Book Review

The Prague Cemetery

by Umberto Eco

     Legendary Italian author Umberto Eco, the most postmodern of postmodernist writers, wrote his last novel, The Prague Cemetery, just a few years before his death. As would be expected, he combines different literary styles and genres with a variety of themes into a complex mesh of narrative threads. It combines the popular fiction scenarios of historical fiction and the espionage novel with thde more higher style of the picaresque novel, meaning the loose plot structure is secondary to the protagonist’s encounters with the people he meets and the situation he gets himself into, a style mastered by the likes of Rabelais and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The overarching theme of this novel is the antisemitism of 19^th century Europe but an under-acknowledged, and less obvious, theme is its commentary on writing, authorship, and the publishing industry.

The main, and highly repulsive, character is Simonini. As the novel begins, he is a secret agent, a forger of documents, and he lives in a junk shop in Paris as a cover for his clandestine activities, most of which involve the spreading of disinformation or fake news as we would call it today. He suffers from memory loss and begins writing a diary, telling his life story in an attempt to recall how he developed an alter ego named Dalla Piccola. He also wants to remember why he has four corpses hidden in the sewer under his shop. Maybe you can relate to this if you’ve ever woken up with a severe hangover, knowing that some really interesting things happened the night before but you can’t remember what they were. But you can’t worry too much because it will all show upon Facebook anyways.

His story begins with his childhood in Turin, the Piedmontese city that was part of France at the time. As he grows older, his grandfather begins indoctrinating him with ideas of antisemitism. This hatred of Jews is established early on as a false premise because his grandfather gets convinced of a Jewish plot to dominate the world by a senile, delusional old man who claims to be the Grand Master of all Masonic Grand Masters, claiming to have a first-hand account of the conspirators discussions. Simonini does not actually believe in the cause of antisemitism but as it grows in popularity, he sees the benefit in propagating it for the sake of advancing his own career.

Simonini gets recuited by a spy ring who send him on a mission to Sicily, posing as a journalist to gather information about Garibaldi’s uprising in an attempt to unify Italy and establish a republic, thereby ending the monarchical rule of Vittore Emmanuele. His ulterior task is to dig up dirt that will discredit the revolutionaries if they succeed. Later, Simonini is transferred to Paris where he is reassigned doing similar types of tasks. He liaises with members of the underworld, Jesuits, Freemasons, proto-fascists, anarchists, Germans, Russians, and Satanists, eventually ending up in his disguise as the Jesuit priest Dalla Piccola while attending a black mass. He even meets Sigmund Freud in a restaurant, calling him “Froide” because he is not sure how to spell his name properly; Simonini uses his contacts to score cocaine for the future founder of psychotherapy.

This varied milieu is significant because Paris is where Simonini begins working on his pet writing project, a work of antisemitic propaganda about a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. As his story goes, these Jews lay out plans to enslave the human race and dominate the planet because of their inherent lust for power. Simonini’s story is entirely fabricated and plagiarized, using materials lifted from books he finds at the library and other writers that he encounters. As Eco points out, conspiracy theorists never have any new ideas; they just keep recycling the same old stories dressed up in different clothes to make them more suitable for every generation that comes along. A lot of this novel is about how Simonini tries to sell this propaganda to other spies. While he wholeheartedly embraces anti-Jewish sentiments, his primary motivation is to make money so he can eat lavish meals at Paris’s best restaurants. Simonini is a 19^th century foodie. While he perpetuates the stereotype of Jews being gluttonous, greedy, and dishonest it is easy to see that his beliefs are all projections of himself onto them because his own paradigm is one of gluttony, greed, and dishonesty. Everything he, and the other antisemites, accuse the Jews of are things they are guilty of themselves.

The careful reader might want to take not of what Simonini eats. In one restaurant he orders canard de la presse which in French means “pressed duck” while the word “canard” in English means “false story” and the press is obviously the media. Simonini’s culinary indulgences are a field of double entendres and word play.

So how does this all relate to writing? First off, Simonini is, above all else, a writer. He starts off by forging documents then moves on to plagiarizing materials to create a work of fiction to be passed off as fake news. He moves on to become a type of literary agent when he hires and collaborates with Taxil, a writer of sensationalized stories about Freemasons and their relationship to Jews and Satanists. This is done because the Jesuit Bergamaschi wants to spread anti-Masonic propaganda and the secret service officer Hubertene wants to distract the public by having ridiculous anti-Masonic propaganda published, tabloid style, so they won’t believe the ridiculous claims of the Jesuits. Simonini serves these two masters simultaneously. He takes a salary for Taxil from both of them but secretly keeps half the money for himself. The Jesuits act as a publishing house. Bergamaschi does not care how stupid Taxil’s stories sound because his publications sell thousands of copies. Taxil becomes a best-selling author and Eco takes a swipe at the publishing industry in this situation by portraying th Jesuit publishers as greedy, concerned more with sales than quality, and oblivious to accuracy and truth no matter what the long term consequences of their publications may be. Eco also satirizes the media when Simonini, at this point, is taken over by the persona of Dalla Piccola and goes to work for an antisemitic magazine whose editor admits the Jews are scapegoats who he demonizes solely for political purposes.

Eco’s satire takes aim at the media and the publishing industry but he also has something to say about writers. Simonini, despite all his awful qualities, does what all writers do. He takes information gathered from life and the people around him then fashions it into stories. He also borrows ideas from other literary sources. He combines all this, deletes what he doesn’t like, embellishes parts that are dull, misrepresents and alters ideas, decontextualizes and recontextualizes information to suit his own agenda, and draws connections between unconnected things for the sake of narrative consistency. Simonini also creates the character of Dalla Piccola as a disguise; he literally wears the priest’s clothes and acts out the part the priest is supposed to play. This is what authors do when they create characters. They walk around in another person’s shoes, get lost in their identity and imagine themselves acting the way their characters act so they can write about their subjective experience. In Simonini’s case, he gets so lost in Dalla Piccola’s persona that he he forgets who he really is, a risk that great authors take which might explain why so many of them become alcoholics or go insane.

William S. Burroughs, another author fascinated by the subject of espionage, once said that writers are akin to spies because they can take on the identity of the people they write about; they operate by becoming someone else. Vladimir Nabokov said he wrote Lolita because he wanted to write from the point of view of someone he completely disagreed with. Eco gets into the mind of Simonini the way Simonini gets into the mind of Dalla Piccola. Like Russian matyoshkas, it is a man inside a man inside a man, even though matyoshkas are usually depicted as peasant women, devotchkas or babushkas.

