Adorno once famously noted in Minima Moralia that the way we
close our car doors is related to the violence of contemporary society. How
might we get around this problem?
While this may appear to be just a wealthy man being ostentatious with one of his toys (and it most certainly is probably that), I want to urge you all to look past that – and the tone of the article, which verges on an advertising pitch – to the interesting questions that hanging up a (beautiful) car poses.
I’ve long been puzzled about the lack of theoretical
discourse about cars (though, if this is not the case, please let me know!).
Original Bauhaus furniture captures absurd prices at the auction, to say
nothing of other antiques. Eames is practically a household name. People have
written extensively about the ‘airiness’ and ‘free-floating’ aspects of Bauhaus
design as central to modernity. Yet Luigi Colani, Pininfarina, and, yes, now
Horacio Pagani seem left out in the cold amongst the dreaded “car guys.” But
why?
The anonymous owner in the above linked article was absolutely correct to point out that people spend treasure chests worth of money on artworks from Basel to proudly hang them in their home, so why can’t he do this with a piece of functional art? I suspect we wouldn’t be having this conversation if he built a special plinth for an ancient vase (rendering it unusable). So what is it about the functional art of cars – perhaps especially what might be termed ‘art cars,’ the rare breed that transcends the hyper-technical nonsense contest for the ‘fast road car’ that transformed Bugatti from a respected coach maker to a gaudy kitsch icon – that so repulses the critical crowd?
I think that Adorno was probably onto something. Cars, more
than chairs, more even than business buildings (consider the Looshaus, which
was built for a Nobel offshoot!), are representative of the dark industrial id
of modernity, intimately and very publicly linked with waging war. They can
also be linked with a noticeable decline in craft among the mainstream, as
well, which, incidentally, is probably more than a little linked with the
production of the great fascist automobile, the Volkswagen. I’m not disputing
either of these, but their existence is also dialectically linked with their
users: cars id, id is internalized, subject applies id to car, the cycle is
perpetuated negatively until we end up with a half-plastic Honda Ridgeline that
looks like it was designed using the Madlibs-method. So the decision to hang a “piece”
on a wall (with all-around views, allowing the subject to see even the
undercarriage) is quietly radical, if still ostentatious (it would be better in
a museum or in a public space), allowing for a reconsideration of the
functional art, where it still exists (and it certainly does exist in the ethos
of Pagani), to de- and re-contextualize what we so often reduce to brutality
and barbarism (not without cause) to allow its beauty to shine forth. This
won’t stop us from closing car doors like fascists, but it’s not a terrible
step, and it deserves some real thought.
After
the sad occasion of Moishe Postone’s death, I was compelled to revisit some of
his work, which I first encountered as an undergraduate. I’m by no means a
Postone expert, and my experience is limited to a few pieces. The articles I
had the time to re-read this week seemed to be perfectly suited to accompanying
my re-reading of Archive Fever: Postone’s
analyses of anti-Semitism and his review of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. The latter brought me back to one of the standard
critiques of deconstruction: what can it do?
Postone’s critique of Spectres is both withering and, for the
most part, accurate. There are many valuable insights in that work – the
differentiation between teleology and eschatology in political spectra comes to
mind – but, on the whole, it always seems like it is missing that extra
rhetorical leap that brings out the true radicalism that is inherent in deconstruction.
Postone points this out, and he’s careful to mostly center his critique
precisely on this book and precisely on Derrida’s occasionally wobbly reading
of Marx. For his part, I think that Postone is too focused on the notion that
Marx dealt predominantly with contextual readings of actually existing
phenomena, ignoring, essentially, the forest for the tree. At the very end,
however, Postone widens his critique, saying that Spectres “inadvertently reveals that the enterprise of immanently
deconstructing philosophical narratives in order to undermine certain reified
cultural self-understandings ultimately remains bound within the limits of
philosophical discourse.” Is that what we are left with?
I think, however, that
deconstruction was meant to be a mode of thought, not a movement, is telling.
