Why I Was Such a Pain in the Ass in Grad School
Below is the text of something I wrote in the winter of 2014, my last year in graduate school.
The Various Things, Internetual and Otherwise, I’ve Been Reading and/or Thinking about Lately
Under consideration: James Gleick’s The Information, Raymond Tallis on Jacques Lacan, John Gardner’s reactionary faff, Dana Spiotta’s collage novels, and some other stuff.
1. Because the digital world is lonely and deracinating and alienating, and also because beyond that I am an introvert and find face-to-face interactions with people exhausting, I spend a lot of time alone. Because I spend a lot of time alone and am an introvert and am alienated and deracinated and lonely, I have come to be a denizen of a variety of online “communities”, viz, websites whereat lonely, deracinated, alienated introverts can gather and discuss things without having to look one another in the eye; usually these begin as single-serving websites, focussed on something specific, and become broader: the one I have spent the most time at, in my life, is Baseball Think Factory, which was originally a gathering spot for data-minded baseball enthusiasts — sports “geeks”, we were, which seemed paradoxical in 2002 but now feels totally normal and intuitive, since the geeks have taken over the world — but has since become a freewheeling society of (almost exclusively) dudes, complete with friendships, rivalries, enemies, politics, and entertainments; though baseball is still the most-discussed subject there, the most riotous arguments always erupt over real-world politics, with the majority trending left-libertarian and a vocal minority standing athwart history shouting “STOP!”
2. I’m going to make a distinction here, and it’s going to be important in a minute, and I want it near the top so nobody will miss it: there is a big difference between “data” and “information”. The superhuman geek-god Nate Silver might call one “noise” and the other “the signal”; what I think it really means is that you can get a lot of input these days, but not all of it means what you think it means — or anything at all. The most dangerous mental bias in the data age is probably apophenia: the human tendency to detect patterns in random data. The classic example is how we perceive there to be a face in the geologic forms on the moon, though of course there isn’t: the data, in this case, is the image of the moon; the information the mind wants to find there is the shape of a face. The information that is actually there is the history of the galaxy — if you know how to read it. Anyway, the Man in the Moon is harmless enough, but apophenia becomes dangerous when we are presented with an overwhelming amount of data about the world and the universe and start drawing implausible conclusions: that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, or that global climate change is a natural process unaided by human inputs (or simply doesn’t exist because it snowed yesterday).
3. An example: the word beautiful contains a very great deal of data, but essentially no information, because if a person says another person is beautiful, we really have no idea what they mean by it: do they like tall, dark and handsome? Rough and rugged? Do they have a ginger fetish? Pretty much anything you could call beautiful — a face, a body, a landscape, a sunset, a night sky, a dream, an idea — is going to present this problem.
4. Anyway, the reason I started off talking about the internet is because there is a common practice on internet forums when someone else elegantly expresses an opinion that you share but don’t feel up to articulating: you quote the entirety of what they have said, and then follow it up with a simple, one-word sentence fragment: “This.” When I sat down to write this little thing, I kind of wanted to quote the entirety of Jonathan Lethem’s essay on postmodernism and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and then type underneath: “This.”
5. It has become axiomatic, in this post-post-(post)-modernist age, that identity is composed and not innate and so on and so forth. I find this to be immensely troubling and ultimately kind of preposterous. It seems to me to be a kind of existential overreaction to the terrors of fascism & colonialism: because for so long the powerful presumed there was an innate quality in being white & Xian that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted to those who were not white &/or Xian, a lot of thinkers freaked out and decided that there was nothing innate about people at all and that the very concept of innateness was dangerous. And that’s understandable, because racialism or whatever you want to call it is a ridiculous and provably false set of ideas; equally, however, it is provably false that identity consists only of inputs. There is a unique processor somewhere in a human brain that causes similar inputs to output different people; it’s not that this is totally immutable or intractable — I am in a lather to assure you that I do not believe in the concept of a soul — but that there is a core to any person’s being that will cause them to compose themselves in a certain way, which has very little to do with culture or language, and may have something to do with genetics, though it’s of course important to note that the way this breaks down runs against the assumptions of race or class superiority that drove several generations of human thought. Pretending as though this isn’t true because it bothers us renders nobody a useful service. The British neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis writes in his crushing review of Jacques Lacan & co: a History of Psychoanalysis in France:
Future historians trying to account for the institutionalized fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on.
