing them, so that they are still perversely protecting the existing order? Preventing the formation of organic working-class intellectuals tends to be the unwitting job of other would-be intellectuals attached to protecting their status. The public conception of the intellectual that they generate (and this seems to be the main function of their intellectual work, such as it is — generating an identity as intellectual) serves to discourage others from the path — that is, from the notion that engaging society on the level of ideas isn’t a sham. Intellectualism appears in society as sterile and cliquish, inherently impractical.

Put in contemporary terms, intellectuals become dilettantish “hipsters” or single-subject “geeks,” neither of which offer a constructive engagement with the social order, a position from which to resist, let alone revolt. Old forms of intellectual endeavor — the ones deemed complicit with bourgeois complacency and social stratification into “brow” levels — have been successfully demonized as elitist, but they have only given way to the wholesale trivialization of the social sphere into competing domains of pop-culture affiliation, corporate branding, public self-actualization as an end in itself. The shift has not produced any sort of political vanguard; at best there is an avant-garde, proud of its irrelevance to the mainstream, and contingent upon it. Pseudo-resistance is institutionalized; we get “revolutions” in fashion, in video-gaming, in rock and roll, etc.

In consumer society, the superstructure has become so minutely articulated that it offers endless possibilities for trivial revolutions in taste. And we are in no position to tell if the change for we which we wish to agitate falls under that rubric or if it constitutes something “real,” something related to shifts in the base of productive forces and relations. Further muddying the issue is the consumerist idea that consumption constitutes a peculiarly modern form of production — so that it may in fact be a epoch-shaking intervention when we laugh at an episode of Two and a Half Men instead of with it, or script movies to be acted out within the universe of Halo 3, or perform home remixes on pirated copies of hit songs. While this accelerates the transformation of the superstructure and even grants individuals agency in guiding its transformation, the base remains untouched. Instead, the acceleration merely intensifies consumerism’s entrenchment, its elaboration, while exhausting our desire for social change (now known as novelty) in the process. This is the consequence of our being unable to directly access the “real.” (Perhaps we can ask for nothing more from a society than to provide for the extinguishing of our surplus energy.)

Many heroic consumers would like to nominate themselves to the new pioneer cult of the left, whether they are green consumers, or creative consumers, or freecyclers, or voluntary-simplicity devotees, or fair-trade consumers, or localvores, or culture jammers, or adherents of any of the other progressive lifestyles available to Westerners. They are merely claiming zones of potential resistance and incorporating them into the consumerist superstructure. Though they believe they are opening doors, they may only be about to walk into a wall they can’t see.

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Joy Division: The Culture of Militant Happiness

October 22, 2009 — Ylajali Hansen

The 1982 film Poltergeist scared the hell out of me. I was four when I first saw it on television. After much petitioning on my part, my parents set aside their reservations and agreed to let me stay up late to watch the film. It was Halloween, after all, they reasoned. So I decamped to the den and timidly curled up on the couch to participate vicariously in the harrowing ordeal visited upon little Carol Anne. By the film’s end, I was so hysterical that my mother had to administer a double dose of Ny-Quil to calm my nerves.

Despite the soothing effect of the cherry-flavored decongestant, I didn’t sleep that night, nor for weeks afterward. I’d lie awake in my bed, which was in a drafty bedroom on the fourth floor of a farmhouse centuries old, and pray that skeletons wouldn’t jumble out from my closet, or that the creaky oak tree outside my window wouldn’t suddenly take the notion to come crashing in and strangle me.

Though it was no great work of art, Poltergeist set my imagination ablaze. The world became a strange and mysterious place where anything was possible. The old house across the street seemed rife with ghostly menace and the desultory field behind my house appeared teeming with unfamiliar, hungry animals. The moon was a dour, disapproving face, and every car that passed along our country road had a body in its trunk. Or so I imagined.

In time, I recovered from the shock of witnessing angry ghosts terrorize a suburban So-Cal family. I slept through the night and no longer feared the contents of my closet. But, though I recovered, my perspective was forever changed. The world had widened somehow, and my curiosity had also. 80s horror films soon gave way to books, which I devoured eagerly, intent as I was to know absolutely everything about a world that didn’t seem quite so safe and sound as my parent’s assured me.

I couldn’t help but think of my experience watching Poltergeist when I came across a recent CNN article on the newly released cinematic adaption of Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, a film whose box-office success and audience buzz are widely discrepant. As of this writing, Rotten Tomatoes reports the film’s take at $32.7 million. It’s a good thing, however, that popular success isn’t measured in smiles. Apparently WTWTA’s greatest shortcoming is that doesn’t bring the happy liberally enough to satisfy today’s new-model parent. Word has it that WTWTA is “joyless.” One parent said that his four-year-old child asked why the film was so sad, while another complained, “There were maybe 15 minutes of the hour and a half that my kids were into it.” Critics have likewise endeavored to plumb the film’s glum spirit. Writes The New Yorker’s Dave Denby, “I have visions of 8-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy?”

Perhaps the the downbeat vibe of WTWTA is an effect of its execution. It may just be off-kilter or just plain bad. I can’t say. What really interests me is the critical reaction, especially among parents, reported in the popular press. But the emphasis on the film being joyless, or too scary, or just plain lachrymose seems to be indicative of a larger cultural problem. Jason Avant, founder and editor of the review site Dadcentric.com, says that “family movies and kid movies have become so safe and homogenized and shallow in a sense.” Indeed, the almost pathological desire to present to contemporary, American children (and adults) a world that is wholly joyful and benevolent is vaguely disturbing — and historically unprecedented. Remember the darkly magical tales of the Brother’s Grimm, where children stumbled upon murderous robber barons and forests were places of gloomy mystery? Or how about J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in which ogres feast upon flesh and dragons scruple not to barbecue the unwary adventurer? Such macabre touches are certainly out of step with the current SpongeBob-influenced aesthetic of bright, primary colors, quick cuts, cacophony and antic optimism.

