Discontents & Its Varieties

On January 26, 2013 at the New School, Dr. David Bell delivered a talk entitled “Civilization and Its Discontents: A Contemporary Perspective.” His invocation of freudian themes turned out to be an inspirational gateway to a reading of contemporary cultural realities highlighted from a marxian perspective. The most striking question that set my thoughts in motion was “Why are we unhappy?”. Further, Bell invited an exploration of the psychoanalytic legacy as a context for negotiating the troublesome dialogue between the public and the private. He evokes ruminations about why we act against others’ and our own best interests. But, do we, indeed? Or, rather, do we necessarily?

Freud’s scientification of his theory might have been a way to make it commensurate with the prevalent positivist thinking. However, he seems to have infused a contingent streak into the deterministic framework. The combination might not be weird by default. And yet, in his particular idiolect, to some readers, it feels so. Perhaps that’s the uneasiness he focuses on in portraying individuals living in a civilized community. But then, one wonders where the contingent aspect is.

Bell reminds us of how Freud used to see human tendency to choose security at the expense of happiness and knowledge. This, in turn, is taken to reflect the repressive mechanism of giving up destruction in exchange for communal wellbeing. A very basic inquiry is inspired by such a presumption: Does Freud imply that destruction is what constitutes human nature? If so, again, one wonders where the much needed contingency can be found.

My reading of freudian postulates seems to be a series of failed attempts to sample his ideas in the ways which would outplay his possibly implying that the death drive is the only indicator of being alive. But then, one wonders whether there can be the life drive which is just what it is.

The main reason for believing that there is may be the inclination contrary to the dominant  vulgarized utilitarian thinking, the predilection for the attitude opposing the dictum of material wealth—resistance against coercive, superimposed, fatalist ideas about human aspirations to live out personal autonomy being merely disguised alienation. Irvine Welsh (Skagboys 2012): “The rat race n that. Stressed if yuv goat a joab, stressed if ye huvnae. Everybody oot fir themselves, at each other’s throat n daein each other doon. Nae solidarity nae mair, ken? The work is ower, it’s aw gaun, n thaire’s nae particular place to go” (340-41).

 The crux of the polemic could be refusing to adopt the idea of the world as an irrecoverably hostile place. Put differently, it may be a wish to (a) understand the constructed aspect of the human being as a potential for the remix and an implicit acknowledgement of the limits of human power that, paradoxically, reconfirms human capacities; (b) believe that destructiveness, including self-destructiveness, is not all what human nature is about and that controlling conduct harmful to others and oneself does not necessarily make one miserable; (c) invest in the process, rather than in the goal solely. Terry Eagleton (The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction 2007): "Perhaps the meaning of life is not some goal to be pursued, or some chunk of truth to be dredged up,  but something which is articulated in the act of living itself, or perhaps in a certain way of living. The meaning of the narrative, after all, is not just the ‘end’ of it, in either sense of the word, but the process of narration itself" (50).

This, again, might be a matter of intellectual affinities. Personally, I prefer to live in a community of individuals who, as citizens, cannot be defined as consumers of political objects. Again, Bell’s are helpful rhetorical tools for configuring such a socioscape. In order to indicate the possibility to meditate and act in the world whose multitudinous hinges tend to dilute ethical centers, Bell devises a remarkably imaginative and suggestive syntagm. More precisely, depicting social ills caused by commoditization of education and health care, he deploys the expression primitive morality. In the context of his lecture, the phrase means a simple, a commonsensical ethic that takes the right to free education and health care to be social givens. Rightly so.

In the vein of such an atavistic ethics, I like to think about human society in the key of humility. Endless are the fruits of such rebirth of individuality out of the blurry haze of the cultural amalgam. Humility teaches how to be oneself through self-giving and what kind of cohesive power refacement has for the fellowship. Rejuvenation on both cultural and personal planes occurs through the ceaseless deselfing and reindividualization through enduring resistance against destruction and ossification.

When Eagleton in The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction meditates on dying to self as a source of life  of abundance, he grounds his thought in the idea of exchange. Transposed into the context of liquid culture and the flux fueling fruitful communication, his observation can serve to resituate the idea of refacement: rebirth through silence and solidarity of reindvividualized deselfed fellow-humans, engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

Today’s simplistically self-centered, competitive, utilitarian, nihilo-cannibalist cultural climate might perceive such mentality as naïve and/or, perhaps, inefficient. In response to the general doubtful reception of the lifestyle celebrating sparseness as abundance, fellowship as individuality-enabling, and individuality as a token of speaking the language of the species, Eagleton notes: “If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love” (91).

Q: We are not robozombies!

A: We are not robozombies!

Indeed. On the contrary, we like to learn how to read-write critically, yet in the spirit of reverence. If to follow the radical guiding light of refacement is perceived as contradictory to critical remapping of the creative realms, one should be modest enough to be reborn through subtonic hi-fi and solidarity of reindvividualized selfless fellow-humans engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love. 

