A monkey ghost, from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, opens with a still portrait: a long mid-shot of a water buffalo tied to a tree somewhere in the Thai countryside. Shot in twilight, the dark greens of the jungle blend seamlessly with the brown of the buffalo’s hide. While the opening shot is not literally a still, it has far more in common with a photograph than a film clip: the deliberate, compositional use of color and light; the careful, static position of the buffalo on the right side of the frame. After a few minutes, the buffalo pulls on its lead and breaks loose, wandering into the jungle. The camera fixes on a particular patch of the jungle, as the buffalo wanders into the frame. Eventually, the buffalo’s owner comes to collect the buffalo and coaxes it back into the field. The actors in the minor drama leave the frame, but the camera remains. In the upper left, a mysterious silhouette gradually appears, as if it were an object in a dark room that only gets noticed once one’s eyes adjust to the dark. The silhouette is anthropoid but not human; it is the same color, in the low light, as the water buffalo, but with glowing red eyes that resemble a photographic red-eye effect. Is it a trick of the eyes? Had it always been there, camouflaged by the foliage? Were we too distracted by the water buffalo to notice? Only when enough time has passed for the viewers to begin to fathom the image do the credits finally drop.

Uncle Boonmee, strangely enough for a film, is more concerned with still photography than narrative. The redeye of the silhouette (which we later find out is a monkey ghost) is the first in a series of references to photography. Uncle Boonmee’s son, a photography hobbyist, first discovers the monkey ghosts as a blur in the corner of a photograph he develops. Not only does that scene explicitly reference photography, but it is also a direct quotation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a film similarly concerned with photography, where the protagonist discovers a body in one of his photographs in the exact same fashion. An odd section in the middle of the film is told only through a series of still photographs of members of the Thai military posing with a captured monkey ghost (not some CGI fantasia, but a man in a monkey suit). And while Uncle Boonmee is filled with surreal, fantastic imagery created through special effects, all of these effects look low-tech. The distorted reflection of a woman in a pond is achieved through editing that would have been familiar to Lang or Eisenberg. The ethereal appearance of the ghost of Uncle Boonmee’s dead wife seems to have been achieved through the old photography trick of double exposure. There are ghosts everywhere you look in Uncle Boonmee, and they are not filmed but photographed. The photograph becomes a tool to bring the dead to life.

This formula inverts Roland Barthes’ interpretation of the photograph. For Barthes, the photograph condemned even the image of the living to a static past:

For the photograph’s immobility is the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object is real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value, but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Barthes compares the photograph—in its flatness, its lack of animation, its temporal fixity and yet, its verisimilitude—to a corpse. The corpse is a true testament to life, but unmistakably of life that has now passed; the link between the corpse and the living person is illusory, although unmistakably profound for those who knew him. Barthes is writing, significantly, about a photograph of his late mother, about someone living and real who has passed on.

Weerasethakul, on the other hand, by photographing ghosts, is referencing another tradition: spirit photography. It was a relatively common practice in the 1860s and ’70s (concurrent with the heyday of the Spiritualist movement) to use the technique of multiple exposure to create the illusion of a dead relative posing with a family, or of ghosts or of “ectoplasm,” the substance of spirit. Many of these photographers were outright frauds. The originator of the practice, William Mumler, was a complete charlatan, whose career ended in a spectacular fraud trial that included such high profile figures as P.T. Barnum testifying against him. Typically, histories of photography have portrayed this period as a tragedy that disgraced the tradition of photography and have dismissed all spirit photographs as nothing more than simple hoaxes.

This rejection of spirit photography is unfortunate, for while many of the spirit photographers were con-men, others had far more ambiguous intentions. Some were plainly artists who used the unique verification ability of photography that Barthes identifies to create photographs that are no less uncanny for being clearly manipulated. More intriguingly, some of these photographers were committed spiritualists who believed that they were capturing ectoplasm or thought or spirit on film, or, at the very least, that although a particular photograph might have been a fraud, it was a fraud that reflected the truth of a spirit world. Even the poor mourners who sat for Mumler must have been slightly complicit in their own fraud: to believe that the fuzzy, anthropoid outlines that stood next to them in the frame were the ghosts of their dead relatives required an exceptional leap of faith. Spirit photographers and their subjects must have occupied an intermediate position between fraud and true belief: they had to have known, on some level, that the photos were illusions, but they believed that the photos were illusions that represented the truth—that is, that the dead live on.

By assuming the position of spirit photographer, Weerasethakul transcends the dichotomy between representation and represented, between past and present, and between real and illusion that Barthes sets up in his interpretation of the phenomenon of the photograph. The “real” objects represented in Uncle Boonmee are no more real in the film than the ghosts and spirits, since both comfortably coexist on film. As a result, reality loses the priority and eternal quality that Barthes describes. The ghosts of the past are as tangible to us as the people of the present; they are all part of an ever-present moment, or more precisely, of a unity that transcends time. In Uncle Boonmee, the dead literally sit down to dine with the living: Boonmee’s son (who became a monkey ghost) and Boonmee’s dead wife do not haunt the present as unholy intrusions or frauds, but readily join in the quotidian life of Boonmee’s convalescence. Similarly, Uncle Boonmee’s Past Lives does not need to identify which lives are past—because none of them is properly past.
To be fair to Barthes, he was quite aware that his interpretation of the photograph was limited to the West. Barthes’ anxiety over the copy, the dichotomy he draws between art and the real, is easily traced back to Plato’s anxieties over sophistry. But this dichotomy is not Weerasethakul’s. Uncle Boonmee is a deeply Buddhist film, and the confusion of the real and the unreal is reflective of Buddhist ontology. The Buddha observed that all phenomena in the conceivable, sensible world (in Buddhist terminology, the world of samsara) are subject to decay and emerges from another phenomenon. Nothing tangible lasts and everything is ultimately the product of something else, or defined with respect to something else. From that basic observation, the Buddha concluded that nothing has an eternal, unchangeable essence, and that all conceptions and perceptions are ultimately relative. The Chinese Huayan school used the metaphor of Indra’s net to illustrate this principle:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

If you examine any single node of Indra’s net, there is no specific content or essence to the jewel: it only reflects every other jewel. The “illusion” of the images of the other jewels constitute the perceived essence of the jewel. Similarly, the Buddhists argue, what we perceive to be the essence of phenomena is only the product of conceptions and perceptions that come from outside that phenomena. Even our own consciousness is shaped only by what we perceive; we think in terms of what we sense and what we know, there is no transcendental logos. In Uncle Boonmee, photography is Indra’s net, a metaphor that serves to illustrate this principle. By using the unique verification abilities of photography to make the unreal real, Weerasethakul demonstrates the relativity and subjectivity of perceived reality. If the ghosts we see in Uncle Boonmee look as real to us as the living, if all reality is composed of manipulable images, it is difficult to believe that we have the capacity to discern an ultimate, non-contextual reality in our ordinary life. In fact, it becomes more likely that the opposite is true: that all we know to be real is actually artifice.

In the final fifteen minutes of Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul manages to extend his radical interpretation of photography even to the internet. Critical views of the internet (nicely summarized in this essay by Adam Gopnik) tend to be analogous to the dichotomies of photography criticism: either the internet poses a threat to natural human functioning (i.e. it is an unnatural way of being that threatens and contaminates) or it positively fulfills human potential (i.e. it completes the real, it is the “this-has-been” of society, the curious paradox of “the global village”). But just as he does with photography, Weerasethakul prefers to resolve the contradiction. In a scene early in the film, Uncle Boonmee tries to convince his sister-in-law to take over the family farm once he dies. She counters that she could never live in the country: she’s a big city girl, she’d miss Bangkok too much. Uncle Boonmee replies, “There’s a monastery fifteen minutes from here, go there to meditate and you can transport yourself to anywhere in the world that you’d like to visit.”

Initially, after a scene full of dead relatives and monkey ghosts, it seems that Boonmee means this remark sincerely. Later in the film, it seems that Uncle Boonmee’s comment was probably tongue-in-cheek: Boonmee’s nephew, who joins the monastery, comments on how all the monks are constantly on the internet, skyping and chatting with people across the globe. But in the final fifteen minutes, Uncle Boonmee suggests that both possibilities are true. Boonmee’s sister-in-law, nephew and niece sit on the bed of a hotel, watching TV. As they are sitting down, exact doubles of them get off the bed, walk to the hotel bar, and sit for dinner. The scene seems to be a very blunt metaphor for telepresence: the screen of television, and modern technology as a whole, allows the characters to be in two places at once. But the fantastic imagery also suggests the saintly quality of bilocation: an enlightened man who understands the illusion of the world sees no contradiction in being in two places at once. The possibility offered by technology is identical to the transcendent result of Buddhist contemplation.

In Uncle Boonmee, modern technologies neither pose a threat to a stable reality nor do they advance a reality in the state of becoming. This new world created by screens is one of specters, marked by a tangible unreality. In past ages, the new modes of existence offered by the internet seemed beyond the limits of ordinary human beings; the new technologies do not adjust our notions of reality, but instead confront and subvert them. As our sense of stable reality is rapidly upset, we are freed to embrace a world that has become superhuman and fantastic. The difficulty of coming to terms with a strange, new world is not new. Instead, the challenge posed to us by the internet is the eternal, familiar challenge of an existence that is perpetually in flux and of a universe of a complexity that will always far exceed our ability to comprehend. The great beauty of Uncle Boonmee is the recognition that the questions that face us today are the questions that has always been before us: if nothing lasts, how we can best live while we remain, and how we can best leave when we must.

The conflict between the two parties is often portrayed as an Orwellian struggle to dominate the language. Today’s most important political strategists are message gurus, and the most successful speeches are those which change the language of a debate. George W. Bush’s introduction in September 2001 of the “War on Terror” set the terms for eight years of global political debate. Major news networks endorsed the terminology, leading to an undocumented but undeniably powerful shift in popular geopolitical perceptions. The same can be said for “homeland security.” Reagan’s “welfare queen” had strongly affected perceptions of the social safety net, and Nixon’s “war on drugs” set the stage for a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate over three decades.

As little as ten years ago, at the inception of the War on Terror, clear channels existed for promoting new vocabulary. A handful of media outlets were still responsible for a large share of the national political conversation. One primetime commercial (like LBJ’s famous “Daisy” ad, aired only once) could strongly influence the tenor of a campaign.

But it’s no secret that cable news, online media, and social networking have changed the way political affairs filter into public consciousness. Three channels of evening news and a handful of national newspapers no longer supply the preponderance of civic knowledge. Anderson Cooper is no Walter Cronkite or even Peter Jennings. Four times more people listened to Joe Buck and Troy Aikman announce the Super Bowl this year than heard Obama deliver the State of the Union. Niche outlets and publications have cultivated ideological communities which often supercede major news networks in providing news to their members. Some of these outlets have become influential players in their own right, like DailyKos or Hot Air; countless others retain small but devout followings. A few giants still stand out from the crowd, but according to Alexa only three news websites (BBC, CNN, and the New York Times) are among the 100 top visited sites on the web, and upstart sites are rapidly gaining ground. In January, Huffington Post had 28 million unique viewers, compared to the Times‘ 30 million. Slate, Salon, and the Daily Beast all have more traffic than the Economist, the Atlantic, and Newsweek, with Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos close behind.

