For those interested: Final Project - DH720 - Fall 2022

Scene from Anna Readman’s Illustrations of McCarthy’s Suttree

At this stage in the conceptual development of my final project, I can, at best, provide a provisional outline detailing the framework of my approach and what I hope to accomplish. Elements of this are still a bit abstract and it will take a bit more time to narrow my scope of inquiry and hone in on that which I intend on arguing. So, with that out of the way:

My tripartite aim for this project begins with the development of an analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree that focuses on its themes of spatial politics and municipal power in Knoxville, Tennessee in contrast to the ways in which those municipal powers have since sought to “monumentalize” Suttree via the production of “annotated space” throughout the city via plaques, retconned statues, and the naming of parks in Cornelius Suttree’s honor.
In McCarthy’s post-war Knoxville, the period’s accretion of municipal power and the resulting spatial codes physically inscribed into the landscape are evident as dominating forces on the story’s cast of characters, resulting in the incarceration, state-sanctioned violence, and murder of fringe figures violating the designated social parameters assigned to them by the city. Interestingly, with McCarthy’s increased fame following his release of The Road and the award-winning film adaptation of his No Country for Old Men, the novel has grown increasingly spatialized in and detached from the city that was the focal point of its criticism. By establishing this example of an inapposite annotation of space (such as in the case of the once-dilapidated Market Square that now hosts a seemingly-out-of-place quote elucidating Suttree’s alienation) as the central throughline of this piece, I intend on arguing on behalf of the Lefebvrian notion that all space is inherently political and through the municipal subsumption of literary works critiquing such municipality’s very dominance, the production of space annotated with such criticism in the creation of a civic identity acts as a neutralizing assault, whether intentional or not, against the power of the critique.

From here, I’d like to expand this analysis to further include Henri Lefebvre’s social theory of the production of space, specifically that of monumental space as to address and analyze the aforementioned monuments to McCarthy’s work that bizarrely operate to enshrine an exposition of alienation, poverty, and death amidst the modern city into the very architecture of such a city’s landscape. Lefebvre suggests in The Production of Space that, “Monumentality… always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message. It says what it wishes to say – yet it hides a good deal more… monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought” (143). Using Lefebvre’s work, primarily the aforementioned text along with his 1968 work Everyday Life in the Modern World, bolstered by Stuart Elden’s Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, I hope to apply a theoretical framework previously unexplored in relation to McCarthy’s Suttree and the criticisms of spatial politics therein. As I conclude my application of Lefebvre by discussing his right to the city* to explicate Suttree’s notion of civil disobedience, labeled “the wrath of the path” by Ab Jones (208), my aim for the closing portion of this section into the next is to highlight the ways in which municipal power exploits the achievements of its artists and intellectuals via Lefebvre’s production of space and through the creation of local identity in pursuit of “urban authenticity” but rarely works to restructure social conditions in such a way that upsets entrenched class relations and delivers potential artists and intellectuals from precarity to opportunity.

My final section will aim to provide additional examples of this annotated space across the landscape of the southern United States. My intention here is to examine the ways in which space might be further annotated in reference to southern literary and intellectual figures as a means to decipher the spatial context of such monuments and understand the range of political motivations behind their production. For example, the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project uses the author’s legacy to install benches to commemorate the absence of slavery in the historic production of monumental space – benches that are notably without the anti-social architecture of those in modern cities meant to engineer appropriate social behavior. Certainly, this doesn’t align with Lefebvre’s suggestion that “Such frontal expressions… do not completely crowd out their more clandestine or underground aspects; all power must have its accomplices” (33). What’s to say of New Orleans’ Ignatius Reilly statue? Of James Agee Park, also in Knoxville? Is there anything to be said at all? Are these simply markers of celebration for a community’s artists and the occasional misuse of such art in the renaming of a park that hosts $60 million condo developments is nothing more than a naive misapplication?

In conclusion (or what acts as a conclusion at this point in my project’s development), I suppose my final point is the re-advancement of Lefebvre’s right to the city to encompass a right to the production of social space within the city in such a way that counters the dominant productive forces (as in the case of Knoxville’s appropriation of Suttree) and recaptures art in order to do so (such as in the case of the Toni Morrison Project). This capacity to shape the city is noted by Lefebvre in Everyday Life in the Modern World in reference to Ulysses, “This narrative has a referential or ‘place’, a complex that is topical, toponymical and topographical: Dublin, the city with its river and its bay – not merely a distinctive setting, the scene of action, but a mystical presence, material city and image of the City, Heaven, Hell, Ithaca, Atlantic, dream and reality ceaselessly merging but with reality giving the tone: a city cut to the size of the citizens: the people of Dublin have moulded their surroundings which mould them in turn. Drifting through the streets of Dublin the wanderer gathers together the scattered fragments of this reciprocal assimilation” (4).

