Author: staceymeeker

Any consideration of consumer society has to begin with recognizing its enormous success, including the exponential expansion of the middle-class and the extension of mass-produced cultural products in global markets. Yet despite its practical success, consumer society, and the market economy that makes it possible, has never been without its critics. The paradox here is that an economic system dedicated to fulfilling desire still generates substantial dissatisfaction, even from those who benefit the most from this system.

Modern critiques of consumerism and the mass media can be found in the recent popular movie The Truman Show (1998) and Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). Both these works express, in very different ways, the cultural anxieties created by consumer society. But while The Day of the Locust offers us valuable insights into the problems posed by mass culture, The Truman Show gives a mythic perspective that fundamentally distorts our modern situation. I present here an anthropological analysis of consumer culture that will reveal the limitations of the neo-Marxist critique of consumerism expressed in The Truman Show. The Day of the Locust, on the other hand, poses the more serious question of whether consumer society is capable of containing the violent resentments that it generates, a question which the second half of this essay will consider at more length.

1. The Truman Show

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.

This critique of consumer society finds its paradigmatic allegorical expression in the popular movie The Truman Show. The main character, Truman Burbank, played by Jim Cary, lives literally in a giant bubble, a climate-controlled dome where every moment of his life in secretly filmed and broadcast as a reality show to a world-wide audience. Life in the bubble appears to Truman as free but is actually governed by the show’s producer Christof. Truman’s day-to-day life is in reality a series of advertisements: his friends and family (all actors of course) are constantly touting the benefits of various consumer products to the show’s audience while they simultaneously play their roles in Truman’s life. Truman believes that his desires are freely chosen, but in fact they are scripted, predetermined by the producer, including his choice of wife, career, friends, and so on. We find out, through a series of flashbacks, that as a teenager he met a woman Lauren who offers him the possibility of true love, but because she has not been scripted as his future wife, she is whisked off the show despite anything they can do. A more conventionally beautiful blonde named Meryl is chosen as his wife, but she only pretends to love him.

The movie portrays Truman’s discovery that a world outside his bubble exists, a world which the movie suggests is more authentic or “real,” free from the manipulations of Christof, the show’s producer, whose name suggests the biblical Antichrist. If Truman could only get outside the bubble, outside the mimetic manipulation of Christof, he could desire authentically, find his true love, and live a real, unmediated life. The movie ends with Truman leaving the dome, refusing the safe yet empty fantasy world offered by the producer.

The Truman Show is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress. In John Bunyan’s classic allegory, Christian, an everyman, discovers with the help of the Bible that he lives in the “City of Destruction” and is accordingly doomed. He must leave his friends and family and set out on the pilgrim pathway, where he encounters various obstacles, temptations, and setbacks. He perseveres, however, and finally arrives at the Heavenly City. The book ends with him crossing the “River of Death” and entering heaven. Likewise, Truman lives in a fool’s paradise until he discovers that his life is a mere sham. He sets out to leave his friends and family and encounters various obstacles; but he perseveres, and the movie ends with him stepping outside the dome to a brave new world of unmediated desire.

The movie has been universally interpreted as an allegory of the sinister influence of the media upon our lives. According to a website devoted to the movie, “It is a story that reveals an essential truth about what is happening to society in the 20^th century, . . . [i.e.] how the media and corporations have begun to surround us with a universe of illusions” (Sanes). In this reading, Truman Burbank is an everyman, a “true man,” analogous to each one of us. As the website puts it,

Thus does the movie offer us a metaphor for our own situation. The fake landscape Truman lives in is our own media landscape in which news, politics, advertising and public affairs are increasingly made up of theatrical illusions. Like our media landscape, it is convincing in its realism, with lifelike simulations and story lines, from the high-tech facsimile of a sun that benevolently beams down on Truman to the mock sincerity of the actor he mistakenly believes is his best friend. (Sanes)

In this allegory, “the producer-director of this stage-set world, who blocks Truman’s effort to escape, is the giant media companies, news organizations, and media politicians that have a stake in keeping us surrounded by falsehood, and are prepared to lure us with rewards as they block efforts at reforming the system” (Sanes).

If the movie is criticized at all, it is for being insufficiently radical in its critique of the mass media. René Girard’s theory of mediated desire, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. Truman thinks his desires are his own, but he discovers that in fact they are all mediated by his mimetic rival, Christof, the show’s producer, who is mythically demonized as virtually all powerful and evil, a tempter figure comparable to Milton’s Satan. (When Truman tries to escape the dome by boat, Christof ruthlessly risks Truman’s life in a terrible storm which almost drowns him.)

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René Girard, in his seminal theory of mediated desire, argues that human desire (as distinct from mere appetite) is essentially imitative; that which we hold most private and personal, our desires, are not really our own: we imitate the desires of others. Put crudely, we want what others want, because they want it. Rather than a spontaneous expression of selfhood, desire is mediated by the model. The mediation of desire, however, remains generally unconscious; the stubbornly held belief that our desires are our own, and that the desired object or person is the key to our transcendent happiness, is what Girard call the mensonge romantique, the romantic lie or illusion. In Eric Gans’s analysis of this relationship, the repression of the mediation of desire is the origin of the so-called Freudian unconscious, not some repressed “event or fact” (Signs of Paradox 124). Rather than expressing our deeply held needs and wants, desire actually reflects our competitive and conflictual relationship with others; for this reason, desire is never really satisfied, as our mimetic relationship with others is an on-going given of our condition as social animals. Desire leads to conflict with the other, because the self and model both desire exclusive possession of the same object. Girard characterizes the desiring subject as the “disciple” and the mediator as the “model.” Describing the ambivalent relationship between disciple and model, he writes,

The impulse toward the [desired] object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator; in internal mediation [i.e., the mediator belongs to same group or social sphere as the subject] this impulse is checked by the mediator himself since he desires, or perhaps possesses the object. Fascinated by his model, the disciple inevitable sees, in the mechanical obstacle which he puts in his way, proof of the ill will borne him. Far from declaring himself a faithful vassal, he thinks only of repudiating the bonds of mediation. But these bonds are stronger than ever, for the mediator’s apparent hostility does not diminish his prestige but instead augments it. . . . The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model–the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.

Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated.

Now the mediator is a shrewd and diabolical enemy; he tries to rob the subject of his most prized possessions; he obstinately thwarts his most legitimate ambitions. (10-11)

Since the mediator competes with the self for the same object or person, the model becomes an “obstacle,” a hated and feared rival who blocks the fulfillment of desire. Despite the hatred that emerges between self and rival, the self remains ambivalently attached to the rival, since it is he who gives value or “authenticity” to the self’s desires. The rival is akin to the “other” in psychoanalytic terminology. An “internal” mediator is essentially comparable to the self, but the self’s vanity requires that his desires remain authentic, his “own”; therefore the rival is often demonized as an all-powerful obstacle that blocks the paradise of fulfilled desire. This distorted version of the mediator is the portrayal of The Truman Show.

In The Truman Show, the original role of the mediator as model has been obscured, “concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated,” as Girard puts it. The movie rather begins with the premise that Christof, the mediator, is “a shrewd and diabolical enemy.” The movie therefore functions in exactly the opposite way from the realist novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky, whose works form the original framework for Girard’s theory (see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). These novels reveal the mystifications of mimetic desire; the reader is able to witness how and why the revered model is transformed into a “diabolical enemy.” At the end of these novels, the protagonist typically undergoes a quasi-religious conversion which creates a new and revelatory understanding of his past for both reader and protagonist.

The Truman Show recognizes on some level the anthropological truth that human desire is mediated, but the mediator of desire is mythicized as all-powerful and evil, rather than a human being similar to ourselves. Rather than accurately representing media influence, the movie misrepresents the media as the all-powerful controller of our desires. The portrayal of Christof reflects the distortions of mimetic rivalry rather than the actual power of the media in our lives.

Life outside the bubble is also mystified as the realm of authentic desire. Most readers of this journal will recognize that life outside the bubble is just as mythic as life inside. The movie’s fantasy is that we can somehow get outside the situation of mimetic desire. The movie therefore has to end before Truman actually faces the reality of life outside the bubble, or the movie would degenerate into either bathos or a simplistic fantasy world easily recognized as such. A charming fairy tale the movie may be, but not a serious critique of consumer society.

The disturbing part of the movie’s ideology is not its childish fantasy of being the universal center of attention, but the projection of responsibility onto a demonic other. Instead of helping people to take responsibility for their use of the media, the movie encourages a regressive projection of blame that evades the true issue.

The problem of mimetic rivalry is real, constitutive in fact of the human species. What distinguishes the human species is that the main threat to our existence is other humans, not the environment (Gans, OT 2). In Gans’s “originary hypothesis” language first emerged to mediate (and ameliorate) our relationship to other humans—not, as commonly thought, to mediate our relationship to the environment, that is, to describe the world. The threat of mimetic conflict is therefore ongoing as a function of the social nature of our existence. The potential for human violence must be continually deferred; this is the “work” of language (and by extension culture), its original, ethical function. All solutions to the problem of human violence are therefore temporary, since mimetic desire is the phoenix which is continually reborn from the ashes of satisfaction. Gans, therefore, rejects all utopian solutions, including those of the quasi-Marxist critics of the mass media.

