Culture

REBELLING AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL REQUIRES EMBRACING THE UGLY:

Dune: The Perfect Deathwork: How the thought of Philip Rieff illuminates a modern epic. (William Batchelder, June 26, 2024, Modern Age)

To reengage fully with the dark myth at the heart of Dune, it is best to turn to the work of one of the most pessimistic of our contemporary social theorists.

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) offers an effective theoretical framework for interpreting Dune as deathwork and dark myth. Rieff made his early reputation as an interpreter of Freud. At the heart of his later work was a historicist interpretation of Western civilization, which he divided into three “cultures.” The first culture was the culture of paganism; in all such polytheistic cultures the gods themselves emerged from a “metadivine,” a source of power prior to and greater than the gods themselves. This source of fathomless power above even the gods Rieff called the “primacy of possibility.” Charged with the “constant energy of menace,” the primacy of possibility can turn men monstrous or destroy them. First culture man understood the primacy of possibility through myth; his relationship to it was mediated by unfathomable, amoral, and relentless fate. To keep his distance from its menacing power, he observed taboos.

Rieff’s second culture is that of the Abrahamic faiths. There is no metadivine; nothing stands above the God of Israel. In place of the taboos walling off the primacy of possibility there are the “interdicts”: directly commanded thou-shalt-nots declared by the God who reveals Himself. Man’s relationship to this God, the final authority, is characterized not by mysterious fate but by faith. The second culture sinks the interdicts into each individual beginning in a preconscious foundational process that builds individual character.

The third culture is the culture of modernity. It rejects God and the interdicts. Rieff believed that, because there can be no culture without either tabooed prohibitions or the character-shaping interdicts, the third culture is an “anticulture.” This third culture was ushered in by an “officer class” of intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Weber, and of course Freud were the most important theorists of the officer class; Joyce, Duchamp, and Wallace Stevens its artists par excellence. Rieff observed that this officer class, while godless, feels itself perpetually “god-threatened.” These intellectuals are compelled to address themselves to the God of the second culture in endless artistic acts of defacement and mockery. Rieff called such works of art the “deathworks”: intellectual and artisticassaults on the old, now disestablished, second culture.

To Rieff, the closest this modernist officer class can come to the affirmative creation of culture is to create deathworks that negate the second culture of faith while also attempting an unbelieving return to the “primacy of possibility”—the source of power beyond even the gods themselves—that marked the first culture. Of course, a skeptical modern cannot approach the primacy of possibility as a first culture man did. Instead, third culture imaginations invoke the oceanic power of the primacy of possibility self-consciously, even ironically. To some moderns, this primacy of possibility returns as atheistic invocations of what Rieff called “the Nothing,” which serve as a kind of anti-creed best expressed in endless hostile parodies of the second culture. Rieff cites as an example Joyce’s mockery of the Old Testament and his sneering “Woid” (void) in place of the “Word.”

To fill the emptiness, other third culture imaginations have embraced, or even self-consciously invented, some supra-human power echoing the ancient primacy of possibility. Moderns have embraced everything from the Trotskyists’ “permanent revolution” to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Wallace Stevens, in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” demanded the angels keep silent while the poet creates a self-conscious pseudo-religious abstraction as a substitution for the Trinity: “It must be Abstract. It must Change. It must give Pleasure.”

Dune is a perfect third culture deathwork because it offers an eloquent address to the Nothing and a invokes a fictive primacy of possibility almost profound enough to approach again the slopes of myth.

The constant need to define themselves in opposition to God is a confession. Richard Dawkins recent admission to being a cultural Christian was particularly hilarious.

GNOSTICISM IS ALWAYS A HOAX:

A Book Club of Two: The Time I Started a James Joyce Reading Group in College (Kristopher Jansma, June 14, 2024, LitHub)

Our professor seemed unsurprised that we weren’t getting into it, even after he gave us a schema that explained the themes and explained that Joyce’s contemporaries had been similarly puzzled, until he’d given them this guide. We settled in with these charts that paralleled the chapters back to Homer’s Odyssey, and perused the maps with the paths of the characters throughout Dublin on the day—June 16th—now known as “Bloomsday” in honor of this wonderful novel. He brought out a big green Gifford annotation and had us read it alongside the original text so that we could see all that was wrapped up inside.

But I couldn’t get into it. An international holiday was nice, I conceded, but what the hell is the point of a 768-page book that even the author’s closest friends needed to read with a cheat key?

it’s a fascistic exercise in an author controlling rather than entertaining his “readers’. (No one has ever actually read it)

SIC SEMPER JOYCE:

Reading dies in complexity: Online news consumers prefer simple writing (HILLARY C. SHULMAN, DAVID M. MARKOWITZ, AND TODD ROGERS, 5 Jun 2024, Science Advances)

Over 30,000 field experiments with The Washington Post and Upworthy showed that readers prefer simpler headlines (e.g., more common words and more readable writing) over more complex ones. A follow-up mechanism experiment showed that readers from the general public paid more attention to, and processed more deeply, the simpler headlines compared to the complex headlines. That is, a signal detection study suggested readers were guided by a simpler-writing heuristic, such that they skipped over relatively complex headlines to focus their attention on the simpler headlines. Notably, a sample of professional writers, including journalists, did not show this pattern, suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it. Simplifying writing can help news outlets compete in the competitive online attention economy, and simple language can make news more approachable to online readers.

Good writers communicate with the readesr, not themselves.

CHARLOTTE’S CROSS:

CHARLOTTE’S WEB REVISITED (Alexander Riley, 6 . 4 . 24, First Things)

The paragraph in which Charlotte dies—and particularly its second sentence, which is so beautifully constructed that it should be carved into a monument somewhere—still staggers me with both its literary perfection and the unbearable metaphysical weight of what it conveys:

She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.

It is true that there is a theme of defeating death in the novel, in Wilbur’s rescue from the holiday dinner table and his continued tie to Charlotte through her children. But even as a child, I knew this was insufficient. Death remains unconquered in the message of the passage on Charlotte’s death. The crushing solitude of those words—the heroine of the novel, a noble and selfless character, is alone in the deserted fairground, to disappear forever—left me with a feeling that lurked in the background of my life for years. It was that universal feeling of unease, anxiety, and trepidation in the face of this terrible thing that can seem to have no solution.

There’s only One Story.

SHARDS:

Tolkien’s Secret: Tolkien’s tale reminds us that we ourselves are part of the Great Story. (Robert Lazu Kmita, June 8, 2024, European Conservative)

People cannot live without true stories, without sacred texts, without myths. Here is, in a nutshell, my shortest answer to the question I posed at the outset: being woven from stories themselves, people give preference to those authors who help them, as best they can, to remember the essential story that is hidden in the anonymity of their gray lives. This is, in my opinion, Tolkien’s secret (if he indeed had one).

Reading Tolkien’s stories, the characters with whom we are primarily invited to identify are the hobbits. Neither the lives of the majestic, immortal elves, nor the harshness and grandeur of the lives of kings like Aragorn or Theoden, nor the wisdom of a Maia like Gandalf are accessible to us. Instead, the little hobbits, with whom Tolkien himself happily identified, possess all those traits that any of us, the readers, would be glad to have: hardworking and disciplined; lovers of comfort, fun, and peaceful living; joyful in friendship; prudent and reserved when it came to foolish adventures; and wise, brave, and steadfast in serving a worthy cause. In short, they have noble souls hidden beneath the mask of humor and friendliness, just as we would (and could) wish to be.