Just like in Norman Mailer’s underrated espionage masterpiece Harlot’s Ghost, Eco writes his fictional protagonist into real historical events, interacting with real historical people. Whether Eco deliberately borrowed this idea from Mailer or not is uncertain but the similarity does underscore one of Eco’s points. By having Simonini borrow his materials from other writers, Eco points out that literature is never original. In the sense of Walter Benjamin, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Originality in art is a myth since everything depicted is borrowed from something else. The postmodern author does not create their own ideas; they take ideas that already exist, reshape them, recombine them, and recontextualize them to make an entirely new product. Simonini does what Eco, the author, does; Eco takes historic events and repurposes them the same way that hip hop artists sample from old records. We are further reminded that the only reason Eco can do this is because history has been written down in books. Without those historical tomes, The Prague Cemetery would never have been written but in light of what Simonini does, we are reminded that the absolute accuracy of those books should be approached with caution abd skepticism. Historical narratives can never be perfectly accurate.

A further thought you might want to consider is what happens to a work of literature after it is released to the public. Simonini eventually sells his propaganda to the Russian secret service. They use it as the basis for the fabricated Protocols Of the Elders of Zion. Simonini gets from the Russians what he intended to get: money in exchange for his writing. Beyond that, two important things happen. One is that the Russian police plagiarize what was originally a plagiarized document, The other is the long range consequence of the document becoming a catalyst for the Holocaust. Although the time span of this novel does not reach as far as World War II, this is drawn to our attention by the chapter entitled “The Final Solution” which was Hitler’s euphemism for the mass murder of the Jews. Umberto Eco, the semiotician, points us in the right direction but we, the readers, have to make the connections on our own. What is being indicated to us is that once a piece of writing is written, the reception of it is out of the author’s control. If Simonini writes vicious propaganda so he can make enough money to eat like a pig and this writing results in the concentration camps being built, we might want to consider our own responsibility in what we write. While an author can not control how the audience receives his writing, they can minimize their chances of a disastrous result by being responsible enough to write with honesty and good intentions, two things which are entirely absent in all the characters of this book.

In The Prague Cemetery, Eco performs a good juggling act, keeping a variety of themes and narrative threads in the air all at once. It is far from a perfect book though. The biggest flaws are in the descriptions of the historical events. The Garibaldi war passage is easy enough to follow, even if you don’t know the details surrounding it. But the overthrow of Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third Commune of Versailles is a bit more muddled and the battle scenes lack the descriptive writing that would make it easier to visualize. The toughest passage is about the Dreyfus Affair. Eco deletes a lot of details from the story for the sake of brevity but it is easy to see how a reader not familiar with that history could quickly get lost. Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski might give the dedicated reader the historical background needed to fully understand this story, but then again both of those books require a good deal of background reading to be comprehended too. Eco also has a tendency, especially towards the end, to over-explain; some details that are obvious to the reader get unnecessarily re-explained. This makes the narrative a little sloppy and awkward.

The Prague Cemetery is a brilliant book. It is bursting with so many ideas that at times it makes you brain feel as if it is bleeding information. Its obvious flaws are probably the result of Umberto Eco writing in his old age, trying to get one last great novel out before death. The antisemitism it portrays is ugly and disturbing but this racism serves a definite purpose. Eco exposes it, displays it, holds it up for us to see, and lays it out bare so we know what it looks like in all its dangerous stupidity. Unfortunately we live in a time when authoritarianism and fascism are becoming a real threat again and he wants us to see what it looks like so we can guard against it now before something terrible happens again. A surgeon must cut a body open to expose a tumor in order to remove it; the operation isn’t pretty or fun but the exposure and removal of such a sickness can save our life in the end. Approach this novel without fear. We’ll all be better for it in the long run.

Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston/New York: 2011.
 

Book Review

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

     Do you think capitalism sucks? Try schizophrenia instead! That is sort of, but not exactly, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari recommend in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They lay out a dense but somewhat comprehensible description of human beings and their relationship to the capitalist system. They also explain how Freud’s system of psychoanalysis acts as a method of repression that makes capitalism function more effectively.

     Deleuze and Guattari begin by describing the human as an individual. The human mind, particularly the unconscious, is made up of desiring-machines which work together to create flows. The concepts of “desiring-machines” and “flows” are both loosely defined and can be applied in a multitude of contexts thereby resisting the tyranny of the sign/signifier as the deconstructionists would say. The flows they write about are roughly equivalent to Freud’s concept of “libido” or psychic energy that circulates through the mind. The concept of “desire” is also central to their thesis. Traditionally, most philosophers, economists, and psychologists have written about desire as being a lack. A poor person desires money because they lack it or a hungry person desires food because they don’t have any but Deleuze and Guattari turn the concept on its head and analyze “desire” as being a creative force. The desiring-machines create energy that combines with energies created by other desiring machines which strive to reach full realization of their potential for completion. Desiring-machines can also be parts of the body; therefore, eyes, hands, mouths, anuses, and anything else can be a desiring-machine or a partial, detachable machine; for example, a breast-machine seeks to connect with a baby’s mouth machine so that both can fulfill their purposes to completion by creating flow, in this case, milk for nourishment for the baby. Like other psychologists, Deleuze and Guattari have a strange preoccupation with things like anuses, penises, and breasts; sometimes you have to wonder why psychoanalysis never offers any theories on knees, ankles, ribs, elbows or eyebrows.

     Desiring-machines create flow that extends beyond the individual into the socius, the societal body in its entirety. Social-machines are individual humans that invest desire in the social praxis. As this desire flows through the socius it gets encoded as things like money, labor, property, or information. Outside the limits of the socius is the body without organs, a wilderness or deterritorialization without form or organization of any kind. The body without organs is the unknown and that is where Deleuze and Guattari want us to go when we become schizophrenized.

     In a capitalist society, psychoanalysis has crystallized the ego in the form of Oedipus. The figure from the Greek tragedy who tore out his own eyes becomes a censor and a castrator for the desiring-machines. The ego-Oedipus blocks the flows they produce and turns them into an unconscious theater where the desiring-machines no longer produce desire but instead express themselves through symbols. This Oedipus-ego is kept under control by the authoritarian father-figure, a representative of the psychotherapist who prevents desire from flowing into the empty space represented by the mother. This Oedipus-complex, according to the authors, is implanted in the psyche by the psychotherapist himself. Since this Oedipus is under strain from blocking the flows and desires created by the desiring-machines, it is under constant risk of neurosis, a state where Oedipus is weak and gets submerged in the psychic content while barely blocking it from circulation. Failure to do so leads to psychosis.