Girard, in contrast, takes a religious perspective on the problem of human violence; in Girard’s view, the only answer to our dilemma is to make God or his incarnation our model of desire, to choose absolute love over sacrificial desire. This can be a satisfying solution at the level of the individual, but it doesn’t work at the level of society. Girard fails to recognize the constructive role of consumer products in ameliorating mimetic conflict, a point to which I will return.

The leftist critique of consumer society is based on a similar fantasy as The Truman Show. Christof, the show’s producer, is a Hollywood version of what Theodor Adorno calls the “culture industry.” He writes, “The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers: producing, controlling, disciplining them” (115). Consumers are completely passive in this model: “Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them” (Adorno 106). Just as in The Truman Show, Adorno seems to believe that if we could only get rid of these huge corporations, we could desire authentically and, hopefully, more tastefully. Certainly we would devote more money to the study of great literature, music, and art (as defined by Adorno and his colleagues). As Gans writes, “Esthetes object to the reign of money: wealth does not guarantee good taste, neither individual wealth nor the aggregate wealth of the masses” (Chronicles #25).

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The neo-Marxist critique of consumerism depends upon a false distinction between authentic desire and the inauthentic desires created by a consumer culture. But what, we must ask, distinguishes between them? Most of the daily goods we take for granted in America, people living in third world countries manage to do quite well without. In fact, all of culture could be classified as superfluous. As Shakespeare pointed out long ago, culture is by definition that which exceeds “true need.” “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s” (King Lear 2.4.266-269). The superfluous is the essential when it comes to culture. But culture is superfluous only in the sense that the ethical is superfluous. What King Lear recognizes is that the existence of the human community may be humanly necessary but is not inevitable, “natural.” Culture, as the basis of civilization, is contingent upon our continual efforts to renew and reaffirm it. The human community is always in danger of extinction. This is the moral imperative that authorizes mass culture, however distasteful we may find its products.

What is at the root of the academic hostility to consumerism, the media, and the market in general? In part, as I’ve argued above, this hostility is based on the mystification of desire. Our vanity requires that our desires remain our own, even if we must demonize the rivals of corporate advertising. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is in agreement with mimetic theory that the perceived integrity of our identity always requires an “other”; capitalism, consumerism, and the mass media are all versions of that “other” by which intellectuals often define and defend themselves.

Capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of a free market. Gans points out that the market is not a thing, but the collective result of the individual decisions of all of its participants (Chronicles #8 and #34). “Reification” has become the bogeyman of recent literary theory, yet the reification of capitalism is still accepted without hesitation. There is no evil demiurge of capitalism, no “producer”: the system expresses the choices of individuals. When we criticize consumer society, what we are really criticizing is the consumer choices of our fellow citizens. At bottom, this is an aesthetic issue. The academic hostility to the market is fundamentally aesthetic. My point here is not original: Gans argues insightfully that “culture” is hostile to the market because traditional culture requires “effective mimetic models, good shows. The market is not about shows, but about the organization of human efforts toward satisfying our desires and generating new ones, in the unceasing, and, we hope, unending effort to stay a step ahead of the resentments it generates” (Chronicles #25).

Intellectuals want people to consume more tastefully, in ways closer to themselves. But this criticism misses the whole point of consumption, which is to distinguish oneself. We cannot all be the best, but we can each be different; this is the meaning of the modern valorization of self-expression, the omnipresent aestheticization of our existence.

Virtually every personal decision is on some level an aesthetic decision, from the clothes we wear, to the food we buy, to our choice of career. Our very identity is the subject of aesthetic self-fashioning. Our ability to be different, if not the best, is the key to modern culture. As Girard has pointed out, humans are essentially mimetic, which means competitive and conflictual. What each of us requires fundamentally is an arena in which we can successfully compete and be recognized as such. The aesthetic is one such arena available to virtually every modern individual. As it was recognized long ago, De gustibus, non est disputandum. In matters of taste there is no dispute. The primary ethical function of consumer society is to aestheticize our daily existence, thereby deferring the resentments created by social/economic inequalities.

Consumerism, and the mass culture that accompanies it, is a necessary evil of a mass democratic society. All societies require some structuring principle to prevent unrestrained conflict and competition. Past societies, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance, were structured along more hierarchical lines. One’s place in the hierarchy was maintained in part by sheer force, as exemplified by drastic punishments for minor thefts. Public, communal rituals and ceremonies were also effective in creating a powerful sense of divine awe for political and ecclesiastical authorities. But Protestant iconoclasm, in collaboration with Enlightenment rationality, has eroded our sense of “divine” authority. In modern democratic societies, power is relatively decentralized, and authority, always vulnerable to suspicion and resentment, is limited by market forces. As Adam Smith recognized, a free market incorporates widespread competition as a positive force, rather than limiting it by rigid hierarchical distinctions. The modern world defers the potential violence of unrestrained competition by allowing each person to create individual difference, which is to say, sacrality.

If we are unique, then nobody can compete with us. The post-modern drive for diversity is built on this principle. We need as much diversity as possible to defuse the competition that threatens to destroy us. We advocate accepting each person as he or she is. Each person is special, unique, and uniquely valuable. It becomes imperative to believe this in a world without the sacral guarantees of religion. Girard underestimates the contribution of consumerism in deferring violence. The constructive function of consumerism is in facilitating individuation, or differentiation, apart from open conflict, which when unrestrained results in rigid hierarchies ruled by the most powerful and violent. Instead of killing others, we recognize their difference, asking them to recognize us in return. Consumer products, which enable this differentiation on a mass scale, are what make a mass society possible. To argue against a consumer society is to argue against a mass society. And to argue against a mass society is to dispute the legitimacy of the modern world as such.

In pragmatic terms, we don’t want to do away with our consumer society; we want to buy the things we want at the cheapest possible price. That’s why so much of the leftist criticism of the consumer society is hypocritical, since the critics themselves enjoy the fruits of this society. Furthermore, they don’t offer any realistic alternative. Corporations can and should be regulated, and of course they are already are. But these political corrections to the free market can be handled within our existing political framework. The advantage of our system is that it allows these kind of corrections to made peacefully, through political negotiation.

From an anthropological perspective, if we can truly understand the workings of mimetic desire, we can also rationally ameliorate its destructive potential. Of course, we can never completely step outside the mimetic circle, but realizing that we live within it can transform our social interactions. The postmodern era brings an increasingly widespread self-awareness of the mediated nature of desire, even apart from the influence of Girard’s mimetic theory. In fact, consumerism is often celebrated in the postmodern world, despite the efforts of humanities professors.

Recent critics, even on the left, have recognized that consumption is an active process. Michel de Certeau argues,

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless and quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed upon it. (31)

There is an “art” or a “Practice of Everyday Life,” as Certeau puts it. While Certeau seems to romanticize consumption as potentially “subversive,” Jean Baudrillard sees it as more sinister, while still recognizing its active nature:

consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production, thus counterposing two oversimplified patterns of behavior (and of alienation). It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system. (199)

Baudrillard recognizes insightfully that consumerism is not really “about” acquiring physical objects, but rather making a positive, aesthetic statement to the world (see below). As a neo-Marxist, he characterizes both consumption and production as forms of “alienation,” but the historical failure of Marxist economics in the 20^th century places the burden of proof on him to offer a better system. Despite his hostility to the market, Baudrillard recognizes how consumerism transforms traditional expressions of social and economic competition:

That same ideology of competition which formerly, under the banner of ‘freedom,’ constituted the golden rule of production has now been transposed without restriction into the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning, competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense range of possibilities of a precarious freedom–indeed, of the ultimate freedom, namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other people. (182).

It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological projection–in other words a model. (183-4)

Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfillment, independently of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. (184)

Baudrillard recognizes that individualized consumption restructures the ideology of competition, the attempt to be the “best.” He emphasizes, however, the paradox that we distinguish ourselves by the consumption of mass produced products. But it is debatable that “everyone is alike,” as he puts it. On one level this is true, because we are all subject to mediated desire. But on another level, people really are different. Even something as seemingly trivial as the car we choose to drive is ethically significant to the extent that this choice is recognized as significant by others. What matters is not that all people are on some deep level unique, but that this system works to defer resentment and violence, even within the pressure cooker of a mass society. Baudrillard’s critique is founded on the utopian presupposition that freedom from mediated desire is possible.

From the perspective of Gans’s “Generative Anthropology,” the paradox of consumer society is the basic paradox of the sign. The same sign which defers desire by substituting for the desired object also stimulates desire, by making the represented object more attractive. The products we consume are all “signs” that both defer and stimulate desire. Because desire is mediated by the other, it can never be completely satisfied. When we achieve the object of our desire, we are often ambivalent or even resentful towards it because it fails to resolve the mimetic situation which created our initial desire (see Girard, DDN 88-89). Rather than recognizing that it is not the poor object’s fault, we tend to blame the object itself, discarding it in favor of some other object. The ultimate object of desire is to be the center of everyone else’s desire, but even this satisfaction is unstable, because once we achieve centrality, we immediately become the object of the others’ resentment and hostility.