Orwell’s dystopia assumed a radical centralization of media. Big Brother’s media monopoly usurped the people’s ability to make informed decisions. But isn’t this exactly the opposite of what has happened? We information consumers may not be free of media conglomerates, but as a rule, the number and diversity of political news sources has grown rapidly. In addition to the cable networks and online newspapers there are blogs, independent political communities, and online social networks. Liberating, to be sure. But our information society hasn’t destroyed Orwell’s fear so much as reversed it.

“ObamaCare,” by now a near universal moniker for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is exactly the sort of pejorative label one might expect to find shackled to legislation by a stalwart political opponent. So who introduced and popularized the term? We might suspect John McCain during the presidential campaign, or the Republican leadership during the heat of the debate.

In fact the term’s origins are murky, but the earliest online media instance seems to be an April 2008 article in the Salt Lake Tribune by Wayne Madsen, a liberal and a supporter of the proposed reforms. From there it gradually percolated throughout the blogosphere, finally achieving significant search traffic in the summer of 2009, as Tea Party protests sprang up across the country (and at almost the precise moment that “death panels” entered the common vernacular). Around the same time, major newspapers began publishing op-eds discussing “ObamaCare.” These op-eds tended to use the term disparagingly; it was a favorite keyword in the Wall Street Journal, whose website contains more than twenty times more instances of the word than the New York Times‘.

But the pejorative use did not last forever. While some liberals remain uncomfortable with the term, it’s not uncommon now to read popular progressive bloggers writing casually and unreservedly about ObamaCare. No single author or source appears to have been responsible for the shift—some writers have accepted the term as neutral, others have not.

How can we explain this seemingly spontaneous eruption of new vocabulary? Some commentators have blamed the organizers of the Tea Party, especially Sarah Palin. Her acolytes, they say, appropriate her often bewilderingly creative coinages. To some extent it is true that Palin’s media machine engenders the vituperation of the Tea Party masses. But even the term “death panel,” which originated in a Facebook post by Palin, gained traction primarily via a blog post on Talking Points Memo. It’s impossible to say whether the term would have attained widespread use without that catalyst. But less than three million Facebook users currently “like” Palin’s page. How many actually read each of her posts? By comparison, Huffington Post’s monthly readership is near thirty million. Could one post from Palin have transformed political vocabulary without extensive help from independent online communities?

I doubt it. Palin’s interviews and online posts are chalk full of potentially inflammatory terms. After the State of the Union address she devoted an entire Facebook post to criticizing Obama’s “Sputnik moment” in favor of a private sector mission she nicknamed “Spudnut” after a family-owned coffee shop chain. Yet only two of the top ten Google results for “spudnut” have to do with Palin. The other eight direct to coffee shops. In the last two weeks Palin has also tried to brand Obama’s speech (“Winning the Future”) as the WTF speech, which has also failed. Her one SOTU barb which did win significant airtime—”blood libel”—has done her no favors.

Palin’s rhetorical efforts exemplify the changing balance of linguistic power. Politicians and media moguls are gradually losing their unilateral ability to control political language. Certainly they, like Palin, can spout incendiary phrases until someone notices. In Palin’s case, because she captivates liberal and conservative pundits alike, that approach at least occasionally yields her desired results. But for the most part the public tail is now wagging the media dog.

Despite incessant lamentations to the contrary, American political culture is not inherently more populist or vitriolic than in decades past. Tea Party rallies are no Kent State. It is, however, less centralized. Presidential addresses reach a much smaller fraction of the population. Local news programs spend less time covering political events. Meanwhile, independent blogs and upstart media outlets compete to establish linguistic norms, knowing how much public perception depends on terminology. In a sense this new evolutionary process is more organic, depending more on public participation and less on private rhetorical objectives.

It is also more sensationalistic. For example, consider the popular controversy over the so-called “millionaire tax bracket.” Last September, hoping to assuage public concerns over the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, House Democratic leaders considered instituting a tax bracket that would apply to families with income in excess of a million dollars. As some commentators noted at the time, the term “millionaire” traditionally referred to assets, not income. That is, one becomes a millionaire by accumulating a million dollars in assets, not by earning a million within a single year. The Democratic tax proposal subtly shifted to the income-based definition, resulting in a tax bracket that would apply only to much wealthier taxpayers.

No organized effort or communications campaign concocted this terminological shift. Bloggers, then news media, then finally politicians began referring to the “millionaire tax bracket” almost by accident. It’s clear enough that the term is more sensational than alternatives—say, “tax bracket for annual income in excess of a million dollars”—and is an obvious choice for any writer or editor. There can be no surprise that its use would spread organically through the world of political commentary and debate. Yet its adoption led to a gap between the proposal’s content and its public perception. Might the same linguistic change have occurred without the new media infrastructure? I can’t say for sure, but at the very least the misperception would have been more easily addressed.

What’s most frightening about Newspeak isn’t Big Brother’s ability to manipulate citizens’ thoughts but the more fundamental observation that (as Wittgenstein had written thirty years before) the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Politically speaking, this means that the nature of our civic institutions depends to some extent on what terms are available to describe them. If our information society no longer needs to fear invidious authoritarian forces co-opting our vocabulary, we should certainly be glad. At the same time, the distributed media and the internet are mechanisms for ever-faster mutation of political language. Would-be autocrats and demagogues can no longer predict and control the consequences of these mutations—but neither can we.

Syl Johnson. Photo by Masahiro Sumori.

On a Friday night in December, I joined a sold-out crowd at Southpaw in Brooklyn to see the soul musician Syl Johnson. Johnson had recently released a comprehensive box set which was panned by music writer Douglas Wolk in his review on Pitchfork Media, creating a minor controversy. In the soul and “cratedigging” hip-hop communities, there was a palpable shock. Numero Group, the record label which released the box set, is easily the best out of the handful of labels dedicated to finding and releasing forgotten quality soul. Syl Johnson is no slouch himself; over his long career, he has written and sung a number of incredible songs (the hit version of “Take Me to the River,” “Sock It to Me,” “Different Strokes,” “Is It Because I’m Black?” “Any Way the Wind Blows”). However, there really should have been no surprise that Wolk on one side and such luminaries as the RZA on the other would come to such different conclusions. For this discrepancy was indicative of a greater gap, not only between two different aesthetics, but between two different histories, and two different worlds.

The show itself was truly amazing. Syl was remarkably spry and unsettlingly blue for a seventy-four year old man, a consummate performer despite his age. Remarkable versatile, he barrelled through R&B stompers and then slowed down to carefully enunciate each note, Al Green-style, in his ballads. He was so at ease performing that he was able to play rhythm guitar while singing, a relatively rare ability among soul artists.

Not only was the performance impressive, but the very existence of the show was poignant. Syl Johnson never did manage to make the impression on American pop culture that Marvin Gaye or James Brown did. A ubiquitious presence on the R&B charts in the ’60s and ’70s, he fell into obscurity during the ’80s and retired. He remained in retirement until a relative told him that one of his songs, “Different Strokes,” had been sampled by the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga.” Syl always had a mercenary streak, and he figured that the use of his music in hip-hop made the timing right for a comeback. Indeed, much of the audience that night had discovered Syl’s music through hip-hop. Part of what made that night an incredible experience was sharing it with the community often proposed but only seldom realized by hip-hop: a diverse brother- and sisterhood forged through a deep knowledge and love of popular music.Watching Syl perform before an appreciative audience, I felt joy at seeing a kind of justice done, at seeing a small group of dedicated aficionados defy the judgment of the market.

This joy, apparently, was not shared by Douglas Wolk. From his review:

Syl Johnson is– there’s no other way to put it– an also-ran. . . . He made the R&B charts 19 times over the years, but never really broke through to a pop audience. . . This isn’t even the full career survey its title implies; more than half of his 19 R&B hits happened after the period documented here, the bulk of them on Hi Records, where he was effectively the second-tier Al Green. (His only Top-10 R&B hit was a cover of Green’s “Take Me to the River”.) It’s a tribute to a local guy who really made good only long after the fact. . . . He spent most of the era covered here on tiny Chicago independent labels that didn’t have any other big acts, most famously Twilight, aka Twinight, in which he was a shareholder. A lot of his mid-60s material was indifferently recorded at best. . . . The broader problem, though, was that he was a totally solid talent in an era of greatness, a deft trendspotter in a period of nonstop innovation. He was a hard shouter, but not quite as hard as Wilson Pickett or James Brown; he was funny, but not as funny as Joe Tex, whose “Skinny Legs and All” he answered with “I’ll Take Those Skinny Legs.”

Wolk’s review is filled with questionable assumptions and small but significant errors. Quality production often improves quality material, but I enjoy quality material even when the production is flawed. Further, high production values are often out of reach for many performers. And Numero Group often must use material that has deteriorated over time, so what Wolk believes is “indifferent recording” may be nothing more than aged tape, damaged masters or even fidelity loss as the result of digital transfer. Wolk also argues that just because Johnson never broke out of a local market, he must have been an inferior artist. This view is anachronistic. In an era of fragmented radio markets, only a few artists, white or black, made the nationwide impact expected of big artists today. Irma Thomas, for example, never broke the Billboard Top 10 or even the Billboard R&B top 10, but is a veritable superstar in New Orleans.

The real problem here, however, is not in the details, but with Wolk’s suggestions that the value of someone’s art is forever fixed, and forever linked to money. After at least thirty years of underground/indie music and its corresponding D.I.Y. aesthetic, it’s jarring that a reviewer for a major music publication can equate commercial and artistic success without reservation. Why should anyone share Wolk’s strange preoccupation with setting up tiers of artists and hierarchies of quality? I am satisfied with performers who are only “totally solid talents,” a difficult enough standard to meet. Who cares that Johnson was never signed to a major label, or that he never made it on to the Billboard Pop Charts? Wolk’s points are all, of course, significant for those who need to assign each and every product in the cultural marketplace an appropriate cultural exchange value; that is to say, the needs and interests of capital. But for those interested in quality―that is, in our own values, determined not on the basis of exchange but on what these works do for us and our society―they’re not terribly informative.

Yet, while Wolk is incorrect about implications, he is mostly correct about the facts. Syl Johnson never had the widespread commercial success or popularity of the Motown superstars or even his labelmate, Al Green. So why have so many hip-hop producers sampled songs by artists like Syl Johnson or Marva Whitney and largely avoided, even before samples were outlawed, recognizable breaks from more popular works? Why are mash-ups of popular works the exceptions, and not the rule?

