Weekly Readings #108 (02/26/24-03/03/24)
swallowing the internet whole
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
It’s been a big week here at Grand Hotel Abyss. First, my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana, arrived at its conclusion with Chapter ∞, “Q. E. D., Revised.” The big New York houses now have about a month to come through with my million-dollar deal before I embarrass them forever in literary history by publishing one of the better American novels of this century on Amazon.
Mary Jane Eyre has published the first review of the novel right here on Substack. If you’re trying to decide whether or not you want to read Major Arcana, this eloquent, perceptive, witty, and largely spoiler-free introduction, complete with an unsparing ideology critique to go with its generous aesthetic praise, should help you decide that you do, while also introducing you to one of Substack’s most interesting and original writers.1
In Mary’s review, I find myself (gently) charged with bourgeois ideology. Accordingly, another big event at Grand Hotel Abyss this week was The Invisible College’s turn toward exactly this worldview: the most recent episode studies the bourgeois ideology of the realist novel at its brilliant inception in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For the full three-hour lecture, “Till This Moment, I Never Knew Myself,” encompassing everything from Longus through Samuel Johnson and F. R. Leavis to Bridget Jones’s Diary, please offer a paid subscription today. In the coming week, our survey of Modern British Literature turns to the Victorians with a study of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s smoothly anguished poetry, probably alongside such related phenomena as the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and the criticism of John Ruskin.
Finally, I made my second appearance on Daniel Oppenheimer’s Eminent Americans podcast, this time alongside one of Substack’s premier pundits, Ross Barkan2 of Political Currents, to discuss our culture’s potential New Romanticism in the episode “Wanderers Above the Sea of Digital Fog.”3 Please listen, and please make sure you’re subscribed to Dan and Ross for more on the state of the discourse.
Two items for today’s post. First, I give a capsule review of Dune: Part Two. Second, I answer a question someone posed to me on Tumblr about some recent and fashionable cultural theory. Please enjoy!
There Are No Sides: Denis Villeneuve’s Aesthetic Desert
As Dune: Part Two presupposes knowledge of Dune: Part One, so this capsule review presupposes knowledge of my essay on Herbert’s novel and my brief ideology critique of the first film. Readers totally unfamiliar with the plot of this science-fiction saga can find a summary in the former, which I’ll forego here. (For better times between Villeneuve and me, see also my little meditation on Blade Runner 2049.)
Dune: Part Two is best understood in sequence with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Dark Knight. Like them, it is the middle part of an epic cinematic trilogy, and like them, it transmits the prevailing conservative ideology of its day.
The Two Towers concludes with a Churchillian peroration on the need for good to challenge evil that paired well with the equally Churchillian justifications for the then-imminent Iraq War. The Dark Knight offered a much more ambivalent justification for the War on Terror’s “emergency” suspension of civil liberties, one ambivalent enough—especially when played against the film’s preternaturally charismatic anarchist villain—to be read as a rebuke on the eve of Obama’s election. Finally, Dune: Part Two dismisses the supposed moral purport of geopolitical conflict to expose even apparently righteous defensive wars or liberation movements as mere proxy conflicts in the power struggles of a shadowy and inbred elite.
“There are no sides,” one of these elites impatiently informs another at the conclusion. Warfare is only the exoteric expression of a esoteric sororal quarrel in the galactic longhouse. The Two Towers’s moral message urged us on to our quagmire in Iraq, while Dune: Part Two, with equal urgency, demands we stop meddling in other people’s affairs or stoking holy wars in which we have no part. The journey from passionate neoconservatism through ambivalent neoconservatism to chastened paleoconservatism has been completed on the pop-culture right. If we can read The Two Towers as an endorsement of Bush—I certainly did at the time—then we can equally read Dune: Part Two as an endorsement of Trump,4 with The Dark Knight’s anguished hesitation between right and left appropriately in the middle (no coincidence that it’s much the best of the three films, a genuine hallucination between the solemn monuments to the state of cinematic art).
Despite the film’s paleocon realism, Villeneuve gives one scrap to the left: Chani emerges by the end as an incipiently secular freedom fighter, the film’s only true anti-colonialist in a sea of jihadists conned by CIA plants, suggesting the third film will come back around to the contemporary imperial ideology implied by the first’s race- and gender-swapping of Liet-Kynes. But the scenario, however enlightened, doesn’t have much visual interest or charisma: Zendaya, like Timothée Chalamet, lacks a certain ineffable gravitas. I felt like I was watching an adult film about real people only when Javier Bardem and Rebecca Ferguson were onscreen. (Maybe I’m just getting old.)