The resentment felt towards the object is articulated at the origin of the human in the moment which Gans calls the “sparagmos” (Signs of Paradox 133-36). We destroy and consume the object, not out of simple appetite or even desire, but out of resentment towards its failure to deliver the promised transcendence. We consume the object, thereby destroying or sacrificing it. We cannot eliminate sacrifice, but we can make it more rational in expression. And consumerism is perhaps the most rational form of sacrifice.

2. The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.

The question raised by West in this novel is whether the resentments created by consumer society can continue to be contained and deferred by the system which creates them. The paradox of the sign is exacerbated in modern society because signs are proliferated endlessly. A general cynicism, a disillusionment with the promise of transcendence emerges.

The Day of the Locust tells the story of a young artist, Tod Hackett, who comes to Hollywood to work as a set designer. The novel is rather picaresque in structure, narrating Tod’s various adventures with the outsiders and hangers-on of the movie industry, and taking us to a variety of Hollywood locations; it does come to a climax, however, in a riot that erupts at a Hollywood movie premiere and which provides the apocalypse promised by the novel’s title.

Hollywood as West describes it is a hodgepodge of cheap and tawdry appearances which hide an inner emptiness rather than corruption as such. The homes are an incongruous jumble of “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles, “all composed of “plaster, lath, and paper” (61). The residents of Hollywood are similarly surreal:

A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. . . . The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court. (60)

The rococo homes and clothing, no matter how tasteless and absurd, reflect the basic human desire for romance and adventure, the need to transcend the mundane banality of everyday life; this desire however has assumed monstrous form due to the mediation of the movies and radio. As West comments in another novel,

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst. (Miss Lonelyhearts 39)

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In Day of the Locust, everyone is essentially an actor, and virtually everyone Tod comes into contact with is literally an aspiring actor or actress. Hollywood or mass culture deforms people into grotesque forms. Harry Greener, for example, an old vaudeville performer trying to adapt to Hollywood, is literally a face with no head:

Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree. (119)

As a result of mass culture, people are severely alienated, not so much from their environment, which they faithfully mirror, but from themselves as whole human beings. Homer Simpson, a middle-aged man directed by his doctor to retire to California for his health, is brilliantly described as disconnected assemblage of human parts:

He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water.

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. (82)

Tod, the protagonist, is the closest thing in the novel to a whole human being. He has compassion for others and seems capable of real love; but he is surrounded by a culture in which love is not really possible. As an artist, Tod tries to resist the allure of Hollywood, but he is finally caught up in it.

The foremost object of Tod’s desire is the 17-year old aspiring actress Faye Greener, who epitomizes the ephemeral glamour of Hollywood.

Tod grunted with annoyance as he turned to the photograph [of Faye]. In it she was wearing a harem costume, full turkish trousers, breastplates and a monkey jacket, and lay stretched out on a silken divan. One hand held a beer bottle and the other a pewter stein.

She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol. She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy sullen smile. She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to pleasure. . . .

Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull likes nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes. . . .

If she would only let him, he would be glad to throw himself, no matter what the cost. But she wouldn’t have him. She didn’t love him and he couldn’t further her career. She wasn’t sentimental and she had no need of tenderness, even if he were capable of it. (67-68)

The men of the novel all compete for Faye’s favor in classic Girardian fashion, and they come to blows in two scenes (117, 170). Even though Tod understands the nature of Faye’s appeal, he is unable to govern his desire for her rationally. As the above description of Faye’s sexual “invitation” indicates, underneath Faye’s contrived appearance lies a curious violence, and the relationship between violence and mass culture can be considered as the main subject of the novel.

The problem with mass culture as described by West is that it consists of images and figures that promise everything, but which continually frustrate by their inability to deliver any satisfaction. Hollywood thus incites to violence, and the ending reflects the supposed inability of mass culture to defer the (desiring) violence that it feeds upon. West’s description of the crowd which gathers at a movie premiere makes this point explicit:

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . .

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (177-178)

The anthropological content of West’s novel is that he reveals the underlying violence of consumer desire. Desire is fraught with violence; this insight is not exactly new, but West applies it to a modern context in which this message is not always apparent. In the movie theater, at home watching TV, and so on, we feel ourselves insulated from the threat of violence. West warns us that the potential for violence remains real, hidden behind the images that surround us.

The unstated problem of The Day of the Locust is the lack of any sacred which would defer the violence of desire. West elaborates on this lack in his earlier novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a newspaper advice column writer. Miss Lonelyhearts (the only name given him in the novel) has an “ivory Christ” hanging on his wall, and he reads Father Zossima’s sermon on unconditional love from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to offer this message to his readers, but he is unable to believe in it himself. Surrounded by absurd suffering undignified by any tragic pathos, he finds himself incapable of true faith. Miss Lonelyhearts lives in a modern world in which faith or love have become impossible. The very idea of absolute love is absurd and doomed to failure.

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At the end of the novel, the protagonist seemingly undergoes a Dostoyevskian conversion in which he dedicates his life to God. In his first act of Christ-like love, he attempts to embrace a cripple: “He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole again” (57). But the attempt to express Father Zossima’s unconditional love ends only in more violence, as the cripple misinterprets the gesture and shoots him in a farcical struggle.Miss Lonelyhearts thus embodies the failure of religion to provide meaning and happiness in the modern world. This failure results in violence. The Day of the Locust continues West’s critique of modernity, but he turns from the failure of religion to the failure of art as a means of transcendence.

In traditional culture, high art teaches the deferral of desire as well as providing diversion: “to teach and delight” in classical aesthetics. But modern art, like Tod Hackett, has been prostituted to the movie industry. At best, serious art can only record the failure of mass culture, as Tod records “The Burning of Los Angeles” in the painting he works upon, and West records the same in The Day of the Locust. Mass culture exists on the model of pornography, much as Faye, as a figure for mass culture, attracts through her mediated sex appeal. As such, mass art teaches the wrong message, that desire can be satisfied. It makes the consumers impatient for more and more. At the same time, through the very repetition and juxtaposition of its messages, the promise of culture is revealed as empty because the ubiquitous images have lost their potency even as promise. West’s favorite technique is to juxtapose the various images of mass culture, thus revealing the arbitrary and illusory nature of cultural representation (see for example Tod’s surreal journey through a Hollywood movie lot, 130-35). As a result the consumer becomes jaded and cynical, impatient. The images which are meant to substitute for reality have lost their believability; at the same time, there is nothing to take their place. The main function of culture, to transcend the violence of desire, is thus frustrated.

West’s critique of modernity agrees in many respects with Girard’s. In Girard’s interpretation of Western history, the revelation of the Gospel text places humankind in a unique predicament. The Passion story confronts us with our own violence; we can no longer blame the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial mechanism can work only as long as it is disguised and mystified. According to Girard, “the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a sacrificial and cultural crisis whose radical effect must be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences” (THSFW 203). In an increasingly secular world, without the protection afforded by myth and sacrificial religion, humans are in imminent danger of destroying themselves. Because of the Gospel revelation, we can no longer plausibly believe in the sacrificial myths that traditionally protect society from its own violence. We are forced to choose between “apocalypse now” or unconditional forgiveness. As Guy Lefort puts this point,

In a world where violence has been truly revealed and the victimage mechanisms have ceased to function, humans are confronted with a dilemma that is extraordinarily simple: either they renounce violence, or the incalculable violence that they set off risks annihilating them all, ‘as in the days of Noah’. (qtd. in Girard, THSFW 201).

For Girard, this situation constitutes the crisis, but also the challenge and opportunity of modernity.

The ending of The Day of the Locust presents a classic Girardian crisis of undifferentiation, complete with angry mob and scapegoat victim (Homer Simpson). A woman in the crowd claims that the riot began because “A pervert attacked a child,” and the crowd “agreed vehemently” (183). Ironically, this same group of people then goes on to demonstrate just how they perverted they themselves are, when one of the men takes advantage of the crunch to start groping a woman with the group’s approval. In other words, there is no meaningful difference between victim and crowd, just as in Girard’s description of the sacrificial crisis. The lack of any organized rituals of sacrifice in the modern world results in a crisis of undifferentiation which threatens the community with self-destruction. The main difference between Girard and West on the problem of modernity is that West does not apparently see Christian love as offering a viable solution.

It might be argued that West’s novel is anachronistic, since he wrote at the dawn of consumer society, in the late 30s, before the post-war economic boom. But in many ways, his novel is prescient; although consumerism delivers more now, it also promises more, so that dissatisfaction always stays one step ahead of satisfaction.

The most obvious problem with West’s critique is that consumerism marches on, becoming more and more efficient in both creating desires and recycling consumer discontent into more consumerism. Dissatisfaction is recycled back into the system as a positive force. There is no shortage of products available to express one’s dissatisfaction with consumerism. Like Marx, West failed to consider the efficiency of the free market.

