Toy Story

I

The largest annual toy fair in the world closed in New York on Wednesday, February 13^th, after a four-day run.  It was convened as usual at the Javits Center over on 12^th Avenue, the vast convention hall between 34^th and 40^th Street (it’s the place Governor Cuomo wants to close in favor of a convention center in Queens).

You know what the book exhibit at the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association looks like?  That windowless ballroom where you need proof of registration to enter and browse the publishers’ booths?  That significant space is typically about 30,000 square feet of boring books, diffident reps, and muted colors, which combine with the florescent light to create the ambience of a professional bowling event, where a normal tone of voice sounds vaguely alarming, a muted signal of emergency: nobody’s dying, but someone has thrown the equivalent of a gutter ball.

The International Toy Fair took up about 600,000 square feet in the Javits Center—Mattel had its own floor, where nobody except reporters and buyers with serious credentials were admitted.  Nothing was boring, nobody was diffident, and the colors were strident, shocking, as if everything here were plastic, or rather, because everything was plastic except the old-fashioned wooden sleds hanging in the booth next to the Sol Wheels.  These popular devices look like portable housing for a garden hose, but they’re unicycles without the height or the effort: you just stand there on a wheel and it moves you, like you’re Barney Rubble with a skinny tie and a back pack.  A set of Sol Wheels will cost you $1800.

The ambient effects were intriguing noise, theatrical voices, astonishing vistas, even strange smells, combining to make the scene feel like the parking lot outside a football stadium before the game: this is all earnest preparation for a spectacle that must be fun for somebody, somehow.  I place emphasis on that word because for all the insane frivolity of the event—toys are for children, but they get bought by adults who work for a living—this is a command economy.

Welcome to industrialized fun, where play is work.  And vice versa, of course!  The dialectic is never dead, only dormant, just ask Zizek.

The International Toy Fair takes the same “wholesale” approach as the publishers at the academic conventions.  At the MLA or the AHA, the exhibitors in the booths are there to sell to the middlemen and the distributors—professors like me, who will decide what products the retail consumer, the student, can buy in his or her segment of the curricular market.  At the Toy Fair, to be sure, the exhibitors are there to sell to much more important middlemen and distributors like Amazon or Costco.  Still, the analogy holds: large textbook adoptions are often determined by department committees.

Now reverse the field and imagine yourself hawking your monograph on the sexuality of the sans-culottes, or the politics of Reconstruction in DeKalb County, Georgia, in this kind of space, like you’ve got a trade book on your hands.  It’s not entirely fanciful.  The toy buyers browsing these thousands of aisles—deciding what to stock for next year—include small businessmen like John Middlekamp, who owns two upscale stores called Zoom in Kansas City, Missouri, one on Country Club Hill, an opulent “open mall.”

Think of him as a buyer at a book fair in Berlin.  Think of him as a publisher.  What would you be pitching?  Soon you’ll be wondering, because academic publishing won’t last any longer than tenure—I mean the academic system of seniority, not the certification of your job security.  Then what?

II

I was there to experience the scene because in noodling around on the Internet one day, I had stumbled on a promotional video for a new toy.  Watching it made me get all anthropological, willing to trek those four long desolate blocks from the 2 Train at Times Square to the Hudson River, fighting for pedestrian space with buses bound for Lincoln Tunnel.  This little video depicts, elicits, and magnifies every infantile desire Freud ever discovered, so I had to go there, to the place where wishes and dreams are accorded the dignity they deserve.  Not to the shrink’s office, no, to the Javits Center decked out as the Toy Fair.

My quasi-official guide escorted me from exhibit to exhibit on the acreage Mattel hadn’t monopolized—it had its own floor and its own security staff, no way we could get in.  She was gleeful, I was overwhelmed, and then I was giddy, like her.  At my request, she played “Jishaku” with a rep who claimed that the unscrupulous guys downstairs had ripped off his boss’s concept—place polished magnetized stones in a felt background, you win if your stones don’t attract others, imagine that.  His solemn conclusion was “It’s all about finesse.”  After watching them play, I agreed, but I still didn’t know who won, or why. Then, at my request, we entered the huge Manhattan Toy site because Parents Magazine was part of the logo, and we all got a little embarrassed when I quizzed the nice woman at the booth about the obviously grotesque affiliation.

