Curator

Artistic Fixers, Butler and Foucault, The Gaming Society, Criminal Insanity

Away With The Art v. Ethics Binary

I’m not very interested in the majority of this piece focused on Sheila Heti’s Pure Color, but the central thesis is nicely stated. “Much has been made in recent years about the problem of political polarization, but just as distinctive of the period has been the accompanying encroachment of the ethos of the fixers across the categories of left-liberal society and culture,” writes Jonathan Baskin. “Dispiritingly, the most common response of contemporary novelists to the encroachment of this ethos has been to submit their manuscripts dutifully to the panels of fixers for judgment, approval and, occasionally, a surely justified censure.” And Baskin digs into a certain sensibility among the intellectuals who came of age around the year 2000 - the belief that art was inherently narcissistic and the best use of intellectual energy was in worthy causes. Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers used the entirety of their artistic capital to…renounce art an and to dedicate themselves to political advocacy, taking their cue, as Baskin writes, “from Nicholas Kristof and the progressive NGOs.”

At the time - in the 2000s - this was all seen as admirable. The vision was that the artist would be, above all, a model citizen. Art was a means to an end - a way of taking center stage and, once a person had that, then the goal was to turn the microphone over to the worthy social causes. There was something unbelievably saccharine about this tendency - as it manifested in Eggers’ What Is The What, in Foer’s Eating Animals, in the natural career progression of all actors to becoming charity spokesmen with hefty tax-deductible contributions - but what was missed, and what Baskin is right to note, was the tendency here to devalue art itself. Art, in this view, becomes implicitly the thing-you-do-while-you-are-narcissistic and before-you-have-the-good-grace-to-step-outside-of-yourself-and-to-give-back.

Jonathan Safran Foer on the soapbox

Through a complex psychological tangle, the trend towards autofiction seems to have developed out of this set of concerns. If there was something selfish and immoral about art, the response by artists was to attempt to be subversive by being almost perfectly selfish - by writing novels that never extended beyond the borders of oneself. That was Heti, Ben Lerner, etc, with Knausgard pushing that tendency well past the point of absurdity. By the same token, that style of writing became consumed with a superego-laden binary - the characters see themselves as bad when they are self-consumed (as they are for the duration of these novels) and as good when they manage, however tepidly, to engage with the outside world. Lerner’s stand-in taking “the people’s mic” in The Topeka School or Lauren Oyler’s participation in the Women’s March in Fake Accounts are meant to be cathartic moments - and the inherent narrative trajectory of autofiction is to dive deep, deep into oneself, explore all of one’s neuroses, and then at some nadir of self-loathing to snap out of it, to become restored once again to the world and to be a giver, a person contributing through, let’s say, advocacy. 

Another strategy became similarly prominent in the 2010s, which was what Baskin calls the style of the ‘fixer.’ The divide between art and justice could be neatly sutured if art became invested in the program of social justice and the work of art served as a cry to arms. This was the underlying idea of woke literature - in which the ready-at-hand method turned out to be acts of extreme violence, the redemptive bloodbath. And discussions about art tended to turn into a vigorous debate between the vigilantism literature of the super-wokes with the clear calls for justice and the bloodbath as the mnemonic representation of vigorous reform; and the whingeing literature of the not-as-wokes which was defended as ‘art for art’s sake’ but reflected a profoundly contrite worldview, in which one would be more socially engaged once one grew up a little bit or, really, once one’s narcissistically youthful work was sold and the world of tax-deductible charitable work awaited. 

I am tempted, with Baskin, to put the blame for these approaches on the fundamentally unserious, sanctimonious view of art by people like Foer and Eggers. And now that we have been dealing with really terrible art for long enough, there at least seems to be some movement away from this dichotomy. Baskin lauds Sheila Heti. I guess I would say the same thing about Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. The sense is of a movement away from the paralysis of autofiction and of the dichotomy between art-and-engagement. The point is that art itself becomes engagement. There isn’t any impetus within the narrative for attempting to fix the world because it’s already evident that the world is beyond fixing - or that what’s wrong with the world goes beyond the capabilities of individual agency. The baby of the narrator’s sister in No One Is Talking About This is completely doomed. She’s already getting great medical care; Lockwood’s narrative stand-in isn’t going to be able to save her no matter how many GoFundMe campaigns she manages, no matter how many ‘People’s Mics’ she steps up to. All that she can do is appreciate her sister’s baby - and reflect on herself - in the short time she’s given with her.