But West’s point is not just that the system doesn’t work, but that it works in ways which should be rejected. Consumer culture focuses on appearances at the expense of inner reality, thus distorting people and making them into less-than-whole human beings. In some ways West’s critique hearkens back to the traditional distrust of appearances in favor of inner reality. The locus classicus of such criticism is Hamlet’s rejection of “seeming”:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)

For Hamlet, then, the inner reality is incommensurable with any form of representation. No one can “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (3.2.364-5).

West goes beyond Shakespeare however, because in The Day of the Locust there is no inner reality with which to oppose the superficial appearances. The charge is that consumer culture focuses on appearances so drastically that inner reality is emptied out. There is no true substance to turn to. Even Tod’s ideals, or Miss Lonelyheart’s, are arguably self-delusions. People are deformed, incapable of love or faith, and capable only of violence, or at best an artificial life of romantic illusion, as we see in Faye’s romantic fantasies which seems to satisfy her (104-5). This is a charge which is more specific to the 20^th century and typical of literary modernism, as for example in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. To make this point, however, West gives us, for the most part, caricatures rather than realistic characters. It’s not clear that modern individuals are really as bad as West makes them out to be. In any case, it’s not safe to generalize. The other problem is that this criticism assumes the existence of some prior golden age when people were whole and complete, which is not a safe assumption. The prosperity of the 20^th century arguably allows more freedom for love and faith.

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The problem that West points to is real, but the solution is in this case would be worse than the problem, since any cure must trample on the freedom we rightly hold as our highest value. It’s not at all clear that there is any alternative to consumer society that would be more hospitable to morality and beauty, not to mention personal freedom.

3. Conclusion

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they should desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of The Truman Show that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.

The anthropological problem posed by consumer society is, how can a society exist without an absolute sacred? In historical terms, modern society is anomalous. But the sacred has not disappeared; it has rather been integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such. We don’t have any overarching, generally accepted, public sacred, but we do have a whole host of private sacreds. Each individual creates his or her own sense of the sacred, in part through consumer products. The great advantage of this system is that it differentiates people without the need for rigid hierarchies, thus maximizing personal freedom.

We live in an age that is highly skeptical about the possibility of epochal change. Although there is a widely held feeling that postmodern irony is démodé and that poststructuralist theory has run its course, there is little or no interest in inquiring whether current culture might be shifting into a new, as yet undefined aesthetic mode requiring an entirely different theoretical treatment. Thus while recent books bemoan “the theory mess” (Rapaport 2001) or muse about what might come “after theory” (Eagleton 2004) they don’t offer much of a positive, programmatic alternative. This attitude, it might be added, isn’t limited to die-hard postmodernists. Even such prominent critics of poststructuralist theory as Walter Benn Michaels in America (2004) and Boris Groys in Germany (2000) don’t try to outline what culture might look like after the end of posthistory.(2) And, as readers of this journal hardly need be reminded, Eric Gans and myself are practically the only two critics who have tried to name and define the new postmillennial or performatist epoch in a systematic way.

Part of the disinterest in defining the nascent epoch has to do with the stringent way that scholars now address any event or utterance laying claim to be something “new.” Today, whoever attempts to define the New is practically required to consider its endless, uncontrollable and open implication in the Already Existing every single step of the way. Derrida, in an essay devoted to the irksome problem of historical “isms,” leaves no doubt as to the alternatives at hand. Either you offer up a “static and taxonomic tabularization” (1990, 65) of the new in divesting yourself of the old, which hardly seems very promising, or you give yourself over to the field of an “introjective multiplicity” that corresponds “neither to a linear and temporal order of succession, nor to the order of a juxtaposing simultaneity” (1990, 69). This being said and done, the whole business of defining a paradigm shift pretty much takes care of itself. The new dissipates in the endless gyre and gimble of a discourse allowing no innovation that its rigorous metaphysical critique has not already touched on and placed under erasure from the start.

Rather than bemoan Derrida’s self-serving demand that history be discussed solely in terms that would make it forever posthistorical, we need to ask how we can go about defining epochal change in the most parsimonious and rigorous manner. In semiotic terms, the simplest and most fundamental way of doing this is to key in on two mutually exclusive concepts of sign. The first such concept includes the object in its notion of the sign; the second leaves it out. Regarding postmodernism there is little doubt about its semiotic preference. The object is always exterior to the sign, which is the sole, albeit belated means of gaining knowledge of the world around us (the triumph of virtuality in postmodernism and of belatedness in poststructuralism are the most salient expressions of this attitude).

Traditionally, this sort of sign is called dualist: there is always a split between sign and thing. Given this attitude, poststructuralists consider monist sign concepts, which treat the object and the sign as a unity, to be just so much hokum–a self-deluding “metaphysics” whose intellectual history has for all serious purposes already come to an end. Not surprisingly, poststructuralists have fundamental difficulties accepting newly developing monist positions. For the radical monist theories of Eric Gans, Walter Benn Michaels, and the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk aren’t just a correction or modification of postmodern culture, they’re its historical nemesis: they would reintroduce that element of difference into our cultural life that would ultimately make postmodernist dualism into something specifically historical–and historically expendable. Perhaps understandably, the theoretical project of radical monism has made little headway in academia, where poststructuralism and its offshoots have many eloquent and influential supporters. By contrast, the basic strategies of the monist aesthetic–closing works of art, striving for unity, ordering space and projecting belief onto characters and objects–have been appearing with increasing frequency and force in literature, film, and architecture without attracting the slightest bit of interest in academia. In the long run, the theoretical project of endlessly fine-tuning poststructuralism by injecting more ideology, more gender, or more history into it is in very real danger of missing out completely on the aesthetic and semiotic shift to monism now going on around it.

Perhaps the most graphic way of demonstrating just how this shift has taken place is to take two similar works from each side of the epochal divide and compare them according to the basic semiotic features noted above. Often, this kind of comparative work is like comparing apples and oranges; unless you’re dealing with an outright parody, it’s unusual to find works that share the same formal features but implement them in two completely contrary ways. In this case, though, I’ve come across two texts which are so close in theme and details of plot that they invite comparison under what are almost laboratory conditions. The works I have in mind here are Ali Smith’s novelHotel World (2001) and the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “The Hotel Capital” (“Numery,” orig. 1989, cited according to 2000).

Both texts use exactly the same gimmick–the fancy international hotel as an allegory of global capitalism–but treat it in two completely divergent ways conforming respectively to the norms of postmodernism and performatism.(3) Smith, who did Ph.D.-level work in English literature, makes ample use of what looks like Foucauldian and Butlerian premises to set up a gender-sensitive victimary scenario. Tokarczuk, who was trained as a psychologist, deliberately follows in the Jungian (and by extension, Kantian) tradition, assigning an inspirational, unifying role to projections of an individual subject; in her treatment of spirituality, time, and space she also draws on the work of Mircea Eliade. Hotel World shows how helpless, decentered subjects accidentally and unintentionally come together to–unsuccessfully–resist the hegemonic order around them. “Hotel Capital,” by contrast, describes how a tutelary, distinctly Jungian type of subject intervenes in that order from within to invest it with spiritual value. As is always the case in performatist works, Tokarczuk’s story offers you a real choice. If you’re still in the postmodern mode, you’ll deconstruct the narrator’s projections in the twinkling of an eye and cast the story aside. If you do decide to go along with the narrator, though, you’ll enter into a whole, aesthetically mediated identification with those projections–and become a performatist so to speak by default.

2

To round out my discussion, I’d also like to treat briefly two other critiques of global capitalism in performatist works. To this end I’ll touch on Arundhati Roy’s postcolonial classic The God of Small Things (orig. 1996), which shows how a Kantian ideal of the beautiful can be used to frame radical individual resistance to caste restrictions and the encroachments of global culture. And I’ll provide a quick wrap-up of the young Czech writer Miloš Urban’s untranslated Sevenchurch (Sedmikostelí, 1999), which offers a sublime, characteristically Central European aesthetic of terror in answer to the resentment arising out of globalization.

Hotel World

On the surface, Ali Smith’s Hotel World is concerned with the accidental death of a young hotel worker named Sara Wilby, whose name (Wilby–“will be”) is already resonant with deferred potential. Sara, who has just taken on a job as chambermaid in the chain Global Hotels, bets a co-worker that she can stuff herself into the hotel’s dumbwaiter. Immediately after she performs this feat, however, the elevator cable tears, sending the dumbwaiter and Sara crashing down to the bottom of the shaft.

The fatal occurrence along with its attendant circumstances is recounted in six stylistically very different narrative sections. Although in the novel five striking individuals dominate each section–they are, in order of appearance, the victim herself, the hotel’s receptionist, a homeless woman, a female journalist, and Sara’s sister–our identification with these figures is constantly being disturbed, undermined, or sabotaged entirely. Thus in her narration, the dead accident victim appears as a ghost who visits first its family, then its own body in the grave. So that no one might get the idea of taking the heroine’s existence in the hereafter all too seriously, the ghost occasionally emits a “o-oo-oo” sound–just like in the comics.

