Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was first published in 1927. Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both responding to the situation (I’d rather not say crisis) of modernity, to the immensity of scientific and technological change, to the dissolution of old certainties, to the fast pace of life, to the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both taking for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even yearning for them, or fixating on them as absent, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both anti-essentialist, both anti-positivist, both working out new ways to think, to do philosophy, to exercise the faculty of wonder.
Yet how different these books are in concepts, in affect, in spirit (if I may use that word).
(I admit it: I am setting up an overdrawn, melodramatic confrontation, inspired no doubt by the recently released film Alien Vs. Predator, which I haven’t seen, as well as by the first episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy Vs. Dracula,” which I just watched on DVD).
I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons. (Did I ever mention the academic conference where a militant Heideggerian, regarding me with the same scorn and disgust he would have shown if he had accidentally stepped into a pile of dog shit, told me with lofty condescension that my problem was that I was unwilling or unable to “patiently hearken to the voice of Being”?). Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).
Whitehead is different. His language is dry, gray, and highly abstract. (Occasionally a joke shimmers through, but rarely; you have to work hard in order to make it to the jokes; and as soon as you’ve gotten one, it is on to something else). But in this degree-zero, “academic,” fussy and almost pedantic prose, Whitehead is continually saying the most astonishing things. His “coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense) is in fact the enabling condition of his discourse: it is what permits him the freedom to analyze, to construct, to reorient, to switch direction, to re-ignite the philosophic sense of “wonder” at every step. Whitehead’s style is a kind of strategic counter-investment: it allows him to step away from his own particular passions and interests, without thereby falling into the pretense of a universal, above-it-all, higher knowledge. It’s a kind of detachment that continues to insist upon that from which we have become detached: particulars, singularities, perspectives that are always incomplete and partial (in both senses of this word: partial as opposed to whole, but also partial in the sense of partiality or bias). There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) just does metaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.
Leibniz is the classical philosopher with whom Whitehead is most commonly compared. (Deleuze’s only extended discussion of Whitehead, for instance, takes place in a chapter of The Fold, his book on Leibniz); but there are ways in which Whitehead is actually more similar to Spinoza. More of this in a future posting.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was first published in 1927. Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both responding to the situation (I’d rather not say crisis) of modernity, to the immensity of scientific and technological change, to the dissolution of old certainties, to the fast pace of life, to the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both taking for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even yearning for them, or fixating on them as absent, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both anti-essentialist, both anti-positivist, both working out new ways to think, to do philosophy, to exercise the faculty of wonder.
Yet how different these books are in concepts, in affect, in spirit (if I may use that word).
(I admit it: I am setting up an overdrawn, melodramatic confrontation, inspired no doubt by the recently released film Alien Vs. Predator, which I haven’t seen, as well as by the first episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy Vs. Dracula,” which I just watched on DVD).
I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons. (Did I ever mention the academic conference where a militant Heideggerian, regarding me with the same scorn and disgust he would have shown if he had accidentally stepped into a pile of dog shit, told me with lofty condescension that my problem was that I was unwilling or unable to “patiently hearken to the voice of Being”?). Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).
Whitehead is different. His language is dry, gray, and highly abstract. (Occasionally a joke shimmers through, but rarely; you have to work hard in order to make it to the jokes; and as soon as you’ve gotten one, it is on to something else). But in this degree-zero, “academic,” fussy and almost pedantic prose, Whitehead is continually saying the most astonishing things. His “coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense) is in fact the enabling condition of his discourse: it is what permits him the freedom to analyze, to construct, to reorient, to switch direction, to re-ignite the philosophic sense of “wonder” at every step. Whitehead’s style is a kind of strategic counter-investment: it allows him to step away from his own particular passions and interests, without thereby falling into the pretense of a universal, above-it-all, higher knowledge. It’s a kind of detachment that continues to insist upon that from which we have become detached: particulars, singularities, perspectives that are always incomplete and partial (in both senses of this word: partial as opposed to whole, but also partial in the sense of partiality or bias). There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) just does metaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.
Leibniz is the classical philosopher with whom Whitehead is most commonly compared. (Deleuze’s only extended discussion of Whitehead, for instance, takes place in a chapter of The Fold, his book on Leibniz); but there are ways in which Whitehead is actually more similar to Spinoza. More of this in a future posting.
Paul Feyerabend‘s Against Method (originally published in 1975) is another one of those books I have been meaning to read for years, but never got around to before now. Feyerabend (1924-1994) was a philosopher of science, famous (or notorious) for his “epistemological anarchism,” his insistence that “the only principle” that can be justified for scientific research is that “anything goes.” I’ve turned to him no, partly out of my interest in science studies, and partly because I’m supposed to give a talk in a few months at a symposium on “foundations and methods in the humanities,” a task I am finding difficult because I have no belief in foundations, and little use for methodologies.
Feyerabend critiques and rejects the attempt — by philosophers of science, primarily, but also by popular apologists for science, and sometimes by scientists themselves — to establish norms and criteria to govern the way science works, and to establish what practices and results are valid for scientific research. Feyerabend’s particular target is Karl Popper’s doctrine of “falsification,” but more generally he opposes any a priori attempt to legislate what can and cannot be done in science.
Feyerabend’s argument is partly “deconstructive” (by which I mean he showed how rationalist arguments were necessarily internally inconsistent and incoherent — though he does not seem to have much use for Derridean deconstruction as a philosophy), and partly historical and sociological. He argues that actual scientific practice did not, does not, and indeed cannot, make use of the rationalist norms that philosophers of science, and ideologists of science, have proclaimed. He analyzes Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism at great length, and shows that Galileo’s arguments were riddled with non sequiturs, loose analogies, ad hoc assumptions, self-contradictory and easily falsifiable assertions, rhetorical grandstanding, and so on. The point is not to undermine Galileo, or to assert that there are no grounds for choosing between seeing the earth and the sun as the center. Rather, Feyerabend wants to show that such (disreputable) strategies were strictly necessary; without them, Copernicus and Galileo never could have overthrown the earth-centered view, which had both the theoretical knowledge and the “common sense” of their time, as well as the authority of the Church, on their side. It was not a matter of a “more accurate” theory displacing a less accurate one; but rather, a radical shift of paradigms, one which could only be accomplished by violently disrupting both accepted truths and accepted procedures. It is only in the hundreds of years after Galileo convinced the world of the heliocentric theory, that the empirical evidence backing up the theory was generated and catalogued.
Feyerabend is drawing, of course, on Thomas Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts,” but he is pushing it in a much more radical direction than Kuhn would accept. Kuhn distinguishes between “normal science,” when generally accepted research programs and paradigms are in place, and rationalistic criteria do in fact function, and times of crisis, when paradigms break down under the weight of accumulating anomalies, thus forcing scientists to cast about for a new paradigm. For Feyerabend, however, there is no “normal science.” There was no crisis, or weight of anomalies, that forced Copernicus and then Galileo to cast about for a new astronomical paradigm; it would be more to the point to say that Galileo deliberately and artificially created a crisis, in order to undermine a paradigm that was generally accepted and that worked well, and put in its place a new paradigm that he supported more out of passion and intuition than out of anything like solid empirical evidence. Because “facts” are never independent of social contexts and theoretical assumptions, Galileo could not have provoked a shift in the theoretical assumptions of his time merely by appealing to what were understood then as the “facts.”
