Sources of Tedium

In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn't seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for the. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it's high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever--by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn't give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet's kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of "words, words, words," of "Denmark's a prison."
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

I was reminded of Humboldt's Gift by languagehat's post and decided to finally read it. I had picked it up for the first time at some tender young age when I thought reading every book mentioned in some other book was a good way to improve myself (in this case, naturally, I got bored after ten pages and quit). Surprisingly enough, the passing of a decade has not made the book less boring, although I can now follow Humboldt's financial misadventures with a sick kind of fascination.

But boredom isn't the issue. Lots of great books are boring, lots of bad ones utterly captivating. In this case, the always satisfying and occasionally marvelous lucidity of Bellow's prose style largely makes up for the tedium. The real problem with Humboldt's Gift is that it is immensely frustrating in a way only a novel of its time and place can be. The book hits every single one of the clichés of 1960s New York Jewish intellectual literature, whose most enduring representative ended up being Woody Allen. The protagonist is, naturally enough, a Jewish intellectual with big ideas and a deep investment in some fad movement or other; he is unable to suppress his learned wisecracking even as he's slumming it with the Mob; he's got a boyhood home back in the unimaginably distant wilds of Coney Island, of which he is perpetually vaguely embarrassed and proud; he's got an ex-wife who is described in no uncertain terms as a shrewish, money-grubbing bitch who's out to get him; he's got a roving, lecherous eye for women half his age. (The book is no less an example of New York Jewish literature for taking place mainly in Chicago.)

It is hard to believe the seriousness with which this book takes all of these aspects of Charlie Citrine's character, as if they were the author's profoundly original invention. Worst of all, however, are the aspects of the book that deal with his relationships with women. Bellow's female characters are all manipulative sluts or conniving Lucrezia Borgias or risible old maids or pert-assed pretend academics--in short, anything but people with real personalities and emotions beyond Citrine's drooling gaze. Bellow appears to expect us to be very interested in the details of Citrine's relationship with his ex-wife, despite the fact that there is nothing whatsoever even mildly interesting or redeeming about the entire plotline involving her. In fact, there is only a single female character that is passably dynamic or complex (Kathleen), and she gets little screen time. The big arc of the end of the book, Citrine's travels with Renata, is a kind of bizarre fever dream apparently dreamt up by someone who has never had a conversation with a woman outside of a brothel. Could it be that that's the whole point, that Citrine's problems come from his narcissism and his inability to treat people as ends rather than means? Maybe, but if so the book never quite breaks Citrine out of his obliviousness. Trying to divine authorial intent in such a case is not an especially useful project; as a reader, I can't help feeling irritated regardless. (Worse yet, the novel was published in 1973, which makes it hard to make allowances for the prejudices of a less enlightened time.)

At the same time, the book is filled with brilliant passages and quips about the failures of intellectuals, about boredom, about what it would mean to live an authentic intellectual life. They're worked in subtly: sometimes they begin in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes they take up several pages at a time. It is these remarks that keep the reader slogging through the book, and the way they seem to be worked into the larger narrative redeems it at least a little. For the inability to be a real intellectual occupying a privileged space of incorruptible isolation is really the main theme of the book, as far as I can tell, and the point is made convincingly. It's hard for me to believe that Saul Bellow takes anthroposophy as seriously as his protagonist takes it, and the inevitable ironic distance that results makes Citrine even more pathetic (and bathetic) and darkly comical than he seems at first. His phenomenological musings feed into his narcissism, and his narcissism leads him to obsess even more about his transcendent, sovereign soul. When all this is placed unsympathetically in the context of Citrine's endless financial and interpersonal problems, the book begins to look positively Nietzschean in the way it discredits his "groping towards redemption" (as the back cover blandly puts it).

Humboldt's Gift is not a book that is likely to change anyone's life in 2010. The Suck Fairy and her assistant, the Sexism Fairy, have done their work well, and many of Bellow's witticisms have aged particularly poorly. (Paul Goodman, alas, is no longer a name anyone would recognize off-hand.) But the experience still seems worthwhile, if only because of the reflections on boredom it encourages us to entertain, both as readers and as bored people. It's just too bad that this goal carries so much dross with it.

Usable Auras

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography ... Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form. 

- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Why is this essay so frequently referenced today? One explanation is the durable and wide-ranging cachet Benjamin has long possessed among humanities scholars. He was a far more tragic and enigmatic figure than any of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, with neither the Mandarin self-assurance of Adorno nor the strict social-scientism of Pollock. His interests were engagingly obscure, and his forays into Jewish mysticism contributed to the still noticeable mystique that surrounded his scholarly persona. His aphoristic style often made him seem like more of an esoteric sovereign  Nietzschean than he really was. Is it all that surprising, then, that this essay--so responsive to contemporary anxieties about media, and yet so unmistakably Benjaminian--has benefited from his, well, aura?

And yet the essay itself is not especially well-argued, something that is easily missed when one focuses on Benjamin's hypnotically erudite style. Why should 1900 be chosen as a cut-off point for the disappearance of the aura, when Benjamin himself presents many other candidates for this role? What makes the form of alienation Benjamin sees as peculiar to film all that different from, say, the various theatrical experiments that became popular in the 1700s? (An eighteenth-century audience certainly had no qualms about playing the critic during a performance, and whatever cultic value their plays possessed would quickly dissipate under the barrage of theater-criticism that accompanied every new play.) Why should we accept his premise that art would necessarily retain its magical significance after humanity emerged from the Stone Age? In fact, why isn't there any attention to context in his formulation at all?

These are serious problems, and they are especially unfortunate because of the coloring they have given to our contemporary debates about the transformative power of media. Supporters and opponents of digitization alike have taken for granted that what is at stake is the survival of some kind of aura, usually metonymized as "the smell of old books." It is especially interesting to observe what has happened to Benjamin's argument as it has been adapted to the present context: the printed book, one of the paradigmatic instances of mechanical reproduction, has been retroactively awarded an aura in order to juxtapose it to the supposedly interchangeable digital text. (Vinyl records, which Benjamin would no doubt consider equally reproducible, have experienced a similar rehabilitation.)

I don't think this retroactive aura constitutes decisive evidence that all Benjaminian approaches to media are wrong, but I do think it points us to a possible revision of his approach. The aura isn't something that lives in a work of art created in a particular way, nor is it something that disappears when creation is mediated by technology. Rather, the aura is a rhetorical function, an attribute that attaches to an art-object when the authenticity of its form becomes a matter of debate. It can emerge when a newer form confronts an older one--in the case of print or Plato on writing, for instance---but also in other configurations. (The contemporary mass-market paperback is only a little older than the e-text, although it has been vastly more popular.) And this is not "mere rhetoric": as vinyl records show, the aura as a rhetorical function can in fact be decisive for determining the fate of a media technology.

If we apply this to "Work of Art" itself, we can see exactly this process at work. Benjamin isn't merely recognizing the existence (or non-existence) of the aura; he's embedding it within a broader argument about the political implications of media technologies. (Like most Frankfurt School texts, his essay is not about what it's about so much as it's about the political dimensions of mass culture.) As a rhetorical function, the aura is dependent on its strategic context of use, so much so that it would lose all meaning if it were removed from it. In other words, we've been reading the piece wrong for ages. We should've been reading the epilogue first.

Khrushchev and the Art of the Possible

We have so little practice at this, thought Academician Nemchinov, watching from the back of the seminar room with his eyes lidded, his arms folded comfortably over his belly. Soviet scientists had learned to be good at telling when the party line in their subject was about to change, like birds who deduce from a particular subtle vibration that the firm earth is firm no longer, and take flight just before the earthquake. But until recently they had not often had to exercise the skill of deciding for themselves whether it was time for a change of mind. A peculiar tension was in the room now, the tension of ambiguity in what had been one of the most warily docile of the sciences. It was not clear, yet, who was going to win the present argument; therefore, not clear where the party of safety was going to be.

The people he had brought together were a mixture: technologists intoxicated by the new power of electronic computers, cyberneticians gripped by the fashionable vision of the planned economy as a complex control system, economists tired of their subject resembling theology more than it did science. Leonid Vitalevich's specific mathematical ideas would not be what mattered most to them. What they had in common, or rather what they ought to have in common, if they could persuade themselves it was possible, was the need for the plug of dead thought to be removed that was preventing all their various projects alike from developing. He himself had a nice practical plan: he wanted to get software written, in the next four or five years, which would run the economy better than the blundering, improvising, suboptimal decisions of human planners.
- Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

It's clear why retrofuturism is so popular on the Internet nowadays. Sitting in front of our brightly glowing rectangles, we feel, more than any previous generation, that we are the fulfillment of the past's aspirations for the future. How justified this is is difficult to tell. With every advance toward complete and seamless global interconnectedness, it seems, we give up another of our past dreams: flying cars flitted away long ago, and we are only now beginning to realize that manned space travel and interplanetary colonization are doomed projects. Historians have been obsessed with the history of history for a long time--but what is coming into focus today is the urgent need to write histories of the future. Retrofuturism, far from being a quirky BoingBoing-driven fad, contains the seeds of a major intellectual project. (Steampunk, I suspect, does too, but that is a subject for another post.)