Patricia Lockwood stepping away from ‘The People’s Mic’

In other words, Lockwood’s novel is situated within a domain that art is capable of dealing with - with tragedy, with the pain of the world as we all deal with it. And that limitation - that turn-away from a maniacal compulsion to fix things - doesn’t, actually, lead to self-absorption. The narrator, in her retreat from the ‘public sphere’ (which is really just Twitter) and her sudden intense focus on the personal, finds herself less selfish rather than more, fully capable of taking in another entity. It turns out, Lockwood discovers, to actually be very easy to move outside of the trap that we have devised for ourselves - our belief in some binary between art and ethics, id and superego. Art, when it’s relaxed, when it’s allowed to be true to itself, does that job with aplomb - real art tends to be curious about the world, not just about the anxieties of the artist. And if it’s difficult to fix things - the dedicated fixers themselves find that fixing is trickier than they might have imagined - it’s actually not so difficult to be engaged and for art to serve as a window out, a means of communication, as opposed to what everybody recently, mysteriously, has assumed it to be, some tunnel for digging endlessly into one’s own narcissism.

Blame Judith Butler

Samuel Clowes Huneke’s unintentionally edifying article in The Point attempts to formulate a ‘queer theory of the state.’ The  critical schism that Huneke detects, and that he is attempting to reconcile, is between a critique of power in Foucault’s tradition and a new wind, initiated by Judith Butler, which views state power as a ‘myth’ and sees power as radiating through ‘normality,’ through mores of everyday life. 

Huneke is absolutely right - this is a profound schism. And he works very hard to bridge the two conceptions - with no results. The queer theory of the state that Huneke posits does, after all, involve recognition of the reality of state power and of the violence that undergirds that power. It rejects radical utopian visions of a different kind of state and proposes democracy (“we can’t simply will away those who wish us ill”), a principle of ‘least harm,’ an understanding of the state as “an agglomeration of competing interest groups and actors.” In other words, it looks very much like the vision of the state that we currently have.

Samuel Clowes Huneke laboring for a queer theory of the state

What a reasonable vision of state power lacks - and I find Huneke perfectly reasonable - is anything from Judith Butler’s tradition. The interrogation of daily life - the impugning of ‘normality,’ the search for the sources of violence in micro-aggressions and the ‘reiterated acting’ of everyday life - seems to have nothing at all to do with the kind of extreme violence that provokes war, that destabilizes societies, and that generates the sorts of protection rackets that Foucault was so adept in critiquing. Huneke is being a fairly devout leftist and is eager to follow the labyrinth of queer theory back towards the realm of political power and the best he can come up with looks a great deal like classical liberalism of the John Stuart Mill style although with the admonition that the basis of the state be communitarian rather than individual, which tips him slightly more towards socialism. Replace the word ‘queer’ in Huneke’s essay with something like ‘the public’ or ‘citizens’ and we’re absolutely back in the domain of rights theory, with ‘negative liberties,’ a respect for ‘difference,’ and with a powerful enough state that can redistribute certain resources for the prioritization of the ‘marginalized.’ 

What an essay like Huneke’s is useful in framing is the poverty of Butler’s vision. Attempt to square the circle, as Huneke diligently does, attempt to apply queer theory to political philosophy, and we’re back to the same central dilemmas we’ve been wrestling with for millennia which are connected to the use and monopolization of force. And, inadvertently, Huneke points - I contend - towards a culprit in what’s gone so deeply wrong in our cultural conversation over the last several years, with the culprit being Judith Butler. A great deal of the shift towards identity politics - the moralization of virtually all social interaction, the intense focus on ‘identity’ to the exclusion of everything else about a person, the tribalism pervading public discourse - has drifted out from the universities at a period in which Judith Butler has, to a surprising extent, represented the universities’ underlying sensibility. This tendency comes at the expense, as Huneke notes, of a Foucaldian interest in state power, a recognition of power as concentrated energy underpinned by violence and with a disposition towards hierarchies. With the left drifting away from the interrogation of that kind of power, the left loses all real meaning and becomes a hall monitor tracking any social interactions that are deemed to run afoul of prevailing morality and, in the process, incidentally, serving as an unwitting agent of power-as-it-is. ‘Normality,’ as we’re all discovering, is an impossible and pointless target to hit. Use the tools of morality to attempt to shift the ‘normal’ and you simply end up with a different and equally coercive ‘normal’ - coercive because morality is an inherently coercive entity. And focus on everyday modes of expression and you lose sight of the kinds of coercion that really are intolerable - limitations on freedom that stem from the application of possessive force. To put it slightly differently, the left had a valid critique of hierarchical power - this is the great egalitarian tradition that runs from slave rebellions through the Waldensians and Tom Joad and Foucault and which will always be a noble and hopeless struggle - and then abandoned that for the sake of a ready-at-hand critique of perceived missteps in daily life often by people who have no power at all. 