Such an argument was quite shocking in 1975. It has become much less so in the years since, as rhetorical theorists, sociologists, and others in “science studies” have studied in great depth the way science actually works, and have contested many other instances of (capital-S) Science and (capital-R) Reason on historical and sociological grounds.
There remains a subtle but important difference, however, between Feyerabend and more recent science studies historians and thinkers like Bruno Latour, Stephen Shapin, Steve Fuller, and many others. Feyerabend justifies his “epistemological anarchism” on the ground that it is necessary for the actual, successful practice of science, and indeed for the “progress” of science — though he explicitly refuses (page 18) to define what he means by “progress.” What this means is that Feyerabend opposes methodological norms and fixed principles of validation largely on pragmatic grounds : which I do not think is quite true of Latour et al. Where Latour sees a long process of negotiation, and a “settlement,” between Pasteur and the bacilli he was studying, Feyerabend doesn’t see Galileo (or Einstein, for that matter) in engaging in any such process vis-a-vis the earth, or the sun, or the universe. Instead, he sees them as blithely ignoring rules of evidence and of verification or falsification, in order to impose radically new perspectives (less upon the world than upon their own cultures). Galileo’s and Einstein’s justification is that their proposals indeed worked, and were accepted; this is what separates them from crackpots, though no criteria existed that could have assured these successes in advance.
What I don’t see enough of in contemporary science studies — though one finds it in Deleuze and Guattari, in Isabelle Stengers, and in the work of my friend Richard Doyle — is Feyerabend’s sense of the kinship between scientific and aesthetic creativity, in that both are engaged in creating the very criteria according to which they will be judged.
More generally, Feyerabend, like Latour and other more recent science studies thinkers, is deeply concerned with democracy, and with the way that the imperialism of Big Science threatens democracy by trying to decree that its Way is the Only Way. Indeed, one probably sees more of this threat today — in the “science wars” that reached a flash point in the mid 1990s, but that are still smouldering, in the popularization of science, and in the pronouncements of biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists like Steven Weinberg and Alan Sokal — than one did when Feyerabend was writing Against Method. But Feyerabend wisely refuses to get lost (as I fear Latour does at times) in the attempt to propose an alternative “settlement” or “constitution” to the one that Big Science has proclaimed for itself. Feyerabend’s genial anarchism, pluralism, and “relativism” (a term he accepts, but only in certain carefully outlined contexts) simply precludes the need for any single alternative account, such as the one Latour struggles to provide. Finally, for Feyerabend, there is no such thing as Science; we should rather speak of the sciences, as a multitude of often conflicting and contradictory practices, none of which can pretend to ultimate authority, and all of which have to be judged and dealt with according to a range of needs, interests, and contexts.
Pluralism is often derided as wishy-washy, wimpy, “soft,” unwilling to take a stand. None of this is true of Feyerabend’s pluralism, though I am not sure how much of his exemption from such charges is due to the rigor of his arguments, and how much to the charm of his rhetorical style — he’s an engaging, inviting, and unaffected writer, able to be clear and focused without becoming simplistic, and able to argue complexly without becoming abstruse. Of course, the attempt to separate logical rigor from stylistic effects is precisely the sort of pseudo-rational distinction that Feyerabend is continually warning us against.
Paul Feyerabend‘s Against Method (originally published in 1975) is another one of those books I have been meaning to read for years, but never got around to before now. Feyerabend (1924-1994) was a philosopher of science, famous (or notorious) for his “epistemological anarchism,” his insistence that “the only principle” that can be justified for scientific research is that “anything goes.” I’ve turned to him now, partly out of my interest in science studies, and partly because I’m supposed to give a talk in a few months at a symposium on “foundations and methods in the humanities,” a task I am finding difficult because I have no belief in foundations, and little use for methodologies.
Feyerabend critiques and rejects the attempt — by philosophers of science, primarily, but also by popular apologists for science, and sometimes by scientists themselves — to establish norms and criteria to govern the way science works, and to establish what practices and results are valid for scientific research. Feyerabend’s particular target is Karl Popper’s doctrine of “falsification,” but more generally he opposes any a priori attempt to legislate what can and cannot be done in science.
Feyerabend’s argument is partly “deconstructive” (by which I mean he showed how rationalist arguments were necessarily internally inconsistent and incoherent — though he does not seem to have much use for Derridean deconstruction as a philosophy), and partly historical and sociological. He argues that actual scientific practice did not, does not, and indeed cannot, make use of the rationalist norms that philosophers of science, and ideologists of science, have proclaimed. He analyzes Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism at great length, and shows that Galileo’s arguments were riddled with non sequiturs, loose analogies, ad hoc assumptions, self-contradictory and easily falsifiable assertions, rhetorical grandstanding, and so on. The point is not to undermine Galileo, or to assert that there are no grounds for choosing between seeing the earth and the sun as the center. Rather, Feyerabend wants to show that such (disreputable) strategies were strictly necessary; without them, Copernicus and Galileo never could have overthrown the earth-centered view, which had both the theoretical knowledge and the “common sense” of their time, as well as the authority of the Church, on their side. It was not a matter of a “more accurate” theory displacing a less accurate one; but rather, a radical shift of paradigms, one which could only be accomplished by violently disrupting both accepted truths and accepted procedures. It is only in the hundreds of years after Galileo convinced the world of the heliocentric theory, that the empirical evidence backing up the theory was generated and catalogued.
Feyerabend is drawing, of course, on Thomas Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts,” but he is pushing it in a much more radical direction than Kuhn would accept. Kuhn distinguishes between “normal science,” when generally accepted research programs and paradigms are in place, and rationalistic criteria do in fact function, and times of crisis, when paradigms break down under the weight of accumulating anomalies, thus forcing scientists to cast about for a new paradigm. For Feyerabend, however, there is no “normal science.” There was no crisis, or weight of anomalies, that forced Copernicus and then Galileo to cast about for a new astronomical paradigm; it would be more to the point to say that Galileo deliberately and artificially created a crisis, in order to undermine a paradigm that was generally accepted and that worked well, and put in its place a new paradigm that he supported more out of passion and intuition than out of anything like solid empirical evidence. Because “facts” are never independent of social contexts and theoretical assumptions, Galileo could not have provoked a shift in the theoretical assumptions of his time merely by appealing to what were understood then as the “facts.”
Such an argument was quite shocking in 1975. It has become much less so in the years since, as rhetorical theorists, sociologists, and others in “science studies” have studied in great depth the way science actually works, and have contested many other instances of (capital-S) Science and (capital-R) Reason on historical and sociological grounds.
There remains a subtle but important difference, however, between Feyerabend and more recent science studies historians and thinkers like Bruno Latour, Stephen Shapin, Steve Fuller, and many others. Feyerabend justifies his “epistemological anarchism” on the ground that it is necessary for the actual, successful practice of science, and indeed for the “progress” of science — though he explicitly refuses (page 18) to define what he means by “progress.” What this means is that Feyerabend opposes methodological norms and fixed principles of validation largely on pragmatic grounds : which I do not think is quite true of Latour et al. Where Latour sees a long process of negotiation, and a “settlement,” between Pasteur and the bacilli he was studying, Feyerabend doesn’t see Galileo (or Einstein, for that matter) in engaging in any such process vis-a-vis the earth, or the sun, or the universe. Instead, he sees them as blithely ignoring rules of evidence and of verification or falsification, in order to impose radically new perspectives (less upon the world than upon their own cultures). Galileo’s and Einstein’s justification is that their proposals indeed worked, and were accepted; this is what separates them from crackpots, though no criteria existed that could have assured these successes in advance.