Fear factor: purging the grim from fairy tales.

Fear factor: purging the grim from fairy tales.

But I imagine those tales have been deemed too scary and violent. In fact, folklorist and literature professor Maria Tatar suggests that some of the best-loved children’s tales should be rewritten. These “‘cruel’ and sadistic’ tales,” she writes in Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, are anachronistic at best and should yield to “a creative folklore … reinvented by each generation of storytellers and reinvested with creative social energy.”

Indeed, the revisionist impulse runs undiminished since its academic heyday during the 90s, though I doubt submitting tales and legends to constant reinterpretation does much to succor fragile young psyches. After all, the Victorians freely re-wrote Shakespeare, often changing his plays’ ending to accommodate popular tastes, which ran to melodrama. Othello and Desdemona tearfully reconcile, Caesar dodges daggers and breaks into song. Such “re-visioning” did little to dispel the frightful spectacles characteristic of the age — grinding poverty, public executions, stifling pollution and rampant prostitution. If anything, these rewrites served to perpetuate certain cherished illusions of the middle classes. They easily forgot the precariousness of their own social situations, and could instead lose themselves in a gaslit world where the earnest fellow always won the fair maiden’s hand, and the dastard always received his just desserts. (Incidentally, French semiotician and critic Roland Barthes sees many of the same master narratives at work in professional wrestling.)

But how do you get a generation reared on relentless manic cartoon optimism, which assures them that everything is fine, that there’s nothing to worry about, that nothing scary or bad will ever happen, to reinvest the world with a “creative social energy”? If anything, the culture of pathological happiness that currently afflicts the United States has effected a great drain on any creative social energy. Just look at the pathetic public response to the bailouts and bonuses this past year. How, pray tell, should creative social energy be expended to make this unhappy tale palatable? Should people imagine Wall Street crooks as knights on a quest, searching for a treasure that by rights is theirs, and themselves as just so many orcs out to deny them this very thing?

Grimm’s fairy tales helped unify Germany, and Tolkien’s novels were written on the eve of the Second World War. They were works that both entertained and edified. They neither sought to comfort their readership, nor did they present a view of the world that was comfortably complete. And it seems that those narratives which leaves things uncomfortably incomplete effect more than those that seek to homogenize and to render shallow a worldview.

I’m not suggesting that parents allow their child to watch films like Poltergeist. In fact, I wish my parents had exercised better judgment and waited until I was a bit older. But I do believe children, and adults, need to be exposed to more narratives that leave them troubled, or haunted. Because it’s only when we’re faced with the idea that not all stories have happy endings and perhaps things won’t ever be all right that we begin to dream of all possibilities the world holds, both good and bad, and think of effecting change in our lives. We begin to wonder, and nowadays, with all the political and social uncertainty, that can be a very powerful thing.

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Trompe le Monde: Slavoj Žižek on Hipsters (a Translation)

October 21, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The following essay by Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of the French photographic journal Rhinocerotique as “L’etat d’hipster.” The original was accompanied by morgue photographs of the late Dash Snow, an American artist. Owing to copyright uncertainties and American libel laws, the photos could not be reproduced here. It was translated from the French by Henry Brulard. (Our thanks go to Jean Bricmont for calling this piece to our attention.)

A company of porcupines crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist. — Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, II. Teil, XXXI., “Gleichnisse und Parabeln” (As quoted in Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego)

The problematics of analyzing “hipster” were recently affirmed in an account of  n+1 Magazine’s symposium, “What was the Hipster?” related by Rob Horning. Though the facts of this bizarre event are, by now, well known to all, I must relate the essential details: When n+1 failed to deliver the symposium’s promises of either an exuberantly carnivalesque King Kong-like display of the hipster in chains (the hipster as un-Prometheus) or a phallogocentric explication of the hipster phenomenon, the gathered multitudes rioted, pointing accusatory fingers at n+1 and each other. The denunciations were as total as they were swift, and were larded with all the bombast and caricature of a show trial.

Indeed, the event was reminiscent of a tactic used by the American police apparatus to entrap those with outstanding warrants: the offender receives a card in the mail telling him that he has won a big-screen tv or similar “big-boy toy” and that he must pick it up at a certain location. When he arrives to redeem his prize at the appointed time and place, he his promptly handcuffed, placed in a paddy wagon, and delivered in carcerem (of course his actual incarceration, as we know from Foucault, was achieved by the inscription of his name upon the card). Perhaps the editors of n+1 had just such a thing in mind when they planned the event, but lost their nerve at the last moment.

In his analysis of the fiasco, Mr. Horning identified the true nature of the analytic dilemma presented by this word, “hipster,” and its cognates:

It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1’s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth.

The nature of the beast, then, is that “hipster” is always presented as an objective phenomenon and never as a subjective stance. If there is no objective “distance” (physical or temporal) from which to analyze hipsterism, then we must look instead for a subjective one. That is, assuming the position of S over s in the Lacanian algebra, we must posit a critico-analytical stance that places itself squarely within the “taint” of hipster. This taint, as such, is felt not by the hipster—who has not yet revealed himself—but by the one capable of uttering “hipster,” as the ejective enunciation of the utterance “not me.” The analysis must therefore start from the perspective of this subject, the hipster, as the “not me” who is simultaneously embedded in the taint of hipsterism and capable of uttering the utterance “hipster.”

Before we proceed we must pause at the appearance of the “not me.” The not me is, of course, the inutterable utterance of the ungrammatical voice. As such, and this should be obvious to all, it is none other than the objet petit a, the ersatz phallus of the hipster’s mother. And this is why, through the object of the mirror, the mask of the hipster’s desire always figures hipster as the effiminate male upon whom a linguistic act of irrumatio must always already have been performed.