A Third Mountain? - Beyond the Stories and Games Dichotomy

As annoyed as I get with The New York Times, I can’t help but have my soft spot for David Brooks, who continues to have a remarkable ability to take the long view and to frame complex issues in philosophic terms. Brooks’ discussion point here is the split between a story narrative of oneself and a game narrative. The story narrative is what lends meaning to our lives, what gives us a sense of destiny and generates an inner morality. The difficulty with it is that it may well be based entirely on delusion. And the abandonment of all of our many deities and then the abandonment of God and then the abandonment of an abiding sense of civic virtue leaves us with a different reigning metaphor - of the game. Brooks and a number of other writers - Anand Giridharadas, Justin E. H. Smith, Will Storr - have been good at documenting the turn of the society towards the logic of gaming. And the gaming paradigm turns out to have a deeper appeal to the human psyche than one might expect. The ideal self under capitalism, is, famously, a competitor, who has no higher purpose than to play the hand he is dealt logically and skillfully. (This is true not only in obvious examples like the capitalist with ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to shareholders but in attendant activities, the ‘adversarial’ legal system or the ‘game theory’ approach to statesmanship, which is usually seen to be the height of practical wisdom.) And it has not been lost on social commentators that, even as capitalism shifts inexorably towards a casino mentality in which winning itself becomes the sole end, that the rest of social interaction has come to be a sort of pale suckers’ version of game logic, in which contestants play with chips rather than real money and attempt to cruise around their social portals accruing ‘likes,’ attention, and adulation. This has become such a staple of the world-as-it-is that it almost seems pointless to reiterate. The works of art that have been captivating, that stand for the era, are virtually all emanations of, and reflections upon, the logic of gaming - Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, Squid Game, Ready Player One, Succession, etc, etc. And even the alleged escape routes - the discourse of spirituality, for instance - tends all to be about ‘leveling up,’ ‘being one’s best self,’ and so on.

David Brooks with game face on

As trenchant and as overpowering as the gaming logic is, the issues accompanying it are equally obvious and innumerable. In a game, there are very few winners and a great many losers - actually, ultimately, everybody turns out to be a loser. And the gaming side of life is unconducive to compassion or any kind of social nurturing. And then the gaming society runs straight into the hedonist trap - and, more specifically, into the feeling of glut, the bad taste that you get in your mouth when you’ve spent too much time gaming.

Had Brooks not run into his word count, I’m sure he would have segued into a discussion of another of his favorite topics, ‘the second mountain’ - or maybe he realized that that phrasation all by itself plays into the logic of gaming, the presumption that a person first has to deal with all the achievements of career, family, etc, and then the real winners move on to God and spirituality and a whole other conception of being. 

The actual point of the second mountain, the unfortunate phrasing aside, is to find an approach to life that falls outside of both stories and games. That’s what Krishnamurti had in mind when he called “truth a pathless land.” It’s what the existentialists are nattering about when they discuss ‘being.’ And it’s what meditators experience directly when they attempt to sit - and obtain a stunningly peaceful frame of mind outside of both stories and games, notwithstanding the frantic attempts of the psyche to impose the logic of stories and games on the experience. It’s very interesting that a discourse of pure being is so completely outside the social conversation at the moment that even a skilled commentator like Brooks doesn’t think to mention it.

