Contemporary Culture

Language is, perhaps, more dangerous than conventional weaponry or methods of punishment; technologically induced wounds will fade after a period of time, but words can sit in the heart and on the mind for an eternity, becoming a part of the very fabric which constructs us. In this respect, the way we address and consequently come to understand one another becomes a crucial facet of our existence. For not only does language construct that metaphysical facets of our being, it also builds the framework—the infrastructure—of the landscape we exist in. Which is to say, how we allow ourselves to be spoken of creates the parameters in which we are allowed to work, to socialize, to live.

            Ideally, we want to be recognized as individuals who are free to make choices within that framework, but once we are outlined and separated from the herd we are burdened by the overwhelming desire to return to the warmth and safety of conformity; it is difficult to take a false step that could induce retribution when surrounded on all sides. What is troubling to us is the bifurcated expectations with which we are inundated at an early age: we are explicitly instructed not to follow the pack—peer pressure is bad, don’t be a lemming—yet we are also discouraged from differentiating ourselves too drastically in order to maintain a continuous thread that shares common properties which can be policed with generalized sets of rules. This puts us in quite a predicament: we want to be unique in order to be recognized and valued, but we must be careful not to cross the thinly veiled boundary into the “weird.”

            At the dawn of the nineteenth-century, the marriage of the medical and the judicial legally defined this contradiction and afforded the major players generalized groupings in order to streamline the punishment process. If “life is simply the will to power,” as Nietzsche claims in his essay Beyond Good and Evil, then the medico-juridical construction of the individual as an abnormality that must be identified and then contained and re-assimilated into a prefabricated “norm” is an attempt by those in possession of a “master morality” to retain their power. By creating a language that is concomitantly based on fear and morality as well as an attempt to comfort, a notion of monstrosity emerges—one which is encompassed by complex technical definitions but what essentially reduces to a discomfort with a legal being that defies codification. Although this discourse is omnipresent, in many respects, there are two ways to circumvent the disparaging effects of a system that seeks to select and define merely to facilitate punishment: either aspire to greatness, or take refuge in the banality of the existence that is given.

            The commingling of medical and judicial theory and practice in an attempt to personalize the penal system resulted in the contamination of both fields, and ignited a process that would eventually come to define what it means to be normal. By sussing out individuated justifications for criminality—such as peculiar behavioral traits—the law, now in the presence of a psychiatric expertise, seeks to soften “the sordid business of punishing…into the fine profession of curing.”[1] Here we see an attempt to showcase various “misdeeds” in order to demonstrate how “the individual resembles his crime and at the same time revealing…a parapathological series that is close to being an illness, but an illness that is not an illness since it is a moral fault.”[2] This friendlier language—one focused on curing—helps to pacify the modern subject at the very moment his legal corporeality is fragmented and he is objectified; as the subject becomes a flailing prisoner to his innermost desires and behavioral motivations, he becomes difficult to hold responsible—at once responsible for everything and nothing—and he becomes “the object of technology and knowledge of rectification, readaption [sic], reinsertion, and correction”[3]

            Framing legal specificities in soothing language—one that imitates the medical profession, which operates within the comforting boundaries of the Hippocratic oath—speaks to another facet of legal individualization: the attachment of morality to notions of perversity and the emergence of a “parental-puerile discourse.”[4]Which is to say, medico-legal individualization loves us, the modern subject, so much it has to give us boundaries and snoops through our journals so it can best assess exactly what boundaries we need in order to mature into happy, functioning adults.  By identifying criminal tendencies and thus re-imagining the modern subject according to intent as a type of petulant child, a “technique of normalization” emerges that facilitates a borderline obsessive desire to codify that which does not acquiesce to prevailing societal norms.
            What is perhaps most interesting about the process of signifying normalization is how it seeks not to reject individuals or groups, but to include them. “It is not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place…and of defining presences,” and it initiates “a series of fine and constantly observed differences between individuals who are ill and those who are not. It is a question of individualization; the division…of power extending to the fine grain of individuality.”[5] Once again we see an attempt to cloak a rather disturbing process—that of a persistent surveillance—in comforting language: the modern subject is not being codified, he is merely being awarded a unique presence within societal undulations.

