Taking Back Our Future

"Human nature" vs. community creation

In How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields riffs on Milan Kundera’s quip that it’s hard to separate the personal from the political “when you go to the grocery store and the cannon of a Soviet tank is wedged into the back window.” What, Shields wonders, is America’s version of the Soviet tank? “The ubiquity of the camera,” he decides — “the immense power of the camera lens on our lives.” Despite a detour with a failed novel, this realization ultimately inspired Shields to write what became his most famous book, the anti-novel manifesto Reality Hunger.

I met Shields over the weekend at the Twin Cities Book Festival, where we had a cordial chat about narrative, collage, and Trump — as well as the ways Trump feeds a kind of spiritual impulse that our culture has otherwise denied most people in this country. Where Shields and I disagree (I think) is on the uses and pleasures of narrative as a central organizing factor of social, and therefore political, life.

In a letter to Lorrie Moore, who dismissed and derided Reality Hunger in 2011, Shields made the case for his work. It’s not an “anti-novel jihad”; instead, he says, it “takes the potential banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts,’ ‘truth,’ ‘reality’), turns that banality inside out, and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological and existential questions.”

Considering his two most recent books, having framed truth this way seems to have come to haunt Shields. Both How We Got Here and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk into a Trump Rally escort us across the bridge from postmodernism (“everything is subjective”) to Trump’s post-truth administration. As with most of Shields’ work, each is a collage of various quotes and anecdotes. But what strikes me in Shields’ defense of Reality Hunger is his metaphor for the project itself. A “staging area” feels apt for collage itself, which — even when linear — is a spatial rather than a temporal artform. Collage is Shields’ response to the “demands” placed on us by our reality-obsessed culture, which is another way of describing a culture where the “ubiquity of the camera” has changed the tastes, the standards, and the expectations of writers and artists. How do you “compete,” as a novelist, if reality TV, for example, offers distilled character and conflict with none of the scaffolding or schema of style?

Even if this were true,¹ it seems odd to expect writers and artists to assimilate the camera and its prescriptions rather than resist it, which is, in my mind, what the function of narrative has always been: to resist the reduction or simplification of the human life into a symbol, an image, an object, or — worst of all — a utility.

Elsewhere in Literature, Shields touches on myth, which he calls “an attempt to reconcile an intolerable contradiction.” It reminded me of a line of Roberto Calasso’s: “Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments.” The ancient myths weren’t stories so much as the elements storytellers combined to tell their own stories. Setting a story at Troy, for example, before Homer canonized it in a poem, gave listeners a familiar cast of characters at a known locale. These myths formed the “eternal” tropes that a talented narrator could arrange to their liking, which gives character to a slate like Helen, whose choices and decisions in this version might color the storyteller’s own view of women, perhaps, or of men’s jealousy, or of love and loyalty — or of humanity as a whole.

To trade in myths without stories denies subjectivity, interiority, and even agency to the various archetypes (or stereotypes) under discussion, just as collage denies context to various quotations excised from larger, subtler texts. Myth without stories — that is, image without rhetoric — is what makes fascism possible: an incoherent, anti-temporal politics that replaces reality with images and symbols, up to and including incinerating human beings who don’t conform to or accept these archetypes.

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While there are obvious and popular exceptions (most “prestige” TV, most bestselling novels, and pretty much all major film releases in a given year), the general perception, in the art and literary worlds, that the fabrications of character, setting, narrative, and plot are no longer “serious” — that, overall, the act of representation in art, cinema, and literature is a jig gone cringingly up — is oft repeated or at least alluded to in the sorts of novels and movies (that is, in the sorts of fictions) that get talked about, that get debated, in what few magazines survive. Why make up a name when the narrator is clearly a version of the author? Why make up a plot when the author went through a similar (if not identical) situation? Why use music in film, asked Bresson, when it only taints the scene with a false, unearned emotion? Cumulatively, this kind of obsession with limitations starts to feel neurotic.²