Perhaps, in a never-ending effort to distinguish themselves from the competition, hip-hop producers are always looking for rarer and rarer samples. Such competition clearly does play a role in the sampling of obscure beats. The very term “cratedigger” clearly valorizes those DJs who find the most obscure samples: the best diggers are those who can dig the deepest. But competition is not a sufficient explanation, however. For one thing, DJing is ultimately a practical profession. People never stop dancing to Madonna or Michael Jackson, why risk an obscure beat when you can play a surefire dance floor filler? More crucially, it doesn’t explain why DJs tend to quote the same obscure passages again and again. You may have never heard of “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons, but I guarantee that you’ve heard the five seconds of that song that constitute the “Amen Break.” Lyn Collins’ single “Think” never charted, but has been sampled for over a hundred different hip-hop songs. This sort of clustering disproves the competition theory: instead of avoiding each other’s samples, hip-hop producers eagerly quote each other’s material.

Looking at what gets sampled, we can discern another commonality, a tendency for
“cratedigging” producers to confine their samples to a very specific range of years. RZA’s samples, for example, almost exclusively come from one of three groups: southern soul, particularly acts associated with Hi Records and with Stax Records, from the years 1967-1971; Motown groups from the same period, after the writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland left the label but before Motown moved to Los Angeles; and Philly soul from the early seventies to 1979. RZA was born in 1969; none of these records was released after his tenth birthday. Dr. Dre’s production style is known for its close association with the sound of L.A.-based Parliament Funkadelic, whose most notable albums were released from 1975 to 1978, when Dr. Dre was thirteen. Discussing his influences in an interview with Scratch magazine, Dre explicitly connects his beats to a pre-adolescent nostalgia:

I’m a big P-Funk fan, that was it for me growing up. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, I was influenced by all of those guys. . . . Just listening to the way they put their records together. That appreciation came from my mother. There was always music being played in my house when I was growing up, and that’s all I heard was 70′s soul. And then the DJing thing came along.

Dre spent his childhood listening to these records, not just as a cultural product to be consumed, but as formative familial and communal experiences. At a later point, Dre became a DJ―significantly, not a musician who mimics what he heard on the record, but an artist working within a contemporary context (i.e. the MC/DJ culture of hip-hop). However, instead of aiming for novelty, Dre consciously made records that sounded similar to the ones with which he grew up. Curiously, unlike other DJs, Dre often opts not to sample: “Most of my music has been played. . . . if we were going to sample something, we would try to at least replay it, get musicians in and replay it. If it was something we couldn’t replay, we would use the sample. I’ve tried to stay away from it as much as possible throughout my career from day one.” The artistic philosophy is essentially modernist. Dr. Dre defines a traditional past in which all signs were understood through a shared context, then creates works that reference that past but do not attempt to retrieve it.

Like many Modernists, the cratediggers reconstruct a past that never existed. RZA’s parents may have owned Syl Johnson’s “Different Strokes,” but even if they did, they probably spent more time listening to the Motown classics. The work of RZA and similar producers instead draws from the margins, the music only occasionally heard, the incidental music. Dialogue shorn from context and soundtrack cues from the kung-fu movies float in and out of his productions, a reference to days freely squandered watching films at a dollar theater with Ol’ Dirty Bastard: “Early on, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and I used to watch kung fu movies, leave the theater, do some kung fu fighting, get on the train, keep fighting, and then run into MCs and musically battle them like it was a kung fu fight. That was my weekend habit.” The kung-fu films represent not only a free and innocent part of his childhood, but also a childhood fantasy. RZA clearly identified and perhaps still identifies with the heroes of those films, heroes who are disadvantaged and isolated and rely on skill, heroes who stand up for the defense of their communities and combat unjust government agents. The nostalgic narrative constructed by RZA does not accurately represent his childhood, but improves on it. RZA’s production fulfills a childhood dream, in which RZA is empowered to combat social wrongs and the Syl Johnsons of the world are honored along with their more commercially successful counterparts.

In his recent autobiography, written with the assistance of dream hampton, Jay-Z concisely describes this ethos:

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift . . . We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves. That was part of the ethos of that time and place, and it got built in to the culture we created. Rap took the remnants of a dying society and created something new. Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.

Wolk is interested in the judgments of a monolithic music history, with winners and losers and one unalterable storyline. As a result, in his review of Syl Johnson, he misses the point entirely. The cratediggers do not passively receive the judgments of music critics and markets. They choose their own ancestors, defying the basic assumptions and realities of a world prepared to condemn them to poverty. The cratediggers return to history only to rewrite it. And when they emerge, it is with a new world.

Herbert Katzman

New York City may be, as Tony Judt writes, a city in decline. Its artistic and industrial regency has steadily weakened while “the intellectual gangs of New York have folded their knives and gone home to the suburbs,” and though the city remains culturally diverse, its days of global cultural ascendency are numbered.

I recently moved to New York, and despite its waning stature, I feel something of the exhilaration that generations of writers and artists have felt arriving in this, as Judt calls it, “world city.” For some transplants, that exhilaration never dies. When the painter Herbert Katzman (1923-2004), a Chicago native, moved here in the early 1950s, he encountered both a thriving commercial economy and an artistic crucible. For Katzman the attraction was both immediate and permanent: he adopted the city as home until his death fifty years later. Converts are often the most devout believers, and Katzman was no exception. The city rapidly became his favorite artistic subject.

So it was only natural for the Museum of the City of New York to mount an exhibition of Katzman’s paintings and drawings (Glorious Sky: Herbert Katzman’s New York,” through Feb. 21; exhibition catalog also available). Katzman’s career broadly mirrored the trajectory of the city’s global status. Katzman’s reputation reached its zenith in the 1950s, largely thanks to the enthusiastic support of Downtown Gallery owner Edith Halpert. With her endorsement he quickly ascended to prestige, with works prominently placed in the Whitney and a feature in Life in 1952 as one of the most promising young American artists.

The story most often told of Katzman’s career is that he represented the best in mid-century American figurative painting, but the critics’ turn toward abstract expressionism condemned him to obscurity in later life. He is indeed obscure—at least obscure enough not to have a Wikipedia page—and perhaps even contrarian. His work in the 50s and 60s had distinct geometric and expressionist tendencies, while later paintings are more directly representational, even emotionally conservative, aggressively defying the trend in art criticism which Tom Wolfe so lamented.

Katzman, like William Whyte, unreservedly embraced the sensual experience of the city. “I do not paint abstractly,” he said, “because if I give up the appearance of the world I find I am unable to become involved in it.” But unlike Whyte’s lush descriptions of hustle and bustle, Katzman’s urban sensuality was wistful and introverted.

Katzman’s New York Times obituary, a mere 300 words, shares one revealing detail: “He died with a drawing of New York Harbor on the table in front of him.” Note that the drawing depicted not a favorite café or block or building or park, but the harbor—a wide swath of the city encapsulated in one small frame. It is a fitting image, since Katzman’s work was never concerned with detail. As the catalogue notes, “For Katzman, the city was not his subject, if by that we signify the literal transcription of its streets and buildings into art; rather it was his muse, meaning the spirit that inspired him.” With the exception of one chalk self-portrait set inside the Metropolitan Museum, every work in “Glorious Sky” is a cityscape or skyline. The exhibit includes six large Brooklyn Bridges and numerous Statues of Liberty, alongside Queensboro bridges, harbors, and downtowns, but nary a Central Park (Childe Hassam) or Columbia University (Guy Wiggins) or snow-filled street (Robert Henri).

New York Bay, 1972

Consider Katzman’s 1972 portrayal of the New York bay. Romantic, perhaps, though subdued, with a perspective that is clearly imagined—elevated well above the downtown heights and some miles out in the inner harbor. The scene is distant, indefinite, quiet. This is not the New York I know. It is certainly not the pulsing cultural artery that had welcomed Katzman in 1951. Is the painting an anticipation of urban collapse? Surely such a parochial loyalist as Katzman would not have thought so. Rather, it is a hint at the particular kind of beauty that defined the artist’s experience of his adopted home.

Brooklyn Bridge, 1951-52

Even his more energetic works indicate an unusual kind of fascination with New York, one motivated not by particular urban features but by the perceived monolith of the metropolis. One of the earliest of the Brooklyn Bridge paintings reveals the vitality and spunk Katzman saw in the city, with radial lines emphasizing the city’s centrality and focus. Yet the painting’s subject, the bridge itself, reveals little—the basic shape is definite enough to identify the landmark, but none of its distinctive architectural features receives attention. The painting tells us much about Katzman’s feelings for the city as a whole but very little about his thoughts concerning any of its components.

So here lies the central oddity of Katzman’s love affair with New York: Yes, he loved the city, but what did he love about it? Innumerable artists have depicted the city from every angle, at every magnification, but only Katzman routinely shunned the city’s crowded streets and buildings in favor of sweeping skylines. He dwelled within that human landscape for half a century but never saw it as an artistic subject. As the exhibit’s title suggests, the city itself seemed to interest Katzman less than its aura.

Why would an artist determinedly avoid the subjects of his everyday life, opting instead for vantages only accessible from far away, on islands or boats, or even airborne vistas he could only have imagined? And why would a man with such devotion to the concept of the city seem to have so little interest in its content?

We can find one clue in Katzman’s reaction to 9/11. Though his eyesight had deteriorated by 2001, prohibiting him from continuing his larger paintings, he continued producing small drawings and sketches. The subject matter was unchanged from his earlier career. So unchanged, in fact, that Katzman’s post-9/11 skyline drawings all include the World Trade Center towers (formerly visible from his studio window).

Katzman’s New York City was eternal. It was as much an imagined city as a real one. The real city evolved rapidly and constantly during the fifty years of Katzman’s residence, but his own private city changed only in superficial ways.

No wonder Katzman had difficulty coping with the abstract expressionists. Some of the earliest non-representational painting emerged from an effort to shed perspectival limits—Cezanne’s still lifes revealing the backs of objects through bizarre perspective evolved into Picasso’s flattened forms and eventually became full-blown Cubism. But Katzman resolutely rendered one angle, one perspective, one unchanging concept—sometimes more boldly abstract than others, but always static.

Yet his works do not depict his physical perspective so much as the revelations of his mind’s eye. The eternal city Katzman painted was a mental construct, in some ways an idealization. The affinity between his imagined city and the real city is only as close as a single man’s experience of the city’s ethos can be to its whole essence.

To look at it another way, the New York Katzman fell in love with was a sublime entity, vast and infinitely complex, impossible to understand comprehensively. Perpetually awestruck by this cornucopia, Katzman’s reciprocation was a lifelong artistic homage to the seemingly infinite environment.

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant writes that the sublime invites our imagination to see something boundless, or unending, while our faculty of reason demands limits. This tension is always uneasy:

The feeling of the sublime is…at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination…and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.

Perhaps this is what happened with Katzman and New York. The cultural abundance captured his imagination, and the bounds of the two-dimensional canvas presented an opportunity to intelligibly apprehend something of that infinite nature. If so, we may have an idea of why Katzman’s response to the city’s magnitude and complexity yielded such dark pieces.

Still, for me the city is not a sublime entity but a discrete collection of finite experiences. And William Whyte, by the way, found his own sublimity in the city’s details rather than its macroscopic form. But there is a place for the forest among the trees. It’s actually tough to see much sky from the streets, offices, and apartments of New York City. Perhaps Katzman’s lesson for us is that the little glimpses we capture are gloriously united.