What I don’t see enough of in contemporary science studies — though one finds it in Deleuze and Guattari, in Isabelle Stengers, and in the work of my friend Richard Doyle — is Feyerabend’s sense of the kinship between scientific and aesthetic creativity, in that both are engaged in creating the very criteria according to which they will be judged.
More generally, Feyerabend, like Latour and other more recent science studies thinkers, is deeply concerned with democracy, and with the way that the imperialism of Big Science threatens democracy by trying to decree that its Way is the Only Way. Indeed, one probably sees more of this threat today — in the “science wars” that reached a flash point in the mid 1990s, but that are still smouldering, in the popularization of science, and in the pronouncements of biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists like Steven Weinberg and Alan Sokal — than one did when Feyerabend was writing Against Method. But Feyerabend wisely refuses to get lost (as I fear Latour does at times) in the attempt to propose an alternative “settlement” or “constitution” to the one that Big Science has proclaimed for itself. Feyerabend’s genial anarchism, pluralism, and “relativism” (a term he accepts, but only in certain carefully outlined contexts) simply precludes the need for any single alternative account, such as the one Latour struggles to provide. Finally, for Feyerabend, there is no such thing as Science; we should rather speak of the sciences, as a multitude of often conflicting and contradictory practices, none of which can pretend to ultimate authority, and all of which have to be judged and dealt with according to a range of needs, interests, and contexts.
Pluralism is often derided as wishy-washy, wimpy, “soft,” unwilling to take a stand. None of this is true of Feyerabend’s pluralism, though I am not sure how much of his exemption from such charges is due to the rigor of his arguments, and how much to the charm of his rhetorical style — he’s an engaging, inviting, and unaffected writer, able to be clear and focused without becoming simplistic, and able to argue complexly without becoming abstruse. Of course, the attempt to separate logical rigor from stylistic effects is precisely the sort of pseudo-rational distinction that Feyerabend is continually warning us against.
David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently, in the anti-globalization movement. Each, he says, has a lot to offer the other.
What anarchism can offer anthropology, according to Graeber, is a way out of academicist impasses, a way that anthropology might change the world, rather than merely interpret it (to use a Marxian formulation to which Graeber might well be averse; here he soft-pedals the Marxist slant that was more apparent in his previous — and more traditionally academic — book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value). This is the most upfront side of the book, but also its least convincing one. For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular. Despite all his rote Foucault-bashing, and sneering at mainstream academics as “people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment” (71), he in fact buys into the authority of normative academic “knowledge” much more than I think is necessary or justified. Most obviously, this is apparent in the fact that Graeber never questions the interests and biases of “downwardly-studying” ethnographic researchers or participant-observers themselves. Graeber’s claim that anthropology has had “an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning”, because of anthropology’s “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities” (13) is disingenuous at best, given the tangled nature of anthropology’s origins (as both an expression of and revolt against European colonialism), not to mention its institutional investments today. It’s not that Graeber doesn’t know that “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder” (96); but he seems to think that the “vast archive of human experience” possessed by anthropologists is uninflected by these origins, and only needs to be shared more publically in order to be efficacious.
Graeber is far more interesting when he writes about what anthropology can offer anarchism: a wider range of both social theory and observation of social practices than is available in orthodox Western theory and philosophy alone. Graeber discusses Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift as an alternative to orthodox economic assumptions about the centrality of markets and “exchange”, and Pierre Clastres’ arguments about societies that explicitly sought to avoid the formation of a State. He cites numerous anthropological examples of social formations that have not taken on the form of State authority, or that have existed in the interstices of States and that have “autonomized” themselves or exempted themselves from its control. He suggests ways that we can dispense with the myth of “revolution” as some ultimate and complete rupture with the past, without thereby resigning ourselves to what hardcore Marxists used to disparage as mere “reformism.” And, paralleling arguments that I am more familiar with in other fields (given my limited knowledge of anthropology), he critiques the common assumption that “modernity” itself represents a radical break from all the rest of human history. And I haven’t even scratched the surface here of the wide range of Graeber’s historical examples and theoretical suggestions.
Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable. It’s very much the exhilarating spirit of May 1968: be realistic, demand the impossible; though Graeber rightly does not couch his exhortations in the form of an appeal to return to the 1960s, or to any other mythologized past of radical political hope. There is, thankfully, no nostalgia, and no call to order, or reverencing of past political models, in this book.
The main problem I have with Graeber’s argument is this. Graeber’s emphasis on the State as the enemy misconstrues, I believe, the role of the “market,” and of concentrations of capital. Like many other anarchists, Graeber is all too ready to see “free market” capitalism, commodification and consumption, and the wage system itself — all of which he denounces — as being adjuncts and epiphenomena of State power. This seems to me to be exactly wrong. While capitalist markets, the wage system, the private ownership of the means of production, the ever-increasing “branding” and commodification and corporate appropriation of all forms of human creativity and activity, and so on, of course could not sustain themselves without relying upon State power, and more generally without exerting and monopolizing power in the political realm, this does not make them functions of State power. It does not follow that State power comes first, either pragmatically or ideologically. Rather the reverse. Marxist political economy, and Foucaultian analytics of power, different as they are from one another, both view State power as an effect and an instrument of social, political, technological, and economic power relations, rather than as the source, or the most basic component, of those relations.
I am not arguing for a monocausal theory (like the so-called “vulgar-marxist” one that would reduce everything to an ultimate economic “base”); and I don’t think that Graeber, in his focus on the State, is monocausally reductionist either. (He mentions, among other things, the differences between the State as an ideal, and the actual ways that peoples’ lives are controlled and constrained, and points out that these two need not correspond). But I do think the difference in emphasis is crucial. For one thing, Graeber’s overestimation of the importance of the State leads him to underestimate other (non-state) impediments to freedom. How successful can “self-organization” be, today, in the absence of any economic resources? Graeber adopts the Italian autonomists’ ideas about “exodus” and “engaged withdrawal” from “capitalism and the liberal state” (60ff), but he ignores, again, the autonomists’ grounding in political economy. The dismantling of the welfare state in the US and other Western countries over the last quarter-century has not led to more opportunities for self-organization and empowerment, but quite the contrary. States have increasingly withdrawn from what Manuel Castells calls the “black holes of informational capitalism,” but the people unfortunate enough to be stuck in those black holes are still subject to the terror of the “free market,” and what Marxists used to call “the international division of labor.”