It’s giving us tools, and Derrida is showing us how to use them. Granted, this
takes work – hard work – but so does any sort of analysis. The power of
deconstruction lies in its phenomenology of language, seeing how each word
unleashes an entire manifold of study. It sees how what is marginalized can be
central to the focus of a text – and that, in the end, there is no hors-texte. This leaves us with one
inescapable conclusion: there are no
deconstructive texts, only ones upon which deconstruction has been inflicted.
Deconstruction is a mode of reading, a mode of thought, but it’s not a genre.
What Postone misses is that Derrida’s texts are always more of an invitation;
they are texts that acknowledge their own finitude and incomplete status. In
such a sense, they’re more closely related to the modernist experiments of Ezra
Pound, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser. One must acknowledge that reality is not a
simple thing; why should philosophy be any different? Philosophy never gives
you the answer; it is always engaged dialogically with the reader. Derrida’s
radicalism comes from a constant quest for justice, for acknowledgement. If
philosophy is always tacitly dependent on the reader, Derrida gives each reader
a unique gift and acknowledges them as special, as worthy. In his refusal to
reduce things to broad strokes, he mounts a bold critique against broad stroke
thinking itself – and it’s hard to conceive of an ideology more dependent on
broad stroke thinking than the universalizing logic of global capital.
So to consider the archive, we have to consider what is at stake. It is nothing other than the arming of the oppressed. History bears down upon us, and we need to shoulder its burden. And it is a burden. And it is our responsibility. The maintenance of the archive is no less than the maintenance of a great army of skepticism. It is wise to remember that fevers are both a symptom and a cure.
NOTE: This was written immediately after Postone’s death in 2018.
The ladder shook like an old suit of armor, shivering
with rust. This clattering persisted long into the night and for several days
thereafter. Days turned into weeks, until finally the noise stopped, and you
could once again hear the petulant cry of a blue jay and the lepuscular
whistling of the mated pair of wood ducks. The creekbed continued its roil and
was satisfied with no longer being simply background radiation. It was all
relatively back to normal, except that there was now a meticulously built structure
several meters above the earth, perched in a tree that could perhaps be
identified as a swamp oak – but which lacked several of its characteristics,
and so was deemed unclassified by the botanists who later passed through the
area. These researchers could not classify the structure either, but they all
agreed that no one could have lived there and suspected that it was a modified
deer stand to stave off the cold.
They
were, of course, only somewhat wrong. With gentle regularity, the man in black
would toss down his rope ladder and go out to forage. Just a few fruits, here
and there. Acorns for boiling. Otherwise, he sat up in his besteepled abode
reading a few books over and over again, until their covers began to bear
imprints of his fingertips, like some sort of bibliostigmata, and scratching
his thoughts in a journal he brought. His handwriting was microscopic; barely
legible, these ministrations were scrawled upon the page from end to end, top
to bottom, in order to maximize the life of the journal. The man could barely
read his own manuscript, much less remember what he had written, but he was
sure that it would provide an account of his flight from society, valuable to
someone someday.
While
beating back some vines that he was worried would suffocate his tree, he was
reminded of his half-hearted attempts at self-flagellation. This was after the
scandals began to break and his trust began to fade. An edifice of life that he
had served for quite a few years at that point was torn down until it was skinned
and only its gilt and leaden skeleton remained. Alchemy had been achieved: the
gold that was used to replace old bones congealed into lead. The body was
poisoned and driven mad, shouting at itself for years into a broken mirror. The
man eventually amputated himself.
He
lived among the screens for a few months, until he began to fear that they were
speaking to him at night, tendrils of photons creeping into his ear. He walked
into the woods one day with a handsaw, some rope, a ladder (remember our ladder?),
a book on foraging, and some texts from his old life.
There
the priest in the tree lived for about a year. In a fit of hunger and anxiety
in the winter, he decided to wend his way to a meadow he knew to clear his mind
and quiet his stomach. He took his little book in his jacket pocket and set
off. The snow swallowed him and, as his remaining body heat melted a tomb
around him, icy water began to decompose his book, too, ink smearing into the
vast whiteness like blood. “Where?” he finally wheezed to himself.