            What this dynamic aspires to is a comprehensive, comprehendible organization of individuals that are presented before the law; when it encounters an undefinable—an undesirable—it casts that individual in the role of the antagonist, and thus we have the emergence of the monster. Since “the norm brings with it a principle of both qualification and correction,” the essence of monstrosity is, at its core, a legal notion.[6] The realm of the monstrous, however, is decidedly rooted in the realm of the flesh—seen in its ability to “combine the impossible and the forbidden” as a veritable chimera which mixes various combinations of species, individuals, sexes, forms, and even stages of life and death.[7] This process of identifying monstrosity in physical reality soon mutated into a process of identifying it within intent—within nature itself—and it soon becomes evident that “there is only monstrosity when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law.”[8] The friendly language that was created in order to “cure” the maladjusted, the sick, has turned ugly; suddenly “the abnormal individual is essentially an everyday monster, a monster that has become commonplace.”[9]

            At times, when legal language such as this—for it is at its root a matter of language—becomes overwhelming, it is comforting to take refuge in philosophy—to allow philosophers to carry the burden of understanding the consequences of the discourses in which we are involved; if this is the intent, Nietzsche is not the remedy. What Nietzsche offers the modern subject attempting to come to terms with his legal predicament is a deeper understanding of hierarchical motivations for individualization, as well as a few suggestions on how to avoid the trappings of this medico-legal discourse. Essentially, the construction of any language is a process of assessing and prescribing value—there is a logic to it—and “behind all logic…there are…physiological demands for the preservation of a particular way of life.”[10] The upper echelons of any given institution “would like to make all existence in accordance with [their] own image alone,” and from this desire a norm is produced.[11] However, by focusing excessively on the nature of individuals they have interpreted them falsely and, as such, have “misused cause and effect.”[12] Which is to say, the law, in its fervor to quantify its populations by distinguishing between those in need of a cure and those in need of punishment, has created monsters where they did not exist. This is partially attributed to the undue emphasis placed upon intent, which “is but a sign or a symptom…with so many meanings that as a consequence it has almost none in and of itself.”[13] When the foundations of a theory are unwell, the conclusions it arrives at are similarly ill.

            Nietzsche’s prescription for this medico-legal virus is “to rid ourselves of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many others.”[14] In other words, the modern subject must counteract objectification within the norm by aspiring to greatness. In his opinion:

                        Being noble, wanting to be for oneself, managing to be

                        different, standing alone and needing to live independently

                        are integral to the concept of ‘greatness’…[and] the greatest

                        person should be the one who can be most lonely, most hidden,

                        most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his

                        virtues, abundantly rich in will. This is what greatness should

                        mean: the ability to be both multifarious and whole, both wide

                        and full.[15]

Which is to say, by retreating from the public realm—by refusing to be incorporated into the legal language of modernity—“the noble soul reveres itself” and only itself, which affords an individual a modicum of catharsis.[16]

            This, however, is not the only avenue the modern subject can take to counteract the dangers of legal individuation; one could also take pleasure in “living in such a way that nobody has the slightest recollection you exist”—living under the radar, as they say.[17] Part of this existence is choosing to “dwell always in the most discrete of discretions, where you could exercise your dear, beautiful virtue to your utmost satisfaction, with a modesty that is moving, enchanting, and utterly beyond praise.”[18] This option concomitantly retains an equivalent dose of nobility while refraining from the medico-legal discourse, just as the option to pursue greatness does. 

In “The Sahara of the Bozart,” one of his most famed and acerbic essays, HL Mencken referred to the American south with a calculated awe:

It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether…. for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ that it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert….It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of civilization.

Welcome to the final years of the Dixification of the United States. Though Mencken’s damnation of the South was no doubt far too sweeping, as if life there consisted solely of outcasts from Yoknapatawpha County– a bestiary of phrenologically dubious kissing cousins and Snopes-ean psychopaths– one of his sharpest criticisms, that the south of the 1920s lacked even “the impulse to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas, and so to give the life of every day a certain dignity and purpose,” now suits the nation as a whole. Disregard for a moment that Mencken’s explanation for this unprecedented slide into barbarism appealed to the decimation of the antebellum gentry. His argument that the Civil War, in culling the aristocracy, thinned the region’s collective “blood” has a eugenic tone to it now. In our day, when the rankest elitism is slopped out on paper plates like barbecue for mass consumption it often follows that the aspiration for an intellectual life beyond drive-thru/ wallpaper culture provokes a faux-democratic response which posits corporation-confected drivel as some kind of organic expression of the people. Leaving aside cultural studies practioners’ complicity in this valorization of media sausage skins stuffed with sawdust, we can see that Mencken’s criticism still applies: culture comes in many variants but surely the most ubiquitous is that brand which acts as a palliative, an anodyne for all ailments, whether in the form of syndicated Seinfeld re-runs consumed in the aftermath of yet another painful 10 hour stretch of humiliation and purposelessness (work) or the poor man’s time travel across barely apprehended concepts and factoids that characterizes a night trawling the net. In each case culture distracts, and if that function is hardly new– “color” reportage of the late 19th century deemed nickel dumps and amusement parks as much, cementing middle-class complacency and widening the age’s high/low breach the great-grandchildren of those arbiters of bourgeois taste worked so feverishly to anneal– it has expanded, and now threatens to extinguish even the possibility of thought. 