When Graeber really lost me, though, was with his praise of decision-making through “consensus,” instead of compulsion. Me, I don’t see much of a difference between having to obey hateful and stupid orders issued by clueless assholes (the Leninist model as well as the State and corporate one), and having to sit in meetings for hours on end while the same clueless assholes make endless objections and qualifications that all have to be worked through before the meeting can come to an end. It’s torture either way, and I’m not convinced that the one method is even any more “democratic” than the other. Anarchist “consensus” is just another way of enforcing conformity and group solidarity, by wearing people down until they are browbeaten into agreement; it’s every bit as stifling and oppressive as military hierarchies and fraternity initiations and the “discipline” of the “free market” are. Empirically, different mixtures of these procedures might be more or less oppressive, less or more democratic, in particular instances; there are cases where the looser form of self-determination that Graeber praises might be welcome in comparison to the alternatives. But let’s not kid ourselves that decision-making through “consensus” somehow eliminates inequalities of power, or that it expands human freedom, or that it’s a desirable social ideal.
David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently, in the anti-globalization movement. Each, he says, has a lot to offer the other.
What anarchism can offer anthropology, according to Graeber, is a way out of academicist impasses, a way that anthropology might change the world, rather than merely interpret it (to use a Marxian formulation to which Graeber might well be averse; here he soft-pedals the Marxist slant that was more apparent in his previous — and more traditionally academic — book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value). This is the most upfront side of the book, but also its least convincing one. For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular. Despite all his rote Foucault-bashing, and sneering at mainstream academics as “people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment” (71), he in fact buys into the authority of normative academic “knowledge” much more than I think is necessary or justified. Most obviously, this is apparent in the fact that Graeber never questions the interests and biases of “downwardly-studying” ethnographic researchers or participant-observers themselves. Graeber’s claim that anthropology has had “an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning”, because of anthropology’s “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities” (13) is disingenuous at best, given the tangled nature of anthropology’s origins (as both an expression of and revolt against European colonialism), not to mention its institutional investments today. It’s not that Graeber doesn’t know that “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder” (96); but he seems to think that the “vast archive of human experience” possessed by anthropologists is uninflected by these origins, and only needs to be shared more publically in order to be efficacious.
Graeber is far more interesting when he writes about what anthropology can offer anarchism: a wider range of both social theory and observation of social practices than is available in orthodox Western theory and philosophy alone. Graeber discusses Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift as an alternative to orthodox economic assumptions about the centrality of markets and “exchange”, and Pierre Clastres’ arguments about societies that explicitly sought to avoid the formation of a State. He cites numerous anthropological examples of social formations that have not taken on the form of State authority, or that have existed in the interstices of States and that have “autonomized” themselves or exempted themselves from its control. He suggests ways that we can dispense with the myth of “revolution” as some ultimate and complete rupture with the past, without thereby resigning ourselves to what hardcore Marxists used to disparage as mere “reformism.” And, paralleling arguments that I am more familiar with in other fields (given my limited knowledge of anthropology), he critiques the common assumption that “modernity” itself represents a radical break from all the rest of human history. And I haven’t even scratched the surface here of the wide range of Graeber’s historical examples and theoretical suggestions.
Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable. It’s very much the exhilarating spirit of May 1968: be realistic, demand the impossible; though Graeber rightly does not couch his exhortations in the form of an appeal to return to the 1960s, or to any other mythologized past of radical political hope. There is, thankfully, no nostalgia, and no call to order, or reverencing of past political models, in this book.
The main problem I have with Graeber’s argument is this. Graeber’s emphasis on the State as the enemy misconstrues, I believe, the role of the “market,” and of concentrations of capital. Like many other anarchists, Graeber is all too ready to see “free market” capitalism, commodification and consumption, and the wage system itself — all of which he denounces — as being adjuncts and epiphenomena of State power. This seems to me to be exactly wrong. While capitalist markets, the wage system, the private ownership of the means of production, the ever-increasing “branding” and commodification and corporate appropriation of all forms of human creativity and activity, and so on, of course could not sustain themselves without relying upon State power, and more generally without exerting and monopolizing power in the political realm, this does not make them functions of State power. It does not follow that State power comes first, either pragmatically or ideologically. Rather the reverse. Marxist political economy, and Foucaultian analytics of power, different as they are from one another, both view State power as an effect and an instrument of social, political, technological, and economic power relations, rather than as the source, or the most basic component, of those relations.
I am not arguing for a monocausal theory (like the so-called “vulgar-marxist” one that would reduce everything to an ultimate economic “base”); and I don’t think that Graeber, in his focus on the State, is monocausally reductionist either. (He mentions, among other things, the differences between the State as an ideal, and the actual ways that peoples’ lives are controlled and constrained, and points out that these two need not correspond). But I do think the difference in emphasis is crucial. For one thing, Graeber’s overestimation of the importance of the State leads him to underestimate other (non-state) impediments to freedom. How successful can “self-organization” be, today, in the absence of any economic resources? Graeber adopts the Italian autonomists’ ideas about “exodus” and “engaged withdrawal” from “capitalism and the liberal state” (60ff), but he ignores, again, the autonomists’ grounding in political economy. There are a lot of things worse than the “liberal state.” So-called “free enterprise,” for one thing. The dismantling of the welfare state in the US and other Western countries over the last quarter-century has not led to more opportunities for self-organization and empowerment, but less. States have increasingly withdrawn from what Manuel Castells calls the “black holes of informational capitalism,” but the people unfortunate enough to be stuck in those black holes are still subject to the terror of the “free market,” and what Marxists used to call “the international division of labor.”
When Graeber really lost me, though, was with his praise of decision-making through “consensus,” instead of compulsion. Me, I don’t see much of a difference between having to obey hateful and stupid orders issued by clueless assholes (the Leninist model as well as the State and corporate one), and having to sit in meetings for hours on end while the same clueless assholes make endless objections and qualifications that all have to be worked through before the meeting can come to an end. It’s torture either way, and I’m not convinced that the one method is even any more “democratic” than the other. Anarchist “consensus” is just another way of enforcing conformity and group solidarity, by wearing people down until they are browbeaten into agreement; it’s every bit as stifling and oppressive as military hierarchies and fraternity initiations and the “discipline” of the “free market” are. Empirically, different mixtures of these procedures might be more or less oppressive, less or more democratic, in particular instances; there are cases where the looser form of self-determination that Graeber praises might be welcome in comparison to the alternatives. But let’s not kid ourselves that decision-making through “consensus” somehow eliminates inequalities of power, or that it expands human freedom, or that it’s a desirable social ideal.
For The New York Times Sunday Book Review to have Francis Fukuyama review Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s new book Multitude is like having Kenneth Starr review Bill Clinton’s autobiography. Since Fukuyama has long claimed that globalized, “free-market” capitalism is the End of History, the ultimate realization of human social and political development (albeit an achievement that is threatened by fundamentalism, narrow nationalism, and posthuman science), of course he will be blind to Hardt and Negri’s vision of an alternative to capitalist domination. I haven’t read Multitude yet, and there was a lot I found to disagree with in Hardt and Negri’s previous volume, Empire, but Hardt and Negri are profound thinkers whose ideas are a necessary starting point for anybody who wants to think about democratic alternatives to the current world order. I’m not in the least bit surprised that The Times Book Review should seek to foreclose such a discussion from the get-go, by commissioning Fukuyama’s predictable review; but it’s important to make a point of this, precisely because The Times is so influential, and so central to what passes for mainstream book and intellectual culture.