The rejoinder would of course be - well, what does a society based on pure being look like, what is its mechanism of action? I think that’s a bit asking the wrong question. The critical component in the construction of societies is the vision of the ‘ideal self’ - that’s the linchpin for everything else. In story-driven narratives, that self is a figure of honor and reputation, in touch with some higher code of conduct - and serious thinkers since the Enlightenment, of which Will Storr is a late iteration, have been merciless in disproving the ‘existence’ of any sort of metaphysical absolute and of revealing the effort to be a morally heightened version of oneself to be a form of delusion and a dangerous means of repressing one’s more authentic drives. In game-driven narratives, the ideal self is simply the best at whatever task they apply themselves to - and I’ve often been surprised in athletes’ interviews at the way athletes tend to insist that there is no higher calling than inner discipline and a refusal to ‘settle for second place,’ just as I’ve been surprised at the extent to which superhero narratives, in which the superhero is ipso facto the best, have suffused the society’s artistic imagination. It’s not so difficult to construct an ideal self that subscribes to neither one of those models, in which what’s emphasized is a certain inner relaxation and inner watchfulness, a self-love that flows readily into compassion, a focus on being entirely for its own sake, and a spirit of play which is not rule-based or achievement-oriented and which leaves a very different taste in one’s mouth than gaming.

And, While We’re At It, Away With One More Binary - Between Criminality and Insanity

A pretty interesting article in Quillette by a court psychologist specializing in violent offenders and making the case that our binary between criminality and insanity is wildly outdated.

The article’s focus is on a very unique case - the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, which holds that a person may inhabit several personae which are distinct from each other and so completely compartmentalized that it becomes fair to say that if one persona commits a violent act the other personae should not be held culpable. This is the defense of Psycho or The Manchurian Candidate and actually is raised in courtrooms by Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who has had a renowned career as an expert witness. Daniel Kriegman, the article’s author, dwells at length on the exotic value of this disorder but in terms of criminal cases it’s a rare guest. His real point is more theoretical - that a condition like DID demonstrates conclusively that agency over oneself cannot be demonstrated in certain cases and that therefore the agency model of criminal culpability is completely discredited. One might think that this would lead to being ‘soft on crime’ but Kriegman takes things in the opposite direction. He wants to get rid of the insanity loophole for violent offenders - or, really, to dismantle that distinction.

Into the minds of violent offenders - with Daniel Kriegman

Everybody is a bit crazy is the point - but it’s generally only defendants with highly-paid counsel who can get off on an insanity plea - and the notion of insanity creates an odd schism within the domain of criminal justice. The better approach, argues Kriegman - which does actually mirror the viewpoint of the rehabilitative justice crowd - is to view crime as fundamentally behavioral, the result of circumstance more than agency. This is an argument that can be made on sociological terms - crime as an extension of social setting - or on metaphysical terms in which the capacity for agency is deemed to be missing entirely. I don’t actually accept the philosophical argument - I do believe that human beings have choices - but the sociological argument is compelling. In the case of poverty or drug addiction or probably certain psychological disorders, agency becomes a moot point and crime just a function of given circumstances. What that means is a certain paradigm shift in dealing with criminality. Crime, even violent crime, comes to be seen less as a heinous act, an inexplicable deviance, and more as an extension of circumstance. Does that affect the outlines of punishment? Not necessarily. It’s very difficult to envision a regime of law and order without the presumption of free will and the singling out of deviant individuals. But it does mean that we understand slightly better that criminal punishment is a kind of short hand - that the society isn’t so much punishing bad actors as attempting to rein in a pattern of problematic behavior.

Into the minds of serial killers - with Dorothy Otnow Lewis

The real benefit of this approach to emphasize the variegated nature of human beings - that we all have a variety of actors inside of ourselves, that some aspects of ourselves are more dangerous than others, and that the task of justice is actually entirely about accountability for a crime as opposed to some sort of moral crusade against the crime’s perpetrator. That idea is embedded very deeply in our criminal code - that we are punishing the crime not the criminal - but it’s easy to forget, and the justice system has developed all sorts of exemptions, the schism between the criminal-who-is-morally-bad and the criminally-insane-who-doesn’t-have-a-moral-compass being one of those exemptions. Try to tease out culpability along the lines of personae, as Dorothy Otnow Lewis does, and you literally go nuts. Better to collapse the distinctions along Kriegman’s model and with the great caveat of the rehabilitative justice model - that you are, on the one hand, looking to apply a strict and fitting punishment to a crime and, on the other, altering circumstances so that a perpetrator is no longer so likely to commit a similar type of crime. Curiously enough, in that model of criminal justice, there actually is no such thing as a criminal, no debates about agency or moral wrongdoing. You enter into a very different moral landscape in which there is no good and bad, no guilt and innocence, only actions and the just consequences for actions.