“A pure conspiracy”: Paranoia as Critical Methodology

It is our national tragedy.  We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.  To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet.  We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us.

~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

            The second section (“Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”) of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, presents readers with four maxims, humorously titled “Proverbs for Paranoids.”  They occur intermittently, although in close proximity to one another, throughout the section’s hundred pages, and are labeled as follows:

·       Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. (240)

·       Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. (244)

·       Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. (255)

·       Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. (265; italics in original)

The Proverbs appear throughout the sequence as Tyrone Slothrop attempts to comprehend the conspiracy in which he is embroiled, “the plot against him” as the narrator describes it (240).  Of course, in Pynchon’s elaborate and complex textual world, the conspiracy is the novel, the literary machine in which Slothrop is merely one character among many.  The genius of Gravity’s Rainbow is the way it prevents its readers from achieving any veritable god’s-eye view; it repeatedly pulls the rug out from under its readers’ feet, incorporating their perceptions of the narrative back into the narrative, continually blurring the line between where the text ends and their interpretations of it begin.  Like Slothrop, readers become helplessly embroiled in an irreducible conspiracy.  As media theorist Friedrich Kittler describes the novel, it transforms its readers “from consumers of a narrative into hackers of a system” (162).

            Kittler identifies this transformation as indicative of the novel’s “critical-paranoid method,” a sentiment echoed by John Johnston in Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation (1998).  According to Johnston, Pynchon novel introduces a new organization of human existence in the wake of World War Two’s violent technological upheaval: “World War II as a watershed event in the growth of technology and scientific research is precisely the subject of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose publication in 1973 endorsed what had already become a given within the sixties counterculture: that paranoia no longer designated a mental disorder but rather a critical method of information retrieval” (62; italics in original).  As Johnston insinuates, the postwar era witnessed a plethora of ultra-paranoiac literature, likely beginning with William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), but pursued through the work of J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, etc.  The degree to which these literatures embrace their paranoia varies: Dick succumbed almost entirely to a debilitating paranoia, while DeLillo maintains a critical distance.  The notion of paranoia-as-method, however, remains at the forefront of several texts by both writers.  To this day, Pynchon remains the godfather of critical, intellectual, and literary paranoiac fiction.

            The presence of paranoia-as-method predates the field of High Postmodernism, however, appearing as early as the mid-nineteenth century in stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) or in classic gothic/detective narratives such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868).  This paranoiac development does not dissipate with the advent of modernist fiction, but in fact finds itself repositioned and embraced in the work of surrealist writers such as André Breton, whose Nadja (1928) proposes to gather “facts which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal” (19).  Details of paranoiac puzzle-solving appear throughout High Modernism, in works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), or William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936); but the power of paranoia as a critical method doesn’t fully materialize until the postwar fictions of Burroughs and Pynchon.  Even at this point, the expansive methodological rigor of paranoia, which I will call critical paranoia, will remain decades away.

            In the same passages where Gravity’s Rainbow lays out the four Proverbs for Paranoids, the narrator also relates the brief life of Paranoid Systems of History – “a short-lived periodical of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished” (241).  The narrator goes on to reveal that the periodical has suggested, “in more than one editorial, that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work” (241).  Throughout Pynchon’s encyclopedic text, numerous conspiracy theories are broached, from the systematic devastation of European nations to the possibility that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is actually an automaton.  The entire narrative operates according to a kind of conspiratorial logic.  If there is a conspiracy, then there must be a narrative explaining the conspiracy; the textual totality, therefore, abides by a minimal narrative coherency, opting instead for lines of flight that gravitate toward chaos, disrupting the internal consistency that characters (and readers) attempt to impose on the text.

            Line of flight is a Deleuzian concept, outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980).  In relatively simple terms, it designates the attempt by various energies to escape the territorializing and colonizing confines of the social body.  A traditional Marxist methodology would likely define such confines as ideology, but that doesn’t quite capture Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.  Deleuze-Guattarian territorialization signals a complex technological/post-sociological process of libidinal intensification, of multiple becomings and formalizations that are continually battling the entropy that seeks to dismantle them: “It is not a question of ideology,” they write in Anti-Oedipus; “There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments […] It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion.  It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure” (104; italics in original).  Allowing for some sense of historical development, we can admit that Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism and Jean-François Lyotard’s post-Marxism bear some similarities to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy; but none of these theories conform to the traditional strategies of Marxist critique, and the work of Pynchon and other postmodernists can tell us something of why.

            We can sum up traditional Marxism’s treatment of conspiracy through Fredric Jameson’s comments in Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).  According to Jameson, conspiracy theories are causal (i.e. linear) interpretations of emergent (i.e. nonlinear) phenomena.  They are psychic reductions of vastly complex, systemic conditions.  Jameson describes conspiratorial literature as a kind of high-tech paranoia, in which systems and networks are “narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies,” reproduced in manner that is linearly comprehensible (38).  Conspiracy theory, however, is a “degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38).  In short, Marxist theory treats paranoia in a symptomatic fashion: paranoia is a psychosis, a reaction to the overwhelming pressures of techno-culture.