As I’ve said, this still needs a bit of development. There are other directions I’d like to explore, such as Suttree existing as a work composed of those on the periphery and Lefebvre’s philosophy speaking to this fringe through notions of centrality. However, much of this will require further research and consideration. As far as what I have put together here, I hope I was clear in communicating my intentions.

* David Harvey provides a concise and applicable definition of the right to the city: The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

Working Bibliography:

Bone, M. (2000). The Postsouthern “Sense of Place” in Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’ and Richard Ford’s ‘The Sportswriter.’ Critical Survey, 12(1), 64–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41557021

Canfield, J. D. (2003). The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree.” Contemporary Literature, 44(4), 664–696. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250590

Elden, S. (2004). Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. Continuum Books.

Furey, R. (2011). Sentence Fragments, Sound, and Setting in “Suttree” and “The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 9(1), 51–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909425

Gay, M.-A. (2017). Cormac McCarthy’s Aesthet(h)ics of the “Canal-Rhizome” in Suttree. European Journal of American Studies, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12372

Guerra, E. (2019). “Nothingness is not a curse”: Suttree’s Absurd Revolt. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 17(2), 148–170. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.17.2.0148

Lefebvre, H. (1968). Everyday LIfe In the Modern World. (S. Rabinovitch, Trans.). Harper & Row.

Lefebvre, H. (1974). The Production of Space. Blackwell.

McCarthy, C. (1979). Suttree. Picador.

Morgan, W. G., & Morgan, W. (2003). “A season of death and epidemic violence”: Knoxville Rogues in “Suttree.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 4(1), 226–243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909736

Wallach, R. (2013). You would not believe what watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville. Louisiana State University Press.

Though I had not read Virginia Woolf prior to this assignment, when the opportunity to do so presented itself in class, I leaped at the chance to finally dive into the work of an author whose name I had long seen showered with praise and aptly compared to the likes of Proust and Joyce. Though Mrs. Dalloway has certainly not been patiently waiting around a century for my recognition, Woolf’s prose, despite my taking a half-dozen or so pages to find its rhythm, is as brilliant and impactful as its reputation suggests and I regret the fast pace with which I had to breeze through it in order to proceed with the remainder of this assignment. Between Woolf’s existential meanderings (“She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day…” p. 6) and the lyrical way in which she highlights the mundane (“…how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looking” p. 10), I was quickly enamored with Mrs. Dalloway and, though my expeditious reading of the text was focused largely on the development of annotations rather than a savoring of Woolf’s voice, I look forward to a closer reading of this modernist masterwork in the future.

So, with all my belated applause for Woolf out of the way, onwards to the project. Comprised of Kai Prenger, Majel Peters, and Sean Patrick Palmer, my group sought to employ a collaborative digital workspace offered by Miro to visually annotate chapters 2 and 7 of Mrs. Dalloway and produce a prototype demonstrating the potentialities of utilizing such software in the development of a vast, scrollable, creatively expounded text. So, that’s exactly what we did. With Majel spearheading our approach to Miro, establishing the project’s groundwork by partitioning the text across the board and systematizing the color-coded delineation of character-specific annotation, Sean began providing notes highlighting the historical context of the piece and illuminating outmoded terms and phrases. My contributions were primarily focused on providing resources that expand on elements of the text that deserve further analysis, such as Woolf’s (and many modernist authors along with her) use of time as a theme and literary device, the reasoning behind Darwin’s name being mentioned throughout the work, and a historical account of Britain’s exploitation of India during the years of Peter’s deployment in India (1918 – 1925). This style of annotation is likely a bit self-serving, as I tend to gravitate towards reading things about the thing that I’m reading as I’m reading the thing, but I find that augmenting the scope of a text via the addition of critical commentaries brings a sense of an ongoing conversation to the work that enriches both it and the experience of reading it. Thankfully, Miro offers an innovative platform in order to do just that.