Read in this light, the hipster’s symbolic and pseudo-ejaculatory utterance of “hipster,” is nothing more than the original of the signal of the taint of hipster: conceived as a danger to the “scene” and the autonomous self. At this point the author’s ears, and perhaps the reader’s too, begin to burn. I am certain that you must feel the heat rising.

It should by now be obvious that the utterance “hipster” finds its analogue in the sobbing flight of the debutante who arrives at the dance only to discover that another girl is wearing an identical dress. The debutante’s double calls into question her own sense of self. In order to avoid Girardian annihilation and rejoin her self she must flee from the sight of her double. But what would it mean if the debutante had planned the entire social disaster, including the existence of her own double and her ridiculous exit, in advance? The utterance “hipster” presents us with just such a scenario.

The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body.

What the hipster, now as the S in the Lacanian algebra, finds in the taint of hipster is the terror of cooptation by the mainstream. And hipster, as the projected invention of the hipster’s own cooptation, exists as a sort of skinwalker who is able to transform individual autonomy and the authentic “scene” into lifestyles and bogus demographics. These threats to the scene and autonomy imperil and attempt to unravel the hipster’s unconscious, which is in the familiar form of the Borromean knot.

Photobucket

There's no place like sinthome: hipsters cut the Borromean Knot.

The Borromean knot, as you no doubt know, is a series of three rings that will be completely severed if any one ring is severed, resulting in psychosis. Hipster and its utterance exist as manifestations of the sinthome or “symptom,” the fourth order in Lacan’s model of the Borromean knot (see diagram). The symptom is that ring that must come into existence when the knot itself is threatened. Hipster, is that place where the real, the imaginary and the symbolic combine into one. The hipster, known only through the utterance “hipster,” is, then, the overcoming of an individual as well as a cultural psychosis, through an act of individual and group projection in the strictly Freudian sense.

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Hooked on Hedonics: Happiness as the Universal of Feeling

October 20, 2009 — Henry Brulard

There are things that money can’t buy. If this is a fact, it is one we are willing to cede only after our many strenuous — and ultimately vain — attempts to buy those very things have ended in failure, lending credence to poet Emily Dickinson’s line, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”

The diamond ring that measures out love in carat weights and “the three C’s,” is easily reduced to a monetary value. When that same diamond ring ends up in the pawnshop, however, the love that it contained has already dissipated into the ether, but its monetized value, diminished somewhat by love’s evaporation, remains to make a fool out of love. Similarly, the new car or other consumer fetish creates a happiness that can be measured by the precise diameter of our smile, only to depreciate in size and corresponding value almost as quickly as the car itself. Though we repeatedly try to monetize happiness and love, it seems that we are ill-equipped to do so.

Perhaps the point then, is to perform the project in reverse. Perhaps we can bring love and happiness into the universal genus of money if we start with the premise that happiness is a sort of universal genus of feeling. Recognizing that it belongs to a sphere that is, for now, outside of money’s scope, we can then attempt to quantify happiness until we find the true equation that will bring it within the scope of money. After all, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum holds that “every quality is merely a quantity”; the discovery that Happiness, once confused with a subjective and internal state of mind, is, then, actually an objective phenomenon subject to quantitative analysis has led to the economic sub-field of “Hedonics.”

In ”The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” scholars of happiness Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have identified a disparity in objective data that attempts to measuring men and women’s subjective happiness. It seems that despite increased equality and opportunity, women have actually become less happy over the last thirty years.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, recently took issue with Wolfers and Stevenson’s conclusions. Ehrenreich argues that the supposed happiness gap is no more real than was the missile gap which during the Cold War fueled so much anti-Soviet hysteria:

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eye. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called “ordered probit estimates” do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: “Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006, women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category.” Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Ehrenreich’s conclusion is that the study itself is a laughable affair that, whatever its authors’ intentions, now exists as an anti-feminist bludgeon. The history of feminism over the last thirty years is the unavoidable line that Wolfers and Stevenson draw between increased equality and opportunity, on the one hand, and declining happiness on the other. Wolfers and Stevenson have used the occult science of statistics as a manipulative discursive tool to tell us something that we think we already know: feminism makes women unhappy. The study is now on set to be flogged in Marcus Buckingham’s forthcoming Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. Which, as Ehrenreich points out, is designed to sell happiness to the growing hordes of dissatisfied women:

It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.

Designed to objectively measure and isolate happiness, the study will now be used to sow unhappiness and reap discord. The happiness gap may be the ultimate in capitalistic self-consumption. The state of unhappiness that is nurtured and encouraged, if not created, by consumer culture is then packaged as one more problem for the consumer culture to solve.

Adam and Eve

Mirth of a nation: hedonics seeks to measure our pleasure.

Wolfers has responded to Ehrenreich’s attack by defending his study as “simply about documenting a fact.” Wolfers then calls Ehrenreich a liar who either does not understand the study, or is purposely misrepresenting its “factual” conclusions. Wolfers has missed the larger point: Ehrenreich is not attacking his study so much as the entire field of happiness studies, especially as they regard the happiness of women:

For starters, happiness is a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend — so what am I really?

And the difficulty of understanding happiness at all seems to me to be the larger point. A cursory look at Wolfers and Stevenson’s metrics of happiness reveals that happiness can take everything into its scope. All the old emotions, anxiety, fear, melancholy, envy, anger, emptiness, are lumped, by an act of the statisticians pen, into the category of dissatisfaction. From that, satisfaction or happiness, the negative of the negative, must be posited, and its supposed appearances measured in various life “domains.” Happiness or satisfaction in each domain is then ranked on a scale of relative importance. Are the satisfactions of these different domains as fungible as hedonic studies suggests? The reporting of relative happiness seems to amount to a collection of data that records instances when the test subjects were, for lack of a better term, happier than themselves. What can this possibly tell anybody about their own life or that of another?