            Writers such as Pynchon illuminate an alternative to the sociological approach, which treats paranoia as indicative of a larger social problem to be diagnosed.  He displaces paranoia and its cousin, schizophrenia, from the realm of psychic energy to that of material energy, energies of systemic forces at large.  Paranoia shifts from a psychic problem of perceiving the world to a mode of operating technologically within the world.  Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani makes this point in Cyclonopedia (2008) when he compares psychoanalysis with archaeology: “According to the archaeological law of contemporary military doctrines and Freudian psychoanalysis, for every inconsistency or anomaly visible on the ground, there is a buried schizoid consistency; to reach the schizoid consistency, a paranoid consistency or plane of paranoia must be traversed” (54).  Taking Negarestani’s lead (which coincides with Pynchon’s), we might suggest that Freudian psychoanalysis was never well-suited to the psyche at all, but rather to the material distribution of energies along planes of various scales, whether these be microbiological or international.

            In this manner, paranoia is not something to be diagnosed as symptomatic, dismissed as politically reactionary, or pursued as conspiratorially perceptive: it is to be methodologically recalibrated as an instrument of information processing.  Paranoia composes narratives, albeit in a manner that necessarily leaves plot holes; surface inconsistency can only be explained by leaps of faith, assumptions that cannot be proven, in order to construct a linear and often malign explanation.  This is the compulsion of the conspiracy theorist.  Rather than accept such assumptions as rational, surface inconsistency should be countered by a drive toward subterranean consistency, an appeal to the neutral and nonintentional complexity of schizoid systems – what Pynchon articulates as the incomprehensibility of terrestrial matter itself, “the World just before men.  Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly.  They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal” (GR 734).  Unable to look at it alive, the conspiracy theorist entertains fantasies about its evil plans, its malign motives, as Oedipa Maas does at the end of The Crying of Lot 49 (1965): “[Pierce Inverarity] might himself have discovered The Tristero, and encrypted that in the will, buying into just enough to be sure she’d fine it.  Or he might even have tried to survive death, as a paranoia; as a pure conspiracy against someone he loved” (148).  By contrast, the critical-paranoiac theorists force themselves to see through the senselessness to the schizoid consistency beneath: the horrifying proliferation of networks, systems, and matter.

            If Cthulhu was born today, its name would be Skynet – but then, both are still paranoid reductions of the world we live in.  For the closest thing to an accurate expression of Western culture’s schizophrenic processes, read Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.

Ideologies of the Immediate: On the Zeal of Trumpish Populism

With the logic of Capital, the aspect of Marxism that remains alive is, at least, this sense of the differend, which forbids any reconciliation of the parties in the idiom of either one of them.  Something like this occurred in 1968, and has occurred in the women’s movement for ten years, and the differend underlies the question of the immigrant workers.  There are other cases.

~Jean-François Lyotard[i]

            In 1980, Isaac Asimov succinctly expressed a crucial deadlock of intellectual argument in America.  Specifically, he suggested that intellectualism faces dire opposition from those who dismiss the very grounds of intellectualism as something too institutionally complex, something too elitist for the uneducated – and, therefore, something dangerous to the homegrown and obvious existence of patriotic common sense:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’[ii]

The cult of ignorance is more powerful today than ever, I would suggest – fueled by an engine of populist paranoia and intolerance.  Now, before I leap too quickly and too soon into the cauldron of political squabbling and rhetorical backwash, let me make it clear: I don’t think the left is entirely innocent of this ignorance, nor do I think they’re above the strategies of propaganda.  My concern lies primarily with what I perceive among the contemporary republican base, which has become more radical as of late and which I will refer to as Trumpish populism, as an ideology of the immediate: crudely, the idea that if I can’t understand it, then it’s bad.

            Simply put, Trumpish populism is constructed around an individualistic paranoia, a concern primarily for individual well-being and rationalism.  This all sounds fine until we begin to perceive the consequences: namely, that the Trumpish version of personal well-being and rationalism often results in fervent suspicion of everyone else (ranging from immigrants to Barack Obama himself) and embarrassing rationalizations of highly questionable strategies.  Trump’s populism perceives itself as the contemporary American underdog, a surreal blend of downhome patriotism and Hollywood showboating that promises high-society success via a seriously warped pursuit of “American” values (which include, among other things, isolationism, xenophobia, and political incorrectness).  These values appear, to those who maintain them, self-evident.  Like the truths illumined by the American Declaration of Independence, they need no argument to justify them.  They simply are, and to question them means to identify oneself as a traitor, un-American, or even a terrorist sympathizer.[iii]

