The Uncommercial Traveler: A Review of Helen Rappaport’s Conspirator: Lenin in Exile

March 24, 2010 — Anton Steinpilz


Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
by Helen Rappaport
Basic Books, 416 pp. ISBN: 978-0465013951

Late in his career, before he succumbed to a fatal illness, French poststructuralist historian and theorist Michel Foucault turned his scholarly attention to ethics. He found particularly interesting the idea, rooted in classical antiquity, of ascesis, a term related to today’s words ascetic and asceticism. This interest in ethics represents a surprising development in the general trajectory of Foucault’s previous inquiries. Foucault had long devoted himself to expelling humanistic biases from the theory and practice of writing history, even going so far as to declare, with Nietzsche-like flamboyance: “It is comforting … and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” According to Foucault, “man” as a concept wandered onto the world-historical stage only late in the present act, and will likely at some future point disappear à la Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — obscurely and with little fanfare, ado, or even remark. ¶ If Foucault proclaimed himself no fan of this arriviste concept “man,” what, then, could have possibly impelled his thought toward ethics, toward the particular issue of ascetic self-transformation? (Eric Paras takes up this very question in his 2006 book Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, which, despite its regrettable title, offers ample — and refreshingly accessible — contextualization for Foucault’s Kehre) Indeed, Foucault’s ethical turn leads him to introduce some unwonted vocabulary into his writing: words like “spirituality” and “truth.” And to all appearances he uses them unironically.

Such a volte-face would surely discombobulate devotees of someone whose conception of history residual Frankfurt-Schoolman (and implacable critic of all things poststructuralist) Jürgen Habermas has characterized as a “chaotic multitude” and “an iceberg covered with the crystalline forms of arbitrary formations.” Foucault himself offered a clue as to what incited him to discourse on this unlikely later subject. “The idea of the bios [i.e., the human organism] as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me,” he states in a 1983 interview:

The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting.

Foucault fastened onto the possibility of aesthetic self-fashioning with one’s very own organismic life as the expressive medium, and ethics as the technique of this expression. The fact that to Foucault’s thinking ethics can instantiate themselves independently — or, indeed, in defiance of — juridical norms, as well as authoritarian system or disciplinary structure to enforce these norms, argues for ethics primacy, and thus also for its strength as a structure for existence. Read the rest of this entry »

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Split Definitive: A Review of Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View

November 13, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

The Parallax View (Reprint Edition)
by Slavoj Žižek
The MIT Press, 448 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-51268-8

The Parallax View, which first appeared in February 2006, was reprinted in April 2009 in a paperback edition that includes substantial additions by the author, the ever prolific “Elvis of Philosophy,” Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is the closest thing to a rock star the academic Left is likely to get; the industry has its celebrities, to be sure, but none of such aptitudes — and amplitudes — as the man from Ljubljana. The Parallax View stands, then, as his Blue Hawaii, the “magnum opus” of his substantial oeuvre. Such a claim notwithstanding, The Parallax View proves a generally rewarding if uneven work.

Cribbed from the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani (to his credit, Žižek is forthright in his appropriations, quoting liberally from Karatani’s Transcritique), a parallax gap, the lynchpin concept of Žižek’s theoretical apparatus, is an “observed difference [that] is not simply ‘subjective,’” Žižek writes, but “is rather … an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view [which] always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.” For instance, from one perspective an individual’s condition appears as one of freedom; from another, however, it appears as one determined by immanent constraints. (Goethe fairly captured this parallax when he wrote, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”) The validity of the one, moreover, does not depend on the other’s invalidation, and, in fact, cannot be brought to invalidate the other. They simply exist as true propositions separated by an insurmountable gap. The task, then, becomes then not a matter of resolving the antinomies (by definition an impossible task) nor even to harmonize them, but simply to think them in their mutually contradictory character as a precursor to their theorization. Read the rest of this entry »

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Mirror Moves: A Review of Rob Walker’s Buying In

October 8, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
by Rob Walker
Random House, 291 pp. ISBN 978-0-8129-7409-6

“The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit,” observes Gordon Comstock, the bourgeois, frustrated revolutionary who serves as the central figure of George Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The New Albion, an advertising firm that Comstock reluctantly joins in a bid “to make good” and thus satisfy his families expectations of him, harbors various types who, regardless of what else could be said of them, could certainly never be accused of taking their eye off the ball. “They had their cynical code worked out,” Comstock says of his colleagues: “The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.”