Questions on the order of, “are you happy?” or “are you satisfied?” seem already to include the inevitably negative response. It is always “no” or “yes, but….” And, if happiness is truly subjective, then it is as meaningless to say “I am happier than you” as it is to say “I am happier than myself.” Aggregating the answers to such meaningless questions simply cannot create meaning out of meaningless, no matter how rigorous the statistical method.

Isn’t unhappiness, if not the human condition reduced to words, the required condition of beings living within a consumer milieu where every commercial message is designed to foment dissatisfaction? And what of the fact that more consumer messages seem to be targeted at women than men? Could the cultural creation of woman as ur-consumer, and therefore perpetually dissatisfied, have anything to do with female unhappiness? How is it possible to factor the effects of advertising and culture, those places where we learn what happiness actually “is,” out of, or into, a quantitative study?

As Ehrenreich points out, if it is difficult to know if the happiness of two women can be compared, it seems even more difficult to be certain that men’s happiness and women’s happiness even the same things? From my own subjective impressions, I would guess not. As evidence for this I would simply present my own romantic life.

But the most overwhelming problem for Jeffers and Stevenson’s is the one initially pointed out by Ehrenreich: we do not know what happiness is. Like obscenity, perhaps, we think we know it when we see it. But if we actually understood and knew happiness, we probably would not spend so much time, money and effort pursuing the things that are supposed to bring happiness, and would instead simply pursue happiness. But happiness slips away as soon as we examine it. Always represented as freedom from worry, want, melancholy, and despair, happiness is known only through its opposites. We all want to be free of never-ending thirst for something more that successive and compulsive purchases can never quite quench, and so we posit happines. Happiness itself, though, seems to exist not so much as an experienced subjective state, but as the echo from a distant future or past of a life beyond what is currently possible.

If their methodology and all its premises are severely flawed, let me suggest that perhaps Wolfers, Stevenson and the rest of the hedononomists should begin by first finding and capturing the truly happy man and woman. These specimens could then be displayed and studied in a controlled laboratory environment. If they will not reveal their secrets, perhaps the surgeon’s knife can be employed to cut away the meddlesome flesh that presently obscures the true nature of happiness.

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The Jargon of Authenticity: Modern Parents Keepin’ It Real

October 15, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Among those in the circles in which I moved in high school, two of the most withering epithets one could hurl at another were “poseur” and “conformist.” We were midwestern kids tugging the fag end of a dying punk scene imported from the coasts, many of whose bands were “crossing over,” that is, changing their sound to metal in order to grab a share of that then burgeoning audience. I was called “poseur” and “conformist” at least as many times as I called others the same; though it was a safe bet that, if pressed, I or anyone of my cohorts would’ve had difficulty defining what either of those words meant.

“Poseur” we were pretty sure denoted someone adopted the signature garb, habits and gestures of a particular scene in a bid to gain notoriety in — and perhaps to bag some of the girls belonging to — that scene, while “conformist” indicated the profane — jocks, overachievers, natty dressers, and basically everyone who was not a) us or b) a poseur.

“Poseur” and “conformist” held for my friends and me an incantatory power. Through their liberal application a magic ring resolved around us, only to be broken once metal and new wave rushed in to fill the void left by punk’s decline, conjuring new factions defined by new tastes. Some of us bought Powell Peralta skateboards and began listening to thrash, while others of us (me included) started buttoning our shirts all the way to the top, listening to Depeche Mode and smoking clove cigarettes.

I suppose our group was so easily riven by shifting musical tastes because, truth be told, we all poseurs and conformists. No matter how deeply we plunged into the cultus of punk — buying black trenchcoats from Goodwill, wearing t-shirts purchased in record stores located in sketchy parts of the city, going to shows in warehouses located in even sketchier parts — we were never quite able to overcome the  irony of our efforts. The trenchcoats we bought to upset the dress-code enforcers of our high school, which was a private college prep. The punk-band t-shirts we wore we got because our moms drove us to the record shop. The warehouse shows we saw we saw because an older member of our group got the keys to his parent’s Saab that night.

The lives of my friends and me, for all their Oi-Boy pretensions, remained rigidly circumscribed by middle-class privilege. Ours was a midwestern mallrats’ simulation of a real scene in retrograde. Though we didn’t know it at the time, and certainly weren’t capable of knowing it, punk for us was simply a pastiche of defiant gestures — or, to put in in a more theoretically sophisticated way, a system of cultural signs ready for consumption by suburban kids of flyover country.

To even worry about the authenticity of one’s crew seems a rather quaint notion these days, one belonging to a superannuated social formation in which fads and trends cohered around rejection of the diktat of a monolithic culture industry. In the days of my youth subtler, more insidious forms of marketing were still in their infancy, and thus hadn’t set begun to extend beyond the places one typically finds them — on television, on the radio, on billboards and in magazines. The social field was largely free of the paranoia-inducing buzz- or guerrilla-marketing stunts (strategies New York Times columnist Rob Walker calls murketing). There was, in others words, still an “outside” whose sanctity was preserved by the relatively sluggish pre-Internet progression of a trend’s birth to its spotting and subsequent marketing.

Now, however, in these days of long-tail markets and consumerist-inflected individualism, trend spotters and the companies that hire them have more or less closed the gap, aided, of course, by modern media technology. The feedback loop has contracted to such a lightning-quick duration that I wonder sometimes if there is indeed anything even remotely grass-roots about any nascent trend anymore. Maybe all fads now are astroturfed. After all, if Goldman Sachs can, with the assistance of powerful computers, front-run trades on the stock exchange, there’s no reason why some apparel or music company can’t front-run trends.