Upon reflection, I think that our approach to annotating Mrs. Dalloway and the tools used to accomplish it both bear a great deal of potential and offer a fun, refreshing method of moving (literally) through a text. However, I do think that viewing an entire book on Miro similarly populated with annotations as that of our prototype might work to overstimulate the reader and cause confusion, especially if the “strategies of reading” advanced by the project aren’t clearly communicated to the reader prior to their diving in. While sure, this instinct might be due to my inexperience with reading a large text in such a way, I do think that, given the time and carefully calculated methodology, one could produce a fluid experience that allows users to easily progress through the pageless-pages of a book on Miro. More than anything, I think Majel’s work creating connections throughout the book with flowing lines, maps, and color keys certainly offers an effective model of what this might look like in the future. However, similar to what Kai has asked, I do wonder if the varied approaches to annotation on the board might have swamped portions of the text with unnecessary augmentation. What is the likelihood that readers will follow hyperlinks and read secondary texts? Is an image of a Skye terrier really helping anyone? Many such things to consider. Should this prototype be developed further in the future, perhaps a more clearly defined “goal of analysis” would be beneficial in driving annotations toward the development of a singular argument, thesis, investigation, etc.

Following our reading of Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires, the languished efforts to create and sustain a critical hypertext edition of Joyce’s Ulysses brought to mind a similarly “ideal subject for hypertextualization”: Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (Graham, 2019). For those unfamiliar, The Arcades Project is an unfinished text (or, collection of texts) by German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin that sought to trace the phantasmagorical experience of life sedated and seduced by capitalism as it existed in 19th-century Paris, in hopes of “awakening the world from its dream about itself,” quoting Marx (Benjamin, 1999, p. 456). By focusing on the debris of history, “the unattended and the seemingly unusable,” Benjamin accumulated a catalog of “quotations, descriptions, excerpts, and observations” from the period, creating an eclectic saunter through the metropolitan lifeworld of the pre-Haussmann experience of the flâneur beneath the city’s iron-and-glass covered arcades, or “inner boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through blocks of buildings… lining both sides… [consisting of] the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature” (Tadepalli, 2019; Benjamin, 1999, p. 3). Attempting to create an interpretive “literary montage” that would encourage and enable readers to “generate their own commentary” (mirroring Benjamin’s observation that “Commentary on a reality calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text”), The Arcades Project seemed to provide the same hypertextual-playground for Digital Humanists that Joyce’s Ulysses offered, leading me to ask questions such as: Have such projects been attempted? If so, did they face the same fate as those produced by pioneering Joycean Digital Humanists? If such scholarship has not been pursued, has anything specific prevented such a project from coming to fruition? And considering my fascination with this text, would it be possible to develop an analysis of The Arcades Project rooted in hypertext theory in the future? While Joyce certainly provided a literary predecessor for hypertext, Benjamin, beginning this “theatre of all his struggles and all his ideas” seven years following Ulysses’ publication, could be said to offer a philosophical antecedent in a similar vein.

So, after discussing this briefly with Jeff in class and realizing that obvious issues such as copyright law and the recent nature of the text’s translation are likely to be what has prevented it from being approached similarly by Digital Humanists as to that of Ulysses, I was curious to see if any “alt-ac” approaches to the text had been produced at any point during its 23 years of being translated into English. Having a vague memory of a sloppily-produced WordPress attempting something similar to that which I’m envisioning that I had once stumbled on years ago after completing Benjamin’s text, it took me close to a half-hour of rearranging words and phrases in Google’s search bar before I was able to come across the modest “hypertextual extension” to Passagenwerk that is the anonymously produced Arcades Awakening.

Arcades Awakening, in the author’s own words, is a project determined to overlay the convolutes (Benjamin’s term for sections within the text) “with hypertext to sate [their] urge to read [the text] as a non-linear constellation.” Attempting to create a wandering-like experience akin to that of Benjamin’s Baudelarian flâneur, the goal of Arcades Awakening was to produce an environment in which readers such as myself could think of the project as a tool to “be used in conjunction with a physical copy of the book” in order to strengthen one’s understanding of the text and be given the opportunity to annotate the project so that passages might be better interpreted, deciphered, and discussed. Employing a system of tags drawn from Benjamin’s notes, similar to that of Blair’s second method in which passages of interest are “copied and sorted under a thematic or topical heading to facilitate retrieval,” the anonymous author of Arcades Awakening provides an option of selecting between 138 topics (basically functioning as hashtags) in order to jump to passages within the text that discuss that which was tagged (examples being “Modes of Lighting,” “Iron Construction,” and “Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty”) (Blair, 2004). Operating as an interesting merger between Blair’s Note Taking as an Art of Transmission (considering Benjamin’s The Arcades Project was, quite literally, just a collection of compiled notes with the occasional insight into his thought and analysis of them) and Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires, Arcades Awakening, despite its outwardly rugged nature and unachieved potential, is a stellar example the note-taking stratagem outlined in this week’s coursework and the faltering state of many grand digital projects that attempt to openly excavate the intricacies of a text through digitally hypertextual means.