The Dialogue Between Tamar and Judah, With Scribal Commentary Marked

Last year, I chanted the story of Judah and Tamar; my partner Sarah chanted the preceding chapter. The Tamar story interrupts the larger Joseph narrative, splitting the brothers’ betrayal from Joseph’s experience in Egypt. Though the narratives are independent – and indeed the Tamar story appears as a bizarre interpolation – Sarah noticed a neat link. When Tamar confronts Judah with “the signet, and the cords, and the staff” – his guarantees of payment for their sex – she says “recognize please” (haker-na) (Gen. 38:25); Joseph’s brothers use that exact phrase that when presenting his bloody cloak to Jacob (Gen. 37:32). To emphasize the repetition, I chanted my haker-na loudly and slowly, as did she.

At the time, we did not recognize the repeated haker-na’s role in a contemporary debate over how to read the Bible. Writing in Commentary in 1975, Robert Alter had used the Tamar story to exemplify a “literary approach” to the Bible. He notes other similarities between the two narratives – in language, plot, character, and theme. At the start of the Tamar story, Judah “goes down” (an odd locution, perhaps), paralleling Joseph’s being “brought down” to Egypt in 39:1. Thematically, Joseph’s future eclipse of his older brothers mirrors the death of Judah’s first-born sons; Jacob’s emotional reaction to his son’s ostensible death registers ironically against Judah’s stoicism on recognizing Tamar’s claim, and so on. When read together, the stories’ protagonists become full human figures, with complex psychological motivations.

But may we use these parallels to read the Tamar and Joseph stories together? Responding in 2007, James Kugel argued that we may not. According to Kugel, most scholars think, the Judah story is “an etiological tale [for the Perezites and Zerahites] that circulated on its own before being inserted in its present location,” with a narrative logic entirely distinct from the Joseph story. Because the narratives are independent (and thus overlap chronologically and contradict each other), the redactor, confronted with both stories, was forced to insert the Tamar story into the middle of the Joseph saga. The verbal repetitions are therefore coincidence, and we should read the interruption as the redactor’s attempt to create a smooth chronology – not as a subversive, pseudo-Shakespearian subplot. Kugel sees literary methods as an attempt to ignore modern scholarship and maintain the Bible’s traditional religious value; critics like Alter want to “have their Bible and criticize it too.”

Alter, though writing thirty years earlier, anticipates Kugel’s position and criticizes it, claiming to show “the limitations of conventional biblical scholarship even at its best.” He quietly concedes that the Tamar and Joseph stories come from different sources; indeed, he chastises Meir Sternberg – his “strong predecessor” as a literary reader of the Bible – for treating the text “as though it were a unitary production just like a modern novel that is entirely conceived and executed by a single independent writer… [ignoring] what historical scholarship has taught us about the… development of the biblical text and about its frequently composite nature.” For Alter, what the original authors intended is irrelevant; his reading shows that the redactor, who combined the sources, paid careful attention to the various literary subtleties. Reading Genesis for literary effects leads us to see the Bible’s compilation not as “some automatic mechanism of interpolating traditional materials but of careful splicing of sources by a brilliant literary artist.”

Indeed, the redactor is the central figure for both Alter and Kugel; he authorizes their interpretations. Alter’s redactor is an artist: therefore, we must read the Bible as art. Kugel’s redactor’s “highest priority was to preserve all surviving traditions about Israel’s ancestors and organize them into a single, chronologically ordered history” – which is to say, he was a dispassionate scholar – and thus we must read the Bible as a work of scholarship.

These two visions of authorship encode subtle and distinct conservatisms. Alter’s analysis of the Bible as a single compiled narrative doesn’t necessarily imply a unitary, artist redactor. Texts from the same cultural context – even those whose authors do not know each other – often use the same word, theme, character, or plot. When read against each other, these uses seem ironic, playful, and more interesting than each source on its own. There is no hermeneutic reason why the complex character of Judah cannot be the result of two conflicting political pressures: the J narrative, being pro-Southern, glorifies Judah, while the interruption, which may be Northern, shames him. Read together, the two stories show different sides of a shared communal myth; different polities contending over a shared narrative.

The reading doesn’t require an author; Alter requires an author, for political reasons of his own. In another Commentary essay, “Scripture and Culture,” Alter attacks “feminists, Marxists, [and] deconstructionists,” who can be distinguished by their “Question Authority” bumper stickers (this was, after all, Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary), and their shrill insistence upon the role of politics and ideology in forming literary canon. Alter prefers to see literature as a distinct, autonomous sphere of culture, whose timeless concerns are above political influence. Their attacks threaten the canon “from Dante to Milton to Dostoevsky to T.S. Eliot,” not only – not even primarily – the Bible: “progressive spirits are fighting the good fight to break down the barriers of canon, displace major with minor, and let in the excluded from below and beyond.”

Rescuing the Bible is a central project of Alter’s kulturekampf. The “leftist” criticism is sticky for a “literary” Bible, because the Bible explicitly announces commitments to various political and ideological systems and because the history of its interpretation is the most ideologically charged in Western literature. If the Bible’s authority can be rescued, John Donne’s will be no trouble.

Alter’s solution? Replacing God’s authority with human authorship, he short-changes the specifically normative parts of the Bible. Alter’s serious scholarship on the Pentateuch focuses on Genesis; his insights on Deuteronomy and Leviticus are both rarer and weaker. “The literary analyst,” he writes, “though he should certainly be aware of the differences of ancient mind-set and ancient literary procedures, presupposes a deep continuity of human experience that makes the concerns of the ancient text directly accessible to him.” Tell that to the author of an elaborate code on menstrual purity or injunctions to kill Canaanites.

Alter’s Bible, to be sure, “addresses itself to our political, moral, and religious predicaments,” but it is under no pressure from those predicaments. It is ontologically prior, and is best interpreted without reference to them : “Literary analysis,” he explains, “brackets the question of history.” Emphasizing the Bible’s ironies and ambivalences distracts from its ideological messages; the more a text hems and haws, the harder it is to pin it to a single agenda. Claiming that the redactor is interested mainly in character renders the text psychological and emotional – not social or political; and demanding its meaning (as opposed to its sources) be the product of a single redactor reinstates its authority over its readers.

In his analysis of Tamar, Alter argues that the literary parallels show “a complex moral and psychological realism” on the part of the redactor. He doesn’t need that claim to read the Tamar and Joseph stories as powerful intertexts; he does need it for his larger cultural project.

Kugel also wants to parry pluralistic, socially-conscious readings of the Bible, but he does so by claiming that the historical Bible has no relevance to our lives. Insisting upon authorial intention, he rejects the attempt to “connect all that modern scholarship knows about the putative original meaning of the text with [scholars’] own religious practice or ideas … ecology and global warming, gay rights, and a good deal more.” Modern Biblical scholarship, like “today’s Homeric scholarship, or Shakespearean scholarship, or all sorts of other pursuits in the humanities,” aims to understand the text in its historical context, which has no bearing on its meaning today. Unsurprisingly, Kugel is especially fond of “etiological narratives,” which give the origin of various features of the Biblical world. His hermeneutic always points backwards.

Of course, many Shakespeare scholars do not work this way, and why should they? Kugel historicizes the Bible, and suggests that “apologists” who want both historical and contemporary meaning have ulterior motives. He derives meaning from these motives; the Bible has a particular political agenda with reference to its historical context, the “apologists” with reference to theirs. Only the academic “will to truth” remains unanalyzed, a still, small voice amidst the thunder of polemic: it is taken for granted as an objective way of reading. Kugel criticizes the New Criticism’s claim that interpretation is independent of authorial intent by noting that to interpret without context requires a belief in “just one standard way of approaching a text, one set of assumptions that all readers brought to the act of reading.” True, but this argument applies not only to the New Criticism, but to Kugel’s hermeneutics. If we may choose from many methods for interpreting a text, why should we choose the academic method?

Not just a motivational problem, this lacuna in Kugel’s argument threatens its success on its own hermeneutic terms. To support his claim that the redactor did not “not care very much about the resulting subtle or not-so-subtle resemblances between one episode and the next in this history,” Kugel lists repetitions or inconsistencies in Bereishit’s narrative logic, for instance “Abraham passing off Sarah as his sister twice in quite separate, but oddly similar, episodes (Genesis 12 and 20) and Isaac acting likewise in yet a third.” But Alter claims that the redactor reads sources together in terms of character, language and theme, not – or not exclusively – to create logical coherency. Kugel assumes that if the redactor is not concerned that the achoti-at (you are my sister) narrative repeats, it follows that he is not concerned with the subtle links between those stories. But if the redactor worked from pre-existing sources, much of his innovation was in juxtaposing multiple versions of a single story. Wouldn’t such a redactor often be interested in literary meaning precisely at the expense of narrative sequence? Kugel’s inference holds for the diligent archival scholar, primarily concerned with the integrity and reliability of the text he reads and the coherence and careful logic of the papers he writes. But a two-thousand year old redactor?

The argument depends, then, upon reading Kugel’s present back into the text – the very thing against which he protests, for interpretation can never – as he argues – be freed from a particular historical context. But it’s not fair to historicize every theory except for historicism. In the end, one cannot escape the question: what authorizes Kugel’s readings?

Let me tell a better story, starting, as do Kugel and Alter, with the redactor.  Since he was neither an artist nor a scholar – nor necessarily an individual – I will call them scribes. There is an important distinction between scribes and authors: as scholars of early modern English literature have argued, the fixed, unitary relationship between authorial intent and meaning which Kugel and Alter assume seems more natural in a culture of print than in one of manuscripts. When you receive a print book, you receive a finished product, which you consume passively – though you may scribble in the margins or excise passages, you basically cannot alter the text, which comes into being before you read it.

Not so in manuscript cultures. Because copies are always scarce, scribes are always recopying – rewriting – the texts that they read. The text is not final or fixed; your handwritten copy does not look any less finished than mine. Because the tradition is uncertain, scribes learn to read critically and carefully, and their reading and writing are wholly intertwined. They constantly balanced the received textual tradition against what their reason suggested that original must have been, weighing past tradition against the logic of the present.

Scribes empower us to think of our relationship to sacred texts as dialogical. Take the story of Tamar’s trope, which evolved over roughly a millennium, and was fixed – a thousand years after the text was supposedly completed – by the tenth- and eleventh-century Masoretic scribes. Trope sometimes subtly comments on the portion: the commentary on the Tamar story is quite striking. Paired tropes (pashta, zakef gadol, and revii) mark each of three vayomer/vatomer (he said/she said) pairs. The Masoretes are plainly emphasizing the dialogue between Judah and Tamar. Why? Perhaps to showcase the Pentateuch’s richest exchange between a man and a woman.