This is just a long way of saying that I sense that people have conceded that trying to cultivate an identity outside market relations is self-defeating (something my preppie-punk teenage self and friends only learned bye the bye), so the best thing to do is to accommodate oneself to the consumer profile that suits one’s tendencies and sentiments. The existential question is not whether to conform or not, but whether to conform to one prêt-à-porter lifestyle or another. This latter question at least relieves one of having to confront to the dreariness and tedium of living a life of categorical refusal — of “tarrying with the negative” as Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, following German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, might say. After all, one has only one life to live, so to throw it on the pale fire of one’s scruples seems a waste indeed.

But, as it turns, out, accepting lifestyle as the only means of authentic individual expression exacts a terrible price in the form of a sort of arrest of one’s personality. People become so wedded to their lifestyle, the only bulwark against dizzying anomie and the void, that they cling to it come hell or high water — or come children.

Birth of the cool: a modern parents inner child and outer.

Birth of the cool: a modern parent's inner child and outer.

Via Canada’s National Post comes this October 13, 2009 story appearing in Commentary (A conservative-rag two-fer today on Generation Bubble!). Entitled “Grow Up,” the story, the first in a week-long series, exposes the growing phenomenon of parents who refuse to “put away childish things,” as St. Paul wrote. “Every generation of parents develops the anxieties it deserves,” the Commentary story states flatly. Parental anxieties for a long time centered on the health of their children, the story contends, but as the 20th century progressed, many of the fatal maladies visiting young ‘uns had been subdued by medical science. Parents responded by shifting their anxieties to their children’s mental health. Incipit the self-esteem movement, of which today’s parents are some of the original beneficiaries.

The Commentary story paints a dispiriting picture of overpraised mediocrity, indiscriminate prize-giving, condoned incompetence, along with other such betrayals of human progress. “In 1969, Nathaniel Branden published The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which argued that the most important factor in a person’s future success was a healthy sense of self-worth,” the story reporting, summarizing the history of the self-esteem movement’s ascendancy:

For decades afterward, children’s television shows reminded their young viewers that they were the most important people in the world. Teachers heaped praise upon even the most lackluster students, and little league coaches dispensed trophies to anyone who showed up to play. Criticism and competition became suspect.

The austere lessons of a winner-take-all became diluted by squishy types who could only tolerate contests in which all are winners. The earnest sentiment behind this impulse put into practice eventually came to have the opposite effect. “Today, the children raised on these accolades are having children of their own,” the Commentary story continues,

and despite the fact that a quiet consensus has emerged among researchers that an excess of praise unattached to achievement undermines self-esteem, the appetite for validation and approval among those raised in Nathaniel Branden’s shadow remains voracious.

The iron rule that everything becomes its other once again rears its ugly head, threatening to thwart plans for the doubleplusgood revolution meant to usher in a generation of mentally and emotionally stable citizens. Rather, these citizens show themselves to be stable only in terms of degree of maturation, which, given the subject’s appearing in the Commentary article, seems to have halted somewhere around age 16. The article puts the situation in no uncertain terms:

This new generation of parents, raised on constant reminders of their own individual uniqueness, refuses to see themselves as merely the latest in a long line of people who have reared children. Because they have so little perspective beyond their own limited experience, their search for authenticity and meaning quickly deteriorates into an orgy of exposure and self-regard. Children are relegated to the role of stagehands in their parents’ dramatic transformation from boy to man, girl to woman. The result, as a recent crop of parenting memoirs and magazines reveal, is a turn from stoicism to solipsism.

It’s difficult to disagree with this assertion, even though it appears in an article for a right-wing magazine. But gold is where you find it. And I’m sure there isn’t a one of my readers whose found him- or herself on the business end of one of those $900 urban assault strollers that these new-model parents use to parade their pride-n-joys, if not as resistance for road training (Rob Horning, Ylajali Hansen and I were nearly mowed down by one of these beasts, a triple-wide, in Zabar’s Deli). They are fitting emblems for today’s eternal adolescence, representing ostentation and aggression in equal measure.

Welcome to the sandbox — though in truth you never left.

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Social Distortion: Wishing Relations Away

October 14, 2009 — Rob Horning

After Oliver Williamson, a pioneer of the new institutional economics — studying the logic of firm organization from within the logic of neoclassical economics — won the Nobel Prize for economics, Orgtheory.net linked to “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness” by Mark Granovetter, which it described as “the seminal piece of economic sociology.” The paper pertains to a question that has bothered me recently about the degree to which the neoclassical view of markets works ideologically, shaping the subjectivity of those living in societies in which neoclassical economics secure respect and sway policymakers.

In other words, does the analytical presumption of perfectly competitive markets and atomized, highly rational actors affect the way in which we end up assessing our own economic behavior privately? Does it constrain it, blind us to alternatives? Does it prompt us to adopt efficiency as an end in itself, so much so that we begin to forget (or begin to demonize) the other aims we might seek to achieve socially? In what ways has supposedly “irrational” behavior become taboo, or become unthinkable? In what ways does capitalist culture glorify the absence of emotional ties, celebrate impersonality? Is a chief goal of marketers and other would-be agents of economic malfeasance to convince us of our rationality (i.e., we are persuaded that our economic choices are ipso facto rational and defensible)? These are among the many issues that the “common sense” notion of markets occludes.