The seemingly defunct Arcades Awakening provides hyperlinks to “projects in the same spirit,” allowing users to browse the similarly deceased visions of Heather Crickenberger’s The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext and bear witness to the 404 File Not Found page that sits in place of the (presumably) once great Fragments of the Passegenwerk: A Meander Through the Arcades. It’s hard not to laugh at the discovery that that which was constantly brought to mind over these last two weeks through our discussions of hypertext, note-taking, and annotations has a little digital graveyard of its very own.

References

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. First Harvard University Press.

Blair, A. (2004). Note taking as an art of transmission. Critical Inquiry, 31(1), 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/427303

Graham, E. (2019). Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Retrieved October 30, 2022, from https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/38d72a93-4bad-48c2-b709-59145658dc98#ch29

Tadepalli, A. (2019, December 23). Syllabus for the Internet: The Arcades Project. Real Life. Retrieved October 30, 2022, from https://reallifemag.com/the-arcades-project/

Following the slight resurgence of interest in the audiobook format that I experienced following my discovery of audio performances by Flannery O’Connor and the literati of YouTubers producing dramatic do-it-yourself renditions of her work (and many other notable authors), I was eager to engage with the production process of such pieces and perhaps dig into that which had subconsciously made audiobooks gradually unappealing to me and how the format might be utilized and experimented with to re-captivate my attention and that of others out there experiencing similar disenchantment.

Upon reflection, the process of development for this project was somewhat of a breeze primarily due to our group’s good fortune in being equipped with a team of talented folks that were each able to apply their unique skill sets in such a way that made each step relatively seamless. Aside from the 1924/1925 In Our Time version hiccup that has been mentioned at length already, Sean’s impressive and proactive approach to providing the foundational audio for the project allowed for developmental breathing room that enabled each additional project member to excel in their role and cohesively produce something that (ideally) bolsters the text and engages listeners. With the early completion of the project’s core tracks, project members were given the creative space to collaboratively develop a blueprint for the application of sound effects and background music, allowing myself and Miaoling to have a map to follow as we populated the soundscape with the clopping of horse hooves and the snorting of bulls to enrich the sparse vignettes of Hemingway’s world.

As I mentioned in class, my role as co-editor was made easy through the space left in Sean’s skillful elocution, allowing for complimentary auditory additions to be positioned in the mix via GarageBand without them cluttering the story too severely. The mixing process itself went as smoothly as one could hope, with each sound effect and its timestamp made readily available and organized through our group’s shared Google doc, allowing me to fluidly flesh out the final version of the second half of our project while Miaoling tackled the first. Though I took some liberties in augmenting the audio with auxiliary effects pulled from Freesound (a site with, well, free sounds) in order to add small embellishments here and there, I largely followed the guidelines expertly established by the group and was able to (hopefully) produce that which we were all initially picturing as we put this project’s pieces together.

While I’m uncertain if my interest in listening to audiobooks has been wholly restored through this process, I can say that my interest in their development has increased tenfold. Not necessarily out of intrigue for the technical elements of their production but more so for the experience of meticulously engaging with a text to such a degree that it might be understood thoroughly enough to audibly compliment it effectively. As an exercise in bringing a text to life, the assembly of an effectual and lush audiobook requires the developer to examine a text through a lens (previously unfamiliar to myself) that excavates each page in search of possible aural textures and tones that might work to animate the narrative and better connect contemporary readers to the stories of a bygone lifeworld. As a tool of comprehension and interpretation, I can say with confidence that I better understand the intention and the appeal of audiobooks and have developed a newfound interest in their potential.

Hi folks – I recognize that this post might venture (perhaps too far) outside of the scope of our coursework so apologies in advance. Attempting to connect these thinkers might have been a stretch and my approach likely mirrors the discombobulation I feel when attempting to recreationally address such abstract and seemingly insurmountable issues. However, I hope some glimmer of what I was trying to convey can be gleaned from my diatribe. Looking forward to hearing any thoughts, criticisms, “what the hell are you talking about”s, etc.

