Weekly Readings #29 (08/22/22-08/28/22)
the world is darkening
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
First, in case you missed it, I read and wrote about Midnight’s Children this week. I wanted to give Rushdie the kind of artistic assessment that often goes missing when a writer becomes the object of political controversy.
Second, I hate to do Netflix’s publicity, but the teaser for Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation was released this week. (I will obviously withhold judgment until I see it, but the only Baumbach movie I really like is Margot at the Wedding.) To mark this occasion, it might be a good time to revisit my 2018 essay on White Noise and my 2021 lecture on it. The YouTube algorithm is so mysteriously generous that it’s the first thing that comes up when you search for the book:
For today’s newsletter, I offer below two miniature essays that can be enjoyed separately or together. The first is about the attempted assassinations of Alexander Dugin and the aforementioned Salman Rushdie and what they might tell us about modern political ideologies. The second is my (bad) review of Netflix’s Sandman (mea culpa again for the Netflix) and how it demonstrates the aesthetic loss accompanying any ideology’s ascent—in this case, postmodern left-liberalism—from counterculture to hegemony.
Bringing Light: Alexander Dugin, Salman Rushdie, and Liberal Freedoms
Michael Millerman, the Canadian exegete and translator of Alexander Dugin, ruminates in Compact on the limits of liberal freedom after the attempted assassinations of both Alexander Dugin and Salman Rushdie. To those liberals who would dismiss the parallels—who would say that one mustn’t compare a Putinist philosopher to a liberal novelist—Millerman makes the same point I’ve made in several places, namely, that Rushdie was himself very much accused of an illiberal or non-progressive attitude toward “the other,” as much by the secular left (John Berger, Paul Gilroy, and others) as by partisans of political Islam:
Rushdie is a slightly different matter. He at least stands for a liberal principle of freedom of speech, however problematically. But even in his case, the possibility of violence could long be played down or even tacitly accepted. For by insulting Islam, he had violated the liberal imperative of inclusion. Threats against his life, like threats against Dugin’s, could be accepted far more readily than threats against the life of an impeccably progressive intellectual. Notwithstanding the conceit of liberal neutrality, the liberal has more tolerance for some forms of political violence than others.
As for Dugin’s appropriate ideological designation, Millerman insists that it include “anti-fascist” due to the philosopher’s “fourth political theory” having surpassed modernity’s other three (liberalism, communism, fascism), while John Ganz claims by contrast that “fascism” really is le mot juste since Dugin once referred to himself that way and since Dugin’s mélange of ethno-mysticism, nationalism, and imperialism answers aptly to the term. I’m no admirer of Ganz, but he has the better side of this argument.
(I should say here that I know Dugin from interviews he’s done in the west and from secondary sources like Millerman’s essays and podcasts and Benjamin Teitelbaum’s strange and absorbing ethnology of the global right, War for Eternity.)
Millerman and Ganz both derive their interpretive authority from Plato, Millerman the political philosopher directly and Ganz the materialist social critic indirectly. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in whose method and lexicon Ganz is steeped, conceded at the outset of his Rules of Art,
the sociologist—close in this respect to the philosopher according to Plato—stands opposed to ‘the friend of beautiful spectacles and voices’ that the writer also is: the ‘reality’ that he tracks cannot be reduced to the immediate data of the sensory experience in which it is revealed; he aims not to offer (in)sight, or feeling, but to construct systems of intelligible relations capable of making sense of sentient data
In the dark light of Rushdie’s attempted assassination, I find Bourdieu’s sentence chilling. Plato, with whatever degree of textual irony, proposed not a secular critique of “the writer” but the political proscription of the writer’s very person. A liberal society should draw the line at that. I can’t, therefore, endorse Millerman’s conclusion strongly enough—it should be carved in stone:
But we should resist in any way accepting, justifying, excusing, or celebrating physical violence against thinkers with whom we disagree, however viscerally. The world is darkening. Murdering intellectuals does not bring light. It doesn’t even kill their ideas.
But Dugin may not be able to defend himself credibly in these terms. The political autonomy of poetry and philosophy is a liberal value. The pre-fatwa Rushdie, with his postcolonial perspective on western hegemony and especially on the Britain of “Mrs. Torture,” is a leftist echo of Dugin’s rightist enmity to liberalism’s amoral and spiritually thin cash nexus. And these cause real social stress, stress the worst type of liberal then proposes to correct with technocracy or managerialism: fraudulent psychiatric medication and a nauseating therapeutic bureaucracy in place of the local community you lost. Without this formal and official amoralism, though, the poet or philosopher can only be an adjunct of church or state—fine if your sect will control the church and your party will control the state, intolerably perilous otherwise. Some poets and philosophers labor under this wishful delusion; for the rest of us, the illiberal polemicists of left and right never have a very convincing answer.