Rediscovery Of The Poetics Of The Remix

Needless to say, whenever I watch a Gus Van Sant movie, I am reminded of what attracted me to the subtle idiosyncrasies of his storytelling in the first place: Drugstore Cowboy (1989). William S. Burroughs’s unlikely cameo endures hindrances threatening to obscure the crystal-clear message delivered by the character he plays. Tom (William S. Burroughs) is talking to Bob (Matt Dillon) when the latter joins a twenty-one day methadone program, having realized that the drugstore rampage came to a close and his pirate ship turned into wreckage. Tom is a priest. He is also a former junky, now on a methadone recovery program. His loquency is imbued with divine toxicity climaxing in a prophecy of a kind. He claims that drug hysteria will be used by right wingers as a means of establishing an omnipresent mechanism of oppressive social control. It can be inferred that such a policy would aim to transfigure the world into a place where unfreedom reigns. Bob’s endlessly charming response is a complementary remark about Tom’s actual vocation being a philosopher. Bob might be right and Tom might not be a prophet in the narrowest sense of the word. As much as he was predicting the future of medicalizing entrepreneurship, so was he an attentive observer of contemporaneous cultural realities and able to articulate his reflections with stunning clarity and ease. Contrary to the perplexities of the social vocabulary.

The viewer, however, is slightly confused--verging on disbelief--within the encounter with Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land (2012). The lingering overtone of the viewing experience is the voice of Mark Renton, a character of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993), who finds himself utterly puzzled when he is supposed to present a simple fact, i.e., not to lie. The reason for this troublesome feeling is that, being a junky, he is so used to telling lies, that laying a simple, undecorated claim  feels eerily alien—false. His thoughts color the viewer’s meditations upon the essentially medievalist political plot disguised behind the modern day cultural context in Van Sant’s movie. McKenzie Wark: “In its thirst for labor that would make land actually productive, and yield a surplus, no indignity is too great, no corner of the world exempt from the claims of property and the uprooting of its custodians” (A Hacker Manifesto [102]). [1]

The story in Promised Land centers around Steve Butler (Matt Damon) who works for the company Global whose business focuses on extracting natural gas from the earth deploying the fracking technique: drilling and injecting fluid in order to fracture shale rocks and release gas. Butler and his partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand) come to an impoverished rural town in Pennsylvania with an intent to restore its economy by buying from land owners property and carrying out their gas business. However, for this they need the natives’ permission and collaboration. The local science schoolteacher, Frank Yates, (Hal Holbrook)  is the main opponent of the anti-environmentalist industry whose modest embodiment, Global, is firmly determined to conquer the land of the suburban empire. The green activist, Dustin Noble, (John Krasinski) is strongly supporting this  subversive endeavor. And yet, after a series of obstructions and conflicts, it turns out that Noble, in fact, works for Global. This is not spectacularly surprising. One cannot but watch a movie such as that of Van Sant’s partly through the lens of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ  (1999): environmentalists are the new realists, the new entrepreneurs.

What is, however, the moment of utter astonishment is Butler’s disclosing the fact about Noble in front of the townsmen. Not only is Butler’s approach unbelievingly to the point, but it more than obviously jeopardizes his (Butler’s, i.e.!) position with Global. For that reason, a contemporary viewer is prone to penetrate the scene with a fierce look infused with a sense of the Antenna/PilgrImage--eXistenZ/transCendenZ oscillations. Moreover, like Renton, who cannot believe himself when he doesn’t lie, the viewer suspects that Butler might, perhaps, be working for a company that is simply trying to squeeze out the competition. That’s the mind of a denizen suspicious beyond belief. And yet, the conspiracy attack lasts only for a split second, after which one is disarmed by Butler’s downright honesty and the simplicity of the fact standing in sharp contrast to the overcritical reading.

The crux of the insight is the shift from reading for the plot solely onto the scrutiny of the character. More precisely, recasting on the inspection of the mutually conditioning relationship between the plot and characterization/acting creates an aspect of viewing/reading that illuminates an intricate nexus between complexity and simplicity. The ways in which the plot is informed and supported by characterization / acting, and vice versa, casts light on the relationship between the public and private. Reshifting the reading onto the level of the character enables demythologizing a misconception about social roles and provides a hint for recuperating the notion of agency.

Butler is a salesman who from the very beginning exudes an aura that foreshadows his being ill-matched for the inhumane, unscrupulous corporate system. Dustin, on the other hand, never wins the viewer’s trust—he can by no means be dedicated to grassroots ideals. His lousy scheme “against” Global is shameful, but does not seriously endanger his career. He does not lose his job. Unlike Butler, who does: he no longer works for Global. But he doesn’t care. Because there are things more important than mere survival in the corporate arena.

It is small wonder that the moments of excessive suspicion within the viewing/reading experience happen. One needs not be an Einstein to know what Dennis Cooper knows: “A blue light suffused the sky. The grass was painted green. The world is faked, head to toe” (Wrong 159).

In an age when a cultural amalgamation is a blurred version of the image of the human face, one still seeks the ways to sharpen that picture. To soothe the rough edges of the ruthless post-industrial world wandering around myriad hinges to globality, one welcomes every opportunity to be proven wrong when those poignant mechanisms of intense distrust are set in motion. One is relieved by the simplicity, evocative of the flow of Sherman Alexie’s prose, revealing the fact that the world can be a friendly place, which it sometimes is. Gus Van Sant’s subtle idiolect is certainly an immense inspiration for sustaining such a conviction and to time and again rediscover the poetics of the remix.

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[1]Wark portrays  the historical development and perpetuation of proprietary relations (“legal fictions”[101]) and the emergences of new classes with a new form of property. He depicts a “progression” from pastoralists who dispossess farmers  from land, via capitalists who hack land and transform it into a new, abstract, form of property--capital that turns farmers into the working class, to vectoralists who hack capital into its abstract form—intellectual property--subsequently hacked from them by the hacker class, should they become one.