thoughts on Sally Rooney's "Normal People"

I just finished reading Sally Rooney's novel "Normal People," set in Western Ireland, near to where my ancestors hailed from, and Dublin. I'd forgotten how healthy it is for me to read fiction in balance with nonfiction, keeps my imagination afloat and gives me some alternate stories to reality.

Initially, I didn’t know if this angsted-out straight relationship would hold my interest, but it did, mainly because of the quality & insightfulness of the writing, and the intrigue of the class dynamic between them, which influenced how they felt they ‘belonged’ in the different spaces of the book. It was at its most gripping to me in the moments in which Rooney elucidated some societal commentary through either Marianne’s or Connell’s read of a situation or phenomenon.

One of my favourite of these moments was following a literature talk that Connell attends: “Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” (221-2)

It’s part cogent critique from what I presume to be something she experienced studying literature at Trinity, part self-drag, as she became one of those writers who becomes part of the 'literary establishment,’ going through the motions of book tours and talks. It reminds me of the movie “The End of the Tour” about David Foster Wallace’s final days—he killed himself just after giving a book talk in Minneapolis, and, through the whole rigamarole of interviews & publicity, was openly critical of the way that artwork is commodified & peddled to the masses for profit. Kind of sucks the soul out of it.

The psychological approach & urban chic reminds me of Virginia Woolf and her London—modernism with a self-awareness & self-deprecation of pretension.

Rooney’s prose is affectedly flat, cool, & quick-witted, so streamlined & well-tooled that you glide through it with minimal awareness of the level of the text—the story is just there. Roland Barthes wrote about the ‘degree zero’ of literature, that there is no such thing as an absence of style. It’s like accents: you might say that one place or another in the United States is the ’no-accent’ version of U.S. English, but of course to anyone outside of that arbitrarily-chosen dialect, there is a perceptible difference that would be read as an accent. That Rooney’s prose reads so smoothly is a sign that she has captured well the diction of well-heeled young people of our time.

In the end, the book has me feeling a bit like Connell after the talk: that was cool, but what is the purpose? Is this book resisting against anything, and does it need to be in order to be a ‘worthwhile’ contribution to the world? At the very least, it got some gears turning in my brain, and this post is a testament to the benefit of art for art’s sake, something against which to bounce your brain off of.

Game of Thrones, Season 8 (spoilers!)

(better late than never, hehe)

Several months ago, I 'tuned in' (streamed on my laptop while in bed, at my leisure) to the series finale of Game of Thrones, along with 19.3 million other people around the world. At that point, I was finishing the series in part due to intransigent commitment to finishing anything I start, which is itself at least partially due to some 'fear of missing out' or of irrelevance—the anxiety of non-conformity in highly conformist times, the social pressure that can go along with any mass-culture 'phenomenon.' My dissatisfactions with the last season echoed those of many other viewers—something just wasn't gripping me in the same way as those early episodes, in which each main character's unanticipated murder retained its shock value, and, with delightful relatability, the powers that be seemed constrained by their existence in a well-built complex fictional world.

A pervasive critique of the series was that the writing went 'off' after episodes outpaced the books. In this article by Zeynep Tufecki for Scientific American, the writer posits that the fundamental shift that took place from seasons 1-4, still based on George R. R. Martin's books, to seasons 5-8, whose writing was overseen by Benioff & Weiss, was one of the modality of storytelling, namely a shift from sociological to psychological narrative. The latter is the dominant mode of storytelling in the mass media with which we would be familiar from a series like Lord of the Rings, or any Disney movie: there are a set of main characters whose internal drives & senses of right & wrong steer the plot, usually along some variation of the 'hero's journey.' Sociological storytelling tells a larger story, fleshing out the story-world with the institutional & environmental factors that influence the characters operating within it, giving the viewer a wider perspective to empathise with any character's actions—or at least be able to understand them as more complex, rather than flattened avatars for good or evil or loyalty, etc.

This dominant mode of character-driven psychological narrative seems to be a holdover of the Freudianism that inspired much of the early-Modernist artistic production at the turn of the 20th century. The prismatic, fragmented 'stream of consciousness' musings of Joyce & Woolf exploring the nuances of the psyche, the self, & the way that lived experience is filtered & inflected differently by & through each individual person. Artists devised new formal methods of representing the human experience in a seemingly unmediated form (how does one actually experience sentient existence? how would I capture in words the flow of thoughts through my head?). This was a watershed moment for innovation in storytelling: now, the banal, the quotidian, the low-brow are all fodder for literature. And not just in the sense of the English Romantics, who a century prior revelled in idolizing the poor agrarian lifestyle as the nexus of some sort of truth of the human condition that is jeopardized by the Industrial Revolution.