Rushdie inched toward the political center after the fatwa because he came to find his own earlier radical critique of liberal civilization too glib once he needed its (often neglected but putatively universalist) traditions of free speech, secular politics, and autonomous art as a rhetorical shield against his would-be killers. Dugin, scourge of the metaphysical shallowness and cultural barbarism of “Atlanticist” liberalism, has no such ground to stand on in his fancied “Eurasia.” He might consider Blake Smith’s defense of liberalism-as-tactic instead:
Liberalism is not as unthinking at it appears. Its apparent inability to comprehend history is, in many cases, a reasonable appreciation of the dangers and insufficiencies of historical thinking. Liberalism instead offers its own myths posed in the form of supposedly rational deductions about human nature. Similarly, liberalism’s characteristic neutral stances toward values are not the result of an inability to comprehend the importance of moral claims, but often a studied, even cynical, strategy for mitigating otherwise insuperable conflicts within a fractious society. Critics of liberalism who see through its intellectual incoherence, and whose own views are informed by illiberal traditions they take to be deeper and wiser than liberal vacuities, might also recognize liberalism as having a practical value and defend it, with varying degrees of transparency, on that basis.
I believe poets and philosophers should hold up our end of the autonomy bargain by not advocating political violence of any type. It is not our business to kill or to assist killers, to decide that some people should live and some must die. It debases our role to garland with beautiful images or intricate ideas the tips of missiles destined to fall elsewhere. If we call down fire on others and then find ourselves under bombardment in return, observers may deem it poetic justice. We will have a hard time answering them.
From Counterculture to Hegemony: Was Sandman Always Woke?
In preface, I don’t like the word “woke,” first because it sounds cutesy and second because its history ridiculously rebaptizes the legitimating ideology of the expert class, extremely elitist and mostly derived from European philosophical sources, as an authentic expression of African-American resistance. For the phenomenon popularly called wokeness, I prefer the more neutrally descriptive phrase “current hegemonic left-liberalism,” though I admit it’s a mouthful. But wokeness is what this ideology is popularly called, so I will use that word in what follows.
I don’t intend to make a habit of commenting on streaming TV, since I don’t find it an appealing form of art; but I did grow up with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and felt obligated to watch the Netflix version, the latest pop culture adaptation of a 20th-century popular property to be derided as ruined by wokeness. And in the ultra-polarized world of comics and genre fandoms, Neil Gaiman and his media allies have been fending off this conservative criticism with the talking point, “Sandman was always woke,” and that the new series is therefore no departure.
This case could be argued either way. On the one hand, critics point to the race-and-gender-blind casting of the Netflix series. Not all of it is forced, especially when it comes to race: there’s no reason that Death or Rose Walker or the Triple Goddess need to be white. But other choices defy explanation, even feel like a stunt. For example, why turn Lucifer, described in the comics script as resembling a young David Bowie, a beautiful androgynous male, into a middle-aged woman who (with all due respect) looks like a school administrator? Not to mention that Lucifer is an exception: otherwise, white male villains tend to remain white and male. Unless they want to change the entire plot, the showrunners are stuck with a nonbinary villain, though with Desire as with Lucifer, Gaiman wasn’t trying to write nonbinary characters—the term barely existed then, if it had been coined at all—but drew on a much older and less politically correct tradition of the androgyne’s alluring yet sinister uncanniness.
On the other hand, the original series did feature “strong female characters” galore, and many gay and trans characters to boot, and even implicitly insisted—in the early 1990s, long before this idea was anywhere near mainstream consciousness—that a woman may have a penis and still be a woman. The entire epic-tragic narrative, moreover, is a positive metacommentary on the postmodern condition: in Dream’s spectacular fall, we behold the welcome deconstruction of the authoritative white man’s mastery, cold and cruel as it was, and the emergence in its wake of kinder, gentler perspectives. Yes, Sandman was, from the beginning, a work whose worldview we can identify as postmodern left-liberalism: pluralist, egalitarian, and celebratory of difference.
But the word “woke” names something else. It names the conversion of these once-countercultural ideals into a governmental apparatus for a precarious expert class and global corporations both needing to oversee an ever-more-atomized and ever-more-restive laity and finding identity politics, ultra-moralism, and the suppression of speech effective tactics. This is why it’s not simply equivalent to 1990s political correctness. That was the ideology’s first becoming visible in the academic humanities and social sciences and some wings of elite and counterculture, whereas “woke” is the ideology’s takeover of every commanding institution.