A lot has changed since the time of Orwell’s writing. We like to think that advertising has undergone certain refinements since the 1930s. Gone are such Here-Sooey-Sooey! crudities as the one Gordon Comstock describes. And indeed they have. After all, any strategy also engenders knowledge of its resistance. One clangor over slops too many and the hogs stop running (Well, stop running as a herd anyway). This is precisely the predicament confronting today’s marketers: hogs who’ve gotten hip to the game.

Were I asked to nominate a contemporary, real-life counterpart to Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, I’d select Rob Walker, keeper of The New York Times column “Consumed” as well as the weblog Murketing, and author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. In his book, Walker mounts an exposé of the various courses and measures marketers have taken since Orwell’s time and even before.

These courses and measures, as the book’s title suggests, have become increasingly subtle, and in many cases have virtually gone underground, all so as to reach the 21st century consumer, who, ad industry legend has it, has developed into one savvy swine. “By the time I started writing ‘Consumed,’” Walker writes, “this clever new creature had been armed with all kinds of dazzling technology, from ad-blocking gizmos to to alternative, grassroots media.” The media environment of the so-called new consumer is a far more diverse and variegated place; the blue-gray veldt of network-television mass culture has become a dense thicket of doo-dads commanding some slice of the consumer’s attention. No longer are consumers the enthralled “millions and millions of the One Eye,” as Jack Kerouac wrote of TV viewers of his time, but brandishers of all sorts of devices, each but one of millions and millions of eyes, which they thrust at the very marketers who would draw them back into narrow oscillations between McDonald’s or Burger King, Pepsi or Coke, Nike or Adidas.

This narrative would have tremendous explanatory power if it weren’t for the fact that it’s completely bogus. Do consumers use their new-found, technologically aided power to lord it over corporate hegemons and their ad-men ax men, as the modern legend has it? The answer is a resounding “No.” “Instead,” Walker writes, one thing that did happen between 2000 and 2006 — right as the new consumer was said to be bossing corporate America around like never before — was that profits of Fortune 500 companies soared.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The truth is, the situation in the marketplace has evolved to a point where neither the marketer nor the consumer does the lion’s share of bossing anymore. If the instantaneousness and spontaneity of new media have demonstrated anything, it’s that any such asymmetries have been more or less eliminated. The relationship between marketer and consumer has become profoundly dialogic, giving rise to a pas de deux that Walker calls murketing. A portmanteau for murky marketing, murketing denotes “the increasingly sophisticated tactics of marketers who blur the line between branding channels and everyday life,” as well as the “increasingly widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial culture.”

As one of Walker’s fellow Gen-X’ers, I found this second aspect of murketing particularly disturbing. Admittedly, I drank my fair share of Rolling Rock beer, which during the 1990s enjoyed roughly the same stature as Pabst Blue Ribbon did before hipsters discovered it, but my dedication to the brand was simply a practical matter: It was cheap and palatable. I certainly wasn’t considered cool for drinking it; several friends of mine from Pennsylvania would frequently inform me of its status there as trashy beer. And I’ll be darned if I ever found myself at some “happening” that I later discovered was some Rolling-Rock-sponsored crypto-promotion. Now, however, indie cred is subject to an entirely different calculus, one which is perhaps more integral than differential. To be tragically hip is no longer founded on a taxonomy of one’s studied rejections of marketing come-ons, but simply on how coquettish one is in the face of them. Here we are now. Entertain us.

Token social scene: murketed modes of self-realization are king.

Token social scene: murketed modes of self-realization are king.

I found myself wondering what brought about this betrayal of one generation by the next. Whatever modest successes Generation X enjoyed in steering larger culture away from rampant consumerism have seemingly been undone by Generation Y, who have shown themselves every bit as much marketers’ marionettes as Baby Boomers were during the golden age of network television. Fortunately, Walker supplies an eminently satisfactory answer. The change that came to marketing was fundamentally political, a sort of re-calibration of what it means to attain the hoary old Marxist concept of class consciousness. Discussing some subjects of his, bike messengers in Portland who were dragooned into a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer marketing … er … murketing stunt, Walker writes, “PBR’s blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anticapitalist image — the image attached to it by consumers — is a sham. You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding.”

Of course, according to the inexorable logic of murketing such a punctilio hardly matters. “PBR may be a political, ‘social protest’ brand … but not in a 1960s sense of political, which assumes a kind of zero-sum ideological game,” Walker continues: “In this new politics, symbolic solidarity with the blue-collar heartland trumps the real thing.” In one nation under the spell of brand consciousness, Coke’s the real thing, and class interest’s just a shadow on the cave wall.