My prior ideology critique of Villeneuve’s lifeless expert-technocratic cinema still stands. If we turn our lens from politics to aesthetics, we find that Part Two only comes alive on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld, with its characteristically fascist mesh of perverse human passions indulged amid sterile and cyclopean architecture, bone-white crowds baying for blood and a bone-white sadist licking his bloody blade amid high black halls as Zimmer’s percussive score rattles the cinema. Here is the true aesthetic corollary of Villeneuve’s politics, also the setting for the film’s only persuasive sex scene, Herbert’s libertarian mistrust of power as such become a worship of power for its own sake. Nothing on Arrakis really compares, except the womb-like caverns where the Fremen matriarchs keep the water of life. It’s probably more fun to read about a desert than to look at one on a screen, however large the screen, or the desert.
As in the first film, Villeneuve slights the source material’s potential for psychedelia or even surrealism, so concerned is he that we absorb his secular political critique of cultural cold wars that turn hot. Whatever we might say about David Lynch’s fraught adaptation, or even Bill Sienkiewicz’s comics visualization thereof, as sampled above, we can’t say that. The final battle, before the big swordplay, is just a grand explosion of dust. The climax would have been improved had it taken St. Alia of the Knife from the novel, the most murderous fictional toddler this side of Pet Sematary, even at the risk of introducing a bit of oneiric irreverence into the sober proceedings. Maybe we can look forward to her antics in the sequel, before she turns into Anya Taylor-Joy.
I will be accused of obtruding a political polemic into an artistic discussion, but the film, like the novel, is a story about the struggles of and for state power, as science fiction, perhaps the most political of all literary genres, so often is. Both Herbert and Villeneuve ask us to understand that politics itself is a floor-show put on by aesthetes behind the scenes. These aesthetes and their magic, however, are by their very nature more interesting than anything else the steely Dune films have to show us. If there are no sides, morally speaking, then we should pay attention to the most interesting one. But Villeneuve, unlike the enthusiastically encyclopedic Herbert, lacks the courage of his cynicism.5 Throughout the film, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the devil’s party was going on somewhere on the other side of the screen—and I wasn’t invited.
Disinterimmediated: For a Longer History of Apparency
An anonymous reader writes to me on Tumblr with the following inquiry:
Seems we’re in another “state of the discipline” moment. Do you have any thoughts on Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy? Or the recent stoush over who gets to be a critic (and what the work of criticism consists of) occasioned by John Guillory’s Professing Criticism and Andy Hines’s response to it in MLQ?
It’s no longer my discipline, if ever it was, so I have to take a pass on Guillory and his critics.6 The Kornbluh discourse did catch my eye earlier this week, though. I read Bruce Robbins’s review of Immediacy and then read the excerpt here, with its opening salvo against manifestation. There is certainly something in what she says, and I’ve said some but not all of it myself:
This style of expressly rejecting mediation can be seen in the loss of distinction between inner and outer that “manifesting” trademarks; in the breakdown of evidence into experience and the “alternative facts” / “do your own research” of personal epistemology; in the dismantling of public education and discrediting of expertise; in the intolerance for art in Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso; and in the nausea for fictionality popularized by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Everywhere we look, mediation—the social activity of putting ideas into the medium of language or art; the social work of making meaning; the social processing of connective tissue—has been rendered illegitimate. Cultural forms like TV, art, music, and fashion should now be instant relay, one-dimensionally literal. Exchange guaranteed. To give a name to this style of disintermediation, instantaneity, self-identicality, and manifestness—differentiating it from its predecessor, postmodernism—we can hazard “immediacy.” Immediacy crushes mediation. It is what it is. Immersed without intermediary, #nofilter, ferment with “no words,” immediacy is temporal presence, spatial intimacy, epistemic populism, and experiential intensity, all congealed into an aesthetics of apparency.
