Weekly Readings #60 (03/27/23-04/02/23)

thou shalt not kill

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I not only surveyed my reading for March, but I also published in text and audio format the first chapter of the first part of Major Arcana, a serialized novel for paid subscribers. An anonymous commenter wrote in to Tumblr to call it “some of [my] best writing yet.” The next chapter will no doubt prove provocative, so much so that I want to warn readers, however gently, that themes introduced early in a novel will not necessarily be treated the same way later in the book.

MAJOR ARCANA: Part One, Chapter 1

If you’d like to learn more about the novel, please read the Preface, and please subscribe today. Alternately, contact me at the email address in my profile for a free subscription in return for some publicity. “Publicity” could include a kind word passed along to me that I might use as a blurb. It does not, however, mean “a good review” or anything like that. When it comes to publicity, I am of the “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right” school.

This week Major Arcana will cross a threshold my fiction has never crossed before: 100,000 words. This is major work. I am deep in a sequence I wouldn’t have had the courage to write if I’d known in advance I would have to write it. The good news is that it will cause conservative traditionalists and radical activists to come together, thus ending the culture war. The bad news? They will come together to destroy me! Such are the consequences of spinning myth from the contemporary, which, not “realism,” I take to be my mission, perhaps the mission of the novel per se in this period. As Melville wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” Speaking of violence, culture war, and intellectuals, that, alas, is the topic of our essay for this week below.

Platonic Complex: Why Do the Intellectuals Rage?

Grant Morrison and Richard Case, Doom Patrol #63

After a week of even more outrages than usual in outrageous America, I pluck one small scandal for commentary, not without hesitating over whether or not I ought to bring more attention to its subject. The scandal? Wayne State University English and film professor Steven Shaviro posted to Facebook early last week,

Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.

This became a minor item of controversy among conservatives and gender-critical feminists, especially after the Nashville shooting, and Shaviro was suspended without pay pending an investigation and referred to local police. Here on Substack, lawyer Ken White argues that Shaviro’s speech merits First Amendment protection, as does his employment by a public institution. Because they take the form of an abstract philosophical proposition rather than an instruction to a specific agent in a specific time and place, his words don’t meet the strict standard of incitement to violence.¹

The law aside, however, I’d like to think more broadly about Shaviro’s thesis. I judge its content straightforwardly wrong. First, anyone not in the grip of activist cultism understands that the terms “racist,” “homophobic,” and “transphobic” are wielded today with calculated imprecision to threaten social stigma, loss of employment, and (now) murder against the holders of a very wide range of opinion, including many people of color, gay and trans people, and liberals and leftists. Second, a society with broad speech protection wagers that no one speaker or ideology holds all the answers all of the time, that we can never be sure we know all we need to know, and that the price of permitting error is therefore worth the returns we receive from uncommon insights and eccentric voices, this as against the old theocratic position that “error has no rights.”

The rejoinder that certain arguments are inadmissible for speech protection because they threaten, whether abstractly or concretely, certain classes of person—i.e., the hate speech exception—sounds persuasive on its face and with reference to historical worst-case scenarios, as if it were always and everywhere 1830s Georgia or 1930s Germany. When we are confronted with particular cases in our actual and increasingly complex society, however, we realize just how many ideas could be construed as threats by the fragile, the credulous, the opportunistic, or the fanatic: witness, as an example, the black female DEI director run out of her job because setting an agenda for meetings promoted “white supremacy.” In such an atmosphere, it’s hard to credit the concept of “hate speech”—which is, whether one credits it or not, protected by the First Amendment in any case.

All of the above, however, is political punditry of the kind I’ve been trying to renounce this year. I am more interested in what makes a literary and film critic in particular feel he not only can but should advocate the murder of his fellow citizens on the basis of ideology.

We could answer this question with a broad sociological thesis. I’ve recommended before the remarkable 30-year-old lecture by historian Darren Staloff glossing the “renegade Marxist” sociology of Alvin Gouldner—a lecture that, when I heard it a little under a year ago, brought so much of what I’ve read, seen, and heard in my life into sudden focus and complete clarity.

According to Gouldner and Staloff, the intellectual clerisy is, alongside the peasantry, the oldest class in human history. Accustomed to their immemorial privilege of governing society’s spiritual devotions and directing its technical activities, the intellectuals immensely resent upstart civilizations ruled by the likes of warrior aristocrats or middle-class merchants, societies like ancient Greece or the modern west. Consequently, in such “low” civilizations, intellectuals always devise philosophies—of which Platonism is the paradigm—to justify why they should again be put in charge over the laity, not to say the rabble.