In any case, the Masoretes offered a good model for Sarah and me. We were reading in a “partnership” minyan (prayer service), which has a mechitza, a barrier between men and woman, but strives to “maximize the participation of women and men all in accordance with a traditional halakhic framework.” Many of its members come from communities in which only men chant from the Torah. Thus we were chanting in a place in which the relationship between men and women is an obvious, central issue. Also, we were partners, learning our readings together.

Sarah and I did not discover meaning; we created meaning. Not out of whole cloth – had we, say, pronounced words incorrectly to pun anew, we would have been corrected. Every interpretive encounter takes place in a community and thus has norms. Still, we had choices within those rules. Our interpretation was itself a dialogue between our choices and the text as fixed by communal norms. Neither autonomous speakers nor subservient hearers, we were at once reading and rewriting our text.

Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom, writes of a yearned-for “marriage of speaking and hearing,” a moment of pure, revelatory, unmediated communication. If biblical criticism is to be theologically useful, it must be in stressing that our text is a “partnership of writing and reading,” freed both of the implicit gender binary (male active speaker/female passive hearer), and of the idea of revelation as a single speech act. At the end of Genesis 38, Tamar bears two sons:

And it came to pass, when she travailed, that one put out a hand; and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying: ‘This came out first.’ And it came to pass, as he drew back his hand, that, behold his brother came out; and she said: ‘Wherefore hast thou made a breach for thyself?’ Therefore his name was called Perez. And afterward came out his brother, that had the scarlet thread upon his hand; and his name was called Zerah.

We can afford neither to obsess over textual origins nor to fetishize their final form. The honest reading will not only make a breach for itself in the text, but also recognize the repressed thread when it returns from the past.

The MGTOW Symbol

I.

I hesitate to write about current events for this blog unless I feel that those events are somehow paradigmatic. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with the beatings of leftist protestors by Tea Party activists in the last weeks before the midterm elections: a particularly vicious head stomping in Kentucky, and a similar attack in Washington. I deeply fear political violence, even in the rare cases in which it is justified. Political violence is the failure of society: after just one blow, everyone’s lives and rights are only as secure as their own power to protect them. Unlike Jon Stewart, however, I won’t simply attribute this violence to general incivility. As the political blogger Josh Marshall notes, these acts have a distinct character that is not simply reducible to fanaticism:

What stands out to me though is how each one of these seems to be a nutshell symbolism of the boiled down essence―the precipitate―of blue and red state America, almost to a degree we wouldn’t buy from a writer if we found it in a novel. . . Each time it’s middle-aged or retired right wing white guy in violent encounter with early-twenty-something Dem woman with either cropped hair or more or less crunchy appearance.

It’s not just right wing activists attacking left wing activists. Middle-aged men are attacking young women. Rarely is violence against women so public.

There is no necessary connection between misogyny and the Tea Party’s radical libertarianism. However, that kind of libertarianism does seem to attract men prone to extreme misogyny. Consider a particular sub-culture within the odious Men’s Rights movement: MGTOW or “Men Going Their Own Way.” What is a MGTOW? As a facebook group for men who self-identify as MGTOW explains:

MGTOW (”Men Going Their Own Way”) is a way of life which refuses to defer to women in defining the worth of men. Instead, it focuses on positive male aspects, inviting men to go their own way in life. The one piece of MGTOW advice I’ve followed the closest is “live for yourself.” Go your own way for your own reasons, for your own prosperity, and for your own happiness. What this translates to practically (for me) is that having a relationship should be peripheral and complementary to a life where you’re already satisfied.

In practice, the MGTOW or “ghost” lifestyle involves avoiding long term relationships with the opposite sex, with the possible exception of mail-order brides, foreign women who can be easily dominated. It is distinct from the PUA (Pick-Up Artist) lifestyle, but it is often linked to it. Both lifestyles have poisonous attitudes towards gender relations and relationships in general: all relationships are defined by power, and it is in your interest to maximize your power within those relationships. As a man who identifies as both a MGTOW and a PUA puts it:

Game is largely about social dominance. A woman will test a man with ‘shit tests’ before sleeping with him to see if he is a true alpha or if he is faking it. If he fails to demonstrate alpha power he will never be boyfriend material. Does this sound a little like feminism? They ‘shit test’ men in general and then treat us with contempt for pandering to them. This is like the poor Niceguy who runs around women as an errand boy and yet is called a wimp and a creep behind his back.

It’s not difficult to see how this worldview might lead someone to libertarian politics, but in any case, MGTOW explicitly connect their views on gender to their views on government. The third plank of the MGTOW Manifesto calls for “a limited government.” The ultimate goal is not only “[to] instill . . . masculinity in men” and “[to] instill . . . feminimity in women,” but “to take away everyone’s ‘right’ to vote on other people’s affairs thus rendering it impossible for political organisms and ideologies to impose their personal will on everyone else.” A MGTOW sees the welfare state as the political manifestation of an evil feminine ideology. MGTOW frequently quote works that contain gendered descriptions of tyrannical government:

“The ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ has been transformed into a socialized Big Brother nanny state.”

“The government is like women. They love to spend what they didn’t earn themselves.Women got the vote. And then voted for entitlement, and more government and police to replace husbands and fathers.”

“When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more ‘protective’ (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase ‘s’) social security.”

Just as a MGTOW sees women as controlling succubi that destroy the independent life to which a man is entitled, he sees government as a tyrannical scheme that limits a man’s freedom through oppressive taxation and legislation.

Few of the Men’s Rights arguments carry much weight. It’s ridiculous, for example, to claim that a country that has only ever had 38 female senators is matriarchial. As for the libertarian arguments, let’s apply Lenin’s favorite analytical technique: when someone says “Freedom,” ask “Freedom for whom? To do what?” What sort of “freedom” are the MGTOW calling for when they bemoan women who have the temerity to reject their advances? What sort of “freedom” calls for limited government, but also calls for men to “[u]se any rights to the benefit of other men as well as themselves?” The “freedom” the MGTOW demand is a freedom to dominate others and to ignore obligations to society. It is a freedom that has more to do with a twisted reading of Nietzsche than with Locke.

Yet however ridiculous and offensive the arguments of the MGTOW can be, I find some of their writings quite moving. The voluminous blog and forum posts of MGTOW are characterized not just by political polemic, but confessions of deep-seated pain. These men feel alienated from women who reject them, a society they feel does not value them, and a government that they feel they have no control over:

“While I love this place, if I let it be my only outlook on life I would have eaten a bullet by now, as we focus too much on news reports of insane feminists, corrupt politicians, and the many ways men’s lives are fucked by dealing with American women rather than the things that make each of us happy…”

“I never had a single date in high school. I asked out a couple of girls on a date, and all except one said no followed by lame excuses. One even became angry at me and treated me like dirt for the rest of my senior year. As for the one girl who said yes… We arranged to meet up at a central meeting place on the high school campus where she inevitably has to pass by after her last class. On the day and time that our date was supposed to happen, she HID BEHIND A WALL (her head was peeking out so she could check to see when I’d leave) AND THEN RAN AWAY when she saw me coming toward her from a distance.”

Whether or not their pain is justified, it is undeniably real. A patriarchal society that defines male sexual conquest as success and female rejection as humiliating failure has made these men miserable. Ironically, these men have resorted to coping strategies that they would likely classify as “feminine” in order to alleviate this misery; for example, joining communities that encourage them to openly share their feelings. Even as their political principles promote sociopathic individualism, they seek the comfort of community.

II.

What tortures these men, ultimately, is a narrative about what it means to be a man. And to combat that destructive, subconscious social narrative, nothing is more useful than a cultural production that actively seeks to bring the basic assumptions of that narrative under scrutiny. For this reason, these men should be answered not only with vigorous feminist critique, but with the greatest American cultural production of the last decade: the Sopranos.

Consider the last episode of season three, “Army of One.” Tony faces two crises in quick succession. In the previous episode, Jackie Aprile, Jr., the son of Tony’s deceased best friend, tried to rob a card game of Made Men in an effort to make a name for himself among the Mafiosi. The robbery is a fiasco; the men, members of Tony’s own organization, demand Jackie’s head, and Jackie goes into hiding as Tony tries to peaceably resolve the situation while maintaining his own credibility. Eventually, with Tony’s tacit approval, Jackie’s own stepfather arranges to have him killed. At the same time, A.J., Tony’s son, has gotten himself expelled from his private school for stealing the answers to an exam. Tony’s conclusion is that “the place was too loose, too easy.” Tony then goes on a tirade about how he works so hard to pay for “a six thousand square foot house, big screen TV, food on the table, video games, all kinds of scooters and bicycles, Columbia University and for what?” When A.J. pointedly responds by saying “Sucks to be you,” Tony slaps him across the face and promises “a new regime.” He then plans to send A.J. to a military school.

The Sopranos tricks you into sympathizing with Tony in the moment. As you watch the episode, it’s easy to see from Tony’s perspective. Jackie’s troubles are due to a decision Jackie himself made, a decision that puts Tony in an impossible situation. And in the midst of all of this stress for Tony, A.J. can’t manage just to stay out of trouble? The truth, however, as only Carmela has the courage to tell Tony, is that Tony and his macho, individualist ideology are indirectly responsible for the fates of both A.J. and Jackie, Jr. Jackie, Jr.’s robbery, for example, is modeled on one Tony pulled off successfully, a robbery that catapulted Tony into the ranks of the Mafia elite. As for A.J., why would A.J. follow the rules when his father is a law unto himself? Even Tony, in his limited way, has an inkling of the truth. When the headmaster of a military academy explains to Tony and Carmela the army’s current motto, “Be an Army of One,” Tony responds by asking, “This Army of one thing, what happens when each army of one decides, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going over the top of the foxhole,’ or, ‘Why don’t I just blow the lieutenant’s head off?’ Because, y’know, they’ve been told, y’know, you’re an army of one.” The individualism and militancy prescribed by a patriarchal society is ultimately a recipe for sociopathy.

There is another way, as Carmela points out: “Why be an army at all?” The intense tragedy of this episode is that even within the episode, the alternatives to Tony’s brutal mindset are everywhere. When A.J., in response to the prospect of him going to military school, has a panic attack―a malady that afflicts Tony and afflicted Tony’s father―Tony blames it on “that putrid, fucking, rotten Soprano gene.” But the illness that fells both Tony and A.J. is not biological. It is the result of a society that demands impossible things from men: A.J. ought to subject himself to inhuman discipline, Tony ought to kill without remorse and never show weakness or empathy. This is a society we have chosen. This is a society that inevitably results in, as this episode unflinchingly insists on showing us, a young man lying in a coffin―a needless, unjustifiable tragedy.

Alternatives are available. In the ending, Uncle Junior serenades a family gathered together to openly console each other in their grief. We can choose, following Carmela’s metaphor, to put down our arms, to give up some of our freedoms in order to find strength, support and love in an understanding community. Instead, we choose to live accordingly to the worst aspects of what we deem “masculinity”―sociopathy, violence, stoicism. We blame ourselves for not being “tougher,” for not being “alphas,” for being “niceguys”; we fail to ask why we have to be armies at all. The song Junior sings at the funeral, “’Core ‘N Grato,” again and again laments the singer’s “ungrateful heart.” But the truth is, the heart has nothing to do with it.