            The idea of self-evidence is quite compelling because it means that we need not look any further.  The answer is right there in front of us, it is immediate.  It is an example of the broader institutional notion that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams label folk politics, a local, tangible, and actionable mentality toward political organization:

At first approximation, we can therefore define folk politics as a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power.  As our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness.  As the common sense of today’s left, folk politics often operates intuitively, uncritically and unconsciously.[iv]

There is nothing inherently wrong with folk politics, according to Srnicek and Williams; their argument is rather that the current conditions of large-scale social organization exceed the capacities of localized action.  Folk politics may present temporary and limited solutions, but these solutions do not address larger systemic contradictions.  They appear successful, however, because their results are immediately perceptible.  We can see the impact of our actions.

            This is the rhetoric of Trumpish populism: change that affects me, change that benefits me – not Obama’s change, the change of complex systems and institutional augmentation.  Change that, because its effects register on larger scales than the individual, must be bad; and as the ones who champion such change, the intellectuals must be the bad guys.  The political and rhetorical divide that occurs here is profound, and it is powerful.  To those who support Trump, intellectual activities and systemic change can only appear within their vocabulary as resolutely un-American since they attempt to account for energies and entities beyond American borders.[v]  Those who resist the folk political tendencies of Trumpish populism, meanwhile, can only interpret its purported nationalism as xenophobic and intolerant (as I myself often do).  Language is everything in this opposition.  More than we like to admit, terminology dictates how we think.

            There exists between these two groups, I want to suggest, something like what Jean-François Lyotard calls a differend.[vi]  The differend constitutes a rhetorical distinction between two modes of thought, each with their own vocabulary, and between which any settlement or agreement “appears in the idiom of one of them while the tort from which the other suffers cannot signify itself in this idiom” (9).  In simpler terms, power determines language; and when a disgruntled group attempts to express its grievances, it can only do so in the language of the power structure (or structures) within which it operates.  The differend designates an ideological roadblock, as it were, since it effectively sterilizes communication between groups, preventing the transmission of grievances.

            What I’m describing between the Trumpish populism that opposes modern intellectualism is not quite the same thing as Lyotard’s differend, however, since the differend forces disgruntled groups to communicate in a decidedly non-radical voice – yet communication still occurs.  What manifests between Trumpish populism and intellectualism is not a line of sterilized communication so much as miscommunication, or a failure of rhetorical translation.  When one group translates the other’s idiom into its own, it exposes the opposing idiom as premised on political principles in direct contrast with its own.  I claim that these mistranslations boil down to a determining disagreement: the populist, folk-political privileging of the immediate versus the intellectualist privileging of systemic complexity.  A reductive yet illuminating bit of evidence for this disagreement can be extracted from the ongoing debate over global warming, or the more politically viable term, “climate change.”[vii]

            Opponents of global warming often cite localized incidents and events, record-breaking cold winters or notably cool summers, as evidence against global warming.  These details are compelling to those who already distrust the science behind global warming because they resonate with what we as individuals can immediately perceive.  The result, unsurprisingly, is further disbelief in the “hoax” of global warming.[viii]  Yet scientists repeatedly insist that emphasizing such details is misleading, and that global warming, or “climate change,” is part of an observable shift in global levels of carbon dioxide – a shift that cannot be deduced from simply walking outside and noting a particularly chilly summer morning.  It can be difficult to convince people of this, though, especially when they’ve committed themselves to an ideology that privileges common sense.[ix]  If phenomena occur on a scale beyond the human senses, we tend to be naturally skeptical, and with good reason; but in this historical period of considerably advanced scientific procedures, there is plenty of literature and published findings to sink our teeth into.

Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism has already made up its mind on such findings.  In a Boston Globe piece from April 2016, Thomas Levenson communicated to his (hopefully attentive) readership just how dismissive of global warming Trump is.  When asked whether he supported a climate change agenda, Trump admitted that he didn’t believe in it:

“I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer.” That’s not really an argument, of course — it’s more an evocation of that old Monkees tune. But stripped to essentials, the GOP presidential front-runner’s stance is essentially the same as that of his chief rival, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who says more bluntly that “climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big government politician who wants more power.”[x]

This is the party line among Trumpish populism: climate change (an already vague and impotent term) is nothing more than a tactful ploy by leftists.  A ploy for political power.  Such ploys are not limited to climate change, but have become the populist mantra against any and all forms of even the slightest suggestion of intellectual thought.  Attempts to address issues on a complex scale amounts to the malign machinations of an elitist few who see such issues as a means to gain power.