     Oedipus is like an iron-door, one that is under the control of the father. It is a barrier and an internal instrument of repression. This functions in capitalism because that politcal-economic system also has mechanisms of internal repression and control in the form of non-productive social-machines like the police and bureaucracies that function by limiting the flow of things like labor and money, otherwise defined as chains of desire produced by social-machines, encoded and overcoded by capitalism. These flows of encoded desire are controlled by the axiomaticization of the ruling classes.

     Capitalism is like schizophrenia because it strives for fulfillment by breaking through onto the body without organs. It is there where the surplus value of the encoded chains of desire get decoded and deterritorialized as pure capital. The system of capitalism differs from schizophrenia because the schizophrenic seeks to go further over the body without organs, permanently plunging into deterritorialization so that others can follow but capitalism actually reterritorializes its capital by extending its limits and reterritorializing its decoded flows. Capitalism reterritorializes its flows by investing them in things like new technologies or private property, or it can recode capital to create more capital through credit and interest. Capitalism also recodes desire by expanding its internal limitations so that the working classes can never get rich or stop working for long periods of time. They become permanantly contained despite the constant expansion of their territorial limits. Factories are prisons and reterritorializing capital expands the prisons into larger and more complex prisons so that the ruling classes can keep circulating encoded and overcoded desires to continuously overcome the boundaries of the socius and generate more wealth for themselves.

     For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two ways out of this dilemma. One is to navigate around Oedipus into a paranoiac molar gregarious-aggregate, a group of social machines that believe themselves to be superior to the rest of the socius. Being molar demands that its social-machines be uniform, conformist, and easy to control. This paranoiac gregarious-aggregate is their definition of fascism but other groups that demand this type of corporatist community can be molar as well. On the same axiom of resistance is the schizophrenic individual, a person whose desiring-machines flow freely without any interference as they break out of the socius into the body without organs. These individuals resist capitalism because their thinking and language are derailed, freed from the logic of repressive categories, and permanently deterritorialized, unable to be recaptured by the socius to have their desires recoded. Thus, the authors advocate a type of psychotherapy called schizoanalysis. They do not literally want to make people schizophrenic but they think an individual can liberate themselves by taking on aspects of the decoded flows that characterize people suffering from that clinical disorder. They wish to dissolve the tyranny that Oedipus has over the desiring-machines of the unconscious so that people can free themselves from the prisons and injustices of capitalism, making it possible to achieve a fuller, richer life.

     So that sums up some of the main ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Where does that leave the reader? Probably confused. There are plenty of descriptions to support these ideas but it isn’t really necessary to understand all the minute details to understand the book. At first you might be impressed by the complexity of the authors’ work. It is an intricate and complete system nd you might even feel self-congratulatory for having understood a lot of it. But with a little distance, something seems to be wrong. While their argument can be understood with a good deal of effort, it appears to be disconnected from reality. There is no doubt that there are flows through the socius and capitalism does appear to succeed at expanding both internal and external limits. But are there really desiring-machines in the unconscious? By what mechanism does capitalism encode, overcode, decode, and recode deterritorialized surplus value? Who is responsible for doing this? Is it happening by instinct? Are the captains of industry conspiring with psychotherapists to operate this machinery? That would take us into the domain of conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it? How can we be sure any of this is real? There is certainly no empirical way to justify this work of philosophy. It is like a city made of vapor that blows away in the wind when you finish the book.

     If we can choose between capitalism and schizophrenia, is schizophrenia really the better choice? The use of schizoanalysis to guide the patient to the body without organs certainly has its risks and could leave the individual being unable to survive. At best, they would probably be a lone eccentric or possibly even one of those homeless people yelling at ghosts on the street corner. Would this kind of deterritorialization really be a legitimate foundation for a society? One might venture to speculate that capitalism is at least stable and relatively safe despite all its horrible shortcomings. Deleuze and Guattari appear to be advocating a naive form of libertarian individualism that could ultimately lead to nothing more than the social and mental isolation of the individual. There are not many radical anarchists out there who could even entertain the idea of living naked in the woods while scavenging for bugs and wild mushrooms to eat for the sake of spiting capitalists. Deleuze and Guattari simply do not make a strong case for the idea that schizophrenia is a desirable alternative to capitalism. They actually do not even make a strong case that capitalism is inherently undesirable either. They describe capitalism in their own unique way but never say much about why it is wrong.

     On top of all that, this book is written using the language of psychoanalysis and the Oedipal complex is the cornerstone of the authors’ thesis. But psychoanalysis is now considered a pseudo-science. Freud has been disproven over and over again. No one believes in Oedipus anymore. Schizoanalysis never made any headway in the psychiatric community either. It could be safe to say that the only people who even know what it is are those who have read this book. And that also revolves around the idea that they were able to comprehend it in the first place.

     Gilles Deleuze once said that works of philosophy are more like works of art than arguments. They should be appreciated for their systematic structure and descriptive language. Taken at that level, Anti-Oedipus is an impressive work. But then you have to wonder why they chose to write it in the first place. Critiquing capitalism and advocating for a new form of psychoanalysis that would radically change the political system doesn’t mean much as a work of art for art’s sake. This is a work that demands its readers put its ideas into action. In the end, it is too dated and disconnected from the real world to be of real value. Even so, Anti-Oedipus is still a real accomplishment because of its intellectual rigor and the way ot forces the reader to keep thinking while goes along.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, New York: 1972. 

 

Book Review

Violence and the Sacred

by Rene Girard

     Imagine a prehistorical time when a band of early homo sapiens committed an act of violence that resonated in such a powerful way that we still feel its effects hundreds of thousands of years later. This act of human sacrifice had a profound impact on the structure of the human psyche and how societies manage conflict. Such a belief is outlined by Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. His provocative theory is well-developed and, at the very least, plausible. Girard, however, runs into major problems when he tries to explain the disconnection between his theory and the social practices of humanity in the modern world.

     Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.

     Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.

     Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.

     Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.

     The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.

     Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.

     While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.

     There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.

     He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.

     Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.

     The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.

     Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1979.

 

Book Review

Book Review

Society Of the Spectacle

by Guy Debord

     Guy Debord was a founding member and the prime theoretician of the Situationist International, an art school that developed out of the later stages of the Surrealist movement. They were reacting against commodity fetishism, as it was defined by the Surrealists, the idea that consumer goods hold a magic power over their owners. Eventually the artistic side of the group fell away and the remainder of the SI turned to urban guerilla politics. They played a key role in the events of May 1968 in France. Debord’s Society Of the Spectacle outlines his concept of what commodity fetishism does to the masses and how it alienates them from themselves.