This nifty bit of ontological reversal reminded me of the observations French philosopher and media theorist Jean Baudrillard makes in his book, The System of Objects. In it, he writes of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” This state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., salable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics), which in turn throw more fuel into the mythopoetic machines of advertising.

Murketing thus leaps forth from this system of impoverished signs, constraining one to modes of self-realization expressible only in and through items of consumption. It thus comes as no surprise to learn from Walker that the politics of PBR-swilling Portand bike messengers, for all of its pseudo-solidarity with the working classes of yesteryear, is “very much a politics of individual freedom.” With respect to this I’d go Walker one better and say that theirs is very much a neoliberal politics of individual freedom, which professes as its sine qua non individual liberty, and fingers as the enemy of such liberty some monolithic entity. Of course, in the domain of parliamentary politics this enemy is the state. But substitute “advertisers” for “Big Government” and it becomes quite difficult to distinguish the sentiments of some service-sector hipster from those of any hack from a right-wing think tank. (As economic geographer David Harvey writes in his indispensable A Brief History of Neoliberalism, spoofing a famous remark Richard Nixon made on Keynesian economic policies, “We’re all neoliberals now.”)

Not given to overt polemicizing like Orwell, Walker peppers just enough editorializing asides throughout Buying In to let his readers know where he stands on murketing-inflected politics and everything else subsumed under his book’s subject. And these asides are what lead me ultimately to recommend Buying In. They rescue the book from the litany of anecdotes Walker relates of murketing instances that after a while become a bit repetitious, pointing as they all do to the same phenomena.

But it may be that this repetitiousness was exactly Walker’s point. Upon finishing the book, I was left with the single depressing impression that for all its dazzling technological wonders, the new world order coming into view is one that promises monotony — monotony adorned with various “Xtreme,” “aggro” or chic publicity spectacles, but monotony nonetheless.

Now if only Walker would pen a companion volume to Buying In addressed to malcontents like me uneasy with the direction in which marketing is heading. He could title it Cashing Out.

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The Unobtrusive Dinosaur: A Review of Wallace Shawn’s Essays

October 6, 2009 — Henry Brulard

Essays
by Wallace Shawn
Haymarket Books, 186 pp. ISBN 978-1608460021

When one hasn’t noticed that it’s one’s own boot that’s standing on the suffering person’s neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them. — Wallace Shawn

The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. — T. W.  Adorno

Wallace Shawn’s Essays (also reviewed here, here, and here) is a collection of thirteen essays and two interviews. Though written over the course of 25 years on such diverse topics as personal morality, the politics of 9-11, the war in Iraq, theater, poetry and art, the book is unified in its concerns. Divided into two sections — “Reality” and “Dream-World” — Shawn’s Essays returns again and again to a question found in his plays, as well as in the film My Dinner With Andre (1981), written by Shawn in collaboration with Andre Gregory and directed by Louis Malle. The question, roughly stated, is a simple one and an old one: How can we live a good and moral life?

Updated somewhat for the readers of Generation Bubble the question becomes, how is it possible to live a good and moral life when that life is predicated on barbarity and death? The question has no satisfactory answer.  We want to be good and we want to be happy, but perhaps we cannot be both.

Essays stands as a sort of record of Shawn’s attempts to live such a life in spite of his own human failings. And to that extent, the book offers a sort of solution to the problem — though he does not present it as that. Rather, he represents his struggle to live through the conflict between reality and dreams that figures as the book’s structural conceit. We can enter reality through our dreams and enter dreams through reality. The disengagement with reality, the escape that is one of the pleasures of the dream life, can never be pursued for itself alone. Nor can we live completely in reality without complete despair. Reality and engagement must be tempered by dreams and disengagement. In this dialectical repetition, from reason to dreams and back, without ever staying with one for too long, Shawn finds a sort of accidental method to retain and maintain his own humanity.

Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.

In “Morality” he demonstrates, as he did in his play Aunt Dan and Lemon, that reason can and often does lead us violently and horribly astray. We like freedom and prosperity, we see that it is offered by free markets and politicians espousing such ideals, and so we vote for Bush, and the result is not only economic disaster, but death and neverending war. Or, we dislike Bush. We think his economic policies are poorly conceived and his adventures in Mesopotamia and Central asia are unlikely to achieve succes. We hear a politician who also dislikes these adventures, so we vote for him, but the economy only worsens and the murder continues. We calmly and happily accept one seemingly sane and reasonable proposition, and then another, and another, and find that the result, as in Adorno’s epigram, is murder and enslavement.