In 1971, Roland Barthes, the wildly influential French semiologist and thinker who declaimed the death of the author, famously effected a structural reading of a passage in the Biblical book of Genesis in “La lute avec l’ange: Analyse textuelle de Genèse 32, 22–32” (the English version of the text “The Struggle with the Angel” can be found in the collection of essays Image Music Text – all quotations in this essay will come from this version). Specifically, if it wasn’t already obvious, Barthes examines the story of Jacob’s struggle with the angel or messenger of God to think through the syntax of mythological tales, among other varying topics. In such a way, he is ultimately examining an instantiation of mythopoiesis, the creation of myth, examining the varying building blocks and underlying structures in the search of what makes these narratives so deeply powerful and affecting. Clearly, this is a deeply important task, seeing as much of our world (and worldview) is built on exactly these sorts of stories; from early childhood, we are inundated by the logic of fairy tales and other myths, which subsequently structure our unconscious methods of making sense of the world. The narrative economy of these stories helps to cognize “real-world” events, i.e., “If [x] gets a [talisman, name, mark, etc.], [x]’s status in the world is fundamentally changed.” Jacob is named Israel, Jacob’s status in the world is changed. Obviously, this is a gross simplification, and one must be extremely wary in the application of these methods, so as not to foist Western worldviews on non-Western cultures (the rhetorical crime of fellow structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss as eloquently exposed by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology). But this method nevertheless remains a powerful toolbox for analyzing the world, albeit in a necessarily elliptical and imperfect way.
We,
of course, in our infinite wisdom, think that the world of myth has either
passed or is currently passing. Nietzsche related a story wherein the shadow of
a boddhisatva remained on the wall long after his death to demonstrate that,
even if the moral God (the metaphysical guarantor, not the Creator) was dead, the shadow of this idea would last for
ages onward. God is dead, so say the atheists, and we merely need to wait until
the light of religion extinguishes itself, exposed by its own internal
contradictions. Naturally, we ignore the fact that we continually construct
various idols and icons to serve as gods. We raise up either science,
capitalism, or any number of other ideas to the status of godhood. This is
completely normal – it’s a way of making the world have sense. I’m dubious if
we could survive without doing this, and, anyhow, it’s a form of artistic
creation, a poiesis. There are myths upon myths upon myths upon myths, and
there’s never any escaping.
In
one of these layers, we find popular culture. (Indeed, Barthes also analyzed
the narrative structure of the James Bond books.) And within pop culture, we
find rock and roll, a world of larger than life superhumans wielding the power
of song. It’s unarguably one of the most powerful (and global, from America to
Germany to Indonesia, whose current president, Joko Widodo is an avowed metal
fan) tropes to emerge in the 20th century, and it has been suffused
by myth since the beginning, for example the Siegfried character of Johnny B.
Goode to the even earlier Faustian bargain of Robert Johnson, who sold his soul
at the crossroads to become a guitar master. Given the immense power of rock
and roll in our everyday life (even if the creation of new “guitar music” is allegedly on the wane), given that it
both gives us joy and sells us beer, its self-mythologizing deserves to be
studied.
This,
of course, has been attempted elsewhere. Notably, the burgeoning field of metal
music studies has examined this mythologizing particularly with regard to black
metal, whose bands don corpsepaint. Jasmine Shadrack, scholar and musician, and
Pablo Roehner, of Alpkvlt Magazin, have both dealt with this topic in some
depth (Shadrack especially). But the self-mythologizing of black metal would
not be possible without the self-mythologizing of rock music at large. I would
like to suggest a case study of a “rock creation myth,” in the style and with
the method of Barthes: AC/DC’s “Let There Be Rock” (1977).
While
AC/DC has undergone a mild critical renaissance, due in no small part to the
work of Julian Marszalek and Michael Hann, both from The Quietus (and the latter of whose article on the AC/DC album Powerage was a major inspiration for
this paper), they are, by and large, ignored in the scholarship. They are,
perhaps, the quintessential band that you hear when you go out drinking in a
dive bar. The songs are simple, loud, and knowingly stupid. But there’s no
denying their commercial success. “Let There Be Rock” tells the story of the
birth of rock and roll in an explicitly mythical manner, in an almost
religiously incantatory way (this will be elaborated later). It is a perfect
case study for the larger project of understanding the role of myth in rock and
roll, as well as mythopoiesis in the late capitalist epoch in which we live.