Granovetter’s paper touches on many of these occluded issues. He argues for a middle ground between what he calls oversocialized and undersocialized views of economic behavior, one which takes into account the fact that social relations are always pertinent to economic transactions and always in process, but don’t necessarily determine the outcomes in advance. “Culture is not a once-for-all influence but an ongoing process, continuously constructed and reconstructed during interaction. It not only shapes its members but also is shaped by them, in part for their own strategic reasons.” And what is to be regarded as rational is not entirely as a matter of economic efficiency; economic behavior also simultaneously aims at “sociability, approval, status, and power.”

Prior relationships matter to what sort of transactions occur, and how frequently, and to what primary purpose and so on. We are much more likely to do business with people we know or have learned to trust. Yet “in classical and neoclassical economics,” Granovetter argues, “the fact that actors may have social relations with one another has been treated, if at all, as a frictional drag that impedes competitive markets.” That is, social relations are an impediment, something that ideally would not exist since they distort market behavior. Without prior and ongoing personal relations, economic behavior would be more “efficient,” more tractable to analysis. If perfect competition, uncorrupted by social relations, was guaranteed to keep everyone honest, it would make all our transactions more “convenient.” We wouldn’t have to know a guy in order to get our car fixed. We wouldn’t have to worry about the mom-and-pop hardware store’s fate when we go to Home Depot. Market discipline would grant us a self-centered paradise in which firms had no choice but to offer us the best deal regardless of who we bothered to get to know, regardless of any of our past behavior or future promises.

Convenience and selfishness thereby become closely intertwined, a connection that market ideology validates. Having to engage with other people is draining and unpredictable. Better a self-service world of frictionless exchanges. Granovetter cites Albert Hirschman, who in “Rival Interpretations of Market Society” (jstor) described the perfect competition model as allowing us to believe that “the various operators that contract together need not enter into recurrent or continuing relationships as a result of which they would get to know each other well.” Instead, we can remain ignorant of one another, isolated, happily preoccupied with ourselves and our intrinsic desires. (As if those exist.)

Built into the assumptions of neoclassical economics is the idea that humans have yearned for this peculiar sort of convenience and evolved the market as an institution that made it possible. But it could be that a market society produces subjects that adopt asociality as an ideal. The ideal of convenience is a product of capitalism not a reason why capitalism has succeeded.

The obvious problem with a world of perfectly competitive agents permanently free of any pre-existing social relations is that such a world would be a Hobbesian war of all against all. One of Williamson’s insights, as Granovetter notes, is that “real economic actors engage not merely in the pursuit of self-interest but also in ‘opportunism’ — ’self-interest seeking with guile; agents who are skilled at dissembling realize transactional advantages.’ ” (If you read anything about the vanilla option and financial complexity, that observation shouldn’t be surprising. Banks amplified complexity to profit at the expense of general macroeconomic health.) With no “reputational concerns” — with no ongoing social relations to worry about — what would stop market actors from doing whatever they could to increase their chances to be opportunistic by sowing confusion and spreading disinformation? “As Hobbes saw so clearly,” Granovetter points out, “there is nothing in the intrinsic meaning of self-interest that excludes force or fraud” as methods of gaining advantage. Clearly there would be nothing convenient about that.

Le enfer cest les autres: Hobbesian chaos repackaged as neoclassical liberty.

L'enfer c'est les autres: Hobbesian chaos repackaged as liberty.

So social relations are not to be wished away unless we want to invite a nasty, brutish, and short existence of lonely vulnerability and cruel predation. This seems so obvious that it needn’t be argued, but what’s striking is the way neoclassical economics idealizes such an outcome by reconfiguring it as total freedom. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to idealize a thick web of social relations either. These can be confining as well — they are the basis for all the prohibitions favored by social conservatives. And social relations also set in motion the entire apparatus of corruption and nepotism and the like that foil fantasies of meritocracy.

Trust among strangers doesn’t spring from a market economy like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is extrapolated from pre-existing social relations and reinforced, possibly nurtured, by conduct in markets. But it always remains fragile, often no more than a matter of blind faith. Granovetter argues that social networks are integral to fostering and maintaining trust, but he also quick to point out how these same networks “may even provide occasion and means for malfeasance and conflict on a scale larger than in their absence.” (This is one reason Facebook may yet prove to be nefarious. The atmosphere of trust the site seeks to establish is a cover for the commercialization of friendship, the systematic exploitation of social ties by third parties.)

The density of social relations necessarily complicates economic transactions, but the results from this are not necessarily positive or negative, just  difficult to predict or extrapolate from. In some cases, social relations become social capital — the golf games among the power elite; the inside information passed at lunches. In some case they engender sweetheart deals between contractors. They preempt excessive lawyering. In other cases they constitute an insulating web protecting a community from outsiders. Social relations prompt mimetic purchasing, determine the relative value of positional goods and the degree of conspicuous consumption, the general usefulness of consumerism in signaling. (If no one sees you in your American Apparel, was it worth putting it on?)  Social relations likely amplify the biases identified by behavioral economics. All these contingencies play into how goods are priced, contracts are drawn up, and arrangements are settled — rendering supply-demand-equilibrium models much less useful in explaining actual economic behavior.

It may be that social relations at play in the economy enable a certain amount of corruption in order to prevent the more generalized chaos of total atomization. The degree of corruption will be kept within bounds predictable from those given social relations, and as they change, expectations about corruption can be adjusted accordingly. Hence regulation, which in practice functions as a valve calibrating that amount of corruption so that it remains tolerable, and society stable.

But how can we trust regulators? Who will be immune to capture? Who watches the watchers, particularly when they can intentionally obfuscate that which they are supposed to keep transparent? We saw what happened to the rating agencies, who coached banks on how to secure AAA ratings for structured securities the risks of which neither party seems to have accurately gauged. In retrospect, that looks like collusion at the expense of investors and, ultimately, bailout-financing taxpayers. The lesson there is that the presence of regulators tends to foster moral hazard in the form of unjustified trust. But in the absence of regulation, the willingness to trade may dry up, halting circulation and inhibiting economic growth. (Marx seemed to think this sort of freeze-up was cyclically inevitable and would eventually topple the system completely; 2008 almost proved him right.)