            The regrettable truth is that in some cases such paranoia may not be entirely inaccurate.  Issues such as climate change and gun control have been relentlessly politicized and propagandized by both sides, enough to make it difficult for dedicated intellectuals to defend their positions.  The sad irony of the matter lies in Trumpish populism’s dismissal of leftist intellectuals as sheep enslaved to their political masters, closet socialists with an eerily suspicious Big Brother vibe.  Yet in truth, the majority of such intellectuals are working desperately to construct models of the world that embrace its complexity rather than ignore it, and to offer solutions that in turn get politicized once they enter the wider public sphere.[xi]  The myopia that populists attribute to intellectuals is actually an effect of their own myopia, a glitch in their hardware that they then project onto the external world.  They exorcise their myopia, their blind spot – their ignorance, as Asimov would say – and reimagine it as a shortcoming of the world around them.

            We all suffer from this glitch.  It’s a constitutive aspect of our embodied condition.  The key lies in being aware of it.

            This too, unfortunately, requires more than common sense.

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[i]              Appeaing in 1982, Lyotard’s comment is uncannily perceptive.

[ii]             Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek, 21 January 1980.

[iii]             Of course, one of the most successful elements of America’s founding documents is the suggestion that the rights they promote somehow preexisted the composition of those documents.  In other words, that the right to bear arms is somehow an immutable, universal, and absolute right, when in fact it was the Constitution itself that created this right.

[iv]             Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, New York: Verso, 2015, p. 10.

[v]             Consider, for example, attempts to discuss ISIS and other forms of non-Western extremism (the West has its own fundamentalist firebrands, of course) in terms of geopolitical history and foreign diplomacy.  Almost immediately, the premises of such a discussion are accused of embracing a terrorist apologetics.  In other words, this kind of terminology appears to rationalize (and thereby excuse) the existence of terrorism.

[vi]             Lyotard, “The Differend,” 1982, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993, p. 8-10.

[vii]            For some insight on the weak construction “climate change,” see Timothy Morton’s short blog post on why he insists on using “global warming”: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-i-dont-call-it-climate-change-and.html

[viii]            Conspiracy theories like this one are powerful among Trumpish populists.  See for example this article on the “documentary” Climate Hustle: http://www.globalclimatescam.com/al-gore/climate-hustle-coming-to-theaters-on-may-2-the-debate-is-just-beginning/

[ix]             Common sense being a historically conditioned and fluctuating concept, despite contemporary common-sense attitudes that tell us otherwise!  It’s easy to see how such a limited, myopic, and solipsistic view of the world feeds its own presuppositions.

[x]             Levenson, “Doubting Climate Change is Not Enough,” Boston Globe, 17 April 2016: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/04/16/doubting-climate-change-not-enough/3aBHd9Weo9AxSmzI99LSZJ/story.html

[xi]             I don’t want to suggest that this is a simple, one-way causal route.  It is definitely true that intellectuals and academics are influenced by political agendas.  The point I would stress is that our form of social action is politics, and we have a limited amount of platforms to choose from – platforms that inevitably place restrictions on our epistemological vision of the world.  Everyone sacrifices something when supporting a political agenda.  Hopefully, we remember what that something is.

Mad Media: Some Thoughts on the 9/11 Imagery of AMC's 'Mad Men'

“Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe.  You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language.  How can you stop thinking about us?  You see us and hear us all the time.  Ask yourself.  What comes after America?”

~Don DeLillo, Falling Man

            In the early months of 2012, the AMC series Mad Men endured some unsurprising controversy – that is, unsurprising for those who were already attuned to the hit show’s apocalyptic undertones, its subtle flavors of marketing mania and the meaning of postmodern America.  Of course, I’m speaking in vague terms that other critics might swiftly disagree with.  Is Mad Men a show about postmodernism?  Is it a show about American consumer culture?  Is it a show about the meaning of “America”?  I think the answer to all of these questions is a resounding YES, but I readily admit that it’s about much more than all of this too.  Specifically, and most importantly, Mad Men is in many ways not at all about the historical period on which it focuses (namely the decade of the 1960s): it is about today, about the post-9/11 world in which we live.  I emphasize “post-9/11” in this description for several reasons, not least of which is the controversy with which I began this paragraph.  For those unaware, or who have forgotten, in the early months of 2012 Mad Men suffered criticism for its increasingly explicit invocation of 9/11 imagery.[i]

            Once again, this controversy is likely less surprising for those who perhaps already sensed something of an apocalyptic current spreading throughout the show since its first season, and even less surprising for those who had already picked up on the imagery itself well before it received any criticism:

The show’s famous “falling man” opening sequence is not only a nod to conflicted protagonist Don Draper’s less-than-productive life choices.  It also recalls a similar image, captured on the morning that terrorists crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York:

Richard Drew’s photograph is known as The Falling Man, and the figure depicted in it was never definitively identified.[ii]  The image quickly became a source of controversy well before Mad Men premiered in 2007, and the unidentified man came to signify an element of the experience of September 11^th and the communal sense of loss, hopelessness, and homelessness in the wake of the tragedy.  In this manner, the figure also nearly perfectly encapsulated the tragic narrative of Mad Men’s Don Draper.

