French Theory

JM, Tilme of Guadalupe, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, 6.5.08


ut I didn't commence Crowds and Power (better in German: Macht und Masse). g As I said below, at Book Expo, my old friend Doug gave me a copy of French Theory, and, like French theory itself, from there the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agly. g French Theory is a very important book. The chapter on the evolution of college education in America is so thrilling it's hilarious. I am only 120 pages through it but it details the progress of the general motors of English departments and then liberal arts departments and then pop culture through the past thirty years: post-structuralism, deconstruction, identity politics, French theory, especially tracking how and when the ideas flowed from various conferences into various lit crit and academic journals. g I'm only a third through it, but I can tell French Theory is a transformational masterpiece, the kind of book that puts all the other books together and leads you to more and more, like Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. It has already lead me to, for instance, Judith Butler and the concept of performative gender. g Best of all, French theory, though widespread, is like a clandestine movement; it's practitioners are like early Christians, forming an elaborate and unregulated faith, full of uncanonized texts that ultimately will have to be collected and either canonized or discarded---all out of the view of the dull, largely witless, ripe for a decline-and-fall Empire of Media. g Evidence: I read at least four blogs, notably Rodger's, far more carefully than I read any newspaper except the New York Times. g To return: it is apt, to compare the powerless academics of French theory v. media to Christians v. Empire: media are to America what lead pipes were to Roma: quite simply, the unwitting poison that causes dementia. It was media that enabled someone like Bush fils to become president; it is media that enable "intelligent design" to be taught in midwestern schools right next to science; it is media that spread political ideas indifferent to wisdom so long as the ideas garner more attention to media. Some of these absurd media battles are fought in the name of the First Amendment, as the absurd media battle over guns are fought in the name of the Second. g When Marx said "The capitalists will sell us the rope by which we will hang them," he needn't had gone nearly so far; capital routinely sells itself all the rope it needs to off itself as a matter of course, and media advertise the rope as a sale item too. g There are lessons that media can draw from the oldest medium of all, the other media it ceaselessly bludgeons but yet can't quite kill: Roman Catholicism. Catholicism, while antiquated, is actually Media 1.0, the first attempt at controlling a message across an empire without running the empire itself. Peeking at it to look for lessons on how media works is like peeking at an old version of MS-DOS to find out how your Powerbook works. g Yet there are lessons, efficiencies, wisdoms to be gleaned from both. One is, spreading literacy wasn't very important to Catholicism, but control of the message was. How like media today! g The other is, if Catholic priests sound docile and less motivational compared to their counterparts in other faiths, it is because most are instructed to do something so utterly revolutionary that it startles, even blows many religious minds: to have faith in God; how unlike media, which leaves nothing to faith in anything. g I'm at a sinewy arm's length from faith in God and certainly at an arm's length from faith in media. Those who are at arm's length need intermediaries to keep any dialog alive: I suspect that is the function of the fabled Virgin, who has many titles indicating precisely as much. g It's also the function of the blogosphere.

Bibliophile

~
hese have been hard-to-characterize days. g A writer's trick: when you find something is hard to characterize, characterize it as hard-to-characterize; the hyphens add character. g Hard-to-characterize: I was asked by a writer to do an intro to a book yesterday, and accepted, gladly; the book, Rodger Jacobs' coming book of Bukowski tales, is an exercise in nomadism and violation of the sanctity of the narrative. g Hard-to-characterize: Lynn went back to work three days a week and next week will try four days a week; should she be? Meanwhile, I've been at Book Expo America this weekend; should I be? g She should. Experiencing her opportunity after a time away has been an opportunity to observe how much her native industry has changed. Tiptoeing in, she might stay in the habit of tiptoeing, and either tiptoe further in, or reverse and tiptoe out. g I should. Running into a City of Glendale reference librarian reminds me why I'm there: first and foremost, I love books. It's almost always been so. Growing up as an only child, for some reason my parents always gave me the master bedroom (a fact that once set a therapist furiously scribbling) and what I remember most about my early rooms was the pride I took in the bookcase. It was long for a child's bookcase; it seemed to stretch the length of the room. g I continue to store books as an expression of vanity. We have a modern vertical stack in the living room, where I keep some of my favorite titles, including Proust, Durrell's biography, Vidal's United States, etc. In the workroom, I derive considerable comfort from the long row of Grantas behind me; I have almost all of them going back to the earliest ones, and they fit neatly onto a special bookcase, the only one we have with glass; some oversize books are behind glass, but the Grantas tucked into the top shelf, with a scant eighth of an inch between book and top of shelf. g I am adding two more books to my summer reading; indeed, I've started both with lots of interest. My friend Doug Armato's press, the University of Minnesota Press, published both of them; he gave both of them to me at Book Expo America, and for that reason alone Book Expo America cannot be a bad thing. I mentioned both elsewhere yesterday: French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States by Francois Cusset, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. g Both cite Deleuze a lot. I remember where I was when I first heard of Anti-Oedipus: a guy was selling books outside of the Stanford Bookstore up in Palo Alto (haven't been to the campus I'm sure in over two decades; I really wonder what it's like today—I used to much like the feel of the place). It was 1977. He was obviously what we used to call "a head"—why has that term apparently disappeared? I was talking to him about structuralism and then saw Anti-Oedipus. "After that one," he said, "I transcended the realm of reading." Still, I didn't buy it, but I was really sold; I probably didn't have extra money. (Remember traveling up the coast with almost no money? I hope young people still do that.) I did order it from Westwood's old College Bookstore when I came home. I still have the same copy, and still write in it all the time; it's spine is completely severed from the pages by now. g In LA, we don't believe much in public intellectuals; the cult of celebrity is too strong; an intellectual is never a public figure, but a celebrity might be. That's increasingly a reflection of the kind of media we have here in LA, a media that increasingly chases stars and leaves everyone else to slog it out themselves. (Yet Deleuze and Guattari speak of a "becoming-imperceptible" which is the last becoming of all—a warrior, for instance, becomes imperceptible, and yes, imperceptibility is an advantage in our culture). There are more intellectuals here than people realize; in a way, it is the perfect town in which to hide as such, because the books are plentiful, the libraries good, and the media focus on Nicole and Brittney and Paris and Lindsey, who are merely LA's fronts, the masks we hold up to the world so we can conduct our secret business. g Still, there were hoards of others I saw yesterday who are not imperceptible: yesterday while making my rounds I saw Arianna in an aisle, Magic Johnson giving an impromptu speech, Rick Pitino signing books. At the Book Expo, the thing that sickened me the most were the tables set up for author signings, and the cordoned-off rows; there must have been thirty of them; thirty author signings going on at once, rows of people with books, standing as though for a bank teller. g Something's wrong with that, but what? These are increasingly hard-to-characterize days; maybe a book can tell us why.