Pluralistic identities, promising a horizon of infinite possibility, have been medicalized, bureaucratized, reified, commodified, and politicized—confining prison-pods for the narrowed selfhood promoted by miserable Malthusian apocalypse-mongers and order-mad technocrats. No longer the ideology of freewheeling comic-book writers, postmodern left-liberalism has become the watchword of managers, physicians, politicians, and even the police and the military—bosses of all kinds. In this respect, Lucifer’s transition from a character who resembles a strung-out young troubadour to one who looks like a human-resources manager could not be more profound or appropriate.
This journey from counterculture to hegemony proves especially lethal to the arts. The Sandman comics may have held an ideology, as all narratives inevitably do, but they held it lightly, as the emergent property of an intricately complicated and strangely symbolic story. Quarrels between characters representing divergent worldviews were allowed to remain quarrels. Gaiman did not preach. Nor did he shy away from the darkness of the human condition, especially in the early stories, but ruthlessly portrayed rape and murder with the amoral gusto of Titus Andronicus, sometimes even playing them for laughs. (I have no problem with this. Art should play all the notes.) A lyrical sensibility, lighting on mysteries without needing to explain them, gave the comic book the odd combination of levity and density we find in all strong fiction. And so rich was the fiction that the politics were often ambiguous.
I even remember as a teenager wondering what Gaiman’s politics might be. I discussed it with one or two friends, and they were also unsure. Younger readers of all ideological persuasions might be surprised at this: weren’t we reading Sandman, in which every other character is gay or trans—a landmark in diverse representation in the mainstream comics industry, a clear foreshadowing of what right-wing critics deride as “woke”? Yes, but conservative writers like Kipling and Chesterton also loomed noticeably over the narrative. The introductions to the graphic novels radically varied in viewpoint, from Samuel R. Delany’s queer critique to Frank McConnell’s Catholic paean. The series in general had a fin-de-siècle atmosphere, like such other works of the period as The Secret History and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and all those Henry James movies, so the queerness and the Catholicism and the crypto-imperialism and the overall neo-Romanticism create an aesthetic unity but not a coherent politics. Which is good, because it’s a work of art, not a treatise in political science.
Back then you didn’t know everything about everybody. How were we to know the author was a Jewish Scientologist by heritage? (Even if we did know, so singular a background would hardly have clarified his political stance.) The surname Gaiman suggested nothing in particular to me, and if he hadn’t dedicated his books to his wife and children, I would have just assumed he was a gay English Catholic. I was already reading Camille Paglia by then, so I knew that was no guarantee that an artist was on the left.
Contrast the Netflix series, where all thematic questions get answered by droning, lugubrious, and didactic speeches. It’s not enough for Dream to represent the white man at the end of his rule, gradually learning to respect the perspective of the other, as in the comics. On Netflix, he must go on an apology tour, and in the 10th episode makes elaborate “I’m deeply sorry for the harm I’ve caused” obeisances to subordinate characters pointedly recast as women of color. Again, this theme can be read in the book—and in the Dream/Nada relationship, it is even just as pointedly racialized along the same white/black binary—but Gaiman allows it to persist as subtext, what the reader may freely gather if the work’s aesthetic has incited sufficient curiosity.
In the adaptation, the didactic sometimes supplants the aesthetic entirely—in a way I find foreign to Gaiman’s earlier efforts. Would the young Gaiman, obviously besotted with Ovid and Shakespeare, have had Calliope pledge to re-write the rules of divinity in favor of women and to inspire humanity to treat each other better, as she does on TV but not in the comics? Or would his youthful pagan pragmatism have led him to deem this a silly, sentimental middle-class affectation, out of character for an immortal goddess—exactly as it is?
Differing media determine the differing artistic approaches—to a point. Comics, despite the form’s sensationalist reputation, has always had its own peculiar subtlety as an art of juxtaposition over which the reader may linger indefinitely while awaiting the next issue. TV, by contrast, even in the streaming era, goes by quickly and therefore has to beat us over the head with with the thesis. (Cultural critics once regarded both comics and television as inherently inferior media. One of these judgments was wrong.)
But we can’t overlook the role of ideology, which I often prefer to media determinism (my apologies to McLuhan) because it necessarily implies that artists have a choice, regardless of medium. Gaiman’s perhaps wishful portrayal in Sandman of Shakespeare’s bargain with Dream—a Faust story with a happy ending—foreshadows his own fate: his dream of an artist’s consequence-free collaboration with power. One woke critic praises Gaiman for 30 years of “listening and learning,” in this worldview’s cloying and threatening idiom of compulsory therapeutic reeducation. But “cowering and forgetting” seems the likelier option. Now his own worldview has changed, in his lifetime, from serving as the battle standard of rebel poets to flying as the very flag of empire—and empire in turn has exacted a price from his art.