My favorite moment came when I tried to topple the Dominoes at the eponymous site—this company is trying to diversify the brand, like Lego, which, I noticed, had commandeered a space the size of a ranch on the second floor.  After I wrestled with the nice little black and beige oblongs, assuming I’d level this playing field—it looked like a miniature cemetery, now that I think about it, serried rows of uniform markers, let’s kill the dead!—the guy in charge said, with practiced aplomb, “They’re glued down.”

I said, “What the fuck, what’s the point if you can’t make them do what they’re supposed to?”  As I said this, though, I saw the “moving life of the dead” Hegel had depicted as monotonous factory work—in his theological writings, in Jena, long before Toussaint or the master-slave dialectic—and I saw the “dance of death” Alex Cockburn had described as the board game of aristocrats we call chess.

OK, I couldn’t actually see these things, but I could begin to feel that every kind of work is preparation for play, and that play, even when disguised as work, is preparation for death.  I could see that maybe Georges Bataille was right about the nature of human desire, after all—it’s always about excess and expenditure, he claimed, always aimed at a pointless waste of resources.  I wanted to steal a domino.

The man in charge shrugged, then he laughed, he had the right attitude.  “It’s like chess,” he said, confirming all my suspicions.  I looked down at the board, where hundreds of little oblongs stood waiting for my first and last direction, and said, “C’mon, man, you can move the pieces when you play chess.”  He said, “Yeah, but you know how it turns out, it’s win or lose.”  I was stunned, I said, “It’s not a game if everybody loses.”

“Exactly,” he said. “This is not a game.”

He was right, it’s a game when the Cubans or the Dominicans play their fast and loose version of Dominoes, clacking and betting and screaming.  This board contained something else—it was a monument built, with painstaking effort, to be wasted gloriously, like a religious shrine.  Everybody loses, but the resulting deficit gives us faith in the future.

Our next stop, in Aisle 2100, was the Marshmallow Fun Company, which has patented and now produces every imaginable plastic device that lets you shoot edible white pellets.  I bought two mini cross-bows, ten bucks apiece, that will send a tiny marshmallow thirty feet with a gratifying sound, the inarticulate equivalent of the emphatic exhalations that come with sex, drugs, and sports events, also death, speaking of Bataille.  My hope was to engage my girlfriend in not-so-sublimated warfare—“Take that, bitch!”—but alas, as a daughter of Enlightenment, she has no interest in skirmishes conducted on this level of idiocy.

III

But as I say, I was there to explore the psychological and perhaps political dimensions of toys, specifically the toy I saw in the video, which mandates and enables personal rebirth by a verbal pact with an impending reality: by wishing that comes true, like a contract, or rather by wishing for the truth even if you don’t know what that is.  Perhaps, I thought, the wasted time we call play isn’t as bound up with those three fundamental realities—food, sex, death.  Perhaps Bataille was wrong in this sense, perhaps toys mine another seam of social reality, the Satanic-Adamic urge to give birth to yourself, or, as Freud put it, “to become father to yourself,” and not just in the limited, clinical sense that the child must be father to the man.

Here’s how that toy works.

You buy the product, a stuffed animal with an opening in its abdomen, and you place your wish there, in writing, in this gestational space.  Then you wait on the world.  If the wish comes true, you share it with the person who has fulfilled it—you name him or her as the cause, not merely the symptom or the effect, of your condition, which is your happiness.  If the wish doesn’t come true, that’s OK, there are no time limits on your search—when your patience is exhausted, you retrieve the message, and you rewrite.

You’re unhappy about your life, and you want desperately to change it.  How do you accomplish that?  You make a wish, and then you act as if it will come true, you commit yourself and then you see—as if your willingness, in every sense, is a real cause of what happens in the world.  Now this urge is not merely childish, “wishful thinking” as we used to say.  Your being-in-the-world just is the volition you bring to the situation at hand, equipped with purposes you can’t know and may never be able to acknowledge.  In that sense, you are always already “thrown” into the world, where you will discover a self—not by coming across yourself, perceiving yourself, but by being brought before yourself, made manifest by the material articulations of your inchoate intentions.  By projection, in short, not introspection.