About the same time that Freud was theorizing the id & the ego, as well as the pleasure principle & the death drive, of the individual psyche, Émile Durkheim was laying the foundations of sociology, notably in his text "Le Suicide" (1897), which was the first methodological study of a social phenomenon in its societal context. Prior to his study, suicide was viewed as an individual tragedy, a failure of the will; Durkheim was the first to collect data & identify societal trends that enlarged the scope to a societal scale (in his findings, he reported that single Protestant men in times of peace was the most at-risk demographic). He also developed a taxonomy of suicide, elaborating four general categories: egoistic (a feeling of not belonging), altruistic (in a society in which individual needs are subordinated to the needs of the whole), anomic (moral confusion & lacking social direction), and fatalistic (when a person's passions & free will is blocked by society). With these categories, one cannot view each suicide as a discrete, individual phenomenon without making connections to other similar cases. This sociological standpoint, the macro movement to Freud's micro/internal move, fostered a revolution in the humanities that touched anthropology, economics, literary studies, and laid the foundation for all sorts of 'cultural studies.' Writers like Pierre Bourdieu & Michel Foucault contributed their intellectual efforts to building an understanding of the nature & operation of institutional power & influence that permeate & undergird post-modern Western society.

It is in this sense that the YouTube vlogger 'Then & Now' asserts that what sets Game of Thrones apart, or at least what set it apart at the beginning, is that it is uniquely post-modern. Here is his video on GoT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiPxRtRbOS4&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3JPFzueouUhsTWu-Q8aTliCWdZDys9U60XBIxJjn4IHWOJEePY0gn7Skk

Of particular interest to me is how, 60 years after their writings, the work of these sociologists has permeated pop-culture at the mass-level—in a society that is over-saturated in pop-culture. Perhaps this is another characteristic of post-modernism: the trickling down of complex social theory into pop vernacular.

Last week, at my outdoor education non-profit's All Hands training day, every employee—from the CEO to the educators to the housekeeping team—went through a four-hour third-party Diversity, Equity & Inclusion training. It was organised by the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee, of which I am part, as a measure to offer training on power & privilege toward the end of better serving the youth with whom we work, the majority of whom come from low-income backgrounds in Reno & Sacramento. Gail & Reena, the hired experts, went through a series of orthodox definitions on the topic (racism, prejudice, discrimination, intersectionality), then led a 'privilege walk' to visualise our respective societally-provided advantages & set-backs. Their approach, as is the general approach in Social Justice circles & efforts going on around the world, is decidedly sociological; institutionalised injustice, racism, & violence is not, in fact about any of us as individuals, helplessly born into our nexus in the web of existing systems of power. This allows for some amount of personal relief, as there is no use in guilt over that for which we are not at fault; what we are responsible for is awareness & action, making the decision to dismantle the systems that benefit us and hinder others. Undertaking this work is vitally important in order to move toward a more equitable society, and is greatly aided by these understandings of the abstract machinations of power at play that often go unnoticed to the untrained or privileged eye. I will say, as a counterpoint to this uncomfortable work, it is important to strive for ways to make Social Justice work sustainable, and even fun, as Adrienne Maree Brown advocates in her book Pleasure Activism. Before the training started, we spent the morning on the ropes course, and that community bonding time is just as important as the definitions & privilege walks in making progress on the mass scale. Start at home, with your community!

Back to Game of Thrones stuff: a little analysis of the character of Daenerys.

We can view Dany as a crystallisation of what Democracy has come to on a mass scale. Initial theories of Democracy as a viable political system took as their model the Athenian city-state. Today, while Democracy can operate in a limited fashion in a single polis (I'm thinking of Seattle banning plastic straws), it is subordinate to state & federal governance (I'm thinking of securing public school funding, or the tension around marijuana legalisation). And on an even larger scale, Democracy (or something under that name) has become the cause that the West has taken upon itself to 'defend' (i.e. spread through colonial proselytizing) around the world. At this mass scale, which attempts to impose onto innumerable sub-cultures one mode of self- and over-governance, there can be no hope for what one would think of as the direct Democracy of Athens, with its rotating towns-folk instead of our career politicians. Perhaps all we can hope for is a benevolent dictator who “wants to make the world a better place,” as Tyrion explains to Sansa when defending his decision to stick with Khaleesi until she has dominated the throne (S8E4, 47:50). Is there a parallel with Obama, the liberal-progressive saint who ruled with virtual moral impunity? Dany began as the symbolic end of authoritarianism & the dawn of democracy with a beloved queen, but she ended as tyranny in the name of liberation. I don't think this points to the inherent pitfall of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as theorised in Marxism, but it is a reminder that the rarest of Revolutions with a big R is that without bloodshed.

ecocentrism everywhere now

Just watched an episode of Blue Planet about the green seas and am feeling so inspired by the natural world! The sea otter population rising, after being hunted nearly to extinction, & keeping the sea urchin population in check, which keeps the kelp forests alive as an ecosystem for the rest of the living things that depend on it!

My time at Sierra Nevada Journeys, this outdoor school in the mountains of California, has had an immeasurable impact on my perspective of the world, and one principal way has been a shift in perspective from anthropocentrism (human-centred, as was taught all my life through university studies) to ecocentrism (locating humans as ultimately and irreducibly in & of their natural environments as part of an ecosystem).