Her knot is tied too tightly, however, and her facts don’t line up. The vogue for manifesting occurs and recurs through modern history (New Thought, theosophy, Transcendentalism, Romanticism itself, all of which could be linked to earlier iterations of capitalism) and has roots in immemorial pre-capitalist occult practices, including folk practices. The same goes for “the nausea for fictionality,” which we find almost a century ago in, well, Nausea, and in a quarrel in English letters between euphuistic and transparent styles dating back almost to the time of the master manifestor himself, John Dee. And the same in philosophy: “mediated” German Idealist complexity follows “immediate” French Cartesian or English empirical clarity. As for Hannah Gadsby, that style of feminism always was an offshoot of the iconoclast imagination, with roots in Plato and Leviticus—did Laura Mulvey live in vain?7
I’m overstating my own “nothing ever changes” case the more forcefully to rebut the Marxist commitment to finding some new “cultural logic” of the present—itself a habit of an “immediatist” sensibility—but more importantly to suggest that culture is powered by an autonomous dialectic undetermined or at least under-determined by the mode of production. (How’s that for mediation, comrade?) To quote from an interview with the one living Verso theorist I respect, Boris Groys, and please apply his critique of the idea of “postmodernism” to hers of “immediacy”:
Well, when I speak about postmodernity in my writings, it’s because other people use this word and believe themselves to have a certain understanding about what it means. Personally, I don’t think any such transition from modernity to postmodernity ever happened. Postmodernity has never really had any meaning as a concept.
Postmodernism was associated with disbelief in progress. But nobody in the nineteenth century who was intelligent believed in progress. Baudelaire didn’t believe in progress and neither did Flaubert, nor Nietzsche, or Wölfflin.8 “Postmodernity” was a way by which people came to understand what people already understood in the nineteenth century.
But perhaps it was only known at first by avant-garde intellectuals, elite circles of artists in Western Europe during the nineteenth century. When people speak of postmodernity, they’re really talking about something that was known before but now was becoming clear to everybody. From the perspective of artistic, intellectual, and cultural modernity, however, nothing has changed. And we still don’t know how to deal with it. Modern problems, as they were formulated in relation to art, culture, and writing, during the nineteenth century, remain very relevant and unsolved. The real change came toward the middle of the nineteenth century. It occurred with the collapse of Hegelianism, the collapse of European idealism amidst the industrial revolution, and with it, the beginning of intellectual and cultural modernity.
But almost as early as the disjunction between Romanesque and Gothic churches, if you will, you’ll always see these “waves” in the succession of European styles. So beginning with the Renaissance, you have clear-cut forms, geometrical models, and a certain kind of clarity or intellectual transparency. But then it’s followed by the Baroque period: by complexity, obscurity, and contradiction. Then you have something similar between Classicism and Romanticism. And then at the start of the twentieth century, there is the avant-garde, which lasted until 1926 or 1927. After that, though, there is this huge wave of embryonic postmodernity—historicism, Socialist Realism, Nazi art, the “return to order,” and the Novecento in Italy. But all of that was suppressed after World War II. Following the war, there’s a new wave of modernism—a neo-avant-garde that goes from the 1950s and 1960s, lasting through the early 1970s. Starting in 1971 or 1972, you get a kind of neo-baroque. There’s Of Grammatology by Derrida, a baroque gesture. So there are these waves in the cultural history of Europe, shifting from clarity, intellectual responsibility, mathematico-scientific influences, and transparency to opacity, obscurity, absence, infinity. What is the Deleuzean or Derridean moment? It’s the moment where they took the structuralist models, defined as a system of finite rules and moves, and made it infinite. It is precisely what Romanticism did with the Enlightenment, what the Baroque did with the Renaissance, and so on. Even in terms of Marxism, you get these waves. There is the classical period of clarity. Then there is a period of obscurity—Benjamin, Adorno, and the like.
Which means that if you have an aesthetic critique to make, just make it. I prefer complex and intricate aesthetics myself. But don’t maunder on about how “shit is very bad,” as she apparently does elsewhere in the book with an “immediate” resort to the vernacular that would not in more mediated times have been thought becoming in a scholar.9 Shit’s always very bad—and so is most art.
If anyone else wants to write a review, I’m happy to provide a free subscription for that purpose. (A paid or comped subscription will also grant access to a pdf of the eventual ebook.) Especially if you have a political point of view opposite Mary’s—I want to hear from a right-winger about what a filthy degenerate I am.
But Ross is not only a political pundit. Please see his recent post, “Adverbs Are Good,” a polemic much in my own spirit against fastidious “rules” of good writing that seem designed to leach the intensity and personality out of prose.
See also the comments to the post where I offer a few more examples of New Romanticism, such as the music of Ethel Cain or the film Poor Things, this in response to the aforementioned Mary’s suggestions of Barbie and T. Swift. Also, while we all agreed on the pod that Dan’s namesake blockbuster and critical darling, Oppenheimer, exemplifies this New Romanticism, we forgot to say why: because it both upholds the Romantic concept of genius while simultaneously issuing a Romantic warning against runaway technology.
Well, not Trump exactly: not populism but enlightened technocracy, a technocracy able to avoid occult conspiratorial bloodletting. I might mention that the one-time consort of the probable true endorsee, not to mention the conduit of his imperial bloodline, titled her first album Geidi Primes. For a longer reflection from me on neoreactionary politics, see here.
