THE AGE OF HYPERLITERACY

NOBODY READS ANYMORE

I was truly psyched, this morning, that the angry internet mob forced David Remnick to disinvite Steve Fascist from the New Yorker's ideas party.

And I'm going to use this as a plug for my essay on the Books and Film Globe site, since it is relevant.
What I was trying to argue didn't have a snappy label. Now I've come up with one: hyperliteracy.

The thing one reads, over and over, is that "nobody reads anymore." N+1, a supposedly lefty site, just featured an editorial that went over the ground with a special hauteur, like the Marquis complaining about the gardner:

"Gone are the happy days when we dialed up to submit a comment to Salon.com, only to be abused by Glenn Greenwald or destroyed — respectfully — by the academics at Crooked Timber. Back then, we could not have imagined feeling nostalgic for the blogosphere… Even those who stridently disagreed shared some basic premises and context… Today’s internet, by contrast, is arbitrary and charmless. On social media, criticism once confined to the comments now comes as free-range abuse directed at other readers. Readers can address all parties instantaneously — writers, editors, publishers, and the world. And so writers who publish online peer into the fishbowl of readerly reception. Drop in some flakes and watch the fish swarm.”"

The idea that nobody reads is contiguous with, and overlaps, the idea that everybody is out there in a meanspirited twitter mob, shaming and destroying freedom of speech left and right.

Myself, I'm for the mob. But even if I wasn't for the mob, I would do a little more thinking about this idea of the writer on one side and the readerly swarm on the other side. Like, where does that idea come from?

Here I'm gonna quote my piece:

"The N+1 article is balanced on a division between the writer and the reader – as if we were still in a space where this division was socially absolute. But that has long been swept away. Rather than fishes swarming, readerly reception is now transformed, almost instantly, into writerly reception. It is as if the dull kids in the back of the classroom, the ones who passed around notes, are now in the front of the classroom, writing on twitter. Which is just another form of classroom note. And the authors are not amused. Like teachers, they suspect that the amusement those notes are causing is distracting from the very important lessons being drawn on the blackboard.

The writerly revolution has still not been fully comprehended, I think. Literacy, until recently, has been thought of as largely passive. In the early modern period, learning to read did not necessarily entail learning to write: women, for instance, who formed even then the most ardent corps of readers, were often not instructed in writing. But both functions became one in the great literacy campaigns of the nineteenth century. Still, just as math beyond primitive algebra were taught to the masses and immediately forgotten by most of the masses, who had no practical use for them, the tools of writing were often used rarely after high school.

All of this has changed in a historical instance. The child who doesn’t know how to use the keyboard on the cell phone is now a rarity. Writing on the popular level has caught up with reading. Twitter is a fascinating place to watch the collision between an older form of literacy and a newer one. Far from being the “cesspit” that older media peeps – and the cranky formerly hip denizens of N+1 – like to despise, it is creating its own vocabulary, its audio-visual forms, its links, its infradig references. It is the old story of the modern: make it new."

We passed a threshhold we don't recognize. Barthes's death of the author entailed, necessarily, the death of the reader, because these were functions in a system of literacy that depended on a relatively small number of people having access to both sides of the literate paradigm. Now, everybody is on both of those sides. The readerly swarms are writerly swarms - they comment and gloss with no sense that they are violating some hierarchy. Far from being the end of reading, this is what hyperliteracy looks like, the crown on a state sponsored effort that has spanned two centuries. The tools of the old penmen have been given to us all. And we should fucking use them.

 

my distinguished pal

We sit down to the expanded energy footprint we have bought, and we unwrapped the hamburger and cheeseburger, free the toy from its plastic sack, open the box and take out the fries, open the plastic bottle and insert the plastic straw through the plastic top of the sprite cup, and go through the comestibles. Ah, two catchup packets. Adam tries to open one of them, but I lend a hand, finally. He’s getting the hang of the knife and fork business, and easily strips the paper from the straw, but opening those sacks that have been carefully pre-perforated for easy opening, with the arrows pointing to the appropriate place to grab, still evades his tool sense, his understanding of affordances. I am thinking, as I always think at Old McDonalds, how can all this stuff be so cheap? Adam takes a satisfied look at the table, turns to me, and says, “thanks, my distinguished pal.”