     This short treatise utilizes ideas from Hegel and Marx. From Hegel’s phenomenology we get a description of a “geist”, which could be defined as a type of motivational spirit that defines a particular society and era. Debord here is defining this geist as the Spectacle, the post-World War II capitalist boom in which a deluge of luxury consumer items were made available to the masses. Along with this surge of material goods came advertising, a solidification of the hierarchical nature of society, and the resulting psychological anomie. This is where Marx comes in.

     Marx, in his day, introduced the concept of “worker alienation”, the syndrome where a factory laborer feels no personal connection to the machinery they operate. They spend the majority of their time pulling levers and turning gears on machines they don’t understand to make products they will never afford to buy in order to make money for the bourgeoisie that they will never personally know. The end result is the disappearance of meaning in life. Debord extends and shifts this idea to mid/late capitalist society where the consumer finds identity in what they own. While the existentialists said “you are what you do”, the Situationists said “you are what you own”. If people’s identity is defined by what they buy, then they invest most of their mental energy into the purchase of consumer goods, most of which have no functional or inherent value, and become alienated from themselves. Lacking reflective self-consciousness, anomie and depression become more intense as they get blindly led like rats through the capitalist maze with no exit, being lured along by advertisers in pursuit of fulfilling an elusive desire that they can not even control or comprehend.

     Guy Debord was a radical leftist but he had no sympathy for communism despite his use of Marx in his critique of society. A whole section of this book is about the miseries of the Soviet Union, a corporatist political construct in which state ideology is the spectacle, or geist, to which people collectively adhere. Communism has no room for individual expression because individuality leads to disruptions in the direct line of communication from the dictators of the ruling class to the submissive block of factory and farm workers whose sole purpose is to follow orders, maintaining the functionality of the state machinery. Debord thus concludes that, while both communism and capitalism are inherently miserable and oppressive systems, capitalism is better because it leaves open more possibility for subversion. An individual can buy a printing press or a movie camera and make consumer goods, like newspapers and films, that can be weaponized to destroy the domination of the spectacle, freeing the masses from the illusion.

     These are some of the most interesting ideas in the book. Other topics briefly covered are the spectacle’s evolution throughout history, its relation with time and space, and the need for the proletariat to awaken to their role as subjective actors in the historical process. That last point could use further development and criticism. Debord falls into the same trap that makes so many leftists ineffectual: leftists are good at diagnosing and articulating society’s problems but they fall short when it comes to providing plausible solutions. Society Of the Spectacle is no exception in this regard.

     Guy Debord’s short tract lays out a vision of the spectacle as a motivating but damaging illusion that drains modern society of its passions, vivacity, and meaning. As a philosophical work, it does not argue or assert its argument. Debord instead describes it as he sees it and lets the reader decide on its accuracy and merit. The critique is rudimentary but would later get elaborated on by Jean Baudrillard. If you think Situationism is outdated or inaccurate, try applying the idea of commodity fetishism to the current obsession with smartphones and tablets. The younger generation lives their social lives by creating internet personas on social media platforms; they manufacture their own image and identity and invest so much energy into doing so that the end result is epidemic proportions of depression, loneliness, suicide, mental illness, and social dislocation. Agoraphobia has become normalized. Recent studies have shown that IQ levels have been dropping since the internet became the central focus of our culture. Debord’s thesis may have been rudimentary in its time but it also was prescient, seminal, and prophetic. 

Debord, Guy. Society Of the Spectacle. Black & Red, Detroit: 1983.

 

Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film

Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film

directed by Isaac Cronin and Terrell Seltzer

 

Book Review

Book Review

Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys

by William S. Burroughs

   Grove Press put together this volume of three novels by William S. Burroughs soon after the time he toured America to give readings, a tour that culminated in The Nova Convention festival celebrating his work. For readers who are fascinated by his most famous books, Junky and Naked Lunch, this trio is the obvious next step for exploring the wilderness of this Beat Generation author’s mind. What we get here are The Soft Machine and Nova Express, the first and third books of The Nova Trilogy, and The Wild Boys, another short novel written in a similar style and addressing similar themes. The experience of reading these three novellas together is not just hallucinatory and disorienting but also disturbing, disgusting, sometimes beautiful, and often phantasmagorical. It is a dirty and entrancing nightmare, a subversive attack on the modern human condition that could possibly cause harm to your sanity.

      The title The Soft Machine is a metaphor for the human body. In a sense this first book examines the fluid boundaries of the human flesh as a vehicle for consciousness. It starts in familiar Burroughs territory, the criminal underground of junkies and dealers and the shady cops who pursue them. But the descriptive narrative gets interrupted by his use of the cut-up technique; the story becomes jumbled and confusing and the reader starts to feel lost. There is lots of stuff about movies of men being hung and ejaculating when their necks snap amongst a whole heap of other vile images. When it comes back into sharper focus, the narrator is visiting a shaman in Panama. The shaman performs a ceremony that transports him back in time to an ancient Mayan village to inhabit the body of a field-working slave. The Mayan priests control the society until the narrator sneaks into their temple and alters their calendar so that crops get planted at the wrong time. The priests get killed and then all hell breaks loose. The village is subjected to a deadly heat ray, a giant centipede, green fish boys with purple gills and anything else you might expect to encounter when a calendar gets altered and the crops get planted at the wrong time. Then we are back in the confusion of cut-up territory with lots of gay sex scenes involving Central and South American young men.

     Nova Express is a little more focused at times. There are plenty of cut-ups but the conflict between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police gets explained. There is also a giant corporation that controls the Earth. The Nova Mob are criminal vampire-type spirits that originate in other planets and enter peoples’ bodies at times when their consciousness is disrupted like when taking drugs or having orgasms. The abundant instances when men ejaculate while being hung from a gallows pole is an especially powerful time, making it easier for them to enter our planet. So basically the nameless corporate syndicate manipulates the minds of humans by using film and sound recordings. Notice these are the most significant components of television, the media, and nowadays the internet. Cut-ups are used to disrupt their lines of communication with the people they control. The Nova Mob creates chaos by disrupting these recordings and the Nova Police are trying to stop them. All this happens at a molecular level; recorded images, sounds, and language are shrunk to miniscule size and implanted into human cells where they later emerge in peoples’ mind screens in order to control them. Wait a minute...did William S. Burroughs, in the early 1960s predict digital technology? Isn’t that similar to the way microprocessors and microchips operate? Anyhow, the Nova Police try to apprehend the Nova Mob by administering apomorphine and restraining them with antibiotic handcuffs because the Nova Mob’s plan is to heighten all the social and political conflicts to incite a global nuclear holocaust, the ultimate planetary orgasm. It’s hard to tell what side Burroughs is on; he doesn’t appear to have any particular fondness for any of the characters involved in this mess with the exception of the young Latino boys who are constantly having sex with each other. And Burroughs dedicates more literary space to the subject of anal mucus than any other known author in history. OK take a breath; it’s a lot to take in but its fascinating all the same.