Though it has likely been said ad nauseam regarding much of the work associated with thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin’s somber dissection of the declension of storytelling, the resulting slow death of wisdom, and the falling value of experience is as relevant today as it was in 1936. Mirroring the loss of aura discussed in his famed The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written a year prior, Benjamin’s critique of modernity and its associated experiences of disenchantment, fragmentation, and solitude have only become exacerbated as instances of rapid transition, such as that which fomented the modern individual’s inability to integrate themself into the disruptive early 20th-century, have increased unimpeded in the Digital Age, further distancing the masses from the possibility of true understanding of the world they exist within and producing the present sense of political impotency and detachment from any sense of historical continuity. Benjamin’s prescient vision of the supersession of knowledge by passively received information is undoubtedly noteworthy and merits its own analysis. However, for the sake of exercise, I’d like to evaluate Benjamin’s The Storyteller as a prognostic account of the cultural trajectory that in some way led to a work I recently mentioned reading in class, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by social critic Christopher Lasch. Though Benjamin and Lasch are wildly different thinkers who approach their cultural critiques from dissimilar theoretical frameworks, I found myself unable to dissociate Benjamin’s survey of the lonely crowd’s “inability to communicate experience or apprehend wisdom” and Lasch’s commentary’s cogent continuation of this societal descent into a narcissistic rejection of the past (i.e., of wisdom) and the “transcendental self-attention” that consequentially surfaces in a dissonant society that believes it has no future, shared or otherwise (White, 2017, p. 10; Lasch, 1979, p. 14). Throughout what follows, I intend to briefly highlight the ways in which Benjamin’s lamented decline of oral traditions and the concurrent rise of information ultimately yielded the narcissistic trivialization of the past that Lasch’s criticism works to illuminate. In conclusion, I highlight the resurrection of communicable experience as an immaterial commodity in the Digital Age and the renewed relevance of Benjamin’s essay The Author as a Producer.

As noted by Richard White in his analysis “Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom,” the philosopher’s primary intention in this piece is to illuminate the way in which the devolution of storytelling’s role in society is a symptom of a wider phenomenon of modernity connected to the atomization of the individual and the crippled capacity to communicate or contextualized one’s experiences within a community (2017). Benjamin traces the root of this decline to the rise of the novel and its “birthplace in the solitary individual,” giving way to a societal condition devoid of experience that Benjamin termed Erfahrung, or the “deeper sense of participation in cultural forms” that transcends and shape the individual (White, 2017, p. 6-7). As time is increasingly flattened and experience is detached from context through ubiquitous connectivity, people are left in a state of distraction and disruption (or, in states of shock begetting systemic bêtise, if we want to be Stieglerian) dependent on disseminated information from above rather than inherited, intergenerational wisdom that modernity has dismissed and “co-signed to oblivion,” to further borrow the cynical poetics of Richard White, a process that the project of postmodernity has (rightfully or not) finalized in its leveling of all totalizing, grand-narratives (2017, p. 2).

While plenty of literature exists today detailing the current landing place of the cultural trajectory that Benjamin’s work sought to delineate, such as Byung-Chul Han’s work in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (I’ll touch on this shortly), Christopher Lasch’s 1979 work can be said to address the post-war evolution of this phenomenon and its manifestations in the culture and social movements of 1970s America, offering something of a bridge between Benjamin’s elegies to the aura in the 1930s and the crucial critiques censuring Big Data’s commodification of the self being published today. Produced amidst escalating global tensions following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, Lasch centers his work in a similar sense of loss and precarity that underlies much of Benjamin’s output as a Jewish German witnessing the early stages of Hitler’s consolidation of power, each echoing Frank Kermode’s notion that “…the sense of an ending… is endemic to what we call modernism” (Kermode, 1967). In the same vein as the cries of “No Future” being issued concurrently by circles of punks in the nascent age of neoliberalism, Lasch notes, “Now that tomorrow appears troubled and uncertain, the past appears ‘irrelevant…,” suggesting that a denial of the past, regardless of the progressive and optimistic package such a denial might be delivered in, ultimately embodies the despair of a society who can’t face their own sense of lost futurity (1979). Lasch theorizes that, within the current economic system, this produced a commodified, marketable nostalgia that “trivializes the past by [simply] equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitude…” and that “…people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present…” (Lasch, 1979, p. 5). Mirroring Benjamin’s criticisms of the modern individual’s inability to exchange experience, Lasch suggests that the disassembly of societal continuity and its resultant radicalized individualism begets “strategies of narcissistic survival” that ultimately reproduce the “features of a collapsing civilization it claims to criticize” (Lasch, 1979, p. 4). Lasch pinpoints these strategies in programs of self-improvement and fixations on our own “private performance” as “connoisseurs of our own decadence,” admitting that while such pursuits are harmless in themselves, when wrapped in the “rhetoric of authenticity and awareness,” they signify a retreat from politics and class consciousness (Lasch, 1979, p. 13). Returning to Benjamin’s notion that collective experience, initially passed on through storytelling and lost through the advent of the solitary novel form, has been devalued, giving rise to the masses as individuals subjected to an absence of collective counsel that renders them wholly dependent on information presumably produced beyond the reach of the layman, this can be said to have subsequently generated a process that Lasch terms the bureaucratization of the spirit. As such, the terminus, as it existed in 1979, of Benjamin’s loss of experience sees the initial stages of its resurrected commodified form through the narcissistic survival strategies of the individualized nascent-neoliberal subject approaching self-improvement and education as esoteric programs to be purchased rather than adopted through intergenerational wisdom.