I went to the Toy Fair because I wanted to see how this product, this idea, might appear to people without my preconceptions.  To begin with, what did the creator think about what she had created?  I was more interested in how the video answered that question than in the thing itself—I never did get hold of the stuffed animal, although I inspected it closely—so my account is still biased in favor of astonishment, wonder, and magical thinking, the properties of children, alchemists, and poets.

In other words, the following reconstruction of my conversation with the inventor is what I wished for.  She later denied she said any of it, and she may be right.

How do you make dreams work?

“I wanted it to be real, and honest, you know?  Not happy, because sometimes when your dream comes true, it’s not all good, it can be awful, just awful.  You get what you want, and then what?  You wanted this guy, a certain kind of guy, and he turns out to be not what you needed.  Look, I’m not talking about myself here.  Yeah, he’s good looking, and he works out, but he’s not . . . well, he’s just not what you need.  You mention the video, it’s mostly sad, everybody’s wishing for something they don’t have, they want to hope.”

You mean the wishing is a kind of denial?

“No, well, yeah, you can put everything aside, you have a purpose.  You don’t care that the sink is full of dishes, maybe you don’t look so good today.  Things could turn out because you know what you want.”

And what you really want is to give birth, like, to yourself?  The video makes me feel like the wish is a seed planted in a female abdomen, then it’s removed by Caesarean section when it’s ready, well-baked.  You become father to yourself, no?  Like the American Adam.

“No, you’re reading way too much into it.  It’s not about having babies.  It’s about facing reality.”

OK, reality.  But maybe, in that sense, it’s about having control of your life—your body?  Freud wrote some cool stuff about how you first experience autonomy by controlling your bowels, then you start equating feces and babies and, uh, penises: they all seem to come from the same place, you know?  You’re not thinking this when you’re a toddler, it’s always unconscious.  It sounds weird, I know.

“It sounds disgusting.”

Yeah, it is, but that’s the nature of the wish, no?  I mean, who really wants what they wish for?  Midas, “Bedazzled,” whatever, your desires don’t have much to do with reality, not once you get past food and clothing, and even there you’re—

“It’s not that complicated.  This toy lets people find happiness when they’re sad, they get to forget what makes them sad.  What’s wrong with that?”

Nothing, nothing is wrong with that, how could there be anything wrong with that?  Except maybe you don’t want to forget what makes you sad because if you do, you’ll regret it, you’ll forget what made you.  You said you didn’t want the video to be happy, you wanted it to be real.  There’s sadness in it.

“But only up to a point.  You can do something about it, you can change your life by hoping for something.”

Something that isn’t visible?  The conviction of things unseen?

“Yes, it’s not here.  Not yet.  Not yet.  But you can believe in it.”

 

 

 

Second Inaugurals

President Obama was clearly aware of Lincoln’s presence in composing and  delivering his second inaugural address.  But the anxiety of influence was absent.

The biblical references were everywhere, and if not in the recognizable references, they were in the cadences of scripture and the impromptu rhythms of the pulpit that carried the ideas past controversy.  Listen to the penultimate paragraph, and ask yourself if it would sound better if you removed any of the adjectives, or any seemingly incidental word: “Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.”

Like Lincoln, Obama sutured the Declaration and the Constitution by citing both (“We, the people” and “all men are created equal”) as if they belonged together.  And in keeping with that surgery, he practically quoted Lincoln’s second inaugural, insisting that liberty and equality aren’t just compatible, but rather that each is a necessary condition of the other: “through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.”

But the accomplishment of this speech is a departure from Lincoln’s solemn use of scripture.   Quite apart from the continuity of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall the president has now enshrined in the rhetorical memory of our unfinished founding—as Americans, each of us from elsewhere, that’s all we can share, this memory—Obama’s accomplishment resides in the way he was able to move us beyond the measure of liberty and equality God offers, whether in the words of the Bible or in the sermons of our contemporaries.

He said it twice:

“For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”

And then, toward the ending:

“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

Liberty and equality are what we make of them, not what God has given us.  They become truths we can live by only insofar as we know they’re our creations, in this life and on this earth.   That’s a new twist on the idea of a gift from God.  When Obama says we can hear a King proclaim that liberty is worthless in the absence of equality, you know he has a doubled son of man in mind.  You know the inscrutable God of Abraham has given way not to the forgiveness of Jesus but to we, the people.