This authorial ironization of characters’ discourse applies no less to the living. The reader’s identification with the younger sister’s anger and grief is undermined by the complete lack of punctuation marks in the chapter narrated by her. Her intensively experienced emotional reaction is overwritten, as it were, by a kind of discursive dysfunctionality whose only source can be that of the author (since no teenager, no matter how grief-stricken, would leave out every last single punctuation mark in her own writing). The suffering of the homeless, tubercular Else is similarly marked by defective language: when begging, her speech is reduced to almost incomprehensible fragments like “Spr sm chn” (“spare some change”).

These and other plays with script and language show the author to be a proficient, remote administrator of that dysfunctionality and defectiveness which otherwise weighs heavily upon her characters. By contrast, the only figure in the novel who is able to write, speak, and act in a conventional way is mercilessly exposed as a fraud. The person in question is a female journalist who befriends the homeless, disoriented Else while staying at the hotel for a night. The character, aptly named Penny, quickly proves herself to be everything promised by her name. Having written out a large check to Else she has second thoughts about it later in the night and has it cancelled–thus neatly exposing her own magnanimity as an empty, vain projection. The author doesn’t want her character (or us) to buy into an identification with Else; she wants to inscribe herself literally and directly in the dysfunctionality, alterity, and suffering of her characters–a contact that, however, never cleaves to one person for very long. Like the ghost, the bodiless, preternaturally weightless author moves effortlessly through her own book, haunting now one, now the other character.

By contrast, the author’s treatment of space and order is easy to pin down ideologically. At times, in fact, the book reads as if the author had cribbed straight out of Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. The hotel is a spatial trap, a panoptic surveillance center in which the employees are strictly monitored and punished according to need. Loopholes in this hegemonic matrix arise only by accident–as when the omnipresent surveillance cameras fail to work shortly after Sara’s accident. The characters in the novel, who are equipped with a quasi natural, spontaneous ability to resist à la Judith Butler, make immediate use of these flubs. Thus Lise, the mentally disturbed receptionist, takes advantage of the camera failure to sneak homeless Else into a luxury suite. Else, who is traumatized by enclosed spaces to begin with–some Christian missionaries once tried to convert her inside a locked room–soon flees, but forgets to turn off the bathwater, causing a small deluge. The damage is, however, quickly repaired and the costs fobbed off on an innocent chambermaid.

As this turn of plot suggests, resistance is both pointless and useless. It can occur only in the involuntary playing out of one’s own dysfunctionality but not as a goal-oriented, willful act. Instead, we are encouraged to imagine the possibility of such resistance from a higher, constantly shifting vantage point. The authorially mediated metaperspective allows us to experience ironic schadenfreude over the small flood caused by Else and Lise even as we realize its accidental, inconsequential character.

In view of the close connection between space and power, Sara’s accidental death in the innermost, “dumbest” and most confining space of the hotel carries a certain ideological weight after all. Sara’s accidental death and the barely concealed spatial violence emanating from the hotel form a contingency relationship suggesting that something like this need not take place but very well can. Sara’s senseless, accidental, death-by-wager–the embodiment of the aleatory per se–exposes the reified essence of the hotel as a whole: its omnipresent structural violence asserts itself even in the case of pure chance. Later on, Sara’s sister will smash a hole in the wall of the hastily bricked up shaft and throw an alarm clock into it so that she may experience the time span between Sara’s life and death by herself. By contrast, the hotel tempts its visitors with a false temporality, a false experience of transcendence: the hotel’s brochure indeed promises that “a transcendent time is waiting to be had by all” (181).

That time is not transcendent, but instead depends on spatial restrictions and contractual obligations is demonstrated vividly in the last part of the novel. Sara’s unrequited love for the salesgirl in a watch repair shop is answered–but only belatedly and in a mode of permanent deferral. The salesgirl, who had only fleetingly taken note of the pining Sara and who knows nothing of her death, intuitively realizes her affection ex post facto and–disregarding all regulations–puts on the watch Sara had brought in for repair. Love, then, is possible after all: you love without knowing the other, without wanting to do so, and without having to invest your desire in a bothersome interpersonal projection. Although the salesgirl’s wearing of the wrist watch marks a double reconciliation–it is a symbolic act both of loving and of remembrance–this moment can ultimately only be enjoyed from the cool, epistemologically remote vantage point of the authorial metaposition–a position that undermines all lasting identifications and does not stay attached to individual figures or positions for any length of time.

At the very beginning of the novel the ghostly Sara begged the reader to “time me”–to measure her time so that she doesn’t disappear in différance, in the endlessly receding, arbitrary conditionality of language. This “timing”–the translation of fluid temporality into fixed spatiality–is achieved formally as soon as the salesgirl puts on Sara’s wristwatch. Yet even this unwitting act of remembrance threatens to go awry. On the book’s last page we find once more the lines that the ghost, who is becoming ever more forgetful, uttered in the book’s beginning chapter:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf. (30, 237)

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This tossed salad of signifiers is followed by the ghost’s howl, which ends and simultaneously opens the book. The voice of the ever-fainter-growing Other forms the alpha and omega of the novel as a whole: the hereafter appears as the mirror image of a dysfunctional here and now rather than as a transcendent shore of salvation. Indeed, the ghost and the author turn out to be effects of the same persistent mechanism that holds forth the possibility of transcendence while in the final analysis always allowing it to fall flat. In terms of reader response, this mechanism is at the end passed on to the reader, who by way of a semi-comprehensible half-insult (“remainder you mist leaf”) is encouraged to take part, albeit belatedly, in an unending ring-around-the-rosy of misdirected resistance and yearning.

The subject representations, epistemological figures and authorial strategies in Hotel World are neither especially surprising nor likely to plunge anyone into a spell of critical brooding on literary technique. The pre-programmed alterity and deficient subjectivity of the main characters, the radical undecidability of the spatial, temporal and causal relations, the author’s superior, infinitely receding play with figures of lack–these are all typical, well-established procedures of postmodernism. One feature that seems characteristic of late postmodernism is the author’s curious will to transcendence and love. These metaphysically loaded moments are however always presented as belated or deferred; they never threaten to become present or real to us. Thus the author can preside over ideal figures of classical metaphysics without endangering the critical posture of her novel as a whole.

This turn to metaphysical, indeed, rather sentimental themes from the standpoint of a constantly moving, epistemologically unassailable metaposition exposes the unenviable dilemma of late postmodernism. For in the process of showing her own superiority in questions of epistemology the author’s dependence on traditional projections of unity–on love, reconciliation and transcendence–becomes ever more evident. The uncanny ability of the author to be everywhere and nowhere in her own book contrasts directly with a yearning for unity and presence–a yearning that is conjured up only to be dispersed once more through the author’s own epistemological or linguistic interventions.

As Hotel World graphically demonstrates, late postmodernism is caught in a self-made trap. Whoever presents herself as epistemologically invulnerable falls into an empty, indeed, ghostly game of hide-and-seek with the reader and with herself; whoever foregoes this sort of epistemological critique in favor of metaphysical ideals becomes a purveyor of simple-minded, if not downright fraudulent projections. Since there is no immanent way out of this endless loop-the-loop, poststructuralist critics and literary scholars have long been in agreement that postmodernism will never end; it will simply refine and multiply self-ironic strategies for acknowledging belatedness and producing deferral. We are fated, it would seem, to shuttle endlessly between the poles of metaphysical wishful thinking and the merciless epistemological critique of the very same.

“The Hotel Capital”

That things can be done entirely differently is demonstrated by Olga Tokarczuk’s story “The Hotel Capital” (orig. 1989; cited according to 2000). Using motifs very similar to Hotel World, Tokarczuk arrives at a specifically monist, no longer postmodern perspective on the sign, space, and the world in general.

At first it could seem as if “Hotel Capital” is even more zealous in its critique of capitalism than is Hotel World. Apart from its transparently symbolic name, the hotel is flatly described in the very first line as being “only for the rich” (35). Like Sara Wilby, the heroine and first-person narrator is a lowly chambermaid and, moreover, a nameless foreigner. As in Hotel World, the Hotel Capital exerts an omnipresent, deforming force on the main character. In fact, as soon as the heroine puts on her uniform, she foregoes her own subjective sense of self: “I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events […]” (35). In keeping with the fatal event related in Hotel World, the heroine is overcome by a feeling of existential angst when riding the cramped service elevator to her work–she is afraid “lest the lift should stop and I should stay here forever, enclosed like a bacterium inside the body of the Hotel Capital” (36). Finally, we even encounter a small flood in one of the rooms which, as in Hotel World, temporarily disrupts order in the hotel without washing it away entirely.

The postmodern reader now expecting to be initiated into a subaltern victim’s chronicle of alienation and otherness will be sorely disappointed. In spite of the superficial similarities with the ambience of Hotel World, “Hotel Capital” proposes completely different semiotic and spatial relations aimed at promoting unity, order, and belief. In particular, space appears as the guarantor of a whole, intimate, indeed sacral ambience which can be experienced only within the confines of the otherwise worldly hotel.