With this turn, consumption as a cure becomes the “wisdom” of the time, addressing alienation and modernity’s malaise with prescribed therapeutics of purchasable personal salvation that allow for the momentary sedative illusion of personal well-being and psychic security, degenerating class-conscious politics into “a struggle not for social change but for self-realization” (Lasch, 1979, p. 39). Or, so Lasch suggests. The importance, accuracy, and relevance of this work are obviously up for debate, as Lasch’s output is in many ways problematically dated and has since been adopted to justify the unsavory politics of unscrupulous slimeballs. However, I found the connective throughline of modernity’s fragmentation of experience and reduction of community in both works to be noteworthy and functional as theoretical rest stops on the highway to understanding our present moment. As previously noted, the work of Byung-Chul Han provides some insight into where the course of culture once critiqued by Benjamin and Lasch currently stands. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han follows Lasch’s critique of the individualized, narcissistic neoliberal-subject in his discussions of their novel role as auto-exploiting laborers, in which class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself due to the immateriality of production and the ubiquitous ownership of the means of unlimited production through their capacity to contribute to the constantly flowing circuit of digital capital via personal data, content creation, etc. while being sedated by the addictive, dopamine-tickling validation attainable through social media, subordinating the social to systems of auto-exploitative self-production under the banner of self-realization and experiential expression (Han, 2017). However, Benjamin’s work remains salient even amidst a milieu of contemporary writers such as Han addressing the terminal processes that Benjamin’s cautionary writing presciently intended to address. In his 1934 essay, The Author as Producer, Benjamin reminds the individualized producer, be it the author of modernity or the content-creator of the Digital Age, of one’s duty in addressing the class struggle, despite one’s inescapable position in the production process. Praising Bertolt Brecht’s ability to distract an already distracted audience only to shock them with the typically ignored shortcomings of modernity, Benjamin employs the playwright as an example of the producer exhibiting clear reflection regarding his position in the process of production and the subsequent changes consciously made to his technique, the infrastructure of the piece that he deems inseparable from its message, in order to maintain a dissenting, transgressive artistic approach countering the dominant economic logic of the time (Hess). Benjamin notes in the concluding portion of the work in reference to the intellectual iconoclasm of the author, “This betrayal [of class] consists, in the case of the writer, in behavior which changes him from a reproducer of the apparatus of production into an engineer who sees his task as the effort of adapting that apparatus to the aims of the proletarian revolution” (1934). Under today’s immaterial mode of production in which the narcissistic neoliberal-subject auto-exploits themself in the circuit of commodification consuming their permanently updating digital autobiography shared in pseudo-social spheres, perhaps Benjamin’s call for mediated solidarity finds new potentialities in the hyper-mediated state of our society should the author, the solitary individual, the content-creator adapt the inescapable apparatuses of neoliberal digital capitalism as mediums of transgression, community, and collective programs that might “blast open the continuum of history,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrasing in On The Concept of History (1968).