Meanwhile, a lot of the more overtly imagined narratives that find popular audiences tend to depict limitations of a different sort: a future either dystopian (autocratic or corpocratic) or apocalyptic (violent and disorganized), or a present rigidly aligned with a highly specific socioeconomic class (the overeducated, undercompensated, self-conscious, infantilized adult entering a world with no room for them). In either direction, then — whether the “autofiction” of the contemporary prestige novelist or the claustrophobia en vogue among more familiar narrative structures — we come up against a kind of wall. I don’t think this wall is arbitrary or anomalous, nor is it all that different from the wall Shields seems to have perceived several years ago. That wall is the defining feature of the overarching ideology that shapes how we live — if life you could call it.

In Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison trace the history of “the deeply unpopular musings of a handful of eccentric economists” to what is now “the dominant story of our lives.” In only a few decades, we’ve come to see neoliberalism “as a kind of ‘natural law,’ like Darwinian selection, thermodynamics, or even gravity — an immutable fact, a nonnegotiable reality.” Story, here, is key: “Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals.” Sometime in the late 1970s, neoliberal economists — who by then, tellingly, were refusing to use the term they’d created to describe their extreme version of economic theory³ — began to tell their own story, which went something, Monbiot and Hutchison write, like this:

Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces of an overbearing and over-reaching state, whose collectivizing tendencies have crushed freedom, individualism and opportunity. But the hero of the story, the freedom-seeking entrepreneur, will fight those powerful forces. He will roll back the paralyzing restrictions of the state and, through creating wealth and opportunity that will trickle down to all, restore harmony to the land.

Obviously, the story was bullshit — and it persists to this day despite decades of evidence that neoliberalism is catastrophic for human beings — as well as for the planet we all share. It is by definition an anti-social story about society; but, as Monbiot and Hutchison point out, “We have produced no new story with which to replace it.” Nor is there an easy way to return to the Keynesian story of collectivism and the “greater good”: “In politics, with one exception, you cannot go backward. That exception is fascism.” Fascism is the answer to the untenable, dis-credible idiocy of neoliberalism; and, rather than offer a story of its own, fascism short-circuits the need for rhetoric and narration at all, instead harnessing its regime of images and symbols directly to the power of the state, which in turn provides the overwhelming violence required to enforce this mythic, impossible, and doomed version of society. It is because of neoliberalism’s foreclosure of narrative — its dissolution of an alternative future, its use of images as a kind of currency, its insistence upon consumer choice as the sole engine of human interaction — that fascism has become an enticing, an exciting, and, for all too many, a desirable version of the future. It returns today despite proof of its horrific history precisely because it is a future. Even if that future, as I think even its most fervent supporters must know, is death. Life under neoliberalism is so intolerable, so unnatural, that apocalypse offers itself as a way out.

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“I think we are a fallen, doomed species,” Shields writes in Trump Rally. He then adds, in parentheses, “Detective story.” The question here, I guess — or the case to crack — is “What went wrong?”

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that human beings are unique in that we are the sole political animal. For tens of thousands of years, we’ve experimented with different social arrangements and, through dialogue, convinced one another of our common values. “Human thought is inherently dialogic,” they write. “[We are] only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.” This, I think, is where stories come from — the use of elemental fragments organized in subjective fashions, not only to entertain but to persuade listeners of a certain viewpoint or value, of an idea about what we all share, or could.

This kind of storytelling is what politics is: the use of rhetoric to bring your community to a consensus. I don’t think it’s coincidental that this loss of faith in stories to change our lives is contemporaneous with the mass replacement of politics with political theater, or a “staging area” for myths to parade themselves before a passive, divided public. Conflict, in this theater, now seems entrenched or innate rather than a temporary relationship subject to change; meanwhile, identity feels preloaded with its own authorities and weaknesses as if everyone were a troll or a goblin or a princess in some massive LARP adventure. This is exactly where, I think, the collapse in institutional credibility that I’ve discussed before is coming from: no one believes the stories politicians tell us because the ideology they’ve allowed to dictate our lives has destroyed our capacity for believing we’ll ever be anything but dogs going for each other’s throats over a few scraps of food. This, after all, is our “human nature” — despite tens of thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.