This spatially determined sacral experience can be thought of as a sphere in the sense used by Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk calls the sphere an “aspirated commune” (2000, 17 ff), a protected interior space that allows intimacy, sensuality, and social cohesiveness to develop at all in the first place. As historians of religion like Mircea Eliade confirm, the origins of this interior experience are primal. Accordingly, the creation of closed, centered spaces must be viewed not as a metaphysical ploy but as an attempt to make space livable to begin with: “If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded–and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space” (Eliade 1987, 22(4)). According to Eliade, this is “not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world” (1987, 21). Because it is essential to founding life the primal space is always placed in the middle of the world and displays a vertical, hierarchical structure that literally and figuratively opens up to the transcendent world of the gods (1987, 63).

Now, the claim that there once existed an originary, pre-reflexive, hierarchically arranged space with a built-in escape hatch to the heavens does not present much of a challenge for a poststructuralist or postmodern appropriation. Inasmuch as this kind of pre-reflexive, originary world is anchored in discourse it can always be conceived of as a double, irreducible act of inclusion and exclusion, whereby the poststructuralist would always be sure to let the excluded and chaotic outer world receive its just due. Apart from this, an originary space can only be experienced again by way of simulation, which is to say in belated act which simultaneously undermines and outdoes the original.

This act of appropriation will encounter serious resistance only when the sense of spatial intimacy is put on as a performance with aesthetic means. In such a case the text will be presented as a closed space, which, by exerting one-sided pressure on the observer, gives him or her an unambiguous choice between an inside (going along with the work) or an outside (going against the work). This kind of performatist work is not mere discourse or simulation, but rather imposes the closed conditions of the sacral, originary space on the observer by aesthetic means. We are dealing here, then, with the fusion of a privileged aesthetic space in the Kantian sense with a rather un-Kantian attitude that you might describe as ritualistic, dogmatic, or compulsive.(5)

4

It goes without saying that this forced aesthetic experience does not suspend the possibility of critical reflection. No one today can actually return to a sacral or ritual experience of interiority, no one can (or wants to) completely shut out the vibrant hurly-burly of exterior space. The possibility of deceit and fraud thus still lingers in every performative act of framing–but precisely as a possibility, and not as a preordained, epistemologically guaranteed result, as in postmodernism. Readers, in other words, now have a real choice. If this kind of aesthetically mediated inner space remains more or less intact we will be dealing with a performatist monism; if it mixes uncontrollably with exterior space we will fall back into the endlessly undecidable convolutions of postmodernism.

But let us return now to “Hotel Capital.” If the space of the hotel is a sphere in Sloterdijk’s sense, then it is by no means an idyllic inner sanctum. The sacrally aspirated hotel room–no less so than in Hotel World–is unavoidably exposed to the pressures exerted by globalization and global capitalism. As the narrator herself remarks, the room is a “four-cornered, prostituted space” that gives itself to anyone who is willing to pay for it (37). The space of the hotel, whose sacral, protective function is constantly being emphasized by the narrator, is in the secularized world itself helpless and exposed. Space requires an agent who would, as it were, clean up the spiritual and metaphysical mess brought into it by the hotel’s guests. Precisely this active, theist role is filled out by the narrator/chambermaid, who intervenes in a life-affirming way in the half-public, half-intimate sphere of the guests. Having temporarily laid aside her subjective personality, she settles into the invisible realm that is neither outside nor in and intervenes from there in interior space–a transcendental subject with a theist mission and a human face.

The postmodern reader secretly hoping for the first-person narrator to be ironically dismantled in the course of the story will wait in vain. Indeed, in narratological terms much the opposite takes place: the first-person narrator acquires distinctly authorial characteristics. In lieu of direct antagonists–as a rule the heroine tidies up in empty rooms–the story appears as a series of quasi-philosophical meditations on space and the people in it; in lieu of disruptive hints from the author we are forced to identify with the heroine and her space-friendly value judgments. From the normative postmodern point of view it is of course always possible to reject this authorially supported mindset as blind self-deception. If you do so, though, you’ll stumble into a narrative trap. For either you enter into the closed space of the work or you remain outside it. The work frame changes from a place of undecidability to a place of decision–quite contrary to the normative precepts of postmodernism. The act of reading reproduces the simultaneously compulsive and comforting quality of the fictive inner space.

This experience of spatially mediated pleasure (Kant’s Wohlgefallen) must be understood perfomatively or as a gesture and not discursively or conceptually. Although we may be in disagreement with individual meanings or arguments in the work, we must nonetheless accept it as a whole. The reader is suspended–half voluntarily, half by way of force–in an aesthetically mediated no-man’s land which can only be conceived of or experienced under the given conditions of the aesthetic frame. This spatially determined pleasure is accompanied in turn by a practically idiot-proof, compulsory mechanism that arrests the restless, hypercritical spirit of the postmodern reader long enough until she is able to identify with what is going on in the work’s interior space. If the obstinate reader balks at this, then she will remain where she belongs: namely on the outside. Thus once more–with a little dogmatic help–we arrive at the restoration of what Kant calls necessary aesthetic pleasure [notwendiges Wohlgefallen].(6)

Loading the Kantian frame with dogmatic and archaic means of enforcement leads to the inevitable question as to whether we are foregoing hard-earned achievements of the Enlightenment by doing so. This fear can be disarmed with a paradoxical reference. For the archaic force exerted on us in performatism allows us to occupy precisely that transcendental position which is generally regarded as typical of the Enlightenment (but which has lost its “punch” due to a hyperrationalistic critique of metaphysics and unbounded pleasure in boundary transgression). This paradox is ultimately possible only in an aesthetic, secularized context and not in a ritual or dogmatic one. Moreover, in terms of cultural history it is only conceivable after modernism and postmodernism, as a reaction to their programmatic skepticism of enlightenment and metaphysics. “Hotel Capital,” for its part, avoids an absolute relapse into pre-Enlightenment gullibility by allowing the transcendental subjectivity of the heroine to manifest itself in the form of a negotiable role or performance.

In this case, the performance manifests itself in the resacralization and reaesthetization of what at first seems to be purely practical terms of employment. When starting work the heroine puts on a quasi-sacral uni–form which cloaks a conciliatory, spatially limited monism; as soon as she takes off her work clothes she returns to a personal, “interested” attitude commensurate with the needs of daily life. The heroine’s space-friendly attitude is based on a simple contractual agreement: it is not an authentic, natural or originary state.

As a result, the usual deconstructive strategies for undermining “metaphysics” meet with little or no resistance. The story is well aware of its own constructedness; it raises no claim to propounding an original or ultimate truth. Indeed, the strict sense of order that applies inside the hotel evaporates as soon as the heroine is outside of it. This can be seen in the only scene not taking place within the hotel. From a hotel window the heroine has spotted a Scotsman playing a bagpipe for money; she muses to herself that he can’t be real since he’s going about it with too much zeal. At the end of the story, after she leaves the hotel, this suspicion is confirmed: the Scotsman takes off his kilt and puts on a pair of stylishly tattered jeans. When the heroine remarks that she already knew he was just pretending, he smiles at her mysteriously and winks (in the Polish original this last glance is a shade more obtrusive: it reads “robi do mnie oko”–literally, “he does an eye into me”). The visual penetration which the heroine shortly before experienced as unbearable when she was being ogled by one of the hotel guests is not made into an issue here–for this is also where the text ends and hence also the possibility of delving further into the false Scotsman’s secrets.

Within the hotel we find a spatially conditioned metaphysical order that travelers take advantage of in different ways. The metaphysical ideal of the hotel room is approached most closely by a Japanese husband and wife who leave behind practically no traces–those indispensable poststructuralist bearers of alterity. Their room, remarks the narrator, “gives the impression of not being occupied at all.” (39) There are no objects left lying around by mistake, no personal traces, not even an odor. And when the chambermaid cleans up, she “create[s] more disorder than they would make in a month.” (39) The only communication between the order-loving Japanese and the order-upholding chambermaid takes place through the tip that the couple leaves behind in a neat stack on their pillow. The coins, however, are not for the chambermaid but for the room itself:

So when they leave the tip it is not for me but for the room, for its silent continuance in the world, for its constancy amid the inexplicable inconstancy. . . . The two coins left on the pillow preserve the illusion that such rooms exist even when nobody looks at them. The two coins dispel our only essential fear–that the world exists only in the act of seeing and there is nothing beyond this. (40)The economy of this gift is transcendental and self-confirming: it represents the sacral opposite of the “prostituted” room and makes the room seem like a “small temple” (40). On the other hand, though, the relationship as a whole remains impersonal and cool. The chambermaid is familiar only with “the immaterial shape of the footprints left in the abandoned sandals” (40); conversely, for the Japanese guests she remains without a body and face. Communication and value exchange don’t take place through tattered words or marks (“spr sm chn”) but through shared attitudes toward space and the objects in it. The scene with the tip simply acknowledges the latent dualism of this dialectical relationship. The more spiritual and complete the relationship to the absent guests, the more the relationship of the individual to material reality is placed in doubt.