If Granovetter is right, social relations operate independently within all manner of economic organizations and affect every transaction, whether in an open market or internal to vertically integrated firms. The volatility of the effects of these relations supplies a good reason for firms, or any institution with established power, to try to suppress them — hence the ideological ramifications of neoclassical economics and the glorification of impersonality. Consumerism, filtering down from these firms and the state, becomes the vector for these ideas; it enshrines social isolation as the highly-sought-after value of convenience and discourages communal ties in favor of competitive consumption and private pleasures of ownership.

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Right-Wing Melancholy: The Graven Images of Glenn Beck’s Amerikan Kargo Kult

October 13, 2009 — Henry Brulard

The Indians of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, a Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. — Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough

Jon McNaughton’s One Nation Under God (“ONUG”) has secured a place for him as the Jacques Louis David of the Glenn Beck–Cleon Skousen divinely inspired constitution scene. McNaughton seems to have created this painting with the very urim and thummim (“spirit goggles” or “seer stones”) with which the prophets of old were able to divine the word and will of God, but McNaughton’s spirit goggles are tightly focused on the dominionist visions of Skousen and Beck. Billed as the most symbolic painting ever created, ONUG is a crowded landscape set somewhere on the Washington mall.

The overall impression created by the painting is that Norman Rockwell has painted a version of Bosch’s The Last Judgment, or that Joe Coleman has become a born again Christian. The scene is set beneath a darkening sky, and our only points of reference are the Capitol Dome in the left-hand background and the Supreme Court in the distance on the right.

Rising from the center of ONUG is the figure of an enormous Christ, triumphant and resurrected, a magnificent light bursting forth from his head. He is bedecked in a golden robe over a white undergarment that is “branded” with the tree of life (composed of dozens of swirling chinatown Nike swooshes). In his right hand, the Son of Man holds the constitution as he stares coldly and decisively at some distant point beyond the viewers’ right shoulder. Surrounding Christ on all sides are a motley multitude of well-known and anonymous figures, who stand as the “symbols” in this painting.

Here I should pause for a brief aside. On McNaughton’s webpage, ONUG is presented with a scrolling java interface that allows the viewer to roll over each figure in the painting and receive the symbolic “meaning” of that figure straight from the artist’s mind. In other words, McNaughton has preempted the work of both the viewer and the critic (for McNaughton’s complete listing of the symbols see here or for a more critical listing, see here). With an authoritarian voice consistent with his worldview, McNaughton has pronounced that a equals a, does not equal b, and that the excluded middle shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. This attempt to control the meanings of words and symbols, to say “yes” and “no,” is the juvenile aping of paternal authority and the degree zero of the authoritarian act.

To resume, the first of the figures we note is a small boy who has approached from Christ’s right to point at the constitution (perhaps he is pointing to the establishment clause?). Before this simultaneously cute and terrifying spectacle, a symbolic concatenation of the saved and the damned huddle in the painting’s foreground. To Christ’s left stoop the liberal elites whose damnation is assured. There is the smug “Mr. Hollywood,” who has laughingly turned his back on Christ. In the corner sits the money-counting Lawyer (the Jew?). Then there are the Activist Supreme Court Justice (portrayed as a sobbing Judas who, probably due to the artist’s own fear of libel suits, is unable to show his face), and the Professor, who clutches Darwin’s Origin of Species to his heart as he pompously ignores the Living God. Also pictured are the Pregnant Woman (who McNaughton tells us is considering an abortion), the Liberal News Reporter looking for a story, the Politician who is too busy talking on a cell phone (negotiating a last minute rewrite of the public option perhaps), and, hidden in shadows, old scratch himself, the Devil.

At Christ’s right hand sit the elect, in every way the sinners’ symbolic opposites. There is the simple Farmer, America’s backbone, who, by a wholesome sort of alchemy, converts government subsidies into life-sustaining food. Also among these living saints are The Mother,the Christian Minister, the School Teacher, the Immigrant (according to McNaughton, to represent freedom of religion!?!), the Family Doctor, the loving, life-renewing, U.S. Marine, and the student, who holds aloft Cleon Skousen’s 5,000 year leap. The ideological debt to Beck and Skousen is finally acknowledged.

This painting is not just McNaughton’s dominionist view of America, it is a channeling of Beck’s and Skousen’s views as well. Behind the painter’s Yankee piety lurks the avarice of the huckster who has finally found his dupe. The best salesman, as we are often reminded, is the one who believes in his own pitch.

Continuing, we find a litany of dead and, it would seem, resurrected historical figures, arrayed at a respectful distance, fanning out from behind Christ. Each one as out of place as the next. Included are a number of anonymous and representative soldiers from all our wars. In the background the careful viewer will also find Frederick Douglas and Ulysses Grant, both staring dumbly from behind Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap. Eisenhower is here too, and so is “space-teacher” Christa Macaulliffe. At Christ’s left shoulder George Washington swears not to tell a lie while Abraham Lincoln strikes an Al Jolson pose in front of a modern African American soldier identified by a name patch as “King” (as McNaughton explains it, in tribute to Martin Luther King). Dolly Madison, Patrick Henry, are here too, as well as many, many, so many more. Chief among this motley crowd looms Ronald Reagan, who, adjusted for perspective seems to be taller than anyone in the photo save the Living God.

The message of the painting is made clear if we simply remove the figure of Christ. The painting’s center becomes an empty field and the constitution flutters lifelessly to the ground. Without Christ we can imagine that this strange menagerie of the Great, the dead, the sinful and the bored, would suddenly come to life in a melee of bickering and strife. Not even Reagan or Harriet Tubman can save us from the mob, and from ourselves; only Christ can turn difference into unity.