If I am right about this project's potential, then Francis Spufford's Red Plenty will almost certainly be part of its canon. The book is a strange one, in more ways than one: it is a history that's not quite a history, a historical novel that's not quite a novel, an original and penetrating book about Soviet history written by a man who has no archival experience or knowledge of Russian.  Its goal, simply stated, is to excavate the element of computerized utopianism at the heart of the post-Stalinist reform project. "Excavate" has become a coin that has lost its imprinting through overuse by lazy historians, but in this case the metaphor is especially apt. Soviet history has had so much garbage poured on it over the decades by all the participants in its writing--garbage about totalitarianism, about dissidents, about stagnation, about perestroika, about socialism--that it takes an excavator to dig down to its meaning.

In particular, we have become so accustomed to seeing the Soviet economy as irrepressibly stagnant, incapable of reform, and riddled with corruption that we miss its successes, most notably the detail that anchors Spufford's narrative: the fact that even by pessimistic post-Soviet estimates it was growing faster than any other economy in the world (except, possibly, Japan) at the beginning of Khrushchev's reign. At roughly the same time, the proportion of Soviets working in scientific fields substantially exceeded that of any other country. By 1967 there were 3 million scientists and scientific workers in the USSR, a figure that had more than doubled in five years. Small wonder, then, that it was possible for Soviet writers to claim with a straight face that the "scientistic civilization" characteristic of socialist countries would eventually require the entire population to engage in scientific work!

Of course, a country growing so rapidly in economic and intellectual self-confidence could not but prove a breeding ground for utopias. Science fiction enjoyed an unparalleled degree of popularity, and the wacky, megalomaniacal projects typical of Soviet administrative practice steadily took on a science-fictional aspect. Spufford focuses on the central element of the reforms of the '50s and '60s: the cyberneticization of the planned economy and its transformation into an ideal machine for the manufacture of human happiness. It is clear from the bibliography that, despite not knowing the language, he has done his homework thoroughly; the list represents more or less the state of the field in 2010, and a grad student who used it as a field reading list would not be behind his peers. This means that Spufford's story, as he tells it, is both eminently plausible and eminently sensitive to the nuances of Soviet life. His few excursions into tired evil-bureaucrats-poor-oppressed-geneticists territory do not detract from the rest of the text--and the vignette about the modus operandi of a Soviet tolkach is, as far as I know, unequalled in any popular book about the Soviet Union.

The reform, of course, did not succeed, and Spufford does full justice to the banal but still heartwrenching sadness of that failure. It should have been obvious, in the perfect vision of hindsight, that the termites were already in the wood, that the growth rates could not be sustained and there would never be enough money for the science. But failed dreams are the very stuff of retrofuturism, and in this context it is the failure that makes them interesting. The death of Soviet economic reforms was not just a failure for the Soviet Union; it was a defeat for the whole idea that the economy was a mathematically-accessible system that could be tuned to help humans rather than crippling them. (We felt a bitter and equally sobering reverberation of that defeat two years ago, when the even more computerized models worked out by Wall Street whiz-kids suffered a similar fate.) By the 1970s, even Brezhnev was more or less encouraging his people to supplement their income by informal means, which in the context of the Soviet economic system was an official endorsement of theft. The economy was no longer a productive machine.

Retrofuturism, especially if it's pursued with the same thoroughness that Spufford gives to it here, has the potential to revitalize the reading of history. We're finding it increasingly difficult to look back to the past in search of models or parallels; even routine appeals to the fall of the Roman Empire are beginning to look strained. If history has anything to offer us at this point, it's a perspective on how to look forward, how to sift apart different flavors of the impossible and make the future coherent. The Soviet experience ought to teach us the value of that kind of practice.