For The New York Times Sunday Book Review to have Francis Fukuyama review Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s new book Multitude is like having Kenneth Starr review Bill Clinton’s autobiography. Since Fukuyama has long claimed that globalized, “free-market” capitalism is the End of History, the ultimate realization of human social and political development (albeit an achievement that is threatened by fundamentalism, narrow nationalism, and posthuman science), of course he will be blind to Hardt and Negri’s vision of an alternative to capitalist domination. I haven’t read Multitude yet, and there was a lot I found to disagree with in Hardt and Negri’s previous volume, Empire, but Hardt and Negri are profound thinkers whose ideas are a necessary starting point for anybody who wants to think about democratic alternatives to the current world order. I’m not in the least bit surprised that The Times Book Review should seek to foreclose such a discussion from the get-go, by commissioning Fukuyama’s predictable review; but it’s important to make a point of this, precisely because The Times is so influential, and so central to what passes for mainstream book and intellectual culture.
Philip Baruth’s The X-President is a science fiction novel about Bill Clinton. It’s a hoot. The novel is set (initially) in the year 2055. The narrator, Sal Hayden, an historian specializing in the twentieth century, is working on the authorized biography of the (still-living, thanks to prosthetic enhancements) 109-year-old former President (referred to in the text exclusively as “BC”).
As Sal toils away on her project in Litle Rock, however, the United States is slowly but surely losing World War III. And the ultimate cause for the war turns out to be a trivial (and at the time scarcely noticed) act of Clinton’s Presidency: in return for submitting to stringent restrictions on cigarettes at home, and agreeing to pay reparations for cigarette-related deaths, the tobacco companies were given free reign, with US government support, to peddle their product in the Third World.
The only way to avert disaster is to change the course of history, using the dangerous technology of time travel. So Sal is sent into the past, to meet the 16-year-old Clinton in 1963, as well as the mature President in the mid-1990s.
That’s the set-up. Such a manic and loony framework allows Baruth to throw out extended riffs on such matters as Clinton’s character, the ways American popular culture has changed over the years (and the ways it hasn’t), and the paranoid mentality of the national-security/surveillance/military state. Baruth plays around a bit with the inevitable paradoxes of time travel (how changing the past changes the present from which we started out to change that past, leading to a destructively self-reflexive feedback loop), but this is mostly in order to think about what it means to look at things historically, and to not take the seeming obviousness of our surroundings for granted. We see the near-present, in which the book was written and is being read, from a perspective of extreme distance.
But mostly, we get to see Bill Clinton from a bunch of different angles, from adolescence before he had made his mark, to a future in which he is scarcely more present in peoples’ minds than Harry Truman, say, is to us today.
The X-President is really about how impossible it is (unless you are a hard-core hater from the Far Right) not to love ol’ Bill, even though you know that he’s a rascal and a scalliwag, whose vision never extended past the reports from the latest focus groups, whose accomplishments were at best disappointingly meager, whose political favors were always for sale, who always supported the military-industrial complex and the interests of multinational capital, and whose libido always overcame his judgment (though this last quality is, of course, rather endearing). But Clinton’s charm and charisma, his odd combination of narcissism and cynical calculation and genuine empathy and desire to help, are such that none of this matters. The book allows Clinton to seduce us all over again, all the more so in that we really should know better by now.
Philip Baruth’s The X-President is a science fiction novel about Bill Clinton. It’s a hoot. The novel is set (initially) in the year 2055. The narrator, Sal Hayden, an historian specializing in the twentieth century, is working on the authorized biography of the (still-living, thanks to prosthetic enhancements) 109-year-old former President (referred to in the text exclusively as “BC”).
As Sal toils away on her project in Litle Rock, however, the United States is slowly but surely losing World War III. And the ultimate cause for the war turns out to be a trivial (and at the time scarcely noticed) act of Clinton’s Presidency: in return for submitting to stringent restrictions on cigarettes at home, and agreeing to pay reparations for cigarette-related deaths, the tobacco companies were given free reign, with US government support, to peddle their product in the Third World.
The only way to avert disaster is to change the course of history, using the dangerous technology of time travel. So Sal is sent into the past, to meet the 16-year-old Clinton in 1963, as well as the mature President in the mid-1990s.
That’s the set-up. Such a manic and loony framework allows Baruth to throw out extended riffs on such matters as Clinton’s character, the ways American popular culture has changed over the years (and the ways it hasn’t), and the paranoid mentality of the national-security/surveillance/military state. Baruth plays around a bit with the inevitable paradoxes of time travel (how changing the past changes the present from which we started out to change that past, leading to a destructively self-reflexive feedback loop), but this is mostly in order to think about what it means to look at things historically, and to not take the seeming obviousness of our surroundings for granted. We see the near-present, in which the book was written and is being read, from a perspective of extreme distance.
But mostly, we get to see Bill Clinton from a bunch of different angles, from adolescence before he had made his mark, to a future in which he is scarcely more present in peoples’ minds than Harry Truman, say, is to us today.
The X-President is really about how impossible it is (unless you are a hard-core hater from the Far Right) not to love ol’ Bill, even though you know that he’s a rascal and a scalliwag, whose vision never extended past the reports from the latest focus groups, whose accomplishments were at best disappointingly meager, whose political favors were always for sale, who always supported the military-industrial complex and the interests of multinational capital, and whose libido always overcame his judgment (though this last quality is, of course, rather endearing). But Clinton’s charm and charisma, his odd combination of narcissism and cynical calculation and genuine empathy and desire to help, are such that none of this matters. The book allows Clinton to seduce us all over again, all the more so in that we really should know better by now.
I’ve caught up recently with a bunch of Warren Ellis “graphic novellas.” (Or, less pretentiously: comics). These are all short, compressed narratives: a complete story in 72 or 96 pages. Each one packs a punch and explores just one mind-blowing idea. Comics like these deliver entertainment + technophilosophy in a package that Hollywood (due to its high budgets and consequent need to play it safe so as to attract the largest possible audience) can’t match.
- Dark Blue, drawn by Jacen Burrows, is a horror/crime story with a VR setting. The main character’s psychotic world, in which he is a vengeful and violent cop, turns out to be a collective hallucination generated by a DMT-like drug. A virtual place “is encoded within the drug itself.” The drug shapes consciousness, even as consciousness shapes the drug. But strange and gruesome things start happening when consciousness at the point of death is caught within the drug’s feedback loop. A terrific, and terrifying, anti-utopian nightmare. If anything is possible in virtual reality, or in heightened psychedelic consciousness, then we’d better watch out for the worst.
- Red/Tokyo Storm Warning. Two stories back to back in a single volume, like those old SF and crime cheap paperbacks.
Red, drawn by Cully Hammer, is about the stupidity of the CIA, and the last dignified stand of a retired hit man. It could also be read as a premonitory fable about the current Iraq morass. You can always develop more destructive weapons, but watch out or they will blow up in your face: you are never really in control of them. Here the weapon is a human one, a highly skilled and ultra-powerful killer; so we get to feel the emotions of the “weapon of mass destruction” itself. We empathize with the killer, whose very real anguish contrasts with the lack of remorse or humanity on the part of the powerful people who set him into motion.
Tokyo Storm Warning, drawn by James Raiz, is all about cool monsters and robots in an alternative Tokyo. We know that Godzilla was invented in response to the trauma of the atomic weapons dropped on Japan. But Ellis literalizes this idea, bringing us to the very heart of one of the twentieth century’s great traumas. Childlike fantasy confronts the unimaginable horror of total annihilation, with strange results. Can there be poetry after Auschwitz? Can there be comics after Hiroshima?