These past couple of months, I've been digging into the graduate school 'application process,' which has mainly consisted of trying to figure out what exactly my interest, my angle of entry into the vast body of philosophical & theoretical thinking on culture, aesthetics, & history, might be. I feel compelled to at least narrow this question down, while at the same time "living the question," as Rilke reminds us, in order to find programs that will nurture this rhizomic knot of interests.

The more I investigate, the more it becomes apparent that many of the intrigues & ills in society that are cast as utterly human or cultural, as opposed to 'animal' or 'natural,' are rooted in humans as biotic factors in an environment. The housing crisis & homelessness, wealth inequality, which presents itself concretely in the disparity of access to resources like food & water, medical insurance, homophobia, misogyny, & racism all have political & cultural dimensions to them, which are the most immediately visible to us, having been conditioned to view things primarily through this anthropocentric lens, but are ultimately based in humans having bodies & living together in spaces that can sustain our lives with food & shelter.

Murray Bookchin puts it plainly, though I'm not totally convinced, when he writes in his 1964 essay "Ecology & Revolutionary Thought," that "The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world." The root of what has led us astray, according to Murray, is greed & the never-ending pursuit of profit (i.e. unbridled neoliberal capitalism, a.k.a. the only form of capitalism that I have known in my lived experience). This radically posits that the Civil Rights movement, seeking to end an age in modern human relations of racial hierarchy, & the human factor in climate change, due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, can be viewed as intrinsically, causally tied.

To briefly follow this rabbit hole: England was driven to settle the 'New World' in the first place as a means of acquiring more 'raw material'—wood for the Navy, in this case, having run out of that resource on their geographically limiting island—in order to be able to compete with other European imperialist powers...for what? A feedback loop of more land for more resources for more land, all driven by an ideology of hubristic, bottomless, aimless greed for control, riches, & moral superiority. As for the brown folks who already lived there, they were dehumanized based on their melanin complexion & less-civilized lifestyles (one could also so, more in resonance with how humans had adapted to life in those regions) in order to justify their domination & extermination; as for who would end up working this new land in order to make it as productive & profitable to the homeland, black folks were stolen from their homes in Western Africa and likewise dehumanized. The motives for racism were based in acquiring & farming the land; racism has long outgrown these roots, and has persisted on its own in culture.

In his odd, new-agey, Socratic "Ishmael," Daniel Quinn explains that there are 'Leavers' who live in accordance with the basic ecological principles of competition & diversity, and there are 'Takers' who wage war on life & seek to dominate the environment, ultimately leading to a decline in diversity of life. A clearly-identifiable trend on this planet is that life becomes more complex, and this ever-augmenting diversity is essential to the stability of every ecosystem. According to Quinn, the moment in history when the Takers diverged from the Leavers is the advent of settled agriculture, the moment of the Adamic fall from grace. Along with this lifestyle shift came a cultural shift to justify itself, based on the principle that the world exists for humanity to dominate.

I'm still mulling it all over, but it does strike me as of the utmost importance that human society shift its standard perspective from anthropocentric (us vs. the world) to ecocentric (us in & of the world). This shift can not only drive us toward turning the tide, or at least stemming the flow, of climate change, but also reestablish a lodestar to guide us toward rebalancing human society with our planet-home.

Some recent reading:

this article about the new form of power that Facebook wields, not quite a government, not quite a tech monopoly (humans as social creatures)

this article entitled "Cruising in the age of Consent" (humans' diverse sexual practices)

this journal article by Robert Pollin entitled "Degrowth vs A Green New Deal" (what humans can do to maintain our standard of living while remaining in harmony with our environment)

new year, new resolution

Happy 2020!

(for some reason this meme has caught on, and I think it's hilarious—it reveals the farcical fragility of our consensus reality)

This year, I think I would like to rant a bit more on this blog, for the purely personal reasons of having a way to organize the reading & thinking I'm doing in a typically internet-y/disorganized way (i.e. starting off reading a New Republic article about AMLO and ending up watching a Vox video on China's border with Hong Kong), keep a living "history" of things I encounter on the internet, and to write more.

What I'm up to: sitting in my friend Rosie's house in Somerville listening to the playlist of ambient music in this Noisey article, still recovering from our New Years festivities a few nights ago.

What's also up: the government is still shut down because of Trump's wall tantrum; Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential exploratory committee on nye; still waiting to see if the gilets jaunes movement will pick up with the same gusto after the holiday hiatus and if it is a movement with a future; AMLO announced that he has no property or wealth to demonstrate his transparency; and the usual neoliberal shenanigans all over the place, I guess.

"Resolution" is a tricky word, with versatile applications: as a noun for a firm decision or the act of solving some problem; as an adjective ("resolute") to describe someone with the resolve and tenacity to make things happen; in music, it is the movement from discord to harmony, the relief of tension with the movement to consonance and closure.

Of course, we are most familiar with this word in the context of a "New Years Resolution:" some personal promise to change something in your life that is not working. The scope is individual, and often merely things we feel we should do for some vague reason (societal pressure!).

I've been reading & thinking about this quote from Fredric Jameson: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Perhaps we can resolve to resolve this conundrum together.