1.

Public spaces are the bulwark of every city’s identity. Parks, buses, and sidewalks are home to the quintessential interactions of city life. Anyone from tourists to mayors contending how friendly or dirty or vibrant a city is will most likely cite anecdotes from public spaces. They describe, flatteringly or not, food carts, street performers, peddlers and swindlers. They might also mention eccentric panhandlers, chess players, and soapbox preachers. And there are inanimate features as well: majestic elms, stadiums, bridges; alongside abandoned industrial façades, tenements, and polluted rivers. How “friendly” the city is perceived to be also depends on public spaces—the disposition of pedestrians, drivers, and subway riders.

Cities, then, have every reason to maintain and improve their public spaces—but their efforts are all too often counterproductive. William H. Whyte (1917-99), godfather of the study of urban living and erstwhile editor of Fortune magazine, was among the first to pursue a quantitative understanding of the dynamics of city life. In his 1988 study City: Rediscovering the Center, recently republished by the University of Pennsylvania, Whyte argues that municipal governments frequently underappreciate their public spaces. “It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it,” he writes, “but there are many such spaces.” Whyte’s examples include parks walled off from the city, steps built too narrow or too low for sitting, and street lights timed poorly for pedestrian traffic. The consequence of such poor design is not mere inconvenience but a real degradation of the quality of life. The more opportunity we have to interact with fellow city-dwellers, Whyte believes, the more happy and comfortable we are in the urban environment. Thus every feature which impedes interaction detracts from the vitality of the city.

During the sixteen years Whyte spent conducting research for this book, a peculiar anti-urban movement was emerging in America. Not only were suburbs expanding at the expense of tight, efficient metropolises, but many urban planners embraced the notion that density was bad. Whyte describes municipal governments tearing down plots and blocks—not to make way for museums or parks, but simply to reduce crowding. Under Title One of the 1949 Housing Act, cities began acquiring areas considered to be “blighted,” hoping to redevelop them—a trend that continued through the 1980s. But Whyte felt these planners were being hoisted by their own petards: “Many of the areas were not truly blighted, but the expectation was self-fulfilling. Once an area was declared blighted, maintenance ceased… Sometimes the redevelopment phase never did come about.” And the effect was not cleaner, brighter cities, as the designers had hoped, but urban wastelands.

Whyte’s contention that hustle and bustle were almost universally beneficial to city life ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time. City, however, advances his position with an impressive collection of empirical observations. Pedestrians in a conversation are likely to move toward the center of sidewalk traffic, not away from it, revealing a native tendency toward clustering. Open parks draw much more traffic than walled parks meant to provide a tranquil refuge from the surrounding city. Whyte’s catalogue of street activity paints a glowing picture of crowded city centers, where public spaces draw all manner of edifying and entertaining activity. Art and commerce thrive side by side. Whyte does not discuss the political importance of these spaces as gathering places for movements, marches, and protests (perhaps because his research predominantly concerned Manhattan rather than Washington, San Francisco, or Paris), but this faculty should be of no less concern to us.

Much has changed in the two decades since City was first published, but its themes are relevant enough to have warranted its reprinting. One reason for its continuing value is made clear by its own observation that the effects of technology on city design have always been limited. The physical elements of the modern city center—”streets, buildings, and places to meet and talk”—have changed minimally from the ancient Greek agora. It is remarkable how little we have utilized emerging technology to improve our cities’ efficiency. Despite generations of futuristic visions from the likes of Ledoux and Le Corbusier, urban design has made few accommodations for new modes of transportation and communication. For example, though we now rely on cars, trains, and bicycles to move us around the city, Whyte notes that the width of modern pedestrian walkways remains close to the twelve- to eighteen-foot range prevalent in most ancient cities. Perhaps this is no accident, but a reflection of the perdurance of fundamental human needs.

Whyte’s utopia is designed not primarily for commercial efficiency (though he does suggest improvements in that respect) but for quality of life—and while the infrastructure required for commercial efficiency responds quickly to technological innovation, the infrastructural requirements for quality of life are more or less static. Experiments with municipal reorganization, like imitations of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, have met with scorn and now regret (think of Castle Village in New York). Despite everything, Whyte writes, “Increased communications and travel have not obviated face-to-face interchange; they have stimulated it… The city is still the prime place. It is so because of the great likelihood of unplanned, informal encounters or the staging of them.”

The fact that commercial development has fortified in American cities rather than migrating to suburbs helps validate Whyte’s hypothesis. Already in the 80s he had observed the signs: “It had been widely forecast that [financial institutions] would move out en masse… A lot of the back-office work has been relocated. The main business, however, is not record keeping and support services; it is people sizing up other people, and the center is the place for that.” Judging by population alone, the trend seems stable—the percentage of Americans living in urban areas increased from 74% in 1970 to 79% in 2000. The population of central cities also continues to rise, with 30% of Americans dwelling there.

To the extent that he is an empiricist, Whyte’s laboratory—the city itself—is too complex to permit reduction to theory. But he does venture quite often into the central issue of why the experience of public spaces is so powerful. One telling example is New York’s Lexington Avenue: “Why do people persist in using this street? …Many [pedestrians] could use less tacky or crowded routes if they wished… People love to hate Lexington, and they have terrible things to say about it. Some actually do avoid it, but it does appear that many of the people on Lexington are there because they want to be.” And why? Whyte offers three compelling reasons.

The first he calls “messiness,” or the “mishmash of activities”—the whole sum of the sensory experience of the street. As an illustration, he relates the observations of a blind man who frequently navigates the street. From the odor of the newsstand to the dripping air conditioner to the record store’s loudspeaker, every foot of sidewalk seems alive and vibrant, an environment that could engross any pedestrian. Second is something Whyte calls “second storiness.” By this he means the jungle of merchants visible from the street but elevated above it, including, in one three-block stretch, an impressively diverse list: “Dance studio, Palmist, Haircutting parlor, Doll hospital, Karate academy, Chinese restaurant, Nail studio, Mattress store, Record shop, Clock repair shop.” These merchants, a visual feast in their own right, support a large number of pamphleteers on the blocks below, as well as directly drawing pedestrian traffic of their own. Finally there is the opportunity for window shopping, an activity best practiced in dense areas where merchants have the greatest motivation to catch the eyes of passerby with flashy displays. Together, these features form a resplendent urban ecosystem of obvious appeal to sidewalk crowds.

2.

While the essential design elements of our cities and public spaces may be timeless, the way we relate to them is not. The two decades since Whyte published City have witnessed what may have been the quietest revolution of urban life. Most technological innovation since the aqueduct has affected city life only superficially, making certain activities faster or safer or more convenient. But thanks to the inexorable prevalence of personal mobile technology, it is now steadily easier for city dwellers to isolate their senses from their environment, plugging their ears with headphones or gazing at a digital screen.

Much ink has been spilt on the psychological detriments of mobile phones and the like, but relatively little attention has been paid to how this technology changes the character of our public spaces. Whyte’s study illuminates just how indispensable these spaces are to civic life, and there can be no doubt that the prevalence of mobile devices has affected their function. Walking a city block used to entail exposure to a complex array of stimuli, from architecture to hawking merchants to sidewalk graffiti. This exposure is no longer necessary. Pedestrians are increasingly likely to use their travel time for other purposes. It is not safe anymore to assume that your compatriots on the sidewalk or in the bus stop or on the park bench are conscious of their surroundings. They may be listening to music or checking email or browsing the web.

Whyte could not have imagined the great isolating power of new technology. To be sure, cell phones and other mobile devices can make it easier for people to assemble. They ameliorate barriers of distance and information exchange. Creative people have used these tools to facilitate completely novel activities in public spaces. But in common usage, these tools also distract from the world they should be opening up. We are all familiar with the texting pedestrian, the mp3-playing jogger, and the web-surfing subway rider. This is not to say that city dwellers haven’t always sought distractions from their environments—books, newspapers, and twiddling thumbs. But these diversions have never been as prevalent as microprocessors are today, nor do they monopolize the senses to nearly the same degree.

If an axial theme emerges from Whyte’s study, it is the indelible richness of urban environments. Though the book takes the guise of sociology, City is really about stories—encountering people and events that are worth thinking about. We don’t have to share Whyte’s passion for urban landscapes in order to enjoy, and learn from, what we can see and hear on any street corner or in any bus stop. As William Zinsser recently put it in an address at Deerfield Academy, “I don’t want to walk around New York talking on a cell phone to someone who is somewhere else; I would miss too much. I would miss seeing and hearing—and overhearing—the things that give me an interesting life.” Taken individually, each wait for the bus might seem better used for catching up on the news, or emailing a friend, or reading a blog. But over time turning a blind eye to the imminent world undercuts the vibrancy of urban spaces. And it may undercut the vibrancy of democracy itself: Cass Sunstein writes in the Boston Review that “people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find irritating, are central to democracy and even to freedom itself.”

A recent cell phone commercial reveals how bizarre our cultural obsession with mobile technology has become. A young woman walks down a city street using her phone. As she walks, the city around her transforms in fantastic ways, changing walls into speakers for playing music or screens for streaming video—presumably mimicking the features available on the phone. The visual effect is entrancing, even beautiful. Yet for the ad’s duration, the woman’s eyes never leave the text message conversation she is having. She is studiously oblivious to the world she passes by, engrossed in a digital fantasy.

The phone company seems to promote this scene as the ideal use of their product: to enhance your environment while separating yourself from it. Far from concealing the insidiously isolating effect of the multi-purpose mobile device, the commercial embraces it. This is the good life, it seems to proclaim; that beautiful world in your palm—the world of your friends and your preferences—is everything you want and need.

As I have written, new media do not necessitate poor expression. The tools at our disposal do not in themselves make us worse at anything. Quite the contrary—the intellectual and social advantages of our newfound access to knowledge and ease of communication can hardly be overstated. Yet when employed in certain ways, these tools exact a penalty. Through them we have the power to alienate ourselves from the compelling characters and narratives which populate our public spaces—a power increasingly exercised. And habitual use of mobile devices in public spaces not only sterilizes the personal urban experience, it inhibits users’ own contributions to the vitality of the spaces they traverse.

Whyte offers stirring (though never sentimental) accounts of street people—”undesirables”—whose eccentric presence enlivens city life. Eliminating these characters, if it were possible, would dampen rather than improve quality of life. Eliminating the undesirable necessity to spend time in their presence—and the presence of society at large—is now entirely possible, but more dystopian than utopian.

A 2,000 year old Olive Tree in Israel

Recently, Ben secularized the idea, paralleled in Mircea Eliade’s study of religion, of “homogeneous” history. For Eliade, profane time – that is, time without divine intervention to organize it – is a vast, homogeneous expanse, the meaningless tohu vavohu (unformed and void) that precedes creation. Significant theological events punctuate these equilibria, giving birth to a radically new order, a “sacred history.” Some of these sacred interventions are familiar: the creation of the world, the revelations at Sinai or in the Cave of Hira, or the life and death of Christ. I’d like to talk about a more obscure theological event: the shrinking of the olive.