- Orbiter, drawn by Coleen Duran, is in contrast deliciously light and upbeat. The romance of space travel, the mystery of First Contact. The aliens don’t want to take us over or anything. They simply want to meet us, and hang out with us; if only we could get over our panic aversion. We can’t really understand them — or vice versa — but that only adds spice to the encounter. The unknown is neither a threat of annihilation, nor a transcendent resolution of our problems, but rather a transversal dimension to explore. If we are children in the cosmos, the aliens are not benevolent parents (as they are in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in 2001), but kids like ourselves, who just “want us to come out and play.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: comics writers like Ellis, and Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, are really thinking about our culture, and our future, in ways that mainstream novelists and academics and critics cannot match. I get far more from them than I do from “serious” writers like Martin Amis and Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, good as the latter sometimes are. Comics are an oddly marginalized form, even in “popular” or “low” culture (think about how few people actually buy and read Spiderman comics, compared to how many go too see the movie version). But comics, with their low budgets, their innovative mixtures of text and vision, and their unabashed genre thrills and chills, are thrashing out the metaphysics of the twenty-first century.
I’ve caught up recently with a bunch of Warren Ellis “graphic novellas.” (Or, less pretentiously: comics). These are all short, compressed narratives: a complete story in 72 or 96 pages. Each one packs a punch and explores just one mind-blowing idea. Comics like these deliver entertainment + technophilosophy in a package that Hollywood (due to its high budgets and consequent need to play it safe so as to attract the largest possible audience) can’t match.
- Dark Blue, drawn by Jacen Burrows, is a horror/crime story with a VR setting. The main character’s psychotic world, in which he is a vengeful and violent cop, turns out to be a collective hallucination generated by a DMT-like drug. A virtual place “is encoded within the drug itself.” The drug shapes consciousness, even as consciousness shapes the drug. But strange and gruesome things start happening when consciousness at the point of death is caught within the drug’s feedback loop. A terrific, and terrifying, anti-utopian nightmare. If anything is possible in virtual reality, or in heightened psychedelic consciousness, then we’d better watch out for the worst.
- Red/Tokyo Storm Warning. Two stories back to back in a single volume, like those old SF and crime cheap paperbacks.
Red, drawn by Cully Hammer, is about the stupidity of the CIA, and the last dignified stand of a retired hit man. It could also be read as a premonitory fable about the current Iraq morass. You can always develop more destructive weapons, but watch out or they will blow up in your face: you are never really in control of them. Here the weapon is a human one, a highly skilled and ultra-powerful killer; so we get to feel the emotions of the “weapon of mass destruction” itself. We empathize with the killer, whose very real anguish contrasts with the lack of remorse or humanity on the part of the powerful people who set him into motion.
Tokyo Storm Warning, drawn by James Raiz, is all about cool monsters and robots in an alternative Tokyo. We know that Godzilla was invented in response to the trauma of the atomic weapons dropped on Japan. But Ellis literalizes this idea, bringing us to the very heart of one of the twentieth century’s great traumas. Childlike fantasy confronts the unimaginable horror of total annihilation, with strange results. Can there be poetry after Auschwitz? Can there be comics after Hiroshima?
- Orbiter, drawn by Coleen Duran, is in contrast deliciously light and upbeat. The romance of space travel, the mystery of First Contact. The aliens don’t want to take us over or anything. They simply want to meet us, and hang out with us; if only we could get over our panic aversion. We can’t really understand them — or vice versa — but that only adds spice to the encounter. The unknown is neither a threat of annihilation, nor a transcendent resolution of our problems, but rather a transversal dimension to explore. If we are children in the cosmos, the aliens are not benevolent parents (as they are in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in 2001), but kids like ourselves, who just “want us to come out and play.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: comics writers like Ellis, and Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, are really thinking about our culture, and our future, in ways that mainstream novelists and academics and critics cannot match. I get far more from them than I do from “serious” writers like Martin Amis and Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, good as the latter sometimes are. Comics are an oddly marginalized form, even in “popular” or “low” culture (think about how few people actually buy and read Spiderman comics, compared to how many go too see the movie version). But comics, with their low budgets, their innovative mixtures of text and vision, and their unabashed genre thrills and chills, are thrashing out the metaphysics of the twenty-first century.
Flyboy Action Figure Come With Gasmask is Jim Munroe‘s first novel. Although I didn’t like it quite as much as Munroe’s subsequent novels Angry Young Spaceman and the brilliantEveryone In Silico, it’s still a pretty good read.
Flyboy is set among a group of 20-something not-quite-slackers (well, they are too counterculturally committed to just be slackers; they range from artists to political activists) in contemporary Toronto. Ryan, the narrator, a sensitive and somewhat socially awkward dude, has the power to turn himself into a fly (and back again). His girlfriend Cassandra, an ex-riot-grrl-punk-rocker single mom, is able to make objects disappear. (These occult powers are never explained; the protagonists don’t know why they have such special abilities, they simply find they have them, and figure out how to use them). Ryan and Cassandra decide to become “Superheroes for Social Justice,” using their powers to fight against sexism, rapacious corporations, and government oppression. The book alternates between humorous satire, naturalistic depiction of countercultural mores, coming-of-age anguish, and right-on action narrative (among other things). This mix of genres is what gives the book its charm; it’s low-key, modest, and unassuming, but it keeps on coming out with memorable scenes and passages you don’t expect.
My favorite passage is the one where the narrator turns into a bee (instead of a fly), and escapes human anguish for a while (but only a while) by getting absorbed into the calm rhythms of working for the hive. Munroe manages to endow such surreal flights as this one with the same matter-of-factness with which he describes the narrator and his housemates teasing one another with dumb, frat-boy insult humor.
Munroe is also politically committed without being pious, something I value quite highly.
Jim Munroe self-publishes all his fiction, and offers some of it (including Flyboy) for free download on his website as well. He’s managed to get widely read and noticed, without having recourse to the usual corporate channels: which is an ethical and political decision and stance on his part. He supports other writers and artists as well, through networking, organizing reading tours, and putting out CD-ROMs.
Risking oxymoron, I’m inclined to call Munroe a pragmatic utopian. He’s an idealist, who does his best to avoid the compromises that most of us find ourselves making time and time again; but rather than high-mindedly preaching his ideals, he finds ways to actually make them work.
Flyboy Action Figure Come With Gasmask is Jim Munroe‘s first novel. Although I didn’t like it quite as much as Munroe’s subsequent novels Angry Young Spaceman and the brilliantEveryone In Silico, it’s still a pretty good read.
Flyboy is set among a group of 20-something not-quite-slackers (well, they are too counterculturally committed to just be slackers; they range from artists to political activists) in contemporary Toronto. Ryan, the narrator, a sensitive and somewhat socially awkward dude, has the power to turn himself into a fly (and back again). His girlfriend Cassandra, an ex-riot-grrl-punk-rocker single mom, is able to make objects disappear. (These occult powers are never explained; the protagonists don’t know why they have such special abilities, they simply find they have them, and figure out how to use them). Ryan and Cassandra decide to become “Superheroes for Social Justice,” using their powers to fight against sexism, rapacious corporations, and government oppression. The book alternates between humorous satire, naturalistic depiction of countercultural mores, coming-of-age anguish, and right-on action narrative (among other things). This mix of genres is what gives the book its charm; it’s low-key, modest, and unassuming, but it keeps on coming out with memorable scenes and passages you don’t expect.