This vague optimism is not to distract from the complexity of such a naive “call to action” and the reality of what it would take to accomplish mobilizing content-creators to follow Brecht and creatively act on their revolutionary potential as producers, despite operating within mediums designed solely for the purpose of capitalist extraction and exploitation, is likely an impossibility. The neoliberal regime doesn’t simply exist in digital platforms but casts the neoliberal-subject into a realm of non-time, the early stages of this mentioned by Benjamin in his statement on loss of “open-ended time, for the openness of idleness or inactivity” noted in The Storyteller. In a model of immaterial production, rituals of closure are destroyed by the “neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance” that does not allow for any sense of completion, constantly incentivizing the production of “new stimuli, excitement, and experience” so that such experience (once lost but now found by the market) caters to the serial perception of consumers as we are rendered incapable of producing the subsequent experiences of duration or lingering, ultimately depriving us of the capacity for reflection that allows for the development of wisdom (Han, 2020, p. 8-9). The narrative, the novel, the ritual of storytelling, all operated as a form of closure, characterized by a beginning and an end in a closed order. Benjamin’s and Lasch’s dreaded rise of information, by contrast, is purely additive, antithetical to that of the narrative. As Byung-Chul Han states, “Information… does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated…” (Han, 2020, p. 31). As time grows inhabitable, as objects are produced without structural endurance, forcing further production and consumption, as both ritual and wisdom are determined to be archaic, obsolete and cast aside, as even moral values are marketed and consumed purely as “marks of distinction,” what is left for the narcissistic neoliberal-subject but distracted consumption and the optimization of the self? (Han, 2020, p. 5). What does a Brechtian reevaluation of our approaches to the mediums available to us look like and how do the atomized work to reestablish the community and the rituals capable of constructing and holding such a collective together? What does a rejection of the psychological goods peddled and produced by us, for us through the immaterial mode of production look like and what is the “role of the author” within this process? What does a seizure of the means of production look like when we are the means of immaterial production? Who knows. So, as we strive to begin answering some of the questions and reflect on the genealogy of decline that led us to this moment, I’ll punt to a quote from Gilles Deleuze as to shift our sights back to the future, whether it will recognizably exist or not;

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

Resources

Benjamin, W. (1934). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1931-1934 (Vol. 2). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. Schocken Books.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso.

Han, B.-C. (2020). The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. (D. Steuer, Trans.). Polity Press.

Kermode, F. (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford Univ. Press.

Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton & Company.

White, Richard. (2017). Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 51(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.1.0001

In April of 1959, American novelist Flannery O’Connor read her celebrated short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, to a crowd at Vanderbilt University as part of a panel with fellow Southern authors Robert Penn Warren and Jesse Stuart. Presumably produced using the recently commercialized and affordable reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders of the time, the muddled audio recording detailing the tale of The Grandmother and The Misfit exists as a rare glimpse into the reclusive and pious nature of O’Connor and the tonality with which she intended her stories to be told. The narrative is appropriately drenched in O’Connor’s thick Georgian accent and is delivered with an ease exclusive to an author reciting their own work, drawing forth laughter (and audio clipping) from the crowd as the Southern author delivers flares of wit and the grotesque to a crowd whose vocal engagement only amplifies the potency of O’Connor’s performance. Despite the mediocre quality of the recording, which includes incessant white noise buzzing beneath the “boxy” register of Flannery’s voice, the aged nature of the audio might be said to add an aura of authenticity to the piece, grounding it in the temporal context in which O’Connor was operating. Little information exists regarding the production process of the recording and from briefly engaging with it, one can surmise that this is likely due to there being little to report. Beyond a button being pressed on a machine akin to a Philips Single Speed High Fidelity Model Tape Recorder and a neighboring button being pressed to stop the recording, it is evident that no editing was involved prior to the recording being published.

Though Flannery O’Connor doesn’t dabble in distinct voice characterization, during the climax of the story she effectively oscillates between the panicked delivery of The Grandmother and the cool, murderous intonation of The Misfit. O’Connor’s elocution quickens until the point of The Grandmother’s death, her speech then slowing to match the reflective state of The Misfit in the wake of his act of violence before concluding the work with the murderer’s oft-debated statement (“It’s no real pleasure in life.”) to the sound of muddy applause. O’Connor’s zeal in communicating her moral fictions, undoubtedly laced with a clear theological intention that presumably drives her impassioned delivery, effectively renders this audio a captivating piece of literary history and an invaluable introduction to the Southern Gothic genre.

Having read A Good Man is Hard to Find multiple times, listening to the story as expressed by the author provided a novel experience and worked to emphasize elements of the narrative that had previously eluded me. Components of the aural experience of the story, such as O’Connor’s vocal urgency amidst the story’s conclusion and her playful diction exhibiting the subtle humor throughout the piece, worked to amplify both the grotesque realism and the absurd hilarity of her work in such a way that breathed new life into a story with which I’m wildly familiar. As an ex-Audible subscriber who has grown somewhat disillusioned with audiobooks for reasons primarily related to my own attention span and capacity for retaining information, my experience with this recording provided a pleasant reminder of what it is to simply be told a story.

Here’s a link to a PDF copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, for anyone that wants to read along.