Signs taken for wonders: the infant piety of McNaughton's ONUG.

The entire history of the United States, of competing interests, compromise, reform and reaction, greed and restraint, war and peace, is reduced to the will of God. America as God’s domain conquers the old notion that the American Experiment, at its best, stands for a faith that reason will, slowly but surely, triumph over chauvinism and self-interest. But this is not Skousen’s view, and that is not what these men represent. Reduced to celebrity status, this horde of known and anonymous great men are stripped of complexity and individuality, reduced to a comforting mob of gestures and facts. Stripped of their greatness, their sole commonality is that, no matter what they thought they were doing, they were conduits for divine purpose, the slaves of Christ. If we wish to be great, we should do as they did an become as they are: we must bow our heads in prayer, and then do nothing. How can base and worldly concerns like universal health care possibly improve the perfect?

It is easy take issue with almost everything in the painting. Why, for instance, is it called “One Nation Under God,” when a more logical title would seem to be “One God over a Nation?” And then there are the painting’s formal issues. Why are these symbolic figures, sinner and saint alike, looking in so many different directions? What are they looking at? And they are just piled on, with no real uniting structure at all. How can Lincoln and Washington stand there blithely unaware that the Word Made Flesh stands just to their right? And is that golden light emanating from Christ’s head, or the heavens, or both? The perspective is unclear. Why does the activist supreme court justice have six fingers? Why do so many of the resurrected appear bored and disinterested? Is that a symptom of the resurrection process?

Many have attacked the meaning and symbolic incoherence of ONUG, challenging both his choice of subjects and the meanings that he attaches to them. Why Teddy and not Franklin Roosevelt? Why Dolly Madison at all? Why is an immigrant numbered among those apparently saved? Aren’t many of the resurrected deists? And why no mention of slavery in explaining Lincoln’s importance?

Some of these questions can be answered by resorting to psychology, cynicism, or ideological motive, but none of them solve the larger problem, which is the strange weight of all these symbols. Every symbol is problematic, and the juxtaposition between each symbol and every other symbol in the painting only serves to multiply the problems. What is the meaning of all these symbols?

Normally, symbolic paintings are ordered to create an organic whole that transcends the symbolic. To achieve this, artists must use symbols sparingly. Look at Leonardo’s Last Supper or Durer’s Nemesis to see this principle at work. When there are too many symbols or the symbols do not have clear meanings, the result, as in Durer’s Melancolia, is fracture and confusion of meaning. At first glance, this seems to be the problem with ONUG. But ONUG is so heavily laden with such a wide variety of symbols that any attempt to find meaning in the juxtaposition of the symbols themselves or to find an internal cohesion fails before it has even begun.

The point of the painting seems not to be so much in the meaning of the symbols, but in their collection and display. The longer we look, the less McNaughton’s painting seems to belong to the modern tradition of painting, and the more it begins to resemble the sort of art found in the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon or Lascaux cave. These older forms of painting work not only on the symbolic and representational planes. They promote divine favor by representing abundance and increase: in short they employ sympathetic or imitative magic.

ONUG finds another parallel in the representational and symbolic practices of others who have been dazzled by American greatness:

When the war ended several years later, the Americans departed [Vanuatu] as suddenly as they had arrived. Military bases were abandoned, and the steady flow of cargo which had altered the islanders’ lives completely dried up. The men and women of Tanna Island had grown to enjoy the radios, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola, canned meat, and candy, so they set into motion a plan to bring back the cargo. They had surreptitiously learned the secrets of summoning the cargo by observing the practices of the American airmen, sailors and soldiers.

The islanders set to work clearing their own kind of landing strips, and they erected their own control towers strung with rope and bamboo aerials. They carved wooden radio headsets with bamboo antennae, and even the occasional wooden air-traffic controller. Day after day, men from the village sat in their towers wearing their replica headsets as others stood on the runways and waved the landing signals to attract cargo-bringing airplanes from the empty sky. More towers were constructed, these with tin cans strung on wires to imitate radio stations so John Frum could communicate with his people. Piers were also erected in an effort to attract ships laden with cargo, and the Red Cross emblem seen on wartime ambulances was taken as the symbol of the resurging religion. Today villages surrounding Yasur Volcano are dotted with little red crosses surrounded by picket fences, silently testifying to the islander’s faith.

So great was the American wealth that had appeared out of the sky, that it could only have come from the gods. Using the principles of sympathetic or imitative magic, the obvious notion that like begets like, the Vanuatuans attempted to conjure up cargo by aping the actions of American servicemen.

9-12, 24-7: Glenn Beck's doctrine of eternal recurrence.

And this too is what McNaughton, Beck and Skousen are up to. Overwhelmed by the strife and discord of the present, they have turned to aping the past. If the country seems fractured and discordant the answer lies in finding the secrets of the ancients. And through the kabbalistic power of 9 principles and 12 values we can do just that. The sacred language of the American past must be pilfered to find just the right men and just the right words. The words, chanted and repeated until devoid of meaning, and spoken by one whose heart is pure, can then be used called forth the New Jerusalem, which has always been our birthright.

McNaughton’s painting does with images what Beck and Skousen do with words. Blending apotropaic and imitative magic, McNaughton has not created a painting so much as a charm or a spell intended to restore the old America of goodness, virtue and abundance. His symbols, and the control he exercises over them is not an attempt to create meaning, but to strip it away. Once the excess meanings and connotations of these ghosts have been excised, the absent god-men can be properly conjured up, and America will be restored, One Nation Under God, with no King but Jesus.

John Frum will come.

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