Dear Friends,
I have a fun piece up on post-literacy for Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Hinternet. Since launching early this week, The Metropolitan Review has posted pieces by Adelle Waldman, Blake Nelson, and Naomi Kanakia.
Best,
Sam
OF CENTERS AND ARCHIPELAGOS
I’ve had only a handful of epiphanies in my life. For one of them, I was on a bicycle in New Hampshire. I was 22. And the phrase popped into my head that ‘culture is a circle.’
It’s taken me a while to understand this but I think I get it now. Culture operates as an unequal exchange. There is a space at the center that is filled. A great deal of effort goes into claiming or demonstrating that whatever is at the center is of value, speaks to the culture-as-a-whole, and then the rest of the society, at least for the time of the cultural engagement, becomes a ring wrapped around the central event.
A great deal of cultural architecture goes into making this relationship explicit. We have the bare stage to be filled with a performance — and, often, in the more Greco-Roman model. the ‘amphitheater’ is a circle. We have the sports stadium with our wrap-around seating. And, more significantly, we have our mass events to which the society as a whole bears witness. An inauguration or coronation signifies that the political center of a culture remains intact while the previous holder leaves by the back stairs and the current holder takes all the mantles of power. In many countries, this change of power is accompanied by a wholesale exchange of symbols — the elegant, earringed young Elizabeth passing over at a stroke to Charles’ large ears. And that is even more the case for mass events. If you want an instant bond with a person of a certain generation you ask them where they were when Kennedy was shot, if of another generation where they were on 9/11. The query instantly positions both parties of the conversation as part of the circle looking in. What’s in the center of the circle looking back is Walter Cronkite taking off his glasses and trying to keep from crying; or the news network footage of the plane hitting the second tower. What’s in the bullseye of the circle — the black box, the holy of holies — is the kind of thing that we will never fully have access to, the moment in the limo and the book depository, the sheer terror of the jumpers. (It’s no accident that some of our most successful modern fiction, Libra and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is exactly about gaining entry to this black box.) In a less macabre way we replicate this sense of centrality in just about every one of our public rituals. Every February, the whole country tunes in for a football game that, by this point in the season, is dwarfed by the ads and the halftime show. Holidays are this idea of centrality but franchised out. The localized center is in the first slice into the turkey or the opening of the presents under the tree or the clinking of champagne glasses at the stroke of midnight, but there is also a public center, whether it’s Dick Clark (assuming he’s still alive) doing the countdown or the massive tree at Rockefeller Center.
The older you get, and the more you think about it, the more there comes to be something monstrous about this centrality. I find it very difficult to watch the Super Bowl halftime show, for instance — just the wash of celebrities on floats, the glazed expressions on the faces of the background dancers. It’s not so much that there’s anything wrong with the activity itself, it’s just that the content of what’s happening is so overmatched by the millions of eyeballs trained on it. It’s the same dynamic that makes everybody flub their Oscars’ acceptance speeches. There probably is one of these mathematical laws, like the law of 150 stable relationships or something, about at what point a mass society becomes unsustainable, where the circumference is simply too large and the center too overstrained and the whole thing pops like a balloon. American mass media is in any case well past that number, whatever it is. What happens when you get to this kind of scale is that you have a profound inequality — this isn’t even a socioeconomic equality, which in a sense sort of follows from this, but a fundamental imbalance between center and circumference. People spend their entire lives on the periphery looking in. The reason for their exclusion is no real fault of their own; there just isn’t nearly enough room for them. Those who are at the center at any given moment are usually there for some hyper-specialized skill, or they are the instrument of the powers-that-be. In any case, they are usually too terrified to enjoy it or to comfortably inhabit it — at any second, the winds could change and they could be sent back to the outskirts.
In practice, one of the ways this problem is dealt with is, very simply, through having different nations, which means different public spheres. Russians, Filipinos, Angolans presumably have some completely different Dick Clark counting down the seconds to New Year’s. The smaller the country, the greater the chance that any individual has of inhabiting its center or at least of having a more significant share of its public sphere. (On the other hand, the smaller countries are always at greater risk of being swallowed up by one or another empire.)