     The Wild Boys is the odd story out. While some cut-ups are used, the narrative is more descriptive and sometimes more clear and easy to follow. Or do you just get more used to the literary technique by the time you get his far? The Wild Boys are a renegade gang of homosexuals in Morocco who indulge in heavy drug use and sexual orgies. They have expanded to a worldwide underground network and criminal cabal. The puritanical and hypocritical American establishment of rich WASPish evangelicals, military commanders, CIA agents, and politicians have set out on a mission to capture and exterminate them. Of course, the Wild Boys are too smart to allow that to happen. If gore and gay sex are things that bother you, this is not a book you should be reading.

     William S. Burroughs may seem incomprehensible if looked at in the wrong light. Knowing the details of his unusual life may be a key to it all. Aside from being a gay heroin addict, he also wrote these books while he was a member of The Church of Scientology. The passages about time travel and the movement from one human body to another are direct references to the times he spent traveling in Central and South America in search of the hallucinogenic drug yage. But most importantly, knowing he was the grandson of William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine and founder of The Burroughs Corporation says a lot about what is going on here. Burroughs had a contentious relationship with his family who rejected his lifestyle. Notice all the references to the bedroom with roses on the wallpaper in the suburbs of St. Louis; that is a direct reference to where he grew up. His corporate syndicate that controls the world could easily be seen as The Burroughs Corporation, a company that played a major role in the mechanization of American society during the Industrial Revolution. The adding machine was one of the first computers but they also invented the time clock and punch cards used in factories as well as being a major contributor to the industrialization of the military during World War II. IBM started as as one of their divisions and eventually splintered off. Burroughs use of non-linear narratives, psychological dissociation through the use of drugs, and randomly inserted elements from his use of the cut-up technique might be read as an attack on his family’s legacy and the role they played in the routinization and control of modern society. It is as if he wanted to tear this cybernetic society to shreds and see what comes next.

      Another way of looking at this writing is that it may be a solopsistic fantasy of a man coming to terms with his drug addiction and homosexuality played out on a universal scale. The vampire spirits of the Nova Mob that control people at a biological level can easily be a metaphor for a heroin habit. The gay sex is a magical act that allows to bodies to inhabit the same space simultaneously while disrupting the boundaries of a rigidly gendered society. Like the poetry of William Blake or the painting of Hieronymus Bosch, his personal vision of cosmic conflict is both outside the understanding of ordinary thought but still close enough that we can see how it all works even if we don’t know what it all means. And all this is expressed by a highly articulate writer who just happened to have one of the most bizarre minds of the 20^th century.

     Whatever the case may be, this is not easy literature to approach. The plot of these books does not really hold the narrative together. Rather it hangs over the text like a blob of slimy eviscerated guts mixed with gallons of sperm, raw sewage, and vomit. Even those who are familiar and experienced with this literature might find these books to be abrasive and bewildering. The cut-ups do wear a little thin at times and the narrative isn’t even really a narrative. It is more like an altered state of consciousness where comprehension fades in and out as if you are watching a film reel that has been double exposed in some places or a movie on tv getting interference from another channel so that you can only understand bits and pieces of what is going on. Sometimes this writing degenerates into the literary equivalent of white noise or the static on the radio between stations.

     Again, this is not easy or even pleasant reading but it is great art. You will not come away from it feeling the same as you did before reading it. Your mind may actually never be the same again. 

Burroughs, William S. Three Novels: The Soft Machine/Nova Express/The Wild Boys. Grove Weidenfeld, New York: 1988. 

 

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

Postmodernism has taken some heat in recent years. Anyone with the capacity to say I don’t know who has taken a close look at it since it first emerged from mid-twentieth century France has considered it, at best, very silly, and some of them have bothered to say as much publicly.

Read the full article on Areo here

Christo, Fearless Maker of Massive Public Artworks, Has Died at 84

Christo, who with his partner Jeanne-Claude used sculpture as a means to dramatically shift people’s understanding of iconic structures and sites, has died at 84. According to a statement released by the artist’s office, Christo died on May 31 of natural causes.

Read the full article on ARTnews here

Propaganda

Propaganda

satirical documentary film by Slavko Martinov (2012)

Book Review

     Death and desire have always been a part of the human experience. Cars and car crashes are something relatively new. The former themes are deeply-rooted psychological currents that manifested in the Romantic paintings of artists like Caspar David Friedrich while the latter cultural phenomenon emerged as modern technology and its modernist and postmodernist artistic expression. In Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture, Ricarda Vidal uses the car crash motif to demonstrate how the two themes are related.

     Vidal uses the theoretical framework of the Futurist avant-garde art movement, as detailed by Tomasso Marinetti in his manifestos, to illustrate the trajectory of society’s fascination with the automobile. Marinetti conceived of the car as the primary element of the technological utopia he envisioned before Word War I. Cars were to be the vehicle that transform the world into a state of rapid acceleration, a plunge into speed that would never end but perpetually keep going faster until everything ended in death. The Apollonian Futurists were obsessed with hygiene and war. The car was to transcend gender, being both a protective metallic womb and an object of penetration. Despite the automobile’s obvious use as a sexual metaphor, the Futurists were anti-sexuality and sought to eradicate gender. They claimed to be making a clean break from the Romantic artistic tradition with its longing for an imaginary mythical past, its celebration of nature, and its preoccupation with death and decay. But the fact that cars crash and auto-fatalities interrupt the process of never-ending acceleration cocked up the humming motors of Futurist cars. Vidal explores the extent of Futurist theory and how it has emerged until recently.

     She begins by comparing Futurist theory to the ideas of Henry Ford and the Fordist vision of future humanity; in Ford’s mind, the mass production of cars would become a means of social engineering. He believed in mass conformity and limits to individuality; every person was to be an appendage to a motorized vehicle. His dream was one of a cybernetic society that moved smoothly and efficiently like a perpetual motion machine that never breaks down, one that can be easily controlled by a small number of men possessed of superior intelligence.

     From there the car becomes a vehicle for individuality and freedom as we see in the proliferation of road trip movies and the writings of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. The car liberates the individual from the restrictions of what Henry Ford desired. As the Beat Generation’s high speed, spiritual experience on wheels and asphalt became more commonplace, so did the inevitable unwanted consequences of of traffic jams, the car crash, and the disappearance of human empathy in the face of tragic disaster. Vidal takes up the two latter themes in her analysis of Andy Warhol, amongst others, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash and its cinematic counterpart in David Cronenberg’s film.