Staloff and Gouldner read Marxism itself as one such expression of what they call “the Platonic complex.” Guised as the agenda of the exploited laborer, Marxism actually functions as the legitimating ideology of the intellectuals’ putsch against bourgeois capitalists in a contest for control of state power. On this theory, a leftist intellectual like Shaviro accordingly reasserts with his murderous musings the Platonic privilege of sovereignty over who among the citizenry may speak and about what.

The Shaviro question may also be answered more narrowly, however, and in less apocalyptic tones. If we grant that there will always be intellectuals, and that they will always work in productive tension with and against other classes, we still need to know why Shaviro’s remark seems, except for its extremity, so predictable, so utterly what one would expect a professor of film to say in the year 2023.

Now is the time to say I only paid any attention to this story because I know Shaviro’s name quite well. Among intellectuals, he came early to using the internet to distribute his ideas; his essays were some of the first I remember reading when I got online around the turn of the millennium. He posted his entire first book for free, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (1997). This treatise-manifesto, so eloquently prophetic of our own time’s theory-fiction, so coolly proto-K-Punk, is organized around the Doom Patrol comics of Grant Morrison, about whom readers of this Substack may feel they have lately heard enough. Not sharing Shaviro’s murderous scorn of the errant interlocutor, I always found it a very heady and witty expression of ideas I ultimately judge dubious. Accordingly, I assigned the book’s first chapter, “Grant Morrison,” at least twice to accompany the Scottish mage’s work in my graphic novel class. This passage seems to me the crux of the argument:

Craig Owens and Celeste Olalquiaga, among others, suggest that Walter Benjamin’s analysis of allegory is particularly appropriate to postmodern culture. In allegory, signs become materially insistent in their own right, detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes the place of organic completion or symbolic translation. The postmodern landscape is evoked by J. G. Ballard as a vista of garbage-strewn high-rise apartment buildings, shattered concrete littered with husks of burnt-out cars, snuff videos in incessant replay. Benjamin sees melancholia as a compulsive response to an intolerable situation: one in which everything seems to be fragments and ruins, in which we know that we are irrecuperably estranged from a supposed ‘origin’ to which we nonetheless continue compulsively to refer. Allegory “represents a continuous movement towards an unattainable origin, a movement marked by the awareness of a loss that it attempts to compensate with a baroque saturation and the obsessive reiteration of fragmented memories” (Olalquiaga). We imagine that these ruins once were whole, that these abandoned structures originally had a rational use, that these signs formerly had a sense, that we used to be organic bodies instead of robots. Dubious assumptions, to be sure; but as Nietzsche puts it, one has recourse to such fantasies and such arguments “when one has no other expedient.” Anxious critics today, like Adorno and Eliot before them, feel cut off, with nowhere to turn; and so they shore up fragments against their ruin, seeking desperately to assuage their narcissistic wounds. But as Nietzsche knew, every proposed remedy to nihilism only increases the strength and depth of nihilism. We invent our lost objects posthumously. The more we brood over supposedly estranged origins, the more those origins take form retroactively, even as they recede from us. Melancholia is a recursive, self-replicating structure: it continually generates the very alienation of which it then complains. I want to suggest, therefore, that allegorical melancholy is less a mark of postmodernity per se, than it is a symptom of the desperation of traditional humanist intellectuals (whether of the Marxist or the conservative variety) who find themselves unable to adapt to what McLuhan calls “postliterate” culture. These people should get a life. In the postmodern world of DOOM PATROL, we couldn’t care less about the decline of print literacy, of the nuclear family, of historical awareness, or of authentic class consciousness. We play gleefully in the rubble, for we know that such antiquated notions will never subvert anything; the grounds of contention and debate have long since shifted elsewhere.

The politically-minded will fixate on the equivalence Shaviro draws between the supposed humanism of conservative and Marxist intellectuals—between Eliot and Adorno. This is a red herring, though. Our postmodern theorist dismisses not class consciousness tout court but only “authentic class consciousness,” my emphasis. I take this to mean that the old avatars of authentic class consciousness—industrial workers—have become irrelevant in the new knowledge economy. Their interests and agenda have been justly supplanted as an emancipatory vanguard, however, by inauthentic class consciousness, i.e., by the politically correct antihumanist attitudes of knowledge workers themselves, of people like Ballard, Morrison, and Shaviro. This passage, in short, leaves the leftist intellectual’s Platonic complex totally intact, more intact than before.²

More important to me is the question of whether or not “Ballard, Morrison, and Shaviro” is a legitimate list. Are artists intellectuals? The academo-historicist context-mongering Alice Gribbin so memorably decries in her recent essay on the muses, for example, seems to depend on viewing them that way—as members, that is, of a determinate class and its determinate interests, interests expressed surreptitiously in their work. In our own time, when artists must appeal to academe and its diaspora in the institutions for patronage, this view may well make some sense. I come before you bearing a Ph.D., do I not?