Adam is now five and 10 months, and he has been learning all about linguistic affordances, in both English and French. Of course, part of that is understanding words and grammar. But it also means getting your tongue around catch phrases. Which proliferate, the age of YouTube.

My distinguished pal. Did he pick this up from Bugs Bunny, or Scooby Doo, or Tom and Jerry, or the horror shows – tales of the cryptkeeper, the Haunting Hour, Goose Bumps – that we, his permissive parents, have allowed him to see? I don’t see the harm, although when he sat at the table at his grandparents’ house a few days ago and said that he wanted a motorcycle, a black helmet, sunglasses like a movie star, a black shirt with a skull on it, and to join a motorcycle gang, I had a few qualms. The gang reference came from Scooby Doo. Adam thought the whole point of the gang was to roll up your t shirt sleeves so that you showed your shoulder. He thought that would be a hilarious thing to do. I had to agree.

My distinguished pal. When I was young, it was of course an unrelenting stream of tv – old movies, rerun tv series, cartoons. And I still, in an age where I am definitely past my sell-by date, remember some of them. I remember, for instance, Newton, the Centaur, calling out for Herc Herc Hercules. I remember seeing a gangster move with James Cagney, at the end of which he died, clutching his stomach and moaning, is this the end of Rico? I must have died like Rico a hundred times, over chairs, on sofas, in the dining room, in the living room, in the back yard. Each time was as fun as the first time.

Every life is full of muses. We just don’t recognize them, or trace their obscure workings and wendings as they sink into our lives. My distinguished pal.

avital ronell

I'm going to be writing for bookandfilmglobe.com as a book editor. Anybody who has an idea for a review or an article should query me! rogergathmann@gmail.com

And this is my latest, about avital ronell, teachers' pets, the culture wars, the state of the humanities, and the impunity of John Searle.

the wasp summer

Me on the wasp summer in Berlin.

against the "legitimate right of a people to self-determination"

I had a twitter exchange with a man who accused me of being an anti-semitic shithead because I did not recognize the legitimacy of the Jews right to self-determination.  I called him a general shithead and accused him of being the anti-semite. Things went from there, in the usual twitter way.

However, if I had not felt like insults were in order, I might have surprised him by saying that I am opposed to the principle of self-determination period. I think that every nation state that grounds its legitimacy in ethnic identity is on the road to fascism. Sooner of later such a state will either have to re-constitute its legitimacy or become a racist state, and as such, begin suppressing criticism and begin the process of institutionalizing second class citizenship.

The principle of the nation state was, up until the 1840s, I’d say, almost never identified with some ethnic group, rather than with a royal family, or a religion. The Atlantic revolutions identified something different, what Rousseau called the popular will. But that will was not identical to being, say, White male and protestant – even though the U.S. was, of course, founded by White Males who were predominantly protestant and often slave owners.

The romantic state, as I’d call it, changed this formula by up-fronting ethnic identity. Germans for Germany, Italians for Italy, etc. Yet this formula was by no means unproblematic. First, there were definitely Germans outside of Germany – the state Bismark made – and there were definitely Germans who weren’t ethnically German inside of Germany. Secondly, the same wave that resulted in the founding of these states resulted in some quasi-democratic form of governance – a Reichstag or Parliament – which gave non-ethnics certain rights to political expression and pathways to governance.

We know how the story went in Europe.

In the U.S., the person who did the most to amplify and internationalize the “self-determination” talk was Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Wilsonian language is still used when the claim is that Jews – or Palestinians, or Hutus, or Japanese, etc. – have a “right” to self-determination. Although the fact that Wilson was a racist president, which was repressed by the old, liberal mainstream view of American history is now out in the open, we don’t see how that racism permeated his internatlonal outlook. But the man who thought Birth of a Nation was a historically accurate film was the same man who thought ethnicities had special rights. Through the Wilsonian lens, the founding of the U.S. was especially a matter of White Christians. The Pat Buchanan/Trump view of American history is a direct descendent of the Wilsonian ideology.