A major hinge in Ricarda Vidal’s critical analysis comes in the chaper on Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt’s landscape portraits in which the ruins in the Romantic paintings of Friedrich get replaced with the inclusion of wrecked cars in somber, mystical settings. A significant portion of Vidal’s analysis exemplifies the flaws and unintended disasters the Futurists could not envision in their time. Ultimately, without her having saying explicitly saying so, she proves that Marinetti and his movement were shortsighted and myopic.

     Another theme introduced in this book is gender via the installation pieces of Sarah Lucas and the films Thelma and Louise and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. In Vidal’s view, the car has also been a tool of liberation for women. As a hermaphroditic object, simultaneously womb-like and phallic, it provides women with an opportunity to control gender roles. The Futurists believed in the end of binary gender distinctions but this did not connote what it does today; they were all about hyper-masculinity and the car for them was a tool for destroying and eliminating weakness and passivity, in other words, traditional roles associated with women. For the Futurists, the transcendence of gender meant an unadulterated purification of masculinity and phallocentric power. As one of my art history professors said, they exaggerated and reinscribed traditional macho Mediterranean values. They didn’t fight against toxic masculinity, they reveled in it and glorified it. So in Vidal’s analysis, when women take control over gender roles, they become more domineering and equal to men by embracing the sadism and violence traditionally associated with the masculine.

     If these ideas are not troublesome enough, you might want to consider what Ricarda Vidal chose not to say about the Futurist art movement. The Futurists were early supporters of fascism and Tomasso Marinetti formed a futurist political party that later merged with Mussolini’s fascisti. Their preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness entailed their disregard for sexuality and dismissal of the orgasm as an obstacle to never-ending speed and acceleration. Their end game was about progressing faster and faster until the ultimate explosion and transformation into pure energy, in other words death. Their visual idioms glorified misogyny, violence, war, and the conquest of nature. Admittedly, Vidal’s book is not a political tract and the aesthetics of this particular art movement can be understood without the obvious fascist political overtones they encapsulate. But fascism was such a big part of Futurist ideology that it seems a little weak of her not to engage with it at all. Maybe she saw it as a distraction to her main thesis or maybe it might have tainted her work in ways that would have guaranteed her cancellation as a cultural critic. If we keep the fascist aesthetics of Futurism in mind though, it adds another disturbing element to her writing; it might imply that the end goal of technological advancement might be fascism, disaster, and dystopia. In terms of her analysis of gender politics, it might lead to the conclusion that a genderless society could also result in fascism or totalitarian social engineering. To be fair, we also have to remember that Vidal’s selection of art mostly prove the Futurists to be wrong on some levels and she never actually says she likes what the Futurists had to say; her tone on that avant-garde art movement is neutral and non-judgmental, neither celebrating it nor discrediting it.

     On a final note, why is this book, along with most books in the Western intellectual tradition so American and Eurocentric in scope? It covers a geographical region that does not extend any further east than Switzerland and no further south than France. Should intellectuals always be stuck in the assumption that the ideas of the Transatlantic represent all the psychological currents throughout the world? Don’t people in China, Thailand, Nigeria, Cuba, or Uruguay have thoughts about cars? Why not include the culture of automobiling in Saudi Arabia, a country that, despite its ban on alcohol, has one of the highest rates of auto-related fatalities in the world, a country where women only recently were given the right to drive, a place where illegal high speed drifting is popular entertainment, and where rich young kids earn bragging rights based on how many sports cars they have destroyed in wrecks? Are France, the U.K., and America really the only places where car crash culture matters?

     Overall, Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is thought-provoking and has a keen sense of where we started with car technology and where we have ended up. Her artistic critique is arbitrary but serves a definite purpose and despite what is left out the ideas hang together nicely. Maybe someday a similar book will emerge about the all-pervasive presence of computers in our lives. The thriving tech-utopianism of the 1990s has died down as we begin to see the dark side of internet technology. Cyber-crime, trolling, election hacking, the easy distribution of child pornography, sweatshop labor in Asian cellphone factories, more non-biodegradable plastics in our garbage dumps from discarded technology and other atrocities may be the car crashes of the future. Can these cultural disasters be another manifestation of the Romantic ruins of art in times past?

Vidal, Ricarda. Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms. Peter Lang, Oxford: 2013. 

The K Foundation and the Destruction of Money as Art

     In 1993, British artist Rachel Whiteread received a nomination for the coveted Turner Prize as administered by the Tate Gallery in London. At the same time, she received a less prestigious nomination for the worst work of public art from The K Foundation. The latter appeared to be a dubious reward but the concept of “dubious” is a subjective one.

     In 1992, the government began demolishing a neighborhood of decrepit Victorian houses and apartment buildings. Rachel Whiteread had an idea for an art project and succeeded in purchasing one of the homes before the demolitions began. At the same time, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the two members of an acid house band called The KLF were wondering what to do with all the royalties they had made from record sales. That was neither here nor there for Whiteread; she was busy making plans to gut the Victorian and fill it with concrete. By the Autumn of 1993, the outer walls and scaffolding used for support during the construction of the sculpture were removed. The new public art object, titled House, was revealed: a white concrete cast of a house that looked like a giant backwards E from one angle while from every other angle it looked like what it was, a giant concrete cast of a house. Some people thought of it as another concrete monstrosity in a country that did not need any more concrete monstrosities. Others thought the work disrespected the history of the neighborhood, a lower class enclave being razed for gentrification. Whiteread, to some, looked like an upper class snob who, without any knowledge or interest in the people who had lived there before, dumped tons of money into a project that would soon be demolished anyway.

     Earlier that year, strange advertisements began appearing in British newspapers. With big letter K’s and slogans like “Divide and Kreate”, The K Foundation started a buzz in the underground art scene amongst other places. Some of the ads announced the release of a new single called “K Cera Cera”. The song would be unavailable in any format until word peace was achieved or so the announcements proclaimed. “Abandon all art now” was another slogan used.

     When the announcements for the four finalists in the 1993 Turner Awards were made, The K Foundation released another bunch of advertisements, this time asking readers to vote on the worst work of public art made during 1993. Not coincidentally, the same four finalists for the Turner Prize were also the four choices on offer for the K Foundation award. Of even more interest was the reward the K Foundation winner would receive. 40,000 British pounds were to be given out, twice the amount of the more prestigious Turner Prize winnings.