There is a difference between the arrogance of assuming a right to improve the residuum as the fabled and defamed Reformers undertook to accomplish during the Progressive Era– a project that sought embourgeoisement of the masses while retaining the vertiginous gap between haves and have-nots– and leaving people collectively to the stultifications of a culture which operates according to the debasing illogic of a market. Theodor Adorno caught flack for disparaging what he has been misrepresented as terming “Jazz,” particularly his criticisms that such music represents a stereotyped idiom, a regimented unruliness that inevitably accedes to the demands of commercialization. These remarks are apposite to his most discussed work (written with Max Horkheimer), The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, an essay concerned with the creation of mass-society individuals whose deepest intuitions and desires are revealed to be the outcome of technical-economic practices. In On Popular Music, Adorno writes 

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”. The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted (“Swing it boys”) — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.

In a culture prefixed with the first-person possessive pronoun– “my” space, “my” insert name of product/institution here, ipod, iphone, etc.– this pseudo-individualization has fully penetrated our consciousness. Reduced from citizens to consumers we download not only our thoughts but the components of our personalities which are accumulated from a stock of existing types and flavors to be assembled and advertised among a shrinking circle of actual acquaintances or uploaded and injected into the world wide web. In the process, whatever cognitive fluency might have been extracted from an encounter with some culture of depth becomes a stutter of repetition and incoherency. Though we maintain a certain self-reflexiveness– an obligatory ironizing which is, after all, the social distinction and lubricant of the hep– the image that bounces back is itself a reflection, mere bent light. 

Is it possible for banality to reach such a stage of perfection that what was merely a kind of numbing vacuity crosses over into the realm of the sublime? Panning across the vicious candy on view in the display case of a post-spectacular mediascape the question is inevitable. Where once somebody intuited a presence beneath that surface– the pale grub of self-interest writhing poisonously under culture’s transgenic leafage– now exists pure absence, a condition of such staggering insignificance that by comparison the insouciant nihilism of pop songs like “Less Than Zero” seem to possess the irresistable tonnage of spiritual redemption. 

Item. The mind-annihilating boredom of listening to conversations weighing the relative merits of Hill or Obama. Should she cash out? Does his wife hate America? What’s a super delegate? Bearing witness to these exchanges takes on a wrenching pathos usually provoked by watching a maimed animal attempting to right itself. What has been broken can never be fixed and neither speaker understands how complete is their incapacity. They continue to struggle back to their feet unaware that conditions have deteriorated so drastically that death will be a kind of mercy. In this scenario political speech empties itself of political significance not through any fault of the speakers but because the situation itself admits to no meaning. “There is no there there” it could be said, and what’s worse no here here either.

Counter-item. Once we could take comfort in bits of language collected at random from film, conversation and literature. Benicio del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects would be a ripe example, as when Fenster, pressed for information, leaned on hard by the cops, remarks of the man in question, Gabriel Byrne’s Keaton, “He’ll flip ya. Flip you for real.” Mere text can’t do the phrase justice; this fragment persists as a sound-byte mimicked by thousands of reasonably bright undergraduates perhaps one of whom has managed to hit the right intonation. Which isn’t to say del Toro’s a genius, unless genius is purely a product of chance and slovenly elocution. There is no context in which the sound-byte could be inappropriate: toasting the groom, watching the court house burn, releasing a bong hit, listening to Tony Fratto defend torture. Any and all occasions are enhanced by the utterance precisely because it has no value. 

Because we are all a part of the same loop and constructed by the same regimented institutions that revolve around repetition in a sepia infused world; positive and negative space are key, learned traits are a must. And it may be the absurdity of it all that keeps us functioning and well lubricated, docile enough to experience another day and feed ourselves into another pattern. At least, that’s what I extracted from The Brothers Quay film Institute Benjamenta, based off the book Jakob von Gutten by Walser. To put the clip in context as best as I can (the film and the book are hard to extrapolate from without an in depth analysis) Jakob von Guten has enrolled himself in an unorthodox school for servants, and this is the classroom scene.