The
mode of structural analysis that Barthes adopts in “The Struggle with an Angel”
is named “sequential analysis.” It consists of three major parts, which will be
quoted at length:
The
inventorization and classification of
the ‘psychological,’ biographical, characterial, and social attributes of the
characters involved in the narrative… Structurally, this is the area of indices
(notations, of infinitely varied expression, serving to transmit a signified –
as, for example, ‘irritability,’ ‘grace,’ ‘strength’ – which the analyst
names)… This is what we might call the indicial
analysis.
The
inventorization and classification of the functions
of the characters; what they do according to their narrative status, in their
capacity as subject of an action that remains constant: the Sender, the Seeker,
the Emissary, etc… [T]his… is [the] actantial
analysis…
The
inventorization and classification of the actions,
the plane of the verbs… What we have
here is thus sequential analysis.
This method will be, for the most part, hewed to, with
some small digressions inspired by Barthes’ book-length treatment of structural
reading, S/Z, which more fully
embraced multiplicitous readings.
In order
to proceed to the next stage of analysis, I will quote the lyrics of “Let There
Be Rock” in full (for the sake of brevity, my analysis will focus only on the
lyrics with brief digressions about the music – not the accompanying music
video):
In the beginning,
Back in nineteen fifty-five,
Man didn't know about a rock 'n' roll show
And all that jive.
The white man had the schmaltz,
The black man had the blues.
No one knew what they was gonna do,
But Tchaikovsky had the news.
He said:
Let there be sound…
There was sound.
Let there be light…
There was light.
Let there be drums…
There was drums.
Let there be guitar…
There was guitar.
Oh! Let there be rock.
And it came to pass
That rock 'n' roll was born.
All across the land, every rockin' band
Was blowing up a storm.
And the guitar man got famous.
The businessman got rich.
And in every bar there was a super star
With a seven year itch.
There were fifteen million fingers
Learning how to play,
And you could hear the fingers picking
And this is what they had to say:
Let there be:
Light
Sound
Drums
Guitar
Let there be rock!
One night in a club
called "The Shaking Hand"
There was a forty-two decibel rocking band,
And the music was good and the music was loud
And the singer turned and he said to the crowd -
Let there be rock.
Who,
then, are our characters? Fundamentally, there is only the narrator, voiced
impeccably by Bon Scott. But this character is locked into a dialectical
relationship with rock and roll, the object of the ode, given enough
characterization to almost become a fully realized figure in itself. The
narrator traverses time and space, as though fundamentally unhitched from the
ontological groundings of society. He (and it is a he) surveys historical
development of rock and roll from its supposed inception in 1955 to an unnamed
time that is nevertheless still in the past where rock is still being called
into existence.
The
narrator functions fundamentally as a mythopoet, cribbing freely from
historical sources as diverse as the Bible and Chuck Berry’s hit, “Roll Over
Beethoven,” from which this iteration of Tchaikovsky comes. We hear the
narrator, this priestly figure, tell tales of how rock and roll has influenced
society, both for good and ill. But then what are the characteristics of the
movement of rock and roll?
Rock
and roll is presented as something ephemeral yet deeply anthropomorphized. It
is, crucially, born. This means that
rock and roll has some sort of life force, which differentiates it from light,
sound, and the other elements, which are simply called into being without being named as birthed. Rock and
roll, in such a way, is what might be called a biotic factor in the environment that is constructed in these
lyrics – possessing the characteristics of a living being on this Earth. Nevertheless,
it is something that must be summoned, which is to say that it is not
present-at-hand. Ghostly, it must be called out of its absence, but we are
never told that it arrives, only that it is born. All of the other elements are
called into being and then send to be; the pattern is that of the Biblical
structure of creation, “Let there be [x]. And there was [x].” Rock and roll is
called, but does it ever arrive? It is born, but it must being continuously
summoned by the incantatory “Let there be rock.” Does this mean that the
narrator is classifying rock and roll as some sort of animating spirit?