For the author’s fascinating life story, and his wife’s, see of course the Art of Darkness podcast episode, “Frank Herbert and the White Witch of Dune.”
I don’t even remember what the letters MLQ stand for. I do remember trying to sign up for the MMLA (i.e., Midwest Modern Language Association) conference in graduate school and finding myself on the website of the Michigan Mortgage Lenders Association instead. A philosophical colleague quipped, after Wittgenstein’s remark on the lion, “If a mortgage lender could speak, we would not understand him.”
And then on the other hand, she misses some genuinely contemporaneous elements of her case: we have to “do our own research” and resort to “personal epistemology” because the “trust the science” crowd literally destroyed our society for over two years, often with a strategic deployment of lies accompanied by a suppression of democratic debate, and now we can’t really believe them about anything. But I can see why the Verso left would rather forget or obfuscate the deeply dishonorable role they played in that catastrophe.
The Euro-theorist all-too-typically ignores Americans: Emerson, Whitman, and even Melville and James did of course believe in progress.
The LARB review, a very extensive summary from which I pull Kornbluh’s “shit is very bad” quote, suggests to me that she watches too much TV. I never even heard of half the shows she writes about. Shouldn’t a sociological critic try to establish if anyone is watching them? My own “materialist” suspicion is that Netflix is some kind of money-laundering operation. Anyway, it was better when intellectuals believed that, as our mothers used to tell us, “TV will rot your brain.”
Believe me, my dear sir, my gratitude is warmly excited by such affectionate attention.
Re: Dune, fair points all, but in keeping with Jodorowsky’s vision, I think it is best viewed as a piece of sacred art: Ben-Hur for the 21st century. I also don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that the best parts of the film are those that look like a Vogue photoshoot: Villeneuve’s greatest achievement is perhaps his ability to bridge the geek-queer aesthetic divide, thereby distracting those most liable to start quoting Edward Said. In Chani, we are presented with the character that we are clearly supposed to identify with – first sceptical, then seduced and ultimately scorned – returning alone to the desert to pen a tell-all confessional for the The Cut: “The Paul Atreides I knew”. But if we are not afraid to listen, the djinns are whispering that we know deep down that we would much rather be that beautiful boy, the one of whom the prophecies spoke, the outsider riding the sandworm rather than being swept along by the desert winds.
I will also defend the desert aesthetics, which offer the opportunity for some much-needed dry (parched?) humour (“My planet Arakis is so beautiful when the sun is low”) in a film so committed to the bit that any sign of Gerwig’s romantic irony would ruin it. We are not dealing here with Hobbits fighting to preserve their green shire, but fanatics yearning to make the desert bloom. (This is romantic realism for you: not the pomo fantasy of attending services at both cathedral and synagogue to soak up the aesthetics.)
As for the slighted potential for psychedelia, as a seasoned practitioner of that particular dark art, I endorse focusing not on the ecstatic certainty of the vision, but on the bittersweet aftertaste. Of course the high campness of the Bene Gesserit stole the show, but I think we were shown just enough of the devil’s party to make it enticing. Weil: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
But we can all agree that Rebecca Ferguson is mother!
(P.S. My gen z boyfriend finds it hilarious that you describe me as the ideological opposite of right wing)
I liked Dune, but I saw Lawrence of Arabia in beautiful 70mm a few months ago and both the visual splendor and the sexual politics make Dune look fusty. It's true that he seems to have missed his calling as some sort of propagandist for ecstatic technofascism, the most memorable scene in the first movie was the imperial planet with the human sacrifice and throat singing. I always notice in modern sci-fi whenever contemporary ideology creeps too far into the dialogue and strikes a weird note with the setting -- did you notice them calling Feyd-Rautha a "psychotic" and a "sociopath"? Surely even a bunch of technocrats like the Bene Gesserit wouldn't think of the mind in such a way in the ten thousand year neofeudal empire? And "zealot" or "fanatic" would have fit as a description of the Fremen, but "fundamentalist" brings to mind Richard Dawkins or Karl Rove.
Ethel Cain's whole aesthetic *thing* is brilliant, but the music is pretty far from visionary to me. When I clicked on the videos I expected something really new and good and I just got more urban outfitters store playlist sad girl pop. Hopefully she will reconcile sound and image further into her career.
Lastly, I clicked on maybe one tweet about Immediacy and the algorithm went nuts, it literally would not leave my timeline for days, I had to cull it like an invasive species. I don't know what that portends.