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The opposite of the Japanese are the “young Americans,” the bearers of imperial disorder. This disorder has no true metaphysical valence of its own but is rather a “thoughtless, stupid mess” (literally bałagan–a kind of Slavic Punch and Judy show) in which “there is no rhyme or reason” (44). This lack of order–quite in keeping with a Baudrillardian scenario–is circulated by the media and intensified ad infinitum. The absent young Americans leave their TV on to CNN, and CNN assures the chambermaid that the world exists and is full of young Americans. The imperial arrogance of the young Americans and their “inattentiveness to the present” (45) is countered by the chambermaid’s recurring to their common corporeal mortality: “I clean around roughly, as if afraid of destroying these relics of the transitoriness of the people who live here” (45). This isn’t ironic schadenfreude but rather existential insight into a shared fear of death–a fear that the chambermaid in this case doesn’t want to assuage entirely. Later, however, in the room of the dying old Swede whose body absorbs all odors from without, the chambermaid will deliberately leave behind a sweaty, vital whiff of her own self. In a way that is “conspiratorial, respiratory and inspirational,” as Sloterdijk writes (2000, 40), the chambermaid tries to forge a “dyadic union” (2000, 42) in interior space that will set both human frailty and human arrogance to rights.

The chambermaid’s job differs, however, from Sloterdijk’s in one important respect. Whereas Sloterdijk is trying to reconstruct historically the “morpho-immunological” spheres (2000, 46) and “foams”(7) that he considers indispensable for the development of human culture per se, the chambermaid faces a much more immediate problem. Her task is, namely, to restore that state of interior intimacy that can be experienced only through a monetary transaction and away from home–the genteel, introspective spatial phenomenology of a Bachelard doesn’t work well in the “prostituted” ambience of the Hotel Capital. And that is why the chambermaid proceeds in such a deliberate way, so to speak in accordance with an authorially approved metaphysical work code.(8) If you want to clean up after postmodernism (or even sweep it away entirely) then you must, as the heroine says, do so with deliberation: you must first frame scattered traces of alienation so that modest inspirational measures can take hold in the first place.

Given the rigid spatial order of “Hotel Capital” it is justified to pose the question of theodicy, which is to say the question of evil and the responsibility which spiritualized space bears for it. (In Hotel World the answer is clear: the spatial order is the sufficient, but not necessary condition of evil.) True to the tradition of metaphysical optimism in which Tokarczuk’s story follows, evil doesn’t appear as a principle sui generis but rather as disorder or as a falling away from spirituality.

The first kind of disorder–that of the “young Americans”–is childish. It corresponds to a lack of consciousness and humility in regard to the world that the young Americans dominate. The second kind of disorder, by contrast, is spatial: it resides in the vast expansiveness of the hotel (and, by extension, the world as a whole). The hotel has a mysterious tract called the “squar” which is designed for long-term guests and has a confusing layout; it is labyrinthine, convoluted, spiraled, and dark: “Something strange happens to space here. Space does not like spiral stairs, chimneys and wells. It tends to degenerate into labyrinths.” (51) The tangled, invaginated layout of the hotel building appears as a flaw offending against the anthropomorphic space’s supposedly natural love of order (once more something hardly in keeping with the architectonic norms of postmodernism). It’s easy in deconstructive terms to get all worked up about this simple tautology, but it’s harder to ignore it within the framework of the story–unless, of course, you are prepared to take upon yourself the stigma of disorder as a matter of principle.

The third variant of disorder is no less anthropomorphic than the others. Its point of departure is a self-willed, mischievous room bearing the number 229; its “Kabbalistic sum” is said to equal the number thirteen, which “is a number of excess and trickery.” (47) This room has an appropriately subversive effect on visitors: “I suspect that one night here is enough to get them trapped, to bring unquiet dreams, to hold them a little longer, to bring out desires and overturn carefully laid plans.” (47) The minor inundation mentioned earlier also had its origin in this room, which induces an intensified sense of corporeality and narcissistic self-alienation in the chambermaid: “The room encloses me within itself, cradles me. It is a most tender if non-physical caress, this embrace which only a closed space can give you.” (48) And:

I feel distinctly that my body exists. . . . I am aware of my skin, conscious that it’s alive and breathing, that it has its own scent, and I can feel my hair where it touches my ears. I like then to get up and look at myself in the mirror which never spares me a surprise. Is this me? Really me? (48)Were the narrator not being caressed by the room around her one could suppose that Lacan and his mirror stage were lurking somewhere in the wings. For the corporeal and narcissistic feeling of insecurity experienced by the chambermaid is further intensified by the gaze of a guest that severs the chambermaid’s metaphysical bond with the space around her. Thus “the established [literally: eternal] order is inverted. My cleaning is no longer omnipotent, it becomes emptied of meaning” (49).

It could at first seem that the presence of the unashamedly gazing guest shatters the Apollonian dream space of the chambermaid and revives precisely that patriarchal order that in Hotel World could only be overcome temporarily by accident and through deceit. Yet here, too, space and the metaphysical service code offer a way out. As soon as the chambermaid leaves the room she is able to recuperate in that very depth of space which was the death of Sara Wilby: “I . . . stop in front of the banister separating a stairwell two or three storeys high. I look down and see only the ground floor from here. And–as usual–not a soul about. . . .] This is the best relaxation: to look down to where everything becomes progressively smaller and more distant, less clear, more illusory” (50). The spatial haven of the theist perspective has been restored–but with a built-in personal or human dimension of self-deception.

If the solidarity among subalterns in Hotel World is characterized by a fleeting, Nietzschean love for pure strangers, then in “Hotel Capital” it reveals itself to be genetic, object-oriented and monist. The justification for this is provided by the Castilian laundryman Pedro, who resembles a bearded missionary and who draws on an originary history of language and etymology to make his point. When people “in times of old” were wandering across Europe and Asia they carried their languages with them “like banners. They formed great families, although they did not know each other; only the words were permanent” (41). Pedro “pulls out the roots from words as if stoning cherries,” and those listening to his lecture slowly realize that they all “spoke the same language long ago” (41). Although this doesn’t quite apply to everyone–the narrator is (unjustifiably) afraid to ask about her own Polish language, and a woman from Nigeria “pretends not to understand,” everyone wants to take cover under the “dark swirling cloud of prehistory”(9) (41) that Pedro stretches over their heads. This emblematic, genetic concept of language has a direct counterpart in the Swedish Bible that the narrator finds in the room of the dying Swede:

I cannot understand anything and yet all seems so familiar. A red bookmark marks the Book of Ecclesiastes. I run my eye along the page and I have the impression that I am beginning to understand it. First individual words and then whole phrases float out of memory and mix with the print. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requires that which is past.” [The Polish Bible translation is much more emphatic; the last phrase reads: “And God will restore that which is past.” R.E.] (53-54)6

These are, as the narrator remarks, “the most mysterious words of the Holy Book” (54). The foreign words behave like small hollow objects into which human memory breathes spiritual life; through her ritually mediated reading the narrator experiences the possibility of an originary, linguistic and sacral unity in the sense of Mircea Eliade’s illud tempus. In Eric Gans’s terminology, this understanding of language is also ostensive. This reading is neither a hermeneutic exegesis nor an act of inscribing oneself in an always already existing network of signs. Rather, it is a ritual making-present of a prehistorical moment in which the sign is experienced as object-related, but also as conflict-resolving and divine: as a performance.

The Politics of Space and Beauty: “The Hotel Capital” and The God of Small Things

At this point, it is justified to ask about the political implications of “The Hotel Capital.” Tokarczuk’s depiction of a monolithic world order is in many respects no less critical than Smith’s. However, unlike the no-win world of spontaneous, mindless resistance depicted in Hotel World, Tokarczuk assumes the possibility of resacralizing and re-aestheticizing capitalism from within–a strategy that the alterity-loving theoreticians of postcolonialism may slowly have to get used to themselves. For whoever wants to construct positive regional or individual identity under the conditions of an all-encompassing global capitalism will practically be forced to create closed spaces inside that order in which desirable values of some kind congeal into more or less coherent form–the “chutneyfication of history,” as Mita Banerjee (2002) has aptly called it.(10)

Thus a postideological, regionally oriented book like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things seeks to transcend oppression, discrimination and loss of identity by welding a genetic and erotic originary bond (incest between siblings), by sensually amalgamating words and languages (English and Malayalam) and by plotting the erotic union of two loving individuals across caste boundaries.(11) The same focus on intimate aesthetic bonding is no less apparent in her political writings, which can hardly be accused of fostering sympathy for capitalism. In her well-known polemic “The End of Imagination,” Roy even goes so far as to suggest that beauty, which is usually high up on anyone’s list of essentialist taboos, is the direct answer to the threat posed by the Indian Bomb:

There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. (Roy 1998)Roy performs in practice what Tobin Siebers has suggested in theory when he links Kant’s notion of beauty with otherness and with an explicitly political notion of shared affect:

Beauty arrives at political form by virtue of the shared experience of affect. The vision of the beautiful object is also a vision of a beautiful “we” because it compels individuals to expose private feelings to the judgment of other people while at the same time imagining them as members of an affective community that shares common goals and objects. (1998, 48)The effect of beauty’s conceptually inexplicable otherness is thus to create a new, potentially reconciliatory set towards “thingness” in its most positive and pleasing manifestation.

