Falling Man and the Public Intellectual

I haven’t finished any new books since my last post, though I’m nearly done with Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. I’m “marching” my way through Ulysses with Jenny, reading for classes, trying to make time to work on a new novel, and more, so I haven’t been reading at the volume or speed I’d like to. I also spend too much time reading news on the internet and various blogs, although whether or not this time is wasted is debatable.

I’m writing now for two reasons. First, I’ve had further thoughts on Falling Man, somewhat in reaction to all the shitty reviews of it that I’ve read but mostly just from thinking more deeply about the book, and second, I’ve sorta been thinking what the fuck is the point of all this noise.

So, Falling Man. The more I think about the book, and about the contrast within the book between the tight, circumscribed personal narrative and the illuminations of geopolitics flashed on this through a) the attack on the towers, b) the terrorist and c) Martin the European, the more I have come to think that the book isn’t about 9/11, but rather about the American reaction to 9/11, and it is a book of subtle and restrained horror, disgust and bitterness at the soullessness of America’s response. I think Delillo’s sympathies are with Martin and the terrorist, not with Keith and Lianne, because I think he is aghast at the empty irresponsibility of the deeply inward, selfish and narrow response of people such as Keith and Lianne to real politics, the politics of guns and bombs and death, that we enact throughout the world and that makes up discourse in the places we rule. To think that Delillo feels for Keith and Lianne, that he cares about their self-regarding pettiness, that he is aligned with their “Americanness,” is to radically misread Delillo, and to forget everything he’s ever written. To think that one should look to Don Delillo, who has ever been a critic of America and American life, for some sort of spiritual guidance on 9/11, to chastise him as reviewers have done for not “explaining” world events to us, to expect him to tell us how to feel about the irruption of real politics into our infantile game show existence, is contemptible and stupid, a misapprehension of what Delillo does and evidence of a gross failure to think for oneself. So, there’s that.

The pointlessness of “intellectual discourse” in America is my second topic. This is perhaps related to the worship of Don Delillo as the Delphi of Postmodernity, but this connection I will not elaborate here. What I want to address is the meaninglessness of midbrow pseudo-intellectual “critical” chatter in this country. It is a commonplace that the public intellectual has disappeared from American life, and nothing signals the final doom of that role and character better, I think, than the most recent stupidities coming from the pen of one of America’s most recently imported brains, the Englishman Christopher Hitchens, on the topic of Paris Hilton’s celebrity. Yet who are the people writing in Harper’s, The Atlantic, N+1, The New Yorker, The Nation, etc., but precisely that: public intellectuals? The problem here is not with the term “intellectual,” though enough objections can be raised to this by those who want to, but rather with the term “public.” One assumes this means one who speaks and writes in the “public sphere,” which we must then assume to mean the very magazines, blogs and episodes of Charlie Rose in which they speak and write. But what is public about Harper’s or The New Yorker? I love to read Harper’s, because I like its brainy, critical and eclectic approach, but what does Harper’s have to do with “public” or “the public”? Does Harper’s somehow affect policy, public opinion or public discourse? Of course not. It is, in fact, a niche publication, much like Hot Rods, Fangoria, or Better Homes and Gardens. It is a hobby mag for people whose hobby is “culture” and “civilization,” but whose hobby is no more connected to the mechanisms of government and power than is Popular Mechanics.

My point is, what good is another article about government malfeasance and incompetence in Iraq? What is the point of another article about the gross greed and mendacity of the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry? What does another round-table discussion of the dangers of American military involvement in Iran, or of the influence of the media on politics, the lameness of the electoral college, the cultural significance of plagiarism, or the next presidential election accomplish?

Well, for one, education. Informing the public, exploring the issues. Great. So we can walk around thinking about this stuff, making clear-eyed, informed judgments about the gut-wrenching disparity between the new information we know and the crude noise in the mass media, between what should be and what is, between ideals and power politics. And, one would argue, in order to make good decisions we need to make informed decisions.

Right-o. The problem is, we don’t have any power. Nobody who writes for Harper’s has any power. Nobody who reads Harper’s has any power. So all these ideas are for nothing. We might as well read Better Homes and Gardens.

Here’s the question, though, in trying to push through disgusted apathy and apocalyptic hostility, how can we bring ideas into power, the “right” ideas, is it even possible, how do we reconcile “ideas” and “power,” can we even do it, who would do it, can Americans even imagine such a thing? The nation that brought the world the freak horror of the “marketplace of ideas,” as if people made rational cost-to-benefit-ratio decisions about thoughts, as if ideas had dollar values, as if ideas got better through “competition”. . . Which is to set aside for the time being the problems of what happens when “ideas” do come to “power.”