Perhaps. But the narrator, too, is seemingly unstuck in time or, at the very
least, outside of the time of the narrative, in a ghostly travelling way.
Thus
it can be said that we are dealing fundamentally with two mythemes: the narrator who can call rock and roll and rock and
roll itself.
It’s no secret that capitalism has changed the way we think about and react to the world. Neoliberalism, in a clinical and historical sense, encourages an economistic worldview – how much money is something worth. A forest is no longer a forest, but, rather, a repository for carbon and a draw for ecotourists; it doesn’t exist for its own sake. While it may not have any basis in a “real” phenomenological view of the world, the (meta)narrative of Homo economicus continues apace and slowly becomes the ideologically dominant trope of our interactions with the world and each other. At bottom, we are Homo sapiens or Dasein or “the subject” or a collection of drives or [insert your philosophical viewpoint here]… but that’s not borne out in the constructed space of society.
None of that is, of course, new; thinkers on the right and the left, from Catholic traditionalists to Theodor Adorno, have written voluminously on the hollowing out of the human in capitalism in all its varying stages. In a word: ideology. Here, I wish to explore, provisionally, how eschatology fits into the ideology of late capitalism. I argue that there is an emergent (or established) eschatology pertaining to personal wealth.
Let’s quickly define our terms here. Often associated with eschatology is teleology. All eschatologies are teleologies but not the other way around. Teleology simply means an end-oriented viewpoint/discourse; a good example would be Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” (cribbed from Alexandre Kojeve’s reading of Hegel). An eschatology is a viewpoint/discourse surrounding the apocalypse; the Book of Revelations is the classic example, though Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a secular iteration. Teleology is more broad, whereas eschatology deals with a true, universe-shaking finality – though one that is often accompanied by some measure of promise (usually messianism). So what I want to deal with here is, essentially, an apocalypse of wealth.
Now, generally speaking, eschatologies are group events. The whole world gets the Four Horsemen, in other words. However, we have been seeing under capitalism the broad dissolution of these group categories. Religious adherence is falling, traditional societal ethnic groups are being exposed to the forces of globalization, and so on. The root cause is ultimately the same: unchecked capitalist rapacity resulting in precariousness. This encourages, variously, a retreat towards a reactionary nationalism or atomization – the alienation of oneself from society. While the former is receiving an upsurge recently, it remains to be seen how much staying power it has in the face of global capital. Far more likely, in my eyes, is the broad increase of atomization, which has been on the rise in the post-war era. (An easy symptom to spot is the self-contained lifestyle of suburbia, which discourages group formation.)
What we see emerging in atomized and precarious populations is, in my view, personal eschatologies. The Second Coming will no longer separate the righteous from the wicked among all of mankind, but, rather, there is increasingly a personalistic worldview that envisages a quite particular fantasy, best exemplified by the lottery.
True social mobility is statistically rare. Mobility to extreme wealth is even rarer. Unlike in the feudal period, it is possible however. What separates a personal eschatology of wealth from the daydreams of a peasant who wishes to be lord is that the former is unlikely yet thinkable. So one plays the lottery hoping to strike it big, to become the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. What this entails is a fairly remarkable act of self-negation. It is, in fact, for all intents and purposes, the hope for death.
Massive amounts of wealth in a short period of time would radically change a person’s life – interior and exterior. It would be such a radical uprooting of one’s own life that the person would functionally be different to the point of the death of their former existence. No more scrounging for food, no more wants or needs or desires (presumably). Essentially, it is a heavenly existence, only here on earth.
This is, of course, impossible; desires would still exist, etc. We hear stories of lottery winners who lost it all. But that wouldn’t happen to you, you can transcend. The impossibility of this only serves to underscore its similarity to religious accounts of eschatology that are, materially speaking, impossible.
The true tragedy of this desire for total self-negation, for a suicide of wealth, is that it seems like the only possible way to be free from the hell of existence under the yoke of capitalism. Is life in late modernity so unpalatable that we must desire our life’s own extinction? Is our own work so unfulfilling that we must try to seek our a personal apocalypse?
The Camo Pulpit 