Likewise, morality, by itself, is no help. In an interview with Noam Chomsky, Shawn suggests that perhaps adherence to moral codes provides a solution. Chomsky’s reply is a resounding “No.” For morality, grounded either in rationality or the chauvinism of religion, is, as we have seen, no less likely to end in genocide and historical disaster. And what, in the face of that, can art accomplish? If we flee into art and dreams because reality is unbearable and unlivable this does nothing to change reality. Even worse, the comforts and security provided by art are questionable because complete escape is never quite possible. The result is that we are left, like Andre Gregory’s character in the film, weeping openly in the street because, to paraphrase, we are able to live only in our art, and never in our lives.  Art, which seems to be our salvation, can just as easily lead to voluptuousness and escapism that leads in turn to more casual inhumanity that inflicts violence upon reality.

At times Shawn reproaches himself with “memories” of his early, privileged life. Immersed in art and music as he was, he still failed to see others as fully human:

Perhaps it was my father, who taught me to love art, who also in some way nourished these perverse “memories.” I remember once, when I was ten or so, I was riding with him in a taxi and I drew his attention to an overweight, bizarre, rather miserable-looking boy whom we were passing in the street. I found the boy funny and was merrily laughing away at him when I turned around and was shocked to discover that my poor father had burst into tears. The sight of the boy hadn’t struck him as funny, apparently, and my response to the boy had also, apparently, not made him happy.

From all this a sort of answer, as much as one is possible, emerges. The trick is to reject art, morality, and reason as solutions in themselves, in order to embrace them as mutually complimentary techniques of living that must exist in a constant and questioning tension if life is to go on.

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What dreams may come: Shawn's oneiric–material dialectic.

I am impressed by Shawn’s simple and familiar morality evident throughout the “Reality” section, and considered explicitly in “The Quest for Superiority,” “Morality,” and “Patriotism.” It is not groundbreaking. It is not fashionable. It is not exciting. That is its charm. This morality is grounded in cutting away all that obscures reality to find the objective condition of one’s own humanity and the effects our humanity has on others who share it in common. The objective fact that Wallace Shawn is only one person, just as I or you are one person, among billions refutes any claim to superiority or privilege that he might make. The humility provided by this objective view requires Mr. Shawn to confront the fact that his life, like mine and perhaps yours, requires the subjection and exploitation of millions of impoverished and oppressed others. That is, for the status quo that constitutes his comfortable and humane life to continue, others must live horribly uncomfortable and inhumane lives.

The knowledge of this fundamental and inescapable immorality — an immorality that he did not choose any more than you or I chose it — requires a moral choice. He must either retain his morality and his fundamental humanity, or follow many of the privileged people he grew up with in “throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation”:

Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, We live in beautiful homes, we’re surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food. And if there are people out there who are envious of us and who might even be tempted to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to protect us. And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission, and we only hope they’ll do what they do with diligence and skill.

On a larger scale, the comfort and security that we have come to expect as our due requires not guards of the manor, but guardians of the empire.  For each of us to continue to live as we do, soldiers will have to kill and die in far-flung outposts. This is the unavoidable truth hidden among the bumperstickers screaming, “Support the Troops”: Silently, and perhaps unwillingly, we all support the troops, and the death they sow. Our lives, as they are now lived, require it. To renounce the status quo means to embrace the humanity of others, and hopefully, discover our own, but it may come at the price of our happiness or our comfort. Those people who have made the choice to accept reality at the expense of morality are, according to Shawn, able to be comfortable and happy at the price, we who are only human think, of their own humanity. I do not know if this is true, and I do not know if happiness or comfort, offered at increasingly lower discounts by advertisers and politicians alike, is sufficient for a life.

In his writing, Shawn refuses to adopt the weighty tones of leaders or the shouting of entertainers and pundits. To do so would be an act of superiority and privilege, and Shawn’s voice is the negation of privilege and superiority. He writes with humility, calm and reflection. He cares and he wants to understand, just as he wants you to understand. Abstraction and reification, political or philosophical, can only be challenged in human and subjective terms. Likewise, inhumanity and barbarity can only be met with humanity and civility. So his voice must be soft and calm, his terms concrete. And perhaps that is the only route left. Amid the din of competing and ever more thoughtless shouts the alarm can only be raised by thinking and living carefully and speaking softly.

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