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Amen.

Life Underground

I

If you live in New York, you spend a lot of your waking hours underground, unless you live in Queens.  In a normal week, I spend five or six hours down there beneath the city, where even the air you breathe has to be delivered.  This is not a complaint: the subway system is a magnificent architectural achievement as well as the best way to get around town.

Unless you get lost down there—it’s hard to do except in Penn Station—you tend not to notice the material intricacy or scale of the thing, because once you descend those steps, you’re in a hurry to get to the right platform, the next train, the destination itself.  You tend not to notice the tile work apart from the murals, for example, maybe because it’s everywhere you look, on the floors, walls, and sometimes the ceilings (can all that tile in the system outweigh the metal?). You don’t even notice how insanely long the trains are unless you ride the C, and then you worry that they’ll shut this line down before long because during off-hours, you can have a whole car to yourself (I once thought that if I were homeless, the C would look like the suburbs).

And you tend not to ask why they number the doors starting at the left front of each car, so that no matter where you sit, you have to read backward if you want to get from 1 to 16, and swivel your head, too, which is embarrassing, like moving your lips when you read.

II

So what are you doing down there?  Waiting and watching.  Mostly waiting, because even after you board your train, you’re just waiting for your stop.  But watching as well, at least to begin with, looking for a seat, looking for signs of something—danger, welcome, novelty, beauty, idiocy—in the clothes and the postures and the colors and the faces of your fellow passengers.

That’s what I do, anyway.  When they get on the train, most other people have something to read, or to listen to, or both.  Or they play games on their smart phones.  They share the sensibility of my girlfriend, who never goes near a subway without a New Yorker or a Times Book Review in tow.  But then she doesn’t make coffee or unload the dishwasher without listening to WNYC or a book on tape: either she’s the last Puritan or she doesn’t want to be alone with her  own thoughts (but then these may be the same psychological state).

Still, the subway does make everybody wait.  My trips aren’t that long, though, and, unlike most passengers, I’m never on my way to or from work.  So I don’t mind waiting, and I love watching.  I rarely read on the train, unless it’s something I’ve just written.  Instead, I look for things and people to look at.

Imagine my surprise, then, last Saturday morning, when I set out from the 14^th Street station at 8^th Avenue, looking for an E to get me to Lexington and 86^th Street, on my way to an out-of-cycle meeting with the shrink.  I’ve been waiting on this platform for almost four years, since I started coming to Chelsea to visit my girlfriend, and before Saturday I had of course noticed an ensemble of brass sculptures down there by Tom Otterness, called “Life Underground.”  But I had never actually looked at it.

III

Waiting a long time for that E train let me look closely.  I was leaning on some white tile beneath one of the 16^th Street stairwells and realized I was right next to a donkey who, according to cartoon convention, is wearing underwear (boxer shorts), work shoes, and a derby hat, but who also has female breasts.  That’s an interesting mix of signs, I thought, and then glanced at the donkey’s match, a figure facing the same way on the other side of a three-sided white tile foundation that looks like nothing so much as a wide shower stall.  It’s an elephant with a very long trunk, wearing the same underwear but women’s shoes and a top hat.

C’mon, the sculptor put three-dimensional caricatures of the two major parties on a bathroom pedestal, facing downtown rather than each other?  Well, duh, I could finally say to myself.  (Later I learn that this work was installed by the MTA in 2001; the artist’s commission was $200,000.)  Then I notice that between and below them, on the white tile floor, is what looks like two hairy feet facing the same way, except that it’s one huge foot with nine toes and two ankles.  Are these parties united by something after all?

These are clothed animals raised above a Big Foot that is clearly prehensile.  What are they doing here?  Keep it simple.  Where are they facing?  Downtown, to be sure, but which part of that dense puzzle?  The West Village is just below 14^th Street, then comes Soho, Tribeca, and the financial district.  What do these parties see—or rather, what do we see when we face the same way?

Underneath another stairway opposite these bizarre figures, on the floor, stage center, we see an alligator emerging from a manhole marked “NYC Sewer.”  This is not a Santa Claus from the sewer—like that jolly piece of shit Mr. Hankie—who brightens the holidays over at “South Park.”  The reptile is gleeful, yes, but he’s chewing on the legs of a little man whose head is a money bag, as in 19^th-century cartoons of monopolists and lesser capitalists.  The return of the repressed?