Resources

Cash, J. W. (1987). Flannery O’Connor as Lecturer: “… a secret desire to rival Charles Dickens”. The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, 16, 1–15.

Fitzgerald, S. (Ed.). (1979). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Vintage Books.

O’Connor, F. (1971). The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Few tropes found throughout the incessantly published analyses of the Digital Age have become more tiresome than the insistence that our present moment comes with the comfort of precedent, that society underwent equivalent upheaval in the wake of Gutenberg’s disruptive contribution, and that the appropriate retaliation to the exploitative and endlessly ubiquitous technocratic structures of power and their “dark mojo,” to borrow Lynn Coady’s reductive phrasing, could be something as simple as “picking up a book” (40). Coady’s Who Needs Books?: Reading in the Digital Age and Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books both advance the notion that to consider otherwise is to fall victim to what Price terms the myth of exceptionalism, relegating contemporary concerns regarding the attention economy, the decline of critical literacy, and the proliferation of what Bernard Stiegler has called systemic stupidity to mere mythical misconceptions, with the added employment of the term exceptionalism to prompt further revulsion to that which falls under the phrase’s conceptual umbrella.

Price’s reliance on recent upticks in physical book sales and the increased popularity of ebooks to counter Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? does little to address the diminishing attention and capacity for critical thought that exists at the core of Carr’s piece and countless articles being written with similar unease. Price then endeavors to remove technological advancement entirely from the sightline of this criticism, going on to strictly attribute the general decline in book engagement to financial conditions rooted in the 2008 recession, neglecting the societal and cultural shifts following the release of the first iPhone that began its expeditious trajectory a year prior. The speed at which consumer technology has progressed within this timeframe has led to the global disruption of communities and disindividuation of individuals, the liquidation and commodification of social systems, and the elimination of a sense of political potency and the possibility of a common future, rendering Price’s optimism for the future of reading as simply an ineffectual assertion utterly detached from the declining condition of the reader.

As our will is replaced by automatisms finely tuned to exploit and homogenize our behavior, both digital and corporeal, in service of the market, Coady’s claim that capitalism is “perpetually confused with technology” is equally erroneous. Coady’s unwillingness to recognize the validity of critiques of technoconsumerism such as Franzen’s without reaching for labeling such positions as that of a “misanthropic uncle” mirrors Price’s dismissive tone in terming the unsettling nature of our contemporary moment a myth. Coady’s self-satisfied usage of curated reactionary quotes from history only works to diminish the material reality of the present pervasive exploitation that is the driving force of “digital culture,” making her eventual pronouncement that, “Books are not going away any more than family is going away, any more than community is going way, any more than love and intellectual inquiry are ever going away” all the more exasperating. As Jonathan Cray bluntly notes in Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness” (83). The drive for intellectual inquiry championed by Coady is swiftly being subsumed into the market through what Stiegler has referred to as the proletarianization of theoretical knowledge, following the same logic of exploitation that television broadcasting did in its proletarianization of how-to-live (savoir-vivre) and the industrial revolution carried out in its mechanization of labor via the proletarianization of how-to-do (savoir-faire). In my view, Coady’s referencing of the fears of the past to some degree works to advance precisely the opposite point of that which she intends to make; capitalism and technology are symbiotic forces, each one working to advance the other, and have existed as such through each stage of proletarianization.

Widespread literacy and engagement with text, either printed or digital, is undoubtedly something to be advocated for. However, it should not be misconstrued as a cure-all solution or final destination. The mnemonic device that is the written word is a pharmakon, capable of acting as a remedy or poison, the latter of which we’ve recently seen the proliferation of in the form of “fake news,” COVID-19 misinformation, and far-right radicalization online. The automatic proletarianization of theoretical knowledge, or the process of our capacity to think critically being replaced by “digital automata” that “bypass the deliberative functions of mind,” leads to the aforementioned state of systemic stupidity, both reflecting and responding to Carr’s question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Stiegler, 2020, p. 16). Coady and Price, in their attempts to champion the form of expression for which their passion is palatable, both, unfortunately, deny the material and noetic conditions at play in the deterioration of engagement with this form, leaving the “singular, magical experience” they romanticize to be further disenchanted by the malaise of the modern digital landscape.

Resources

Coady, L. (2016). Who Needs Books?: Reading in the Digital age. The University of Alberta Press.
Crary, J. (2022). Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso Books.
Price, L. (2019). What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading. Basic Books.
Stiegler, B. (2020). Nanjing Lectures: 2016-2019. Open Humanities Press.