Recipes for Stupefaction (pt.2)

 

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. 

 

Recipes for Stupefaction (pt. 1)

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. 

 

The Torturer’s Horse

Iraq has become the other scene of American life, a kind of geopolitical limbo that exists beyond the horizon of intelligibility, at least for those Americans who manage to breach the cocoon of their everyday lives. Surfacing from our mediatized narcosis we gaze past the computer screen out the window onto the street and imagine what it would be like to see our neighbors screaming and bleeding on the pavement, to feel the buildings shake from heavy weapons fire. Later, as we go slack in the moment before sleep, we brush against the fantasy of the door snapped off its hinges and half a dozen bellowing, armed men crashing into the room kicking over the furniture. Or not. It’s tempting to succumb to the vague conviction that nobody knows what anybody else is thinking, that the apparent apathy and disconnectedness of acquaintances and passersby regarding the US occupation of Iraq and its larger imperial project of dominating the “dark corners of the world” (as one of El Busho’s speechwriters once phrased it) is endemic, generalized, the symptom of a cultural zombification which could only be interrupted by some cataclysmic event. 

The kids who still watch television have a reservoir of selected and approved images, bytes and clips to draw from whenever Iraq enters the conversation. The dead boy’s mother jabbering incoherently; the American soldier– lean or beefy, tall or of middling height, padded with gear, gloved, booted, helmeted– virtually erased as a person by his equipment; the sprightly dignitary, girdled with kevlar, smiling, palpably thrilled to be in the midst of well-trained, purposive men and women whose destinies, directly or indirectly, he shapes. 

Six years gone and the Iraq War image-system has expanded into a minor constellation:  from the obscene abstractions of policy makers and pundits and technocrats concretized in ink– the print cacophony of position and rebuttal and counterposition and reiteration– to pixilated YouTube “videos” of resistance operations: the odd US soldier dropped by a sniper, another humvee buckling from an IED blast, a man in a keffiyeh firing an RPG. There is a surplus of such signs and messages, and they have become so ubiquitous they no longer encourage reflection but function as a somewhat interesting yet insubstantial scrim against which we live our lives.

Meanwhile the occupation and its strange inchoate politics, their mass mediation, proceeds according to a principle by which what is revealed remains hidden– airstrike, kidnapping closed-door meeting. New “actors” emerge: “militias” morph into “criminal gangs”; the Sunni-Shia narrative, which was always an intentionally and dangerously stupid oversimplification, fragments and coalesces. Nobody really knows what’s happening, possibly those who are in Iraq least of all. 

And here, in the US, New Babylon, where we are permitted to see parts of the world in order to ensure we remain insulated from it, “the dogs,” as Auden observes, “go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”