Meanwhile, on the railing, stage right, is a fat rodent feasting on the enormous coins that spill from a torn money bag, eating them as if they’re chocolate bars, that’s right, as if he’s munching on shit.  Let them eat money.

 

 

 

In the background, stage left, are two rodent policemen—they have caps, uniforms, and holsters—sweeping smaller coins into their receptacles.  Some representative of the neo-liberal state has to clean up this mess, might as well be the cops.

And in the dark, way beneath the stairs, almost unnoticeable at the back of this hilarious animal tableau, the smallest figure lays still, on her side, with two plain bags beside her: she carries no money, only her belongings.  She might be asleep, but she could be dead.  Either way, she’s homeless.

 

 

She’s hard to see in this light, isn’t she?

So when we face downtown with the Democrat and the Republican, these two brass animals, we see all the way to Wall Street, where the Law of the Jungle is at work.  Not exactly a dog-eat-dog world, but close enough to the reality of the 21^st century.

 

Transcript of Interview with Paul Solman at PBS

Here’s the link to part of the interview I did with Paul Solman at PBS (some of which you can see in video).  This is the empirical part that didn’t make it on air.  Maybe I’ll just copy the whole thing?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2012/12/james-livingston-corporations.html

Oh. Christmas Tree

 

I can’t make this shit up.  Who could?  In New York at this time of year, every corner is a good spot to sell Christmas trees.  It’s hard not to buy one.  Last Wednesday, I was walking down Broadway to the 96^th Street station, having eaten some excellent Mexican food at 104^th with a friend whose life is about to change because his new book is going to change everything we think about, well, everything, and I noticed a guy with a yarmulke haggling with the proprietor of a makeshift Christmas tree business at 98th.

What is he thinking, I asked myself, and I had both of them in mind.  You’re an Orthodox Jew and you’re buying a Christmas tree, and/or You’re bargaining with a man who doesn’t celebrate the holiday this tree represents?  The negotiation was pretty clearly fun for both of them, this being New York, so I just laughed.

Still, I thought about what I had seen the day before, walking west on the 124 between Lexington and 5^th Ave, a desolate stretch, a lot of addicts, a lot of silence, until you get to Marcus Garvey Park, where I noticed a tired old guy pulling a huge Christmas tree down the street.  My first impulse was to say “Hey, you need some help?”

Then I realized he was stealing the tree.  So did the proprietor.  She came tearing around the corner of 5^th and 124^th, and she was pissed, she said, “You stupid old mothafucker, I’m a kill you right now, what the fuck is the matter wit you, you try to steal a fucking Christmas tree, why’nt you steal shit from yo children, you stupid old mothafucker, I’m a kill you now.”  The tired old guy turned and walked away.

This being New York, I just laughed.  I didn’t offer to help her.

How Not To Think About Sandy Hook

On Saturday morning starting at 6:17, standing at the kitchen counter in my girlfriend’s apartment, I tried to put what I was feeling into words.  I failed.  That’s a good thing.  On Monday, Connor Kilpatrick of Jacobin emailed me, saying that there’s an argument to be made here, have at it.  He cited my own words, from an ancient book.  I gave it a try.  Here’s the result, which Jacobin posted yesterday.

Thanks–or not–to Connor.  Judge for yourself.  Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.

I

Start here.  Adam Lanza can’t be accused or convicted of “unconscionable evil,” not in the court of public opinion and not by the criteria of moral philosophy.  He wasn’t making a moral choice when he shot his mother in the face with her own gun, and then killed 20 defenseless children.  So individual responsibility and culpability aren’t at issue, as they have not been and cannot be since Columbine.

It follows that the NRA’s slogan, to the effect that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is moot at best—the killers in every case were sentient beings, but not one was a person at the law or anywhere else in the landscape of possibility most of us can take for granted.  Not one was an individual who came to the scene of the crime equipped with a conscience, thus able to make moral choices.