My favorite passage is the one where the narrator turns into a bee (instead of a fly), and escapes human anguish for a while (but only a while) by getting absorbed into the calm rhythms of working for the hive. Munroe manages to endow such surreal flights as this one with the same matter-of-factness with which he describes the narrator and his housemates teasing one another with dumb, frat-boy insult humor.
Munroe is also politically committed without being pious, something I value quite highly.
Jim Munroe self-publishes all his fiction, and offers some of it (including Flyboy) for free download on his website as well. He’s managed to get widely read and noticed, without having recourse to the usual corporate channels: which is an ethical and political decision and stance on his part. He supports other writers and artists as well, through networking, organizing reading tours, and putting out CD-ROMs.
Risking oxymoron, I’m inclined to call Munroe a pragmatic utopian. He’s an idealist, who does his best to avoid the compromises that most of us find ourselves making time and time again; but rather than high-mindedly preaching his ideals, he finds ways to actually make them work.
I’ve long had an aversion to the prose of Henry James. (How I prefer his brother, “the adorable William James,” as Whitehead calls him). There is just something so smug about Henry James’ prose, creepy and self-congratulatory and fussy and self-important and filled with hideous phrases like “in fine,” and “I daresay,” and “she hung fire.”
I often think of Henry James as the polar opposite of Proust (who is my favorite author of all time). James is all about the subtle folds and crevices of consciousness, where Proust is about those aspects of our emotional life where consciousness fails to reach (like “involuntary memory”). James fetishizes a narrow, instrumental “intelligence”; Proust is all about the limitations and failures, and ultimately the irrelevance, of such an intelligence. James’ characters are always calculating, always jousting for advantage, always manipulating one another, while Proust tracks the movements of passion, for good and for ill, in generosity and in cruelty, that are beyond calculation. James and Proust are both snobs; but where James takes his snobbery complacently for granted, Proust subjects it to lacerating self-analysis. And so on.
But Nightspore has been after me for ages to read James’ little-known novel The Sacred Fount, and his recent post quoting Rebecca West’s hilarious description of the novel (she writes that James “records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people that it is among sparrows”) finally persuaded me to do so.
Well, I have to admit that The Sacred Fount really is quite something. It’s James’ parody (intentional or not, I’m not quite sure) and reductio ad absurdum of his entire aesthetic and method. Significantly, the novel features James’ only first-person narrator; and this very Jamesian narrator spends the entire novel discerning subtleties that simply aren’t there, ‘reading’ his fellows entirely incorrectly, congratulating himself for his own mistaken insights, and constructing a “theory” of human behavior that finally collapses into a black hole of irrelevance and inaccuracy (or collapses like a house of cards, to use one of the novel’s own metaphors). The ultra-subtle discernment of James’ prose turns out to be nothing but projection and interpretive paranoia; the novel’s seeming exploration of intersubjectivity is unmasked as a wishful solipsistic fantasy. Thus, the narrator goes to great lengths to describe to the reader his silent unspoken sympathy and commiseration with a ravaged woman, filled with desperation, at the end of her rope, her life blasted by passion, on the verge of total breakdown, courageously and beyond her own strength struggling to hold herself together only a few moments longer… only it turns out the woman is none of these things, but rather just a witty and skittish flirt.
What’s more, you can’t even say the narrator learns anything at the end, when the full extent of his folly is revealed to him. He sort of shrugs it off, admitting a kind of defeat, but with his faith in his own intelligence and discernment largely unshaken.
The entire content of the novel, including everything that makes any of the characters potentially interesting, is withdrawn at the end, leaving nothing but a void. The Sacred Fount is so wonderfully crazy and pointless a book, so extreme an exercise in style (albeit one that makes me cringe) devoid of any meaningful content, so dazzling a display of writing without any reason to write, an act of pure expression without anything whatsoever to express, that it won me over in spite of myself.
I’ve long had an aversion to the prose of Henry James. (How I prefer his brother, “the adorable William James,” as Whitehead calls him). There is just something so smug about Henry James’ prose, creepy and self-congratulatory and fussy and self-important and filled with hideous phrases like “in fine,” and “I daresay,” and “she hung fire.”
I often think of Henry James as the polar opposite of Proust (who is my favorite author of all time). James is all about the subtle folds and crevices of consciousness, where Proust is about those aspects of our emotional life where consciousness fails to reach (like “involuntary memory”). James fetishizes a narrow, instrumental “intelligence”; Proust is all about the limitations and failures, and ultimately the irrelevance, of such an intelligence. James’ characters are always calculating, always jousting for advantage, always manipulating one another, while Proust tracks the movements of passion, for good and for ill, in generosity and in cruelty, that are beyond calculation. James and Proust are both snobs; but where James takes his snobbery complacently for granted, Proust subjects it to lacerating self-analysis. And so on.
But Nightspore has been after me for ages to read James’ little-known novel The Sacred Fount, and his recent post quoting Rebecca West’s hilarious description of the novel (she writes that James “records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people that it is among sparrows”) finally persuaded me to do so.
Well, I have to admit that The Sacred Fount really is quite something. It’s James’ parody (intentional or not, I’m not quite sure) and reductio ad absurdum of his entire aesthetic and method. Significantly, the novel features James’ only first-person narrator; and this very Jamesian narrator spends the entire novel discerning subtleties that simply aren’t there, ‘reading’ his fellows entirely incorrectly, congratulating himself for his own mistaken insights, and constructing a “theory” of human behavior that finally collapses into a black hole of irrelevance and inaccuracy (or collapses like a house of cards, to use one of the novel’s own metaphors). The ultra-subtle discernment of James’ prose turns out to be nothing but projection and interpretive paranoia; the novel’s seeming exploration of intersubjectivity is unmasked as a wishful solipsistic fantasy. Thus, the narrator goes to great lengths to describe to the reader his silent unspoken sympathy and commiseration with a ravaged woman, filled with desperation, at the end of her rope, her life blasted by passion, on the verge of total breakdown, courageously and beyond her own strength struggling to hold herself together only a few moments longer… only it turns out the woman is none of these things, but rather just a witty and skittish flirt.
What’s more, you can’t even say the narrator learns anything at the end, when the full extent of his folly is revealed to him. He sort of shrugs it off, admitting a kind of defeat, but with his faith in his own intelligence and discernment largely unshaken.
The entire content of the novel, including everything that makes any of the characters potentially interesting, is withdrawn at the end, leaving nothing but a void. The Sacred Fount is so wonderfully crazy and pointless a book, so extreme an exercise in style (albeit one that makes me cringe) devoid of any meaningful content, so dazzling a display of writing without any reason to write, an act of pure expression without anything whatsoever to express, that it won me over in spite of myself.
Tonight I went to a reading by the totally wonderful Kelly Link (whom I’ve written about before). It was part of the Clarion West speculative fiction series of readings this summer.
She read half of a story about zombies, and an animal shelter where dogs are put to sleep, and Canadians, and strange pajamas, and working retail at a 7-11 type store that’s open 24/7. It was melancholy, and sweet, and drily hilarious, and filled with all sorts of surprising, counter-intuitive leaps that nonetheless somehow made perfect sense.