Even four years ago, at the onset of the pandemic, the neoliberal story would have us believe that society was on the verge of collapse, that we would bludgeon our neighbors to death for N95s or canned corn. Instead, as Monbiot and Hutchison point out, “some people — especially the elderly — received more community support than they had had in years, as their neighbors checked up on them and offered to run errands.” Elsewhere, communities set up food distribution events in parks, provided free masks and diapers, and left meals on doorsteps. People quit their jobs en masse as the culture of working oneself to death for a corporation lost all credibility once those corporations began asking us to risk our lives to sit at a desk and “keep the economy afloat,” all while the richest people on earth concentrated their wealth at obscene and unprecedented rates. Yet we continue to hear about “human nature,” as though starving our neighbors rather than helping them, as though ignoring our families in favor of spreadsheets, were inscribed in our DNA.

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“The image,” as a cultural phenomenon, has troubled me for a while. In Image Control I connected its ubiquity, via social media, to our political vulnerability to fascism. What I tried to make clear is that the image does not mean strictly a pictorial representation, but a kind of ethos or way of life — the same kind of ideology that undergirds neoliberalism.

In Shields’ books, the authors he tends to quote are authors who are especially quotable — the great aphorists in particular (Nietzsche is always a favorite among the “doomed species” crowd). It fits that the aphorism would be a preferred form for a collagist, as it compresses and compresses until an idea shines like a gem — and, like a gem, offers different faces, different interpretations, depending on how you turn it. It doesn’t argue so much as asserts and dismisses — a form that Sontag, in her journals, called “aristocratic thinking.” An aphorism, she wrote, “is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.” To dress itself as an argument would shame the aphorism: “it is too well-bred for that.” With its aristocratic aura, the aphorism — “generally regarded as a product of detachment” — connotes a certain arrogance or immutability: things may change, but my legacy, my nobility, my intelligence, my elegance, my truth, my authority — all this is eternal.

One of the many reasons I abandoned Twitter a year ago is that it is, by design, the aphoristic platform. Its brevity rewards, of course, an aphorist’s wit and concision, but its architecture (funded by advertising and built on the viral model of content dissemination) hones those aphorisms to seem as sharp, dismissive, and irrefutable as possible. By incentivizing this kind of cynicism and close-mindedness; by systematizing the theatrical disqualification of one’s contemporaries from consideration, Twitter invites each of its users to become an aristocrat — that is, someone with no real investment in convincing others of their values or participating in the shared creation of social life, but only in attracting a kind of fealty or loyalty to what amounts to nothing more than a name, a brand. I started to realize this environment was intentional — a way to get millions of dispersed individuals, including many of the most intelligent and influential people on earth, to believe that human beings were awful, that nothing could be done, that conflict was irresolvable, and that it was better to shrink one’s own coterie of “unproblematic” individuals into a sort of salon. The function of Twitter, I realized, was to disempower intelligent and curious people by handing them what amounts to a false title, an impotent authority.⁴

I should say that none of this — or maybe almost none of this — has anything to do with me being a novelist. As much as I wish what I did mattered on the scale of what we mean when we talk about politics or values or ways of living together, my own books, like most books, are superfluous. I’m not trying to aggrandize the novelist’s role in society. If anything, I’m trying to belittle it: Everyone is capable of storytelling, and it’s this storytelling capacity that teaches us how to imagine other ways of living, other ways of behaving, and other ways of caring for the people around us. It’s stories that aim us toward a future, even if it’s not quite the future we imagined or told each other about in the story itself. (Utopia is not a state