It also follows, logically at least, that better regulation of access to guns is actually consistent with the NRA’s stupid slogan: the man who slaughtered those 20 children was not an individual, a person able to distinguish between right and wrong.  So let us hereafter make sure that the people who want to kill other people are persons who can make moral choices—screen them thoroughly when they buy guns, or send them to the State Department with fair warning to all concerned at home and abroad.

By all means, then, let us ban assault weapons, and make it a lot harder to buy 9 mm Glocks.  And let us make sure that people suffering from mental illness can get treatment—that they’re not thrown back on the meager resources of their families.  Expand Affordable Care, to begin with.

II

But still.  Let us also ask the obvious question.  Why do these young white male people whom we routinely characterize as crazy—as exceptions to the rules of civilized comportment and moral choice—always rehearse and recite the same script?  If each killer is so deviant, so inexplicable, so exceptional, why does the apocalyptic ending never vary?

The answer is equally obvious.  Because American culture makes this script—as against suicide, exile, incarceration, or oblivion—not just available but plausible, actionable, and pleasurable.  Semiautomatic, you might say.

But mainly to young white male people who want to kill many other white people with sophisticated weapons.  Their apocalyptic endings make their deeply private states of mental anguish and illness very public.  These gunmen don’t understand their mission in these terms, but they do tell us that they represent something beyond their own lives and families when they take innocents with them rather than just killing themselves—when they behave like terrorists without a political cause.  They’re mute symptoms in search of a social disease, a cultural diagnosis, and a political cure.

Adam Lanza dressed the part for his first and final shootout as a man without a calling: all black, all military.  He wore a Kevlar vest, he taped extra magazines to his weapons, he moved and he killed systematically; he was ready for anything in his theater of war, an elementary school.  He knew how he would die that day—he knew the SWAT team would arrive soon after he started shooting—but not exactly when.  He was armed against his own fear, and he was desperate to make it known.

III

William James saw him coming in 1910.  In a Protestant culture that had defined manhood and character as the result of real work—a calling—what would happen, he asked, when such work became elusive if not altogether unavailable?  Would manhood survive?  Or would war then become the principal means of rehabilitating the “masculine virtues”?

James correlated the impending demise of those virtues with “pacific cosmopolitan industrialism”—a stage of development in which an older “pain economy” organized by the emotional austerity of necessary labor was giving way to a “pleasure economy” animated by the emotional surplus of consumer culture.  This new economy, according to James, was a world without producers, “a world of clerks and teachers, of co-educators and zoophily, of ‘consumer’s leagues’ and ‘associated charities,’ of industrialism unlimited and feminism unabashed.”

From the standpoint of that correlation, the decline of necessary labor or productive callings, and the consequent confusion of male and female spheres—“feminism unabashed”—became the elements of an identity crisis for every man; for they threatened to dissolve the ego boundaries hitherto determined by the sanctions of scarcity, both economic and emotional.

Here’s how James put it: “The transition to a ‘pleasure economy’ may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences.  If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase: fear regarding ourselves now taking place of the ancient fear of the enemy.”

He worried that this fear of emancipation from the older “pain economy” would take a regressively masculine form; he knew the manly virtues could be reinstated by the violent means of war, by militarism unabashed, and he designed his moral equivalent—real work with a social purpose—with that possibility in mind.

IV

The diary of a superfluous man doesn’t get written by a nobody.  Adam Lanza couldn’t have told us what made him unimportant as a person, or a man.  He lived forward without understanding backward, so he needed a template, a blueprint, a script he didn’t author.  He found it in the insane militarism of American political culture—that’s why he dressed up like a commando and stormed an elementary school as if it were a fortified bunker.  He played his part.

The unabashed hyper-masculine militarism he performed was, as William James suggested, a hysterical reaction formation against the “pleasure economy” we have created but denied—as if we could still locate the source of manhood in the demands of necessary labor, in the rigors of military discipline, in the sacrifice of war.

So this reaction formation is a social disease, and Adam Lanza is both symptom and attempted cure of it.  Manhood need not be a function of extreme necessity, denial, and sacrifice, as enacted on a field of battle.  War is a drug only where the meaning of masculinity is reduced to mere survival, and when power derives from the barrel of a gun.

But that where and when is already here and now.  End there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Debate on Lincoln the Movie

Here’s the exchange between Corey Robin and me at Facebook yesterday, which I think gets to the heart of the debates about “Lincoln.”  I’ll see the movie again tonight.