     Drummond and Cauty were putting together their first installation piece. Called Money: A Major Body of Cash, it consisted of piles of banknotes nailed to various everyday objects like a boat, a table, and other common things. One piece titled Nailed To a Wall had one million pounds sterling nailed to a wooden board. They intended to sell it for 500,00 pounds, half the value of the cash used to execute it. As The K Foundation explained, the buyer of the art object had a choice; they could either destroy the piece by removing the bills and doubling the value of their initial investment or they could wait and see if the monetary value of the work would fluctuate or even increase in the future. Drummond and Cauty tried unsuccessfully to have their installation pieces shown in the Tate Gallery as well as other major art museums in Europe. Nobody wanted anything to do with it though. The pair tried to make arrangements to tour with it across either Russia or America but no insurance company would underwrite the project. Finally they succeeded in negotiating a chance to show it in Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail but in the end they chose not to.

     When the beginning of 1994 rolled around, announcements were made for the winner of the Turner Award. Rachel Whiteread won for her public sculpture House. At the same time time, the winner of the K Foundation prize was announced. Rachel Whiteread won for her piece House also, dubbed the worst piece of public sculpture in London. When contacted, Whiteread at first refused to accept the prize of 400,000 pounds but it was explained to her that if she did not take it, the money would be destroyed. In the end she decided to accept the prize. She gave one part of the money to a charity and another part of it to a fund that helps young artists without money get started in their careers.

     But The K Foundation’s piece Nailed To a Wall still did not attract any buyers. The two artists were not happy with the idea of showing their work in an Irish jail, so they came up with a better idea. They burned the entire one million pounds in an incinerator on the Scottish island of Jura. The event was filmed by a friend named Gimpo using a handheld Super 8 camera. Not all the money burned though; some of it went up the chimney and blew away in the wind. The hour long film was titled Watch The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid. Drummond and Cauty had finally caught the art establishment’s attention. Several galleries and lecture halls invited them to show their film. They pair toured the U.K., with a suitcase full of ashes leftover from the fire. After playing the movie, most often to small audiences, the floor was opened up for a question and answer session to get the audiences’ reactions.

     Opinions were mixed. Many could not understand why they would destroy a small fortune in that way. The K Foundation could not precisely answer why they did it either. They did say that royalties from The KLM sales gave them enough money to live comfortably and everything else they made was just extra cash they didn’t need. Some people objected to the waste of money that could have been used for a good cause but a counter-argument to that might be that public works of art are just as much a waste of money. How often do members of the general public look at some mediocrity of an abstract sculpture on a street corner or an island road divider and ask why somebody would make such a thing? And couldn’t they have put the money to better use like feeding poor people or paying for children’s education? Does anybody actually benefit from public art, especially when no one likes it or understands it?

     The K Foundation later tried to sell the ashes from the burnt money but nobody wanted it.

     To wind the anti-art event down, The two members of the K Foundation rented a car in Scotland and drove it to the cliffs of Cape Wrath. They signed a contract stating that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty would begin a moratorium and never talk about the burning of their money for 23 years. After signing the document, they locked it in the car and pushed it over the cliff. The event was well covered by the press.

     World peace never happened. Seeing as they had previously announced that such an accomplishment would be the necessary precondition for the next KLF single to be released, they found a way to get through their own loophole. While The K Foundation were busy at work burning cash, they quietly released their next single “K Cera Cera”. But it was put out in as a limited edition without any publicity, solely in Israel and Palestine. Due to breakthroughs in negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the song was meant to encourage further discussions on solving political conflicts without war. Furthermore, the song was not officially done by The KLF since the song was released under the band name The K Foundation Presents the Red Army Choir. Five years later, militants from the Gaza Strip embarked on a long-running campaign of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.

     The K Foundation finally announced that they would never record another song ever again. But soon after that announcement, NME ran an article stating that a new K Foundation track had been released on Help, a CD produced to raise money for charity. The drum ‘n bass track named “The Magnificent” was credited to The Massed Pipes and Drums Of the Children’s Free Revolutionary Volunteer Guards. The single immediately rose high up in the British music charts.

     On Christmas Day of 1995, the K Foundation decided to hold one last happening. They filled up a van with cases of Tennant’s Super, a high-alcohol content beer. They drove to the Waterloo subway station in London with the intention of distributing it to the homeless people who ordinarily camped out there. When they arrived, the scene was deserted. The homeless population had accepted invitations to be fed dinner at charities located near that area.

     That was the final happening of The K Foundation.

References

Dwyer, Simon, editor. Rapid Eye 3. Creation Books, London: 1995.

Home, Stewart. Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis. AK Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco: 1995.

The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid

documentary film (1995)

Book Review

Money by Martin Amis

     Money talks and bullshit walks. We’ve all heard that saying. John Self, the lead charcter in Martin Amis’ novel Money infuses a new meaning into the saying. Self is a British version of the 1980s nouveau riche and his money gets him everything he wants; he literally is a walking pile of bullshit though.

     As a mixture of Ignatius J. Reilly, the Tasmanian Devil, John Belushi, and GG Allin with access to a seemingly unlimited line of credit, John Self tears like a hurricane of filth through the lowest and highest ranks of Manhattan. He is an obese, obscene, gluttonous yob on an alcohol-fueled rampage, consuming cigarettes, junk food, liquor, prostitutes, and pornography in colossal quantities. Unbelievably shallow and infantile, he operates without intellect, motivated by pure instinct and impulse but at times strangely charming despite himself.

     Ironically, the big idiot has a way with words. The narrative of Money is John Self’s own internal monologue and the language is a big part of the its appeal. He describes his misadventures in vivid and precise detail. The descriptions are loaded with Cockney slang, British witticisms, complex word play, ironies, alliteration, double meanings, and inside jokes. Amis plays the presence and absence game well by having John Self wake up with hangovers after a binge-drinking blackouts; the odd injuries, strange objects found in his pockets and hair, lipstick smears on his ear, and what appears to be lubrication in his ass crack signify that Self went through a memorable night but leaves the actual story untold so the reader can piece the elements together for themselves.

     While the mind of John Self may not plunge to incredible depths, the concepts of money and pornography work effectively as psychological reference points for explaining how his mind works. Self has access to vast amounts of cash but money also figures allegorically in the narrative; it is his libido, his life force, his psyche, the polluted energy that permeates his brain, blasting him through New York and London like a firehose filled with poisonous sludge. Money is a tidal wave of sewage that carries John Self as he surfs on it to the fulfillment all his delusional dreams.

Like money, pornography acts as a frame of mental reference too. The exchange of money for meaningless, explicit, transitory, and unsatisfying sensation is a mode of consciousness for Self. It is his method of interpreting the world, his philosophical framework, and his primary motivating impulse. His mind is so saturated with pornography that when he gazes up at a cloud in the sky it looks like a giant pussy to him.