Link is a writer so singular, and so acute, that she makes utterly irrelevant the usual distinctions between “genre” and “serious” writing, between storytelling and prose experimentation, between hard-headed actuality and fantasy or dreams.
Tonight I went to a reading by the totally wonderful Kelly Link (whom I’ve written about before). It was part of the Clarion West speculative fiction series of readings this summer.
She read half of a story about zombies, and an animal shelter where dogs are put to sleep, and Canadians, and strange pajamas, and working retail at a 7-11 type store that’s open 24/7. It was melancholy, and sweet, and drily hilarious, and filled with all sorts of surprising, counter-intuitive leaps that nonetheless somehow made perfect sense.
Link is a writer so singular, and so acute, that she makes utterly irrelevant the usual distinctions between “genre” and “serious” writing, between storytelling and prose experimentation, between hard-headed actuality and fantasy or dreams.
Today’s New York Times Book Review illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with mainstream Anglo-American literary culture.
Exhibit One: the review of Julian Barnes’ new book of short stories. From what I’ve read of him, Barnes is a deeply unoriginal writer, utterly devoid of interesting ideas, with a humdrum style, and whose main stock in trade is to create kneejerk responses (through a judicious use of literary allusions) in order to reassure his highbrow readers that they are indeed reading Great Literature. He professes to love Flaubert, but his writing about Flaubert is distinguished only by its utter banality. And sure enough, the NYT Book Review says that his latest volume, “in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader’s faith in literature.”
Exhibit Two:the review of David Foster Wallace’s new book of stories. The reviewer is quick to criticize Wallace’s “ostentatiously elongated, curiously bureaucratic, stubbornly overdetermined prose style” (translation: his sentences are too long). Now, I am not one of Wallace’s biggest admirers; his writing, though always provocative and interesting and hilarious, fails to entirely convince me. But, still, to criticize Wallace’s prose style! To object to the length and density of his sentences! If nothing else, Wallace is certainly a powerful and innovative stylist. He is doing something to and with the English language that deserves both notice and praise. His sentences are deeply pleasurable in their ornateness and richness of detail; and their twistings and turnings at once exacerbate and mock the hyperbolic meta-self-consciousness whose contradictions, necessities, and discomforts are Wallace’s real subject as a writer. Wallace’s prose style embodies thought and pushes at its limits; the drama of this style is the drama of postmodern irony and earnestness: a play of qualifications to the point of exhaustion, but also a manic, deeply comic energy. The reviewer clearly knows all this, but still he insists that… Wallace doesn’t have a heart! Which is sort of like criticizing Orson Welles for not being Steven Spielberg.
Exhibit Three: the review of the letters of Isaiah Berlin. Here, the reviewer freely admits that there are those of us who do not regard Berlin with reverence and affection. Me, I find him far too mealy-mouthed, as well as unbearably smug about his advocacy of moderation in all things. And I’m deeply suspicious of the way that he, like so many Cold War intellectuals, countenanced all sorts of vileness on the part of the “free world” because it was being done in opposition to the vileness of Stalinism (much as, today, Christopher Hitchens approves of Bush’s barbarities, because they are ostensibly being done in opposition to the very real barbarities of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein). But this objection evidently positions me, in the view of the NYT reviewer, as a member of “that species for which ‘anti-Communist’ is the harshest term of abuse (and which cannot be persuaded by any amount of evidence that it might have been quite a good thing to be anti).” I would have hoped that the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (one evil empire down, one to go) would have meant the end of such crass Manichaeanism as is evidenced by this reviewer’s anti-anti-anti-Communism. At least Berlin himself had the excuse that he was writing during the Cold War, which pushed thinkers of all positions into dualistic boxes. But such arguments have no excuse, and no point, today (unless the point is precisely to bully the unwilling into joining Bush’s so-called “coalition”).
All in all, these articles show the Times‘ instinctive adherence to an utterly anachronistic version of “literary culture,” and suggest its inability even to recognize anything that is vital or meaningful in Anglo-American culture (literary or otherwise) today.
Today’s New York Times Book Review illustrates perfectly what’s wrong with mainstream Anglo-American literary culture.
Exhibit One: the review of Julian Barnes’ new book of short stories. From what I’ve read of him, Barnes is a deeply unoriginal writer, utterly devoid of interesting ideas, with a humdrum style, and whose main stock in trade is to create kneejerk responses (through a judicious use of literary allusions) in order to reassure his highbrow readers that they are indeed reading Great Literature. He professes to love Flaubert, but his writing about Flaubert is distinguished only by its utter banality. And sure enough, the NYT Book Review says that his latest volume, “in ways both modest and grand, helps sustain a reader’s faith in literature.”
Exhibit Two:the review of David Foster Wallace’s new book of stories. The reviewer is quick to criticize Wallace’s “ostentatiously elongated, curiously bureaucratic, stubbornly overdetermined prose style” (translation: his sentences are too long). Now, I am not one of Wallace’s biggest admirers; his writing, though always provocative and interesting and hilarious, fails to entirely convince me. But, still, to criticize Wallace’s prose style! To object to the length and density of his sentences! If nothing else, Wallace is certainly a powerful and innovative stylist. He is doing something to and with the English language that deserves both notice and praise. His sentences are deeply pleasurable in their ornateness and richness of detail; and their twistings and turnings at once exacerbate and mock the hyperbolic meta-self-consciousness whose contradictions, necessities, and discomforts are Wallace’s real subject as a writer. Wallace’s prose style embodies thought and pushes at its limits; the drama of this style is the drama of postmodern irony and earnestness: a play of qualifications to the point of exhaustion, but also a manic, deeply comic energy. The reviewer clearly knows all this, but still he insists that… Wallace doesn’t have a heart! Which is sort of like criticizing Orson Welles for not being Steven Spielberg.
Exhibit Three: the review of the letters of Isaiah Berlin. Here, the reviewer freely admits that there are those of us who do not regard Berlin with reverence and affection. Me, I find him far too mealy-mouthed, as well as unbearably smug about his advocacy of moderation in all things. And I’m deeply suspicious of the way that he, like so many Cold War intellectuals, countenanced all sorts of vileness on the part of the “free world” because it was being done in opposition to the vileness of Stalinism (much as, today, Christopher Hitchens approves of Bush’s barbarities, because they are ostensibly being done in opposition to the very real barbarities of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein). But this objection evidently positions me, in the view of the NYT reviewer, as a member of “that species for which ‘anti-Communist’ is the harshest term of abuse (and which cannot be persuaded by any amount of evidence that it might have been quite a good thing to be anti).” I would have hoped that the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (one evil empire down, one to go) would have meant the end of such crass Manichaeanism as is evidenced by this reviewer’s anti-anti-anti-Communism. At least Berlin himself had the excuse that he was writing during the Cold War, which pushed thinkers of all positions into dualistic boxes. But such arguments have no excuse, and no point, today (unless the point is precisely to bully the unwilling into joining Bush’s so-called “coalition”).
All in all, these articles show the Times‘ instinctive adherence to an utterly anachronistic version of “literary culture,” and suggest its inability even to recognize anything that is vital or meaningful in Anglo-American culture (literary or otherwise) today.