To what class, however, does the work of art belong? To none and all, I would argue, because it speaks so variously and so intensely to its plural audience, and because, per Gribbin, it enters the the consciousness of the artist from somewhere else. Shaviro’s own reduction of the work he scrutinizes exemplifies the danger of assuming art to be equivalent to theory, i.e., to the professional and ideological discourse of intellectuals. In translating art into theory, you may catch the ideas in all their murderous purity but miss the emotion in all its impure sympathies, the symbols in all their proliferating significance, the form in its uncanny vitality. The intellectual draws sustenance for his ideological program from the work of art the way Dracula draws sustenance from his victims.

The passage from Shaviro above is eloquent in its knowingness, but misses the qualities of satire and elegy in Ballard, of bittersweet passion in Morrison.³ Because human beings are the receivers and transmitters, the hearers and bearers, of this higher elsewhere consciousness—even flawed human beings, even wrong human beings—you must, from the strict aesthetic point of view, never advocate their murder. This goes for artists, but it goes, too, for the intellectual custodians of art. For the artist or the critic to call for civil violence is finally disgusting.

The phrase “Platonic complex” rolls nicely off the tongue, but the main battlefield for the war between poetry and philosophy, between life-giving art and murderous theory, was the inside of Plato’s own head.⁴ If we know the Plato who supposedly believed intellectuals should govern the polis, there is also the Plato who knows where the words and pictures come from, who knows that they are not the property of this or that person or this or that class, and who knows, finally, that they may not therefore be offered in extenuation for the slaughter of our enemies.

The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

1. Incitement will always be a slippery standard. In On Liberty, Mill judges revolutionary socialism to be acceptable when voiced in the abstract but unacceptable at the moment of its utterance in the pragmatic circumstance of potential revolution:

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Liberalism here tips its hand: allowing the expression of all ideas as long as they have no immediate application leaves them as inert as cult objects in a museum, the captured prize of liberalism itself. I am not a political philosopher, however, and cannot solve this problem in the footnote to a blog post. Anyway, official liberalism has, no less than its old enemy on the radical left, abandoned this cunning posture of neutralization-by-expression for brute-force censorship under partially or totally meretricious rubrics like “hate speech” and “misinformation,” rendering the whole argument academic.

2. From Marx to Freud: Shaviro’s citations on melancholia are to Benjamin but he must also have Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” in mind. There Freud claims that the melancholic, unable to mourn or even properly to name the lost object, identifies the ego itself with this object and thereby experiences a death-in-life. This reminds me of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, in hindsight a stunning prophecy of the disastrously apocalyptic course radical intellectuals would pursue in the subsequent decade after its release. If I may quote from my own 12-year-old essay on the film:

…in light of Lars von Trier’s statement, “I understand Hitler….I sympathize with him a bit,” the reading will almost certainly have to be carried a bit further, toward a sense of the dangers that come when the Romantic melancholic, who would rather will nothingness than will nothing, bursts into some violent action in or on the world. The key scene for this reading of the film is the one in which Justine, in a fit of rage, assaults her beloved horse: a melancholic who acts—in effect, a revolutionary—may destroy what beauty actually exists.

If the planet Melancholia is the world-destroying force of a refusal to mourn-or-conform turned outward on the beloved world, then Justine’s ultimately feminized passivity is the therapy Lars von Trier ministers to himself to treat his sympathy for his Uncle Steelbreaker, Herr Hitler. Better to be an artist than a politician. Better to be Ophelia than Hamlet, who may in the end have toppled the state, as some observers hope our latter-day melancholic Bartlebys on Wall Street will do, but in so toppling it, do recall, he only cleared the way for Fortinbras (whose name more or less means “strong-arm”).

3. Ironically in the light of Shaviro’s Facebook post, Morrison in particular has been as clear as possible in rejecting civic violence as a solution to social inequity; this is almost the entire political point of his masterpieces, The Invisibles and The Filth.

4. Exemplifying the murderousness of theory is artificial intelligence’s recent persuasion of a man to kill himself based on the worth of his existence when weighed against the putative climate crisis. While the machine also manipulated the man’s emotions, it did so first by convincing him of a theory, a theory he believed no one else fully understood. What artificial intelligence understands—and artificial intelligence is theoretical intelligence, intelligence abstracted from experience—is that there is always a reason to kill yourself or another. There’s a reason for everything. So what? Who cares? We do not live on reason alone; we may not live on reason at all. Hence, among other things, the superiority of poetry to philosophy.