            Mad Men took its appropriation one step further, however; as a hit television show, there was no way to avoid the promotional moves necessary for selling its product to the public.  Quite consciously, Mad Men participated in the very behavior that it simultaneously critiqued, which was part of its artistic merit.  Inevitably, the stenciled figure falling through the show’s opening credits (unidentified, anonymous) became a marketing icon; and equally inevitably, it pulled Drew’s haunting photograph along with it:

And this:

Understandably, these advertising techniques drew heavy criticism from individuals and families most directly affected by the events of 9/11.  AMC denied any referential ties to either the tragedy or Drew’s photograph.  Yet it feels increasingly difficult to believe that the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, and its writers did not have the imagery of 9/11 in the back of their minds, despite anything Weiner might say about the opening sequence being an homage to Hitchcock (after all, can’t these two things overlap?).

            The show sealed the deal, in my opinion, with “Lost Horizon,” its twelfth episode of the final season.  While in a meeting, Don turns his head to glance out the window and witnesses the following scene:

The vision prompts Don to leave the meeting, sending him impulsively out West, through Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Utah, and finally to California.  Critics and viewers have interpreted the ambiguous ending in various ways, with some seeing it as an optimistic and hopeful moment of authentic rediscovery for Don, as the finale depicts him meditating at a spiritual retreat before smash-cutting to the famous 1971 advertisement for Coca-Cola.[iii]  Others (myself included) view the ending more cynically, as the clear entanglement of a peaceful collective and consumer culture forecloses the possibility of true authenticity in any traditional sense.  However, no matter how one chooses to read the show’s conclusion, the scene of Don witnessing the plane fly past the Empire State Building raises some unavoidably foreboding conclusions.  I for one see no way to dissociate this image from the terror attacks of 9/11.  At the time the “Lost Horizon” episode is set, in June 1970, the Empire State Building was still the tallest structure in New York City.
            It was surpassed in October 1970 by the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

...

What inspired Don to get up and leave the meeting?  Was it some kind of spiritual yearning?  An anti-corporate impulse?  Or was it something darker?  I don’t believe in prophecy, so I’m not trying to claim that Don saw 9/11 coming or anything so supernaturally poignant.  I do want to suggest that we read the show not purely from within, however – that is, not as though all we have to work with is the historical moment of the narrative itself, the trials and tribulations of its characters.  As critics, we have more at our disposal.  We have the conditions in which the show itself is produced, the conditions in which its writers are living.  We have the entire cultural history from 1971 until now, the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And we have something else: literary history.  It is from this final angle that I want to take a stab at Mad Men’s enigmatic imagery, its dark and foreboding 9/11 undertones.  Specifically, I want to consider another text that was published in 2007, the same year that Mad Men premiered on AMC.

Don DeLillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man.

In a conversation about halfway through DeLillo’s novel, two characters discuss a fictional manuscript that appears to predict the 9/11 attacks, producing “‘statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts’” (138).[iv]  The prediction of disaster is a paranoiac fantasy, something that DeLillo flirts with in earlier novels such as White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997).  The issue is not so much the actual prediction of disaster itself, but the accumulation of information in the digital age, the expansion and permeation of society by data.  When so much data accumulates to such an extent, patterns become almost ubiquitous, and the unsurprising response to the mass of data manifests in conspiracy theories: the attempt, according to Fredric Jameson, “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38).[v]  In DeLillo’s Underworld, one character refers to this “impossible totality” as dietrologia, “‘the science of what is behind something.  A suspicious event.  The science of what is behind an event’” (280).  In the years to come, Underworld, published in 1997, would prove a source of minor paranoiac awe for even DeLillo’s intelligent readers who perceived the uncanny anticipation of the first edition’s cover art:

Conspiracy, of necessity, is always retrospective.  It makes sense out of enormous pools of data, words, images, and organizes unrelated or disconnected points into meaningful constellations.

At the moment of 9/11, the world is entering into a new phase of global information with the rise of internet.  In more ways than one, DeLillo’s fiction addresses the filtration and consumption of massive global events through the lens of technical systems, namely mass media.  Television is nothing new at the turn of the twenty-first century, but the obsessive media fixation on the next big story is relatively new, with networks such as FOX News and CNN providing 24-hour coverage like fishermen trawling for anything they can find until their next major catch.  In this scenario, 9/11 was the biggest catch anyone could imagine, and the response from viewers was unprecedented.  In this moment, terrorism found a mass media outlet in a way it never had before, and it affected people on a visceral level: “Every time she saw the videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote,” DeLillo writes of one character; “Then she kept on watching.  The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers” (134).  Out toward, to borrow from Mad Men, some “lost horizon.”