I don’t know that I have a point here, except perhaps that the more I learn and think about the world, the less I want to do with it.

Cheers and happy Bloomsday.

Other texts

I forgot to mention in my last post that I finished reading The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers. This was an at times beautifully lyrical book, and at times the symbolic structure of the book and the resonances between the images promised access to something transcendent, some powerful truth, but in the end it failed to sustain these heights or to join them together into a cohesive unity, and the book stumbled to a close on flat feet, unsythesized loose ends dangling, meaning little, signifying little. There were gorgeous moments though, scenes and descriptions, and the theme at the heart of the book, the cognitive dilemma of being unable to recognize someone closest to you, the exploration of neurobiology, was dazzling and sometimes dizzying. Unfortunately the characters often seemed shallow, and the faux-Oliver Sachs doctor was asked to carry too much weight, too much significance. His affair with the nurse toward the end of the book seemed not only arbitrary and unnecessary, but also rushed and thin. This is the first book I've read by Powers, and it makes me want to read more, in the hopes that what glimmers in this book would shine in others.

I also recently read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Derrida's On Spirit, and Delillo's new Falling Man. Starting from the end, Falling Man was, perhaps, disappointing, but it is not in any way a bad or failed book, only a minor one. Part of the problem is, as various reviewers have mentioned, that Delillo has already written the 9/11 book we want to read, whether it is Mao II or Underworld or Cosmopolis, and this book, while focused on the events of 9/11, is really about trauma. The book's central event, the attacks on the World Trade Center, could have really been any event, any catastrophe, and the book would have sustained the same strength of perception and the same delicate sifting of consciousness. Part of the problem is that what Delillo writes is books of anxiety, books of conspiracy, books of paranoid imaginings, or as somebody described, plotless books about plotting, and Falling Man isn't about the anxiety or the conspiracy or the possibility of terrorism, it is about coping with the trauma of an event, and while Delillo does this well and deftly, it is not what we want when we read Don Delillo. So good for him for writing what he wants and not giving us "another Don Delillo book," and I look forward to his next book, wondering where the strange course from Underworld to The Body Artist to Cosmopolis to Falling Man leads. . . into the interior, the banal, the bourgeois, or back into the dromosphere, the systemic pulses, the shallow depths, or what? Also, minor notes, the "Falling Man" performance artist was a bit stale, the poker playing was actually, unexpectedly cool, and the bits with the hijacker were masterful. A quite good if minor work.

Derrida's On Spirit, I will confess now, requires another reading for me to begin to get, and I also need to be more familiar with Heidegger's work, especially his "middle" Nazi period. What On Spirit is investigating is "spirit" in Heidegger's work, pushing it against Nazi ideology on the one hand and Christian theology on the other, problematizing Heidegger's strategies of evasion and linguistic hermeneusis. Derrida raises fascinating problems (aporias), but illuminates less that I would like because in typical Derridaean fashion he refuses to push a particular interpretation or make any normative claims. It feels good to read some Derrida and not feel completely pissed off. . . I'm also curious now about Derrida and theology, and looking forward to reading Glas and Writing and Difference.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra shouts where Derrida shrugs, and in revisiting the book (I read the first two parts several years ago, but did not then finish the whole thing) I am somewhat shocked by how bad it is. Nietzsche is, without question, a consummate stylist, a subtle, powerful and ranging thinker, and is both more pleasing and more provocative to read than almost any other philosopher I can think of save Plato, but Zarathustra is awful. It is like reading a great man vomit. In this book, it seems, all of Nietzsche's virtues become flaws through sheer volume, and the language seems unable to bear the exertion demanded of it. It is as if he was trying to give birth to the overman through force of will, through pure verbiage, through extra exclamation marks. It also has some typically genius bits, some mind-blowing revelations, some things that will live with me forever--eternal recurrence, the higher men huddled in Zarathustra's cave, worshipping an ass, the tightrope walker, and other things--but overall, I'm more glad of it being behind me than I was to be in it.

That's all for now. I'm reading some other stuff, my summer classes have started, and I'm doing the Ulysses march at 10 pages a day. I hope to read Being and Time this summer, but we'll see if I have the time.

Cheers.