     John Self had an American mother but spent half his childhood in the working class slums of London, raised by a man who runs a low-class pub with cheap liquor, slot machines, and strippers in a hidden back room. One of the strippers is his soon-to-be mother-in-law who shows him a photo spread she did for a pornographic magazine while crying tears of joy because she has so much pride in her accomplishments. Self shows no sign of an emotional reaction as if he just shuts down his mind to avoid the initial turmoil of the situation. There are times when his humanity shows through the cracks in his character armor and eventually we see that he is a profoundly lonely person who is not equipped with the traits or strengths he needs to find himself out of the nightmare of his life.

     John Self finds some success as a director of commercials, flies off to New York City to celebrate, and meets up with a film producer named Fielding Goodney who hires him to direct a feature film with some celebrities who may or may not be well-known. Goodney supplies Self with tons of money as pre-payment and so the perverted rampage around Manhattan begins. Fielding Goodney is John Self’s entry into the lives of upper-class socialites. He is also his nemesis. Meanwhile, Self starts getting phone calls in his hotel room from a man he names Frank the Phone. Frank has an uncanny ability to know all the intimate details of everything John Self does in public; he vows to humiliate and destroy John Self. The phone calls continue all throughout the book.

     But John Self goes through a change. When he reads the film’s script, he realizes the neurotic actors who were hired by Fielding Goodney were incompatible with it and ultimately incompatible with each other. John Self, alert to the fact that the movie production is a train wreck waiting to happen, returns to London and hires a writer named Martin Amis to rewrite the script. At the same time, Self is reading Orwell’s Animal Farm because an attractive female acquaintance named Martina lent it to him in Manhattan. Self does not seem to get the deeper meaning of the novelette and instead gets preoccupied with the talking pigs that run the farm. It is not hard to understand why, but Self unconsciously identifies with the pigs and has a bit of an awakening. He does not take control of a farm but he, the pig, does begin to take control of his life. His infatuation with Martina motivates him to refine his tastes, ease up on the drinking, make a pitiful attempt at exercising, and polish up his manners. His better self starts to emerge. Martina may not be in love with him, she does start to have feelings of affection for him.

     He also takes control of the movie production by hiring Martin Amis. They work together so that the plot makes more sense and the characters align more closely to the personalities of the actors meant to play them. John Self stops acting like an uncontrollable oaf and starts behaving like a director. Contrary to Fielding Goodney’s ulterior motives, Self takes charge of the movie and his own life as well. He becomes a lay psychologist by helping the actors to overcome their anxieties and insecurities and then they start to feel they can not continue. For a brief moment we see that Self has the potential to at least be an ordinary human being when given the chance.

     Martin Amis is not an overbearingly pedantic author; he does not try to preach or make a moral lesson the center of a story. But one lesson to be learned, expressed with subtlety, is that reading makes people more complete as human beings. John Self becomes more self aware and begins to grow up, first when he reads the original script for his film and second when Martina gives him books by George Orwell to read. As the novel progresses, Self continues to read and finds comfort in books and libraries when he later hits rock bottom. Reading saves his life. While this theme of the importance of books is not center stage in the plot, Amis does show us how they begin to replace pornography as Self’s intellectual frame of reference.

     At this point, the novel starts to take on all the cliches and trappings of a romantic comedy or the zero-to-hero transformative plot so abundantly common in Hollywood movies. But Self has not really changed all that much yet and events take a turn for the worse.

     But aren’t the names Martina and Martin A. (Amis) just a little too similar to be coincidental? The two characters are like the axis around which John Self’s changes revolve. Take a step outside the narrative for a minute. While John Self is the center of the cyclone, the film script has Oedipal parallels to his own family life. The author Martin Amis makes himself a character in the novel, the one who gets hired to rewrite the script as the author Martin Amis writes the novel. There is a metanarrative within a metanarrative. Money is a frame within a frame within a frame within…well, you can just say the number of frames are somewhere between four and infinity. By now the metanarrative is a postmodernist cliché and one that is sadly accredited to postmodernism itself, hence all the references to Shakespeare throughout the story. Amis can get away with this now since Money was written about forty years ago before the literary convention became a redundant distraction for writers who wanted to show how cool they were. Money really stand out though because he inserts so many frames into the narrative and still makes the story a coherent whole; the shifting frames of reference are handled effectively without causing any confusion or disruptions in the narrative flow.

     By following the logic of the metanarrative, we get a passage where the character Martin Amis is explaining to John Self how an author causes a fictional character to feel pain in order to indicate that something is wrong. Simultaneously John Self’s toothache begins to hurt him, just as it does throughout the whole book. Therefore, Martin Amis the character draws attention to Martin Amis the author which draws attention to the novel as a work of fiction, a framework inserted into reality but a framework that reveals truths about the reality in which it exists. We are also reminded that John Self is a fictional character but also a fictional character that came from Martin Amis’s mind, an externalization of an idea the author feels he needs to address. The metanarrative not only goes inwards, into the novel, but expands outside the framework of the novel itself and into the metanarratives that exist beyond the covers of the book.

     So a lot can be said about John Self. Is he really the worst character in the story? Fielding Goodney may be more evil. He arbitrarily creates the whole situation. He is the wannabe puppet master, the wizard behind the curtain, the one who adds the most fuel to John Self’s fire. He encourages and enables John Self to run wild so he can shame and humiliate him. Het sets him up to tear him down. John Self is a rat, albeit a bloated and a buffoonish one, in Goodney’s maze. But if Goodney is a puppet master he is one that can not control his puppet. John Self at least makes a feeble attempt to improve his life and become a better person; Fielding Goodney makes no attempt at redemption whatsoever. Is Fielding a metaphor for an author? If so, what does that say about the characters an author creates?

     But what does Money mean to us as readers? Many people say that John Self is so repulsive that they do not understand why anybody would want to read this book. If John Self were a run-of-the-mill man, so bland he would never need to redeem himself, would there be any point in reading about him? Why you would want to read Money is a question you have to answer for yourself. The fact that you may have asked that question to begin with shows that the novel has forced you to question the relationship between the reader and what they read. Underneath all the layers of filth this book has to offer, may it is not about money after all. Maybe your own money is not your money in Amis’s sense of the word; maybe your money is what you read. Maybe you read for the same reason Self looks at pornography; maybe you enjoy watching him degrade himself for money as a form of public spectacle so you can feel superior to him. Maybe you get your voyeuristic thrills by reading about characters who humiliate themselves with their self-defeating behavior for your pleasure. Maybe John Self is a reflection of a part of your Self and you are not so much better than him after all.

Amis, Martin. Money. Penguin Books, New York: 2010.