The relation between media and terrorism has not gone unnoticed by perceptive writers.  William Gibson writes about it as early as 1984 in his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, demonstrating that science fiction more often accurately forecasts not scientific developments, but cultural ones: “‘There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt,’” a character intones; “‘A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.  Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related’” (57).[vi]  In other words, modern terrorism may seek out media platforms on which to stage its atrocities, but at some point the attraction reverses.  At some point it is no longer only the terrorists who look for media platforms, but the media platforms that seek out terrorism.  This seeking should not be misconstrued as a conscious effort, an intentional search for atrocious acts.  It is rather an effect of global mass media.  Like a gravitational attraction, media finds itself compelled toward disastrous events.

DeLillo’s Falling Man does not ignore this relationship between terrorism and the media, but actively stages it.  The novel’s title is not only a reference to Drew’s photograph, but also to a character within the novel: David Janiak, a performance artist who repeatedly hangs from public structures in clear imitation of the actual anonymous falling man.  A media sensation, the novel’s fictional falling man is treated as a quasi-terrorist by law enforcement in the novel, having been “arrested at various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct” (220).  Learning of Janiak’s death, another character (Lianne) attempts to track down an image of one particular performance that she witnessed near an elevated train track: “She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks, nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past.  There were no photographs of that fall.  She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface.  That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb” (223).  In this moment, near the novel’s conclusion, media platforms are replaced by a maintenance platform.  Lianne can discover no media trace of the act she witnessed, causing her to think of herself, of her own body, as a kind of media form.  She becomes the photographic record of the performative/terrorist event.

As a media expression, the terrorist event occupies a strange and unsettling place in our contemporary cultural unconscious.  As an event of extreme violence, it enters the physical realm, wreaking havoc on bodies and flesh, spilling blood and causing pain.  As a media image, however, terrorism concerns us at another level: the level of representation, of spectacle, a form of engagement that is quite nearly filmic, popular, marketable.  Slavoj Žižek elucidates this point when he describes “the fundamental paradox of the ‘passion for the Real’:

it culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle – from the Stalinist show trials to spectacular terrorist acts.  If, then, the passion for the Real ends up in the pure semblance of the spectacular effect of the Real, then in an exact inversion, the ‘postmodern’ passion for the semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion for the Real.”[vii]

Žižek’s argument is a troubling one, namely that the media fascination of contemporary American culture desired, to some degree, the tragedy of September 11^th.  Whether or not we agree with Žižek’s suggestion, his analysis of the conflicting position of modern terrorism has the ring of truth.  Even if what we desire is not real, visceral horror but the representation of horror, this desire partakes of a strange trajectory back toward reality.  Fantasies exist because at some level we desire them, even if we do not really want them.

            Ultimately, this is what Mad Men is all about.  Advertising appeals to our fantasies and desires.  Even if it sells us products that we want, even need, it does not succeed in selling these products by reminding us that we want them.  Advertisement works by reminding us what we desire: “‘Nostalgia,’” Don Draper says in a pitch for carousel projectors,

literally means, “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we are loved. (“The Wheel”)[viii]

The Kodak carousel projector doesn’t actually change one into a child again, or allow us to travel through time, but gives us something of an experience we once had while preserving the material structures of our current lives.  This is the fantasy of advertising, particularly in the age of mass media.  Don knows how to pitch products because he knows how to identify and amplify the desirable attribute of an object – the fantasy it can fulfill.  Desire isn’t about re-experiencing an experience, but about the longing that separates us from the experience.  It is a means of reimagining the experience, of projecting it, just as memories are always revisions of the past as well as recollections of it.

            Somewhere in its aesthetic unconscious, Mad Men recognized the fantasy of disaster lurking at the dark heart of American consumerism, and projected this fantasy back to its viewers in images of post-9/11 horror.  Whether we are meant to see the finale as uplifting or as a cynical concession to the throes of postmodern globalization (no matter what Weiner himself insists),[ix] I think we have to contextualize its falling-man imagery and “Lost Horizon” sequence within the post-9/11 atmosphere of contemporary America, and as dark acknowledgements of the link between the expansion of media platforms and the explosion of twenty-first century terrorism.  I do not intend to suggest that we should continue to privilege authenticity in an era of absolute media saturation, an era of “semblance,” as Žižek claims, in which the “place where we know we are loved” is always partially a projection of fantasy.  Perhaps this is one of the costs of living in a network society, positioned globally within matrices of data (hence the other paranoiac obsession of getting “off the grid”).  And perhaps there is an unrealized expansion of our current virtual state in which technology and media forms may yet provide knowledge of the human condition as yet unavailable to us.  One in which love is more than just an invention by men like Don Draper to sell nylons.