The romantic nation-state seems to follow an inexhorable logic, in which the very liberatory culture that accompanied the founding of the state is sooner or later alienated from the power establishment that runs the state. That power establishment, in turn, begins to attack that liberatory culture as anti-German, or anti-Italian, or anti-American – or anti-Jewish, or anti-Palestinian. Not to get all Hegelian here, but the history of the last two centuries does seem to show that there is a logic here, or at least, that the structuration leads to similar results.

This all seems obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t obvious to everybody. I don’t know.

Treptow Park

 We went to the Soviet war memorial at Treptow Park expecting Soviet kitsch. It turned out to be a curiously moving site. The memorial is most noted for a giant statue depicting a soldier with a sword, holding a baby, or being held by a baby, which surmounts a smaller stone space, a sort of hypertrophied hut.  The soldier faces (at a field’s distance) two pinkish red marble walls, which are separated by a space. There is a series of steles depicting various scenes of war and peace that make their way on the edge of the field between the wall and the giant statue.

None of this seemed in bad taste, or in some non-synchronicity with the event commemorated – the massive war between the Soviets and Nazi Germany that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, when the German army finally surrendered.

In the 90s, it was considered in bad taste to prefer the Soviets to the Nazis. The moral equivalency argument, which had started on the far right in Germany, triumphed after the wall fell.

Of course, that is utter bullshit.

I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s account of the final push and the “battle of Berlin” since I’ve been here. Beevor’s account is famous for finally putting into the scales the massive number of rapes committed by the Soviet troops. This was a moral advance in historiography: military history has almost completely avoided the subject of rape, even though rape has been weaponized in all wars.

However, along with the moral enlightenment comes a certain puzzling moral blindness. While fully willing to lay the blame for the rapes on the Soviets, Beevor doesn’t spend much time pondering the terror bombing of the German cities, and in particular, Berlin. In the moral calculus, the Nazis and the Soviets get very bad marks, while the allies fall back into that comfortable category of military history, the advance of a number of divisions. In fact, though, those Allies were advancing through civilian casualties of at least 600,000; they were advancing through the deliberate destruction of cities, and their residences, which were all openly part of the Allied war plan, much more so than the Soviet quasi-approval of rape.

I myself have no doubt that the right side won in WWII. Whether it should have been fought at all is a question that goes back to WWI – the truly unnecessary war. If Vladimir Lenin had been the head of Russia in 1914 rather than Czar Nicholas, or if the governments had listened to the socialists, led by Jaures, and its radical wing, led by Trotsky and Lenin, WWI would never have happened – which would have meant that WWII never would have happened. Instead, the momentum of the 1900s and 1910s, which was with the Left, was broken, never to be fully recovered again.

Beevor, I should make clear, feels that the campaign of rape is morally important without feeling, therefore, that the Soviets and the Nazis were morally equivalent – which I take to be, logically, the idea that it would not have made a moral difference if the Nazis had won. 

Of course, the argument that the radical right made in the 70s in Germany, which you can now see casually sprayed across the New York Review of Books, as if it were obvious, was the argument of America First in 1939/1940. A group with which, I believe, Trump’s father was involved. But the same bien-pensant liberals who find Trump shameful have gone along with finding Trump historically justified. Such is the price of keeping in place a neo-liberal order that has to justify itself with larger and larger historical revisions. Otherwise, one has to question how we came to a place where the top ten percent own more than the bottom seventy percent, and how the top 1 percent own more than the next nine percent, and so on. Put it on a graph and label it: world-historical fuckup.

But I digress. The Soviet memorial is a quiet place, much quieter than the argument I am making above. There is something to be said for the aesthetic continuity of muscularity between the fascists and the communists. In the U.S., we confine the bulging muscles to the comic book and to action movies. But the monumentality, the bowed heads, the sense of human waste and exhaustion – this is what the memorial, in its entirety, conveys well. I expected something triumphal. What I found was something elegiac.

One of the more memorable spots in Berlin.

Walter B. and me

Me on Walter Benjamin's lost Berlin here: http://bookandfilmglobe.com/creators/dreaming-of-walter-benjamin-on-walter-benjamin-platz/