But that seems not to be an option for those in the American public sphere. Cultures tend to agglomerate rather than fragment. It’s difficult to be ‘big in Detroit’ or ‘the pride of Tomkinsville’ as was the case once upon a time. Everyone is part of the national culture, which is also to a great extent a global culture, and has to set their worth against it. The tendency in American mass culture has been to bid to be at the center of it. In the days of domination of culture by a handful of networks, that meant securing one of the ‘primetime slots,’ say by hosting a late-night comedy show or having your musical act be the guest appearance on Saturday Night Live. When network television lost its cachet and the center of the culture became streaming, it was still possible to bid for the center of the culture. That was the case a few years ago when everybody was watching Game of Thrones and Monday mornings in every office were dedicated to reviewing what had happened the night before (with the exception, in my office, of the office manager who had TIVO’d the episode and spent all day trying to head off spoilers and was, accordingly, loathed for it) and that was the case not long after with Squid Game. (Both Game of Thrones and Squid Game, incidentally, are exactly about the insanity of wanting to be at the center of the culture — whether that means sitting on the Iron Throne or winning the game — and about the human toll that that takes, and both series are about how that ambition is nonetheless irresistible.)
But something interesting has happened in mass culture in the last few years — sometime between the moment of collective disillusionment at the finale of Game of Thrones and now — which is that the culture has actually fragmented, or at least siloed. It’s already harder to imagine somebody capturing the kind of market share that was possible with, say, Dallas or Friends or Game of Thrones. The most obvious point is that the technology has changed in a bizarre new direction where people are participants as well as observers. On sites like Twitter or Facebook or Substack, it’s much harder to identify where the center is — other than, of course, the control room which is, to whatever extent, manipulating the conversation. For one thing, this means that the culture has siloed — being big on TikTok doesn’t necessarily really mean anything to anybody who’s not on TikTok — and, for another, the culture seems to take on a new shape, the shape of an archipelago.
In cultural formations that are archipelagoic, the boundary between participant and observer is far less clear. All group conversations are archipelagoic — all family dinners, that kind of thing. Everybody is in it whether or not they wish to be, and even their silence says something. Black box theaters, comedy clubs, immersive performances, etc, are all much closer to archipelagoes. The performers and the audience are looking at each other. The audience can be very much in the performance, not just whether they like it or not, but, say, in a comedy show, when they start heckling the comedian or the comedian starts mocking them. And in these kinds of environments, a sort of reciprocity may be encouraged that is missing from circular cultural engagement — in cool jazz clubs, it’s standard for other jazz musicians to be in the audience and then maybe get invited up at the end for a number or two.
In archipelagoic culture, there may not be a center at all. Everybody may be positioned somewhere on the periphery (if it’s even fair to speak of a periphery) and the conversation rolls forward with participants gaining momentum from one another. The internet is, of course, almost inherently archipelagoic. If the Web 2.0 created the idea of the control center guiding one or another platform, we are all also capable by now of seeing where that leads. A platform like this one I find to be genuinely archipelagoic. There may be a certain ego drive that we all have to be at the ‘center’ of it, there may be a degree of algorithmic control, but, fundamentally, the engagement is reciprocal, the people writing posts are the same people who are commenting on others’ posts, it becomes almost impossible to identify where the center is.
What I notice with the phase of the internet we’re in is a certain restlessness with archipelagoic conversation. A circle is a neater geometry than an archipelago and the idea of being at the center of it gratifies our ambitions, but, ultimately, it’s just not worth it. The drive to the center creates a necessity for a dominator/dominant relationship between the center and the periphery where an archipelagoic culture allows for a conversation between equals. The mandarins of the web have been doing what they can to impose a center — Zuckerberg and the Dorsey-era Twitter creating stringent guidelines in order create a smooth conversation, Musk taking over Twitter so that it can be a mouthpiece for him personally — but a platform like this one points in a genuinely different and far more mature direction, in which we give up on grand ambitions and inhabit communities where we both listen to each other and have the chance to speak. Whether this works or not depends largely on us and whether we are willing to adapt ourselves to the less pleasing but more humane structure of archipelagoes.
Thank you for this elegant metaphor for culture. You have synthesized our common experiences and created a new way to visualize something more meaningful. I will be looking for archipelagos that don’t celebrate football or Christmas.
The difference between the spectacle of pageantry and theatre of ideas is that of motive. The former is played out for the group reinforcement of power structures, the latter for the open questioning of them 🐈⬛