"The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks.  She saw it almost everywhere she went."
~Don DeLillo, Underworld

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[i]              Interested readers might look to Mallory Russell’s piece in Business Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/unintended-horror-these-mad-men-ads-look-just-like-sept-11s-falling-man-2012-3), or Michael Dooley’s piece from Imprint, reprinted in Salon (http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/mad_mens_long_standing_911_connection/)

[ii]             Richard Drew, The Falling Man, 11 September 2001.

[iii]             For example, Tim Goodman’s reading at The Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/mad-men-series-finale-tim-796826

[iv]             Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 2007, New York: Scribner, 2008.

[v]             Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

[vi]             William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984, New York: Ace Books, 2000.

[vii]            Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, London: Verso, 2002.

[viii]            Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith, “The Wheel,” Mad Men, AMC, 18 October 2007.

[ix]             “Cultural harmony,” …?  Maybe, but I’m not so sure: http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/matthew-weiner-on-mad-men-finale-you-cant-get-100-percent-approval-rating-1201501909/

The Trump Dump

“Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I’m going to jump on the current political bandwagon and talk about Trump.

            I’m conflicted on this issue.  On one hand, I hate talking about Trump, I don’t want to have to talk about Trump… and yet I’m also strangely compelled to talk about him, to talk about the phenomenon that is his success, about the demagoguery that is his campaign.

            I’ll be frank: I do not like Donald Trump.  His politics trouble me, and his supporters increase my concern exponentially.  What I fear more, however, is Trump’s lack of responsibility when it comes to the things his supporters say.

            I may not have voted for John McCain, and I still wouldn’t vote for him today (if he were running).  But I’m reminded of a moment during his campaign in 2008, popularized on HBO’s Game Change (2012), when a supporter stood up and described democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as an “Arab,” implicitly (although let’s face it, not that implicitly) associating him with terrorism.  As soon as the word left her mouth, McCain leaned forward and took the microphone from her, offering the following rejoinder:

“I have to tell you. Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

People in the crowd did not like this.  McCain was met with cries of disdain, and certain people even shouted “liar” and “terrorist,” thereby making the association mentioned above very explicit.[i]  McCain saw it as his responsibility to counter these attitudes, especially once they voiced themselves.  I don’t think it’s too outrageous to suggest that if he had had any shot at winning the presidency, this moment irreparably damaged that shot.

            As far as HBO dramatization goes, their depiction of this scene communicates a specific interpretive angle: the woman who identified Obama as an Arab, and those in the crowd that accused him of terrorism, were drawn to McCain’s campaign by Sarah Palin.  I have no idea if that’s true, but I think it’s more than believable.  Whether or not that’s the case, however, I cannot help but wonder what that woman must have been feeling when McCain stepped forward, took the microphone from her, and told her she was wrong.  Was she embarrassed?  Was she angry?  Was she humbled?  Maybe she felt all three reactions, or a mixture of them.  As I think on the possibility of embarrassment or humility, I find myself having a very singular reaction: good.  Embarrass her, humble her.  The point of education is to find yourself temporarily ungrounded, to have to navigate your way through new information and possibly change your position because of it.  I love that McCain did what he did, and I hope that woman felt humbled.

            Of course, I doubt she did.  She probably found some way to rationalize her belief that Obama is an “Arab.”[ii]  We’re all guilty of similar rationalizations, in one way or another.  But I want to turn here to a comparable moment during Donald Trump’s recent presidential campaign when one of his supporters called candidate Ted Cruz a “pussy.”  Now, this is certainly different than calling someone an “Arab,” but both comments generate political fallout.  What I find fascinating is Trump’s handling of the situation.  After telling his supporter that he “never expects to hear that” from her again, Trump repeated the comment through the microphone: “She said he’s a pussy.”  The comment generated tremendous applause and laughter.  After joking about the nature of his constituents, Trump told the woman she was “reprimanded,” which generated more laughter.  After the rally, the woman told reporters that she “knew that Trump was kidding.”[iii]

            Trump’s manipulation of the moment is impressive, although perhaps not as much when we consider whom he’s manipulating.  Ostensibly, Trump dissociates himself from the comment, and we can already predict his own defense to reporters: “I can’t help what my constituents find funny” (or something along these lines).  He bonds with them as he appears (albeit thinly) to chastise them.  I’m not so sure we can credit this to Trump’s political skills as much as we can to the intellect of his average supporter.  Ryan Lizza’s recent piece in The New Yorker speaks to the magnetic irrationalism of Trump’s campaign: “State and national polls consistently show that he draws strongly from all four ideological segments of the party.  His strongest supporters are less educated and less well off; his fiercest opponents are Republicans with advanced degrees and high incomes.”[iv]  The lack of consistency within his own campaign reflects the ideological quagmire of his supporters, what we might describe (tenuously) as a brand of radical nationalism informed more by a paranoiac pathos than by any sense of critical thought.