 

Corey Robin:  I’m too tired to rehash this whole debate. But you bring up something I’ve heard a lot — the importance of that first scene of fighting, and you make a comparison that I have not heard a lot: to the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I think the comparison is very apt — and crystallizes, for me, the overall weakness of the point and thus the film. I thought that opening scene in Private Ryan was unbelievably compelling cinema; I was totally mesmerized. (Also that late battle scene, in the French village.) It was brilliant. And so completely divorced, in quality and substance, from the rest of the film: it was gritty, unhistorionic, quiet in its observations in a way that Spielberg is seldom quiet. It was everything that the rest of the movie was not; no moralism, no preachiness. Now I don’t think the opening scene in Lincoln is as powerful. But insofar as it does what you and others say it does, it also suffers from the same problem as the opening scene of Private Ryan: it’s a note that’s hit and then is only rarely heard again (the conversation that ensues with Lincoln almost instantaneously devolves into kitsch, dissolving whatever power that scene might have had, so much so that I didn’t even remember that battle scene until others pointed it out afterward; all I remembered was the conversation and that recitation of the Gettysburg Address). Maybe Spielberg is just good at opening scenes and should leave it at that.

James Livingston: Corey Robin, point well taken, but what if we say that these opening sequences SET the scene for everything that follows, including the vernacular moral philosophies of “SPR” and the political debates of “Lincoln” by making us ask, What is this carnage about–what can it mean? You forgot the sequence, and you say the conversation that follows is kitschy. I’m surprised by your responses, because the battle scene saturates and, yes, colors every word that comes after. Recall that in the conversation that follows with Lincoln, the black soldiers explain that they gave no quarter because their brothers had been massacred–no, executed–at Fort Pillow. This conversation answers the question of carnage with admirable concision: we kill without mercy or we die not as soldiers but as escaped slaves. The debate on the 13th Amendment takes up the same question, and answers by declaring that escaped slaves, ex-slaves, and slaves as such are no longer mere war contraband subject to military rulings and exigency; they are instead human beings endowed with natural rights. Soldiers, not slaves, and people, not property. More later on the visual-verbal disjuncture you detect, which I think Spielberg sutures with grace.

Corey Robin:  This might seem like a fussy response, so forgive me, but…The question for me about the film was never whether or not it accurately and effectively teaches us that the Civil War is about black freedom; I always thought that it did. The question was whether it makes blacks a central part of the story of winning their freedom. Now the response of the critics to that claim is to invoke the first scene: there you have black soldiers fighting, exercising their agency. You amplified that response with the comparison to Saving Private Ryan. And my response to that response — like I said, forgive me! — was to say that if the point of the first scene is to emphasize black agency, it makes the film suffer in the same way that the first scene of Saving Private Ryan makes the film suffer: that is, there’s a disjuncture between the power and content of the first scene and the film that follows. And I think that’s still the case. Even more so, now that I have read your response to my response. Because your response is essentially to change the subject and to say the first scene reminds us how central black freedom is to the Civil War. But a topic — emancipation — can be central to the film while still deemphasizing blacks as protagonists of their own emancipation. I think you’re left with two choices: either take the tack of other defenders of the film and say that the first scene showcases black agency (in which case I’d say the rest of the film doesn’t deliver on that; it only shows that white men then took up the question of black agency) OR say that the first scene showcases how black freedom is central to the Civil War, which I think the rest of the film does deliver on — but then we’re not in disagreement; we’ve merely changed the subject.

James Livingston:  Briefly, no, the subject has not changed except in this sense: the agency of black folk in winning their freedom from bondage is no more a question in this movie than the central issues of the Civil War, slavery and race. The question Spielberg and Kushner raise is whether the white folk in power at the North were willing to validate the freedoms won on the ground, in battle, but then to protect AND ENLARGE them by political means. In other words: The transition from contingent military necessity to permanent constitutional prohibition made a world of difference, but it was nowhere near inevitable. Without the 13th Amendment, black agency after Appomatox would’ve been reduced to paramilitary activity–guerilla war–or exodus.

Corey Robin:  That sounds like a truly great movie. I wish I had seen it.