Since the writing of the Talmud, Jewish law has used the olive (k’zayit) as a standard of bulk. But that size, which was then itself subjected to a complex legal dialectic, has changed over time, as Natan Slifkin has shown. Haredi Jews today hold a k’zayit to be much bigger than any existing material olive, about the size of an egg. To resolve this disparity, many Haredim claim that olives today are much smaller than those of the past. There is abundant archeological and literary evidence to the contrary. Further, because olive trees are exceptionally hardy, some have survived for 2,000 years; many such trees are found in the Middle East, and their olives are the same size as those of younger trees. The Haredim do not mind: they are describing not the natural world, but a miracle.

The “shrinking of the olive” enacts in miniature the central feature of what Menachem Friedman calls the “Haredi historiographic conception.” Friedman claims that “Haredi society divides Jewish history into two main periods,” that is, the past and the present:

The first arguably commences with the Patriarch, receipt of the Torah, or perhaps the mishnaic and Talmudic eras and concludes with the inception of the Haskalah [Jewish enlightenment]. According to Haredi historiography, there was only one kind of Jewish identity during this period, one whose sole legitimate expression was unconditional commitment to Halakha… generation after generation… Contrasting with this age of fulfillment and wholeness is the modern period… This period was marked by a substantial and fundamental rift, as great masses of Jews abandoned the traditional Jewish identity and unconditional commitment to Halakhah… The contemporary mythology of Haredi society may well be based primarily on this interpretation of historical realities during the age of schism. The rift was so vast and so dramatic that even those who remained loyal to the values and customs of the previous age… were somehow affected by it… Awareness of flaws, of incompleteness relative to the previous era, is a central component in Haredi society’s self-perception.

In other words, “the olives aren’t what they once were.” The large k’zayit, interestingly, is essentially a stringency: one must eat a k’zayit of matzah at a Passover seder. Slifkin points out that even if olives were larger in the past, it’s not clear what that means for practice today; indeed, early medieval sources explicitly say we follow the size of modern-day olives and do not worry about the past. But within the Haredi historiography (and worldview), following the olives of the past (despite explicit legal precedent saying the opposite) makes perfect sense; the past, as Friedman writes, is considered “a way of life which Haredim aspire to maintain,” a lost innocence which our practice seeks to preserve.

The Haredim see a sociological, moral, and theological rupture between present and past which interrupts the working of both natural history (uprooting the ancient olive tree’s evidence) and of fundamental human sameness. Being “fallen,” Haredim cannot trust the reality of the present and must follow the (imagined) past. Most of us see the flow of time from past to present as continuous or homogeneous; the Haredim see a mythic, sacred line dividing two eras.

It’s telling that Friedman cannot situate “the past” precisely in history; this sacred, mythological history stands apart from the Bible’s pre-existing mythic structure. Haredim rarely interpret the present in light of the stories of the Deuteronomist, which could be natural precursors to modernity. These stories formed the basis for traditional Jewish historiography, described by Yosef Chayim Yerushalmi as basically cyclical. The Israelites deserts God, are punished, repent, and return to God’s favor, until they desert God, are punished… and so on, always cycling through a constant pattern. Haredi sacred time, in contrast, revolves around the axis of “modernity,” and sharply cleaves two times from each other; this break does not follow the pattern of past history. The Haredi worldview is, paradoxically, a new mythology.

Haredim see themselves as resisting modernity, but scholars like Friedman and Haym Soloveitchik have used cases like the olive to argue that the Haredi conservatism is itself uniquely modern. Opposing what he calls “textual” and “mimetic” sources for authority, Soloveitchik writes:

Jews have been practicing the Seder for thousands of years, and no one paid very much attention to what [the k’zayit] was… One simply did as one’s parents had done… The problem of “minimal requisite quantities” has been known since the mid-eighteenth century… Though the men who raised this issue… were some of the most famous Talmudists of the modern era… nevertheless, their words fell on deaf ears and were without any impact, even in the most scholarly and religiously meticulous circles… A theoretical position [about the k’zayit] that had been around for close to two centuries suddenly begins in the 1950′s to assume practical significance… From then on, traditional conduct, no matter how venerable, how elementary, or how closely remembered, yields to the demands of theoretical knowledge… Fundamentally, all the above… reflect the essential change in the nature of religious performance that occurs in a text culture. Books cannot demonstrate conduct; they can only state its requirements… Performance is no longer, as in a traditional society, replication of what one has seen, but implementation of what one knows…

For Soloveitchik, modernity signifies the primacy of “textual,” rationalist authority over the “mimetic” traditions passed through the family. Mass migration from Eastern Europe to America and the devastation of the Holocaust “wrote finis to a culture.” Since the 19^th Century, dialecticians had theoretically revised the quantity of the k’zayit; only after the loss of the tradition was this reasoning applied in practice.

It’s a fascinating narrative, which is unfortunately wrong about the olive. For if the Haredi history involves miracles (like sacred botany), Friedman and Solovetichik require the historical equivalent. The olive’s expansion did not begin in the 18^th century, as Solovetichik claims, but rather, as Slifkin shows, in the 12^th century, when Jews emigrated north from the Mediterranean and became Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenazi rabbis began to closely scrutinize Talmudic texts, exploiting comparisons between various sizes (e.g between an olive and a thumb, or an olive and an egg) to infer the size of an olive. They offered progressively larger definitions of an olive. Slifkin explains:

…the Ashkenazi authorities never saw an olive. Olives do not grow that far north; they only grow in the Mediterranean region. In medieval Europe, transporting commodities was expensive, and was only done with foodstuffs for which there was high demand. Many food items were simply unknown in some regions.

Spanish rabbis continued to hold that to determine an olive’s bulk, one looks at an olive; but for Ashkenazi rabbis things were not so simple. By the 16^th century, the Ashkenazi discussion of the k’zayit had grown quite ornate, whereas the Spanish rabbis rarely discussed the question.

When, in the aftermath of the Jewish expulsion from Spain, R. Yosef Karo united Sephardic (i.e. Spanish) and Ashkenazi halakha in the Shulchan Aruch, he recorded only the Ashkenazi opinion (that an olive is half an egg). He preceded it with the tag, “some say,” – that is, indicating it was a dissent from the common opinion. But because the more “mimetic” tradition of Spain had produced no complex dialectics – or indeed, any controversy – it was not recorded in the Shulchan Aruch. Probably, this omission meant little to the Spanish Karo – after all, he had seen real olives. As a compiler of an authoritative law code, he did not want to exclude an important existing custom, even if he didn’t take that custom seriously.

But future halakhic discourse would not depend on what Karo saw, but on what he wrote; the theoretical stringency he recorded prevailed. Already, textual reasoning triumphed over mimetic tradition and straightforward trust of reality – 400 years before Soloveitchik’s “rupture and reconstruction.”

To read the olive as the signum demonstrativum of Modernity – as do Soloveitchik and Friedman – suggests “sacred history”; these historians sharply divide tradition and modernity, placing the line between past and present roughly at the Holocaust. Their myth is more familiar to me; “post-Holocaust theology” seems more natural than “post-Haskalah theology.”

But both the Haredim and their historians are invested in the historiography of “rupture,” of Modernity as a distinctly new historical epoch. If we follow the olive’s history, however, we should probably speak of the repeated reconfiguration of Jewish tradition in the wake of myriad “modernities.” That is to say, modernity happens over and over again, each time that a tradition is dislocated from the life-world that produced it.

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster distinguishes story, a succession of events connected each to the last by “and then,” from plot, a structure by which an author orders those events and gives them meaning. Sacred history superimposes a transcendent plot on a homogeneous story; it is sacred because just as the author transcends her text, God transcends the world. I mean “transcend” here in a specific usage; both God and the author stand outside the world of the text, on an entirely differently level of reality.

The historian cannot avoid plot; without it, information lacks order and meaning. But not all plots are sacred: sacred plot implies the rupture of transcendent interference, the creation of foundational new categories, the will to say “everything is new.” What I’m proposing, in speaking of “modernities,” is neither homogeneous time nor sacred history, but rather “human history,” that is, time organized by the material changes to human situation. I’m following Richard Rorty’s defense of modernity:

The way to stop the pendulum swinging between ‘irrationalism’ and ‘defences of reason’ is to let historical self-consciousness take the place of metaphysics. Such historical self-consciousness would not require ahistorical metaphysical or epistemological back-up, but merely a vocabulary which, as [Hans Blumenberg] says, has ‘a durability that is very great in relation to both our capacity to perceive historical events and the rate of change involved in them’. In other words, if we can tell a story about why we moderns are in better shape than the ancients and the medievals, we’ve got what he calls ‘sufficient rationality’ – the same sort of Whiggish rationality as we use when telling stories of scientific progress. We can ignore the question of whether the heuristic vocabulary we use in telling this story – the vocabulary which describes ‘the constant matrix of needs’ which humans fulfil by telling themselves philosophical and theological and historical stories is – grounded in anything.

That is to say, modernity ought not be thought of as a new metaphysical or existential condition, created ex nihilo. It is instead the simply the logic of certain historical sequences; it exists today alongside other logics, to a greater or lesser extent, and needs to be grounded not in revelation (or, for that matter, foundational rational justification), but merely as a pragmatic response to particular events. According to Rorty, we should stop worrying whether the scientific method is “grounded,” that is, whether its conclusions (ideally) correspond to the outside world and are thus absolutely true. Instead, science is a good way of achieving consensus on some difficult, old questions; it is a very useful tool in achieving human happiness.

What happens to the halakhic olive’s  symbolism? Perhaps it just vanishes; changes in its size reflect simply the constant redefinitions of halakha as a living community bumbles its way through an ever-shifting cosmos. But instead, I’d like to offer the olive as a Lacanian real, its symbolism deriving precisely from its arbitrary materiality and resistance to simple historical stories. The olive instantiates the difference between our symbolic narrations of history and the irreducibly chaotic reality. In Hebrew, the word for nothing (cloom) comes from the word for olive-pit (loom). In writing history, we always discard that which is not useful to our narrative – the olive-pits. Yet the olive-pit, inedible and incapable of being assimilated into human history, survives, serving as a constant reminder that our stories are the not ultimate truth, that our “nothing” may be the egg from which a future narration is born.

Halvard Solness?

Reading Ben’s post on stagnant thought and homogenous time, I thought of a cultural rut that America seems unable to escape: an obsession with vampires. The past two years have seen “Twilight,” “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries, ” not to mention a flurry of knock-offs. Today, the movie “Let Me In” comes out in theaters, a vampire film which is itself an adaptation of the Swedish film “Let The Right One In.” Even the venerable New Yorker has dedicated a panel in its three-day festival to the phenomenon. Of course, media executives often hop on the bandwagon of whatever superficial element seems to be selling tickets and DVDs. Still, I am curious about this cultural trend. What is so compelling about vampires right now?