            If it isn’t obvious by now, I don’t care much for Trump supporters.  Or, at least, for a significant portion of them (after all, one shouldn’t generalize…).

            Lizza’s article in The New Yorker divulges some of the disreputable underbelly of Trump’s campaign, specifically as it surfaces among his supporters: “The racism of some Trump supporters has been well documented.  At one rally in Las Vegas in mid-December, attendees punched a black protestor while others yelled, ‘Shoot him,’ ‘Kick his ass,’ ‘Light the motherfucker on fire,’ and ‘Sieg heil.’”[v]  Comparisons between the president and Hitler are nothing new.  They started back when George W. Bush came into the presidency, and they continued when Obama became president.  I cannot recall, however, any supporters of either Bush or Obama actively exclaiming “Sieg heil” during campaign rallies.  Judging from the quality of the vocabulary leaving the lips of Trump’s base, this is a different kind of political candidate.

            Trump’s is the perfect candidacy for that woman whom McCain shut down back in 2008.  It is the candidacy for those who want desperately to say all their politically incorrect sentiments, and to do so at a venue that breeds cognitive dissonance and emotional irrationalism.  It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Trump feeds on the outbursts of his supporters.  This is the same candidate who criticized McCain’s war record (Trump prefers people who don’t get caught, remember).  It also shouldn’t come as any surprise that Sarah Palin endorsed Trump, leading her flock of redundant seagulls to perch patriotically on their candidate’s stump.

            The Trump Stump.

            It’s like a tramp stamp, but more painful and infinitely more embarrassing.

            Trump’s defenses are ironclad despite what should be severe criticisms.  He brushes them off with ad hominem attacks and other juvenile methods.  His supporters believe him because of his apparent confidence.  This appearance of confidence is an important political tactic.  In the view of his supporters, personal authenticity trumps (oh, the inevitable pun) media accuracy.  As one supporter interviewed in The New Yorker said, “‘I’m dead set unless I find out something down the line […] But I’m not going to believe what the media tells me.  I have to hear it from him.  The media does not persuade me one bit.’”[vi]  Of course it doesn’t.  That lying, corrupt, propaganda institution that is the left-wing liberal media.  Sounds pretty evil, yes?

            The overarching story of the New Yorker article is how Trump’s candidacy is changing the GOP.  It’s an interesting read, and one that I recommend.  But I have another take on Trump’s success that I want to touch by way of conclusion.  Trump reaches his constituents because he talks about national issues in a manner that they feel touches them.  He appeals to low-income, blue-collar workers who feel cheated out of what they believe they’re owed.  The candidacy of a Jeb Bush, or a Ted Cruz, appeals to business owners; but Trump’s constituency consists of those employed by business owners.  This is a powerful base.  His campaign has toned its muscles on an implicit class differential, appealing to a particular demographic of working-class right-wing Americans.  When Trump does speak on issues such as immigration, or national security, or religion, he does so in a way that connects these issues to the immediate experience his constituents (the immigrants are taking your jobs, ISIS is threatening your safety, secular politics are limiting your ability to practice religion).  This is a necessary tactic, since Trump knows that to expand the scope of his arguments would mean to lose his base.  His voters need to see how these large issues are affecting them directly.

            The problem is that not all of these issues affect us directly.  They affect us indirectly, through various channels and other cultural dynamics.  We live in a complex world, not one that can be distilled from the campaign stage.  The vision that Trump puts forth for his voters is not an accurate description of the world.  It is not even close.  It is a paranoiac fantasy.  It caters to his supporters’ egos by making them feel as though each and every one of them is the center of the universe.  In this case, it’s incredibly easy to point to various minority groups – immigrants, Muslims, etc. – as scapegoats.  To give the impression of direct impact, of the immediacy of cultural factors, one has to be able to identify and classify the cause.  It isn’t a new strategy by any means.

            Hitler did the same thing.

            Objection!

            Withdrawn.

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[i]              This episode is fairly well-documented, but those interested can read more about it here: http://www.politico.com/story/2008/10/mccain-obama-not-an-arab-crowd-boos-014479

[ii]             The problems with this sentiment are, of course, numerous.  For starters, “Arab” is a vague term that does not specify religion, nationality, or cultural values.  There are also millions of people of Arab ancestry living in America, and who identify themselves as American citizens.  I doubt she trusts any of them either (and just to be clear, Obama isn’t one of them – but should it really matter if he was?).

[iii]             Full story here: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/politics/donald-trump-ted-cruz-waterboarding/

[iv]             Ryan Lizza, “The Duel: Understanding Trump vs. Cruz,” The New Yorker, 1 Feb. 2016: 42.

[v]             Ibid, 40.

[vi]             Ibid, 43.