In a postideological world beauty can, as Roy vividly demonstrates, become that positively charged other that is uniquely suited to combating an economically unshakeable but “ugly” political order. This is no doubt also the reason why Roy (who is not a religious believer) deliberately spiritualizes her aesthetic credo. Seen this way, the “God of small things” is none other than the God of beauty, which in Kantian terms has a modest or human scale and applies to the intrinsic qualities of things rather than to interchangeable, subjective characteristics assigned to them after the fact. Kant’s equating of beauty with smallness makes possible the confluence of the human and the transcendent in terms still acceptable to secular individuals.

Since “Hotel Capital” was written before the actual advent of capitalism in Poland and because Tokarczuk has since then addressed historical and psychological rather than topical themes, it’s not as easy to pigeonhole her politically as it is Roy.(12) All in all, though, Tokarczuk remains a good deal more comfortable with closed space and capitalism than does Roy, whose plot stresses boundary transgression,(13) and whose politics are in conventional terms left-wing. Also, unlike Roy, whose chutney-like mix of Malayalam and Anglo-American culture is still very much a thing of her own making, Tokarczuk comes from a Central European culture steeped in venerable literary traditions and an acute sense of national history; she has plenty of time and opportunity to seek out the closed spaces in it in which to cast out her projections. Although not exactly an apology for globalism, her story suggests the possibility of a spatial accommodation with the capitalist world order that would probably be foreign to Roy.

Sevenchurch

This kind of inner accommodation does not, however, apply to all Central European writers addressing their respective countries’ sudden re-immersion in capitalism. In the following discussion I would like to touch briefly on another book from post-Communist Europe that also stresses space and order but which presents them expressly in terms of the sublime.

The work in question is Miloš Urban’s Sevenchurch. A Gothic Novel of Prague (1999),(14) whose basic plot motif is the struggle for control over post-postmodern space and form. Echoing an old theme of Czech culture, the book sets the Gothic style of the Czech high Middle Ages against the Baroque of the Counterreformation, whose onset coincided with the long-term loss of Czech national sovereignty. The main protagonists of Sevenchurch are all enthusiastic, not to say fanatical admirers of the Gothic and detractors of the Baroque, whose ornamental bombast and playful superficiality are clearly reminiscent of postmodernism. The Gothic, by contrast, is declared to be the only epoch at all capable of realizing architectonic transcendence:

The Gothic architects were the only ones to resist the dictates of antiquity; they came up with a style that did the impossible: it realized the victory of spirit over matter in human dwellings. In all preceding and following epochs exactly the opposite was the case. (64)The hero and narrator of the novel, a failed history student and ex-policeman named Švach, is gradually initiated into the plans of a mysterious sect that seeks to roll back democracy in favor of a medieval regime. As the leader of the sect declares:

Monarchy is a thousand times better than democracy. Democracy is dynamic and quick-moving, it reckons with the permanent growth of everything possible and impossible, it thrives on a cult of innovation. How monstrous! How erroneous! How against the order of the universe! By worshiping enlightenment, prosperity and functionality this loudmouthed democracy has taken us to where we are now–the end of Western humanity. (300)7

These tirades are embedded in a detective story emphasizing the sublime, “gothic” side of the narrator-hero’s perspective as he uncovers ever new atrocities and eavesdrops on ominous sexual practices (part of this, incidentally, takes place in the corridors of a dark, labyrinthine hotel). After the zenith of sublime terror has been achieved–the hero is subjected to a fake execution–we find out that the sect has already achieved its goal. Švach, who has now become a faithful disciple of the group, informs us that the center of Prague has been cut off from the surrounding world and is being ruled according to the cruel dictates of the “wonderful, beatific 14th century” (326).

As in “Hotel Capital,” Sevenchurch forces a spatially defined monist order upon the reader. However, this now occurs using the specific means of what might be called the archaic sublime. In his novel Urban carries out that “rollback” of the Enlightenment that Tokarczuk suggests only in passing. This odd novelistic performance is neither ideological in nature–the real-life Urban is not a monarchist–nor can it be explained as an exercise in infinite postmodern regress. You could, I suppose, argue that the backwards-directed plot is simply a ploy meant to expose a weak hero to arbitrary manipulation by an infinitely receding author (the hero’s name “Švach,” which means “weak” in German, might support this). Problematic about this however is that there is no immediate possibility of regress behind the Medieval scenario; there is no mise en abyme into which the author nonchalantly plunges after having left the reader holding the bag (what Ali Smith does in Hotel World). Rather, we are confronted with a setup or frame similar to that in “Hotel Capital.” The point is not that we actually identify with the sect’s claims about Gothic style, but that we more or less involuntarily assume a position of terrified awe vis-à-vis the text. Upon finishing the book, we are transfixed and stunned by its representation of the victory of a whole, monist order without necessarily agreeing with its actual content.(15)

The text, in other words, carries out what might be called a performative gesture. The reader is forced to assume a unified attitude that is only possible within the framework of the given work; assuming this attitude is in turn what allows an aesthetically rewarding reading to occur in the first place. We ourselves remain in an aesthetically defined, sublime space that exposes us alternately to waves of pleasure and terror and keeps us from making practical ideological or conceptual judgments. If we did try to make such judgments nonetheless, we would merely conclude that this sublime vantage point allowing us to obliterate the Enlightenment at one stroke is guaranteed by the aesthetic principles of precisely that Enlightenment for which that stroke is intended.

All in all, the performance in Sevenchurch allows us to assume the cognitive position of a terrorist without having to share his or her practical interests. This sublime or terrorist monism comprises a necessary counterpart to the monolithic capitalist world order, whose metaphysical destruction must take place all at once in order to be truly gratifying (we will recall that in the Butlerian ambience of Hotel World the unshakeable hegemony of global capitalism is expressly confirmed: resistance takes place only partially, in a mode of murky, haphazard solidarity among victims). Rather than wallowing in a victimary mode, Sevenchurch employs a “high” aesthetic that allows you to let off your resentment all at once in an act of sublime projection and identification. And, needless to say, it leaves behind more than enough irony, allusion, and loose ends to keep further interpretations alive. The Gothic ideal propounded by the sect, for example, contains elements both of Communist internationalism and of Czech national ideology and appears to mock the nostalgic yearning for both.

Conclusion

These examples suggest that the switch to a radical monist, postmillennial or performatist kind of consciousness is not exactly going to cause writers or other artists to burst out in hosannas to global capitalism. What it does mean, though, is that the thing that Eric Gans calls victimary politics (of which Hotel World is a prime example) is going to grow increasingly outmoded as an aesthetic device. In part, this is due to the ubiquity of victimary argumentation itself. The ironic act of displaying your political impotence on the one hand and flaunting your epistemological superiority on the other has by now become an entirely predictable exercise even for those who agree with its political aims. However, the rise of radical monism also appears to meet a real cultural need to create spatially discrete identities or performances within global capitalism that would enable forms of totalized or holistic resistance to it.

Using the examples I have discussed here as a rough guide, you could speak of a “right,” a “left” and a sublime or “terrorist” path to this goal. The “right” method is not uncritical of capitalism. However, it tries to work within it by creating inspirational projections in its inner space (by aspirating what Sloterdijk calls spheres or foams–whole pockets of belief, faith, truth etc.). The “left” strategy corresponds roughly to the attempt to amalgamate variegated otherness into an appealing, tasteful object of cultural identity (a nice hot chutney, so to speak). This strategy seems particularly appropriate to postcolonial writers, as it would allow them to reify attributes from their own cultures that are at the same time universally binding or “necessary” for others to enjoy in the Kantian sense. Finally, the “terrorist” alternative suggests the possibility of a total critique of capitalism that takes place in the mode of “as if.” The terrorist aesthete will play va banque with the sublime possibility of a radical monist alternative to capitalism, postmodern society or Western culture per se(16) (although this doesn’t mean that we must now be on the lookout for a novel by Osama bin Laden).

Summing up, the performatist works by Tokarczuk, Roy and Urban can all be subsumed under the broader umbrella of what might be called “anthropological Kantianism.” In the new literature, Kantian notions of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment are being applied–sometimes quite consciously–to topical problems relating to the role of individuals and cultures in the era of global capitalism. In the process, these Kantian notions have been modified and adapted to a new, specifically monist mindset that runs counter to Kant’s original (and possibly also misinterpreted) dualism of mind and matter.(17) The innovative crux of this adaptation lies in what I call the performance.(18) The author knows there is a split between mind and matter (or some other basic duality), but nonetheless forces us to identify with the possibility of transcending it per formam–by passing with our mind’s eye and with our bodily emotions through form. The “reward” for engaging in this formally mediated identification or projection is an aesthetic, performatist pleasure which transcends the dualism of cognitive vs. physical; the “punishment” for dismantling that projection is to live in the epistemologically correct but joyless state of knowing that is postmodernism. In performatism, aesthetics trumps epistemology. Art is a privileged place where secular individuals will once again be able to experience transcendence, albeit only under limited, artificial conditions.

There is little doubt that the most appropriate philosophical, psychological, and sociological sources for dealing with this “closed” situation with its specific, positive projections can be found in the Kantian tradition. Reclaiming this long line of Western thought for performatism/postmillennialism is a project that must, however, remain reserved for further studies.

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