books

Philip Pilkington reminded me about Christopher Lasch, a critic of big government arguing from the left, who I remember not liking much back in the day. This summary is good, though:

Lasch was a complex figure. A cultural historian by trade, he wrote many fascinating books on topics as diverse as the idea of progress and the origins of cultural politics. His most outstanding work, however, was his critiques of the modern welfare state (most especially in The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self)...

Lasch claimed that as government intervention in the economy grew the state soon found itself mediating more and more social relationships. For example, as the welfare state flourished in the post-war era social workers soon became a significant social force. Lasch claimed that they would swoop in and destroy family ties, replacing these with artificial and technocratic relationships essentially ruled over by the state.

And it was not just in poor families that Lasch saw the creeping hand of the state. Middle class families too were coming to rely more and more on state institutions. From family planners to psychotherapists in public schools (guidance councillors) Lasch thought that many of our social relationships were gradually becoming mediated through a technocratic apparatus at the centre of which stood the modern state.

Lasch then went on to argue that such a shift was hollowing out everyday social relationships. As we came to increasingly rely on these supports our personal and family relationships became ever more distanced, ever more managed. Into this vacuum, Lasch claimed, swept celebrity and consumer culture. The state hollowed out our relationships – the market filled the void with tatty consumer goods and celebrity gossip. It is this mix that Lasch referred to as the "Culture of Narcissism."

In the fights over the NEA and government arts funding some of us pondered the wisdom of taking money from the same "technocratic apparatus" that was at the time funding Central American wars and building H-bombs. In the post quoted above, Pilkington goes on to consider the opposite extreme, which is a libertarian world without centralized government (its most likely short-term contribution, he predicts, would be "a depression from which it would take decades to fully recover"). He concludes that we need the feds for their stabilizing effects on markets but puts forward the idea of a jobs program where funds emanate from Washington but are distributed at the municipal, community level. Sounds fine, as long as there are mechanisms to prevent local Tammany Halls from eating up all the money.

The Exiled editor Mark Ames, who spent many years as an American expat in Russia thinking about the basic weirdnesses of his home country, has written a book polemically comparing workplace and school shootings to slave rebellions in the American South and Caribbean in the 18th and 19th Centuries. According to his research, public attitudes towards the earlier paroxysms were much like they are now: "gosh darn it, why do such evil random things happen in the world?" -- because, Ames argues, thinking that is easier than examining the intolerable conditions of your own time that might produce such violence. "Going postal" we think of as a more modern phenomenon, though, and was in fact foreseen fairly accurately by a '60s science fiction writer. From a web page posted by Carnegie Mellon statistics prof. Cosma Rohilla Shalizi:

"Mucker' is a word coined by...John Brunner in his great novel Stand on Zanzibar. The word derives from "amok," which will require a bit of history. It is a Malay word, and a person who goes violently insane, rushing through the village and murderously attacking everyone in his path, is said to have "run amok." In what was an egregiously idiotic statement, even for him, the eminent French critic Georges Bataille called running amok the purest manifestation of revolt, "the movement by which man rises up against his own condition and the whole of creation." (Bataille never ran through the streets of Montparnasse madly slashing with a kris, so he either lacked the courage of his convicions or was a hypocrite with a small - a very small - modicum of brains.) The Malays, inevitably, were and are more sensible: they kill those who run amok.

A "mucker," then, is someone who runs amok; the times havin' a-changed, now they use guns. As always, they are people driven to murderous madness by intolerable frustration, repression and conformity, whether in an isolated kampong or the Postal Service. So far muckers seem to have been mostly Americans, but just the other day the radio carried news of one in Germany.

It does Mr. Brunner's prescience great credit to have foreseen the need for this word, back in 1964; and it does the rest of us no credit at all, for letting such a word be needed.

Mark Ames, like Bataille in the above passage, sees mucking as a form of revolt. Am not sure either writer is so dumb as to think it's the best form of revolt--Bataille only said it was the "purest." Stand on Zanzibar is a book about a world population explosion (published in '68, not '64), and Brunner's "mucking" wasn't political so much as biological (population self-thinning, possibly, but mostly unexplained). Ames ties the phenomenon specifically to Reaganism, which isn't particularly scientific but has a nice ring to to it. Here's an interview excerpt:

Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America's Heart of Vileness -- its penchant for hating people who didn't get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

I hate to sound like a Clintonite here, but let's remember Hillary Clinton became the most hated human being alive because she tried to give most Americans the opportunity to lead longer, healthier lives, while these same Americans adored goons like Sam Walton, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump -- everyone who has dedicated their lives to transferring wealth, health and pleasure from the masses to a tiny elite. Liberals are hated in America precisely because they want to help people, which is seen as "patronizing."

You can see how this kind of cultural insanity, unleashed by Reaganomics after decades of New Deal (relative) harmony, could make someone snap, when the cognitive dissonance suddenly strikes on a very personal level, and you realize that you've been screwed hard by your own dominant ideology.

Ames pegs the workplace shooter, then, as a bitter Republican who finally comes face to face with the realities of a tough-love economic philosophy. In a similar vein, Ames recommends profiling schools rather than individuals to determine where the next outbreak will happen: "Just look for white kids, and you'll have a potential Columbine." On a level of sheer cinematic poetry, it's hard to beat Michael Moore's juxtaposition of the Littleton CO events with an interview of a local technocrat standing under an enormous bomb that is being manufactured in that city -- while the students are at their desks preparing for a bright future in the work world.

Simon Reynold's new book Retromania suggests a causal relation between two conditions: (i) that for the past 10 years we've had easy access to a cornucopia of past expressions in the form of digital archives such as YouTube and iTunes and (ii) that art and music are trapped in a backward-looking malaise. Unfortunately item (ii) is just wrong--once a critic reaches this place of boredom no advocacy is possible and every trend becomes grist for "hyper-stasis," as Reynolds calls the current moment of high speed technological change and stalled paradigm-shifting.
We don't lack for exciting developments right now, but rather the ability to recognize, articulate or even proselytize for new work, in particular without lapsing into the techno-boosterish cliches of the art-and-technology websites such as "cutting-edge," "game-changing," etc. In music, new gear and software give us new sounds--the difficulty is finding a common frame of reference for describing them, when people have only the vaguest idea how anyone else did something. In the art arena, a few months ago we spent several threads yelling about whether GIFs did anything that Flash or YouTube couldn't do. This wasted energy from discussing specific examples of how GIFs are currently being used.
"Phone Arts" or "blog art" almost by their very nature couldn't be in a book called Retromania unless you were indulging in perverse nostalgia for the art of one day ago. With "phone art" we know most of it is made on Apple products but perhaps not which programs are used, or how "easy" an effect is. Easiness isn't really even the point since the work is by its nature disposable and ephemeral. But one thing we could agree on is that a group blog of mostly abstract art that is "phoned in" is not an artifact of the past.
Reynolds writes mainly about music but he mentions a recent Frieze panel where experts weighed in on the relationship of YouTube-era accelerated meme-exchange and garden variety postmodernism, so it's fair to say his concerns are larger. Speaking of crossing disciplines, one bristles at his pairing throughout of such purely cynical, commercial phenomena as the boomer TV show remake glut with artists' complaints about the difficulties of being original, if the latter is even as common as Reynolds suggests. The issues of the suits and the avant garde may sometimes converge but that's not enough material for a book.

Update: Ongoing rewriting for clarity, style, and sussing out the main point.