This.
6. There is something assaultive about living in the age of data. James Gleick’s magisterial The Information, which is sort of almost a biography of data, is subtitled, A History, a Theory, a Flood, and that feels right: god, there’s just so much of it. Climate data, the home / road offensive splits of the Seattle Mariners, the likely-voter adjustment in a Real Clear Media poll of Ohio voters, the live birth rate in Iran. Those are just the datastreams I, personally, have waded into over the last few days. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, and equally it’s hard to trust yourself to organize all of it, at least if you’re constantly aware of your own mental biases, which trend apopheniac.
The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense—I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. — Jonathan Lethem, “Postmodernism as Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution”
This.
7. Have you ever stood in a swimming pool at such a depth that you had to tilt your head back and look at the sky in order to breathe, and even then water kept getting in your mouth and you found yourself wondering if this was a good idea and if maybe it was too late to pull the abort switch?
8. If one were to have an interest in watching a novelist grapple with the feeling that modern life overwhelms identities, it might be valuable to read Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which is about a woman who was once the sort of bullshit-hippie-idiot-terrorist that I’m glad ceased to be in vogue ten years before I was born: you know, the white children of privilege farting about with pseudo-Marxism and blowing people up in the name of something, though just what has never really been clear to me. I guess it’s because I’m a GenXer and was born jaded that I find this kind of thing hard to sympathize with, but it strikes me as dangerously stupid to assume that there’s an ideology that’s going to cure society’s ills, and even stupider to assume that Marxism is it, but then I’m getting off track and anyway the principle narrator of Eat the Document has gone underground and sold out or bought in or whatever ridiculous thoughtcrime growing up is meant to be, and her past comes back to haunt her. Unlike the Lethem essay or the Tallis review or whatever I cannot simply quote a passage of the book and say “this, I believe this,” because on some level the book buys into a concept of authenticity that I just don’t believe in, ie, it seems to me that people are what they do and the attitude they hold when they do it or the, I don’t know, cultural background of their upbringing or whatever other fundamentally irrelevant data you want to bring into the equation doesn’t really matter. On the back cover, in my notes on the book, I wrote, The fetishization of authenticity results from a pointed anxiety about one’s own lack of it. It’s a kind of conservatism. So that — that’s what I think about that, I guess.
9. And then I made the mistake of reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which, wow, what a piece of shit that book is. Some of this reaction has to do with the fact that Gardner was a small-time novelist taking arrogant pot-shots at people who were vastly superior writers (anyone who dismisses Kurt Vonnegut out of hand, especially when allegedly thinking about how to deal with morality in fiction, pretty much goes straight to the bottom of my shit list). But more it has to do with the intellectual straitjacket that Gardner tries to fit on society, dismissing postmodernists as glib and “commercial”, which I guess might have some merit, but then when he talks about what a book or work of art art or whatever is supposed to get up to, he makes these vast generalizations that stand on a foundation of pure hot air, to wit: “True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.” Do I really have to explain why this is total faff? Aside from the fact that it’s reactionary and dangerously dismissive of what one might call the great polyphony of world tradition, it’s also the kind of big, baseless assertion that lies in the crumbly fundaments of religions (of which, by the way, Gardner was dismissive, somehow not quite seeing irony there). This is the kind of thing that sounds stern and brave but is really just an odiferous belch in the face of the challenges of modern life. It also precludes what I think of as the diagnostic role of some art in society: I once had a conversation with a woman I was dating about the state of the newspaper industry, which was then in the early stages of the death throes that continue to drag down a few papers a year; she wanted to know what I thought about, well, that, and I gave her my honest opinion: that the age of print media was basically over and in a few years we would live in a thunderous echo chamber made up mostly of tiny niche websites that would help us live in the self-organized feedback loops of corrupt data. She wanted to know, given such a dire prognosis, what I thought should be done about it. And I said, Nothing. It’s going to happen and we can’t stop it. This made her very angry and she said there was no point in having an opinion about something if you don’t have an opinion about how to change it for the better, which I find to be a completely ridiculous way of looking at the world, which I told her, and then I said, Sometimes the patient just has terminal cancer. She really didn’t like that. A few months later she moved to California and I didn’t go with her.
10. It is necessary these days to have one’s perimeter well-defended against bad data. There was recently a story that raced around social media among a certain stripe of conservative, which concerned a former Marine attending a college course taught by an atheistical professor who blasphemed loudly and demanded to know where God was to strike him down. The Marine then gets up, assaults his professor, and says, “God’s busy looking after our men and women who are out defending our freedoms, so I stood in for Him” [sic]. The sickly irony aside, this story is obviously a lie, and I suspect that many people who shared it around didn’t have any illusions as to its factuality. But it confirmed the way they thought about the world: professors and atheists bad; soldiers and Xians good. It may not have been factual, but it was true, as far as they were concerned. Encountering this on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of my more conservative relatives drove me crazy; but more pernicious by far, at least in the Life of Liberal Joseph, is the mirror image of that story, one in which the atheist is tolerant and triumphant, and the right-wing macho man is served justice. Such stories exist, I am certain of it. But I may be too blinded by my biases to properly ferret them out.
11. Liberals loved Nate Silver as long as he was was reassuring them that Mitt Romney wasn’t much of a threat to Barack Obama. Those feelings have become much more complex now that he seems to think the Senate will flip red this fall.
12. Change your passwords. They know.
13. Yeah, but who are they?
14. THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING RED THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING THE SYSTEM IS THE SYSTEM
15. What was I driving at? Oh, right — there does seem to be a semi-radical consensus going around that the way we live now is somehow difficult to take, in a way that it didn’t used to be. I’m not sure I find that particularly persuasive (living in the age of data is certainly not worse than living, for instance, in wartime Europe, or Soviet Russia during the famines, or really medieval anywhere), but does it seem to anybody else that we are all somehow far from home? I think I’m comfortable stipulating that the way we live is qualitatively difficult in a different way, in that there is a shattered, unfocussed, drowning quality to day-to-day life (combined with a stultifying unstimulated stillness of the body); but I’m not prepared to say that life is more difficult to tolerate than it used to be. I think the feeling I’m trying to describe, which is nebulous and which I don’t completely understand myself, comes from an intolerable clash between the fact that there is a core identity to each of us and it’s struggling to combat &/or process an oceanic amount of input in order to fashion a self. We live in postmodern times but do not possess a postmodern I, in the convenient, destabilized, meaningless, ultimately quite wrong way that Lacan and his many acolytes, students, scholars, fellow-travelers and dipshits would have us believe.
16. But what does this mean? Should you read The Information? Yes, I suppose you probably should, if my experience of it — that it was accessible, fascinating, and completely full of thoughts that seemed new to me — is one that can be generalized. Should you read Eat the Document? That’s a more complicated question. Eat the Document is about how the shredded remains of a life story cannot be completely disregarded or disposed of, though its execution sometimes seems more intellectually sound than — what’s the word? — oh, satisfying, that old critic’s saw. It’s a collage of voices and sorts of documents, which is interesting; but ultimately Spiotta fails properly to inhabit all the voices she’s telling her story in: a teenage boy writes in much the same way that his 40-something mother does, and it’s a problem. Her next novel, Stone Arabia, avoids this, sort of, by narrating itself in a weird amalgam of the first and third persons, so the voice makes more sense, but the book ends arbitrarily and is probably a hundred pages too short for its own good (not a common complaint in this day and age, but there you have it). Should you read On Moral Fiction? Yes, if you’re an aesthetic reactionary, or maybe if you’re participating in a bit of ancestor-slaying like what I’m doing here; otherwise, no, of course not, it’s a silly book, overfull of generalizations about what art is and what it’s for and why one should pursue it and . . . I don’t know, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe if I annoy you, if after reading this little bit of post-post-(post)-modernist dithering you find everything I have to say stupid and silly and objectionable (an entirely reasonable reaction, if you ask me, as I am a bit of a pain in the ass), then it’s the book for you, and you should go off and buy it and read it and write modernist, realist, moralist fiction that my friends and I can sneer at and write dismissive reviews of and then send links to said reviews to one another via our Twitter accounts and then you guys can review what we write and poke fun and nobody will listen to anybody else and we’ll all just live as one big unhappy family in a choking atmosphere of self-arranged, self-reinforcing data that can mean whatever we want it to mean. I don’t know, guys. Who am I to tell you what to do?