Writing about the zombie craze that has had a stranglehold on the nation’s (sub)consciousness, Mark McGurl refers in passing to the enduring appeal of vampires:

The brightest star in [the community of the Undead] has always been the vampire, with his elegantly alarming fangs and aristocratic lineage, and a philosophically instructive vampire vs. zombie class war is being conducted before our eyes today. Vampires are smart, agile, glamorous. Even when presented as a sort of minority community, as in the HBO show True Blood, they are also highly individualized, even eccentric, with identities held intact across centuries. They are “historical” figures in this sense, a representation, within the generic, of the realist ideal of character. But as the recent multimedia megahit Twilight makes clear, they should more properly be thought of simply as celebrities, beings superior to us in every way except morally. They represent the cruelty entailed in all our dreams of exalted individuality.

I think McGurl is right. The vampire represents our fantasies of being Hegelian, world-historical figures at the same time that they serve as a safe target for ressentiment at an aristocratic class seen as parasitic and debauched. This reading, however, falls short of explaining why there is such a craze for vampires right now, at this particular historical moment.

The first relevant feature of the vampire archetype to our times is eros without reproduction. It’s a cliché to talk about the vampire as an essentially sexual creature, but what really fascinates me is that, for all its sexual power, the vampire is impotent. All the sex/bloodsucking is incapable of creating new life; the only way a vampire can “reproduce” is by transforming a non-vampire, an act that is less reproduction than re-appropriation. Twilight is the notable exception, but the exception that seems to prove the rule: note the series’ intense fear of sexual intercourse, and the fact that Bella’s pregnancy almost kills her.

The immortality of the vampire also raises some interesting issues for a contemporary audience. McGurl’s identification of the vampire with Hegel’s concept of the world-historical figure is particularly useful here. World-historical figures are world-historical because they have some sort of insight into the zeitgeist; as Hegel puts it, they are “thinking men who [have] an insight into the requirements of the time – what was ripe for development . . . [the world-historical individual] is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else.” At the same time, Hegel notes, the world-historical person is unlikely to be aware of his role in serving the World-Spirit: “Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men.” The eternal, world-historical individual is a curious paradox. He would share the eternal moment of the World-Spirit, and act instinctively in the spirit of that moment, but he would likely be ignorant of the historical progress of the world. In other words, the vampire is a powerful being who is nevertheless trapped in an eternal present, unable to conceive of a possible future.

The prototype of this particular vampire comes not from Bram Stoker, but from Henrik Ibsen. The main character of his play The Master Builder, Halvard Solness, is the key to understanding the modern preoccupation with the vampire. For, despite his lack of dramatic bloodsucking, Solness truly is a vampire. He refuses to graduate his apprentice, Ragnar Brovik, so that he may continue to feed on his creative ability. Further, Solness is simultaneously erotic and impotent. He seduces Ragnar’s wife, but contrary to appearances, he never consummates the relationship; it is simply a means to the end of keeping Ragnar attached to him. He is also creatively ineffectual: despite his reputation, he long ago abandoned the grand artistic challenge of building churches in favor of building “homes for human beings,” and Ragnar’s father Knut, contrasting Solness’ designs with Ragnar’s “completely new and different” designs, suggests subtly that Solness is long past his creative prime.

Solness is the type of world-historical genius who has a unique insight into the zeitgeist. He sees a crack in the chimney of his wife’s childhood home and does nothing, allowing the building to burn down in order to give him the opportunity to build a new home that would create his reputation. This is the world-historical mentality in action: “If old Knut Brovik had owned the house, it never would have burned down so conveniently for him – I’m positive of that. Because he doesn’t know how to call on the helpers, or the servers either.” But trapped in an eternal present, Solness has an intense fear of change, growing, by his own admission “awfully afraid of the young. . . . Wait and see, the young will come here, thundering at the door! Breaking in on me! . . . they’re retribution–the spearhead of change–as if they came marching under a new flag.” Note the traditional vampiric aversion to thresholds. Who the young are and what change they bring always remains vague. Solness doesn’t fear one development in particular, but rather the whole idea of development; or better yet, the final development, the arrival of the Eschaton that will put an end to his dominance. When the character Hilda–herself an uncanny, eternally youthful presence from Solness’ past–announces that she “wants her kingdom,” the symbolism isn’t exactly subtle.

The Solness vampire, freed from the baggage of fangs and capes, can be found throughout contemporary culture. Consider Mad Men‘s Roger Sterling. In the most recent season, Roger has either no desire or no ability to bring in new business to the firm, and instead feeds off of the abilities of others: Don’s advertising acumen, Pete’s sales ability. Sterling is still powerful, but he lives in a world he does not understand, surrounded by rapid change that petrifies him. In the episode “The Sword and The Chrysanthemum,” he sabotages a deal with Honda. The excuse he gives is that, as a World War II veteran, the idea of doing business with the Japanese is abhorrent to him. But as Pete points out in the confrontation that follows, Roger’s real reason is that Pete bringing in the Honda account would shift the power balance away from Roger and towards Pete–and towards the younger members of the firm in general. Roger’s complaint to Joan towards the end of the episode is very telling: “Since when is forgiveness considered better than loyalty?” Forgiveness here really means change, and not just any change–it means the dramatic, historical change that renders the ledgers of the previous era meaningless. It means a minor eschaton.

It is an anxiety over eschatology, Walter Benjamin points out, that is at the root of the prevalence of vampirism in contemporary culture. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he writes about what was perhaps the original Solness vampire, the sovereign of the tragic form called Trauerspiel. The sovereign is characterized by melancholy and an inability to take action. The root of the characterization, Benjamin argues, is, on one hand, Calvinist thought that reduces all human action to the non-historical function of the signposts of predestination and, on the other hand, the Counter-Reformation which positively rejects historical development. The sovereign has the power to act historically, but also the knowledge that such action is futile. The future is something that he cannot comprehend and that positively excludes him. Thus, he does not move:

The religious man of the baroque era clings so tightly to the world because of the feeling that he is being driven along to a cataract with it. The baroque knows no eschatology; and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to their end. The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.

As Benjamin knows so well, the modern significance is that the baroque period represents the birth of our modern, capitalist society. Their religious men are now our Solnesses and Sterlings.

We hear constantly from the media, from politicians and from entertainment that our way of life has been too good for us. It will come to an end. The world will boil over. The US will go bankrupt. Our food supply is unsustainable. It’s simply been too good and it has to end, and when it will end, it will end in a cataclysm. Obsessed with such an outlook, our society bitterly resists any sort of change that might herald the end. It refuses to let our current form of unrestricted capitalism die. And when something’s time is up, and it refuses to die, what can it be other than undead?

Whether or not his prejudices should cast doubt on his credibility is a question we can leave aside, since his articles contain enough poor science to disabuse us of any sympathy we might have for his views. For a taste of Kahlenberg’s inclinations, here are the concluding sentences of his first article:

In a fundamental sense, this nation’s first two great wars—the Revolution and the Civil War—were fought to defeat different forms of aristocracy. That this remnant of ancestry-based discrimination still survives—in American higher education, of all places—is truly breathtaking.

If the professor genuinely believes that legacy admissions disgrace the spirit of our forefathers, one can only imagine what he must think about expensive private high schools and family businesses—institutions that are much more efficient than selective colleges at keeping wealth in the family, evidently an un-American activity. Perhaps he would prefer mandatory public education and a one-hundred-percent estate tax? And, for good measure, throw in a federal prohibition against hiring relatives.

For the most part, Kahlenberg dismisses each of the “10 Myths” with misdirections. He cherry-picks statistics from specific colleges, then compares the colleges as apples to oranges. He makes a habit of assuming that correlation implies causation. Caltech, which does not give legacy preference, receives nearly as much financial support from alumni as MIT, which does support legacy preference; thus he ostensibly proves that legacy admissions have no effect on alumni giving. As if the logical fallacy weren’t enough, it turns out that MIT legacy “preference” in fact consists only of one extra review for rejected applications, very rarely changing the outcome of the process.

Even when Kahlenberg draws on serious academic research concerning legacies, he is very selective about which data he reports. To take one example at random, he refers (without citing) to research by Thomas Epenshade of Princeton which suggests that legacy status boosts an applicant’s chance for admission by the equivalent of 160 points on the SAT. (Incidentally, this advantage is less than that typically received by blacks, hispanics, and recruited athletes.) However, another study by Epenshade (“The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities,” Social Science Quarterly, June 2005) concludes that existing legacy admissions policies “only mildly displace members of minority groups”—though one of the great “injustices” Kahlenberg laments is precisely this displacement. “Myth 9,” in fact, is the idea that legacy admissions are only mildly harmful to non-legacy students’ admissions chances. Instead of proving that the idea is a myth, he diverts the reader by rattling off a paragraph of statistics about how wealthy and important selective colleges are.

It is especially hard take seriously what Kahlenberg has to say about the legality of legacy admissions. Referring to an obscure constitutional detail about Titles of Nobility, he presents a case made by Carlton Larson (though Kahlenberg fails to disclose that he himself edited the paper) that legacy admissions are “precisely the type of hereditary privilege that the Revolutionary generation sought to destroy forever.” I may be no lawyer, but “Court Rules That Legacy Status Is Title of Nobility” sounds more like a bad headline from The Onion than a report any admissions officer should be worried about. Larson, as Kahlenberg puts it, “makes a compelling case that this prohibition should not be interpreted narrowly as simply prohibiting the naming of individuals as dukes or earls, but more broadly, to prohibit “government-sponsored hereditary privileges.’” But even if it meets legal muster, this argument only applies to public universities, many of which have already eliminated legacy admissions preference. Kahlenberg also claims that the 14th amendment should prohibit the practice—referring to a constitutional argument grounded in the principle of birthright citizenship that children should be judged only on their own merits—but if a court were to take this argument seriously, it would also have to prohibit all nepotism in hiring practices. No more working in dad’s hardware store.

I agree with many of Kahlenberg’s sentiments. Until the 1960s, my own alma matter admitted all legacy students, causing the legacy population to rise to a peak of nearly a quarter of the class. Some of these students certainly did not earn or deserve their coveted spots. But these days it is hard to say whether any student really deserves her place in the freshman class. When the most selective universities confess that they can only admit a small fraction of the students they believe to be equally well qualified for admission, speak of an educational meritocracy. Would Kahlenberg be able to provide a list of selection criteria he thinks are best for any given institution? Many colleges use financial need as an admission criterion; is family income more meritocratic than family educational background?

Like Kahlenberg, I would prefer more merit-based admissions policies. But his insinuation seems to be that elite colleges and universities which maintain legacy policies do so in bad faith, or at least with ethical indifference coupled with inferior intelligence. In reality, the process of choosing among thousands of impressive applicants is not only greatly subjective but demands an extraordinarily complex balance of values. Perhaps one of those values, at least at some institutions, ought to be loyalty to the members of the community of learning. Every college should carefully deliberate legacy status just as it evaluates the dozens of other evaluative attributes. There is no universal ethic, and Kahlenberg’s pretensions to know the right answer for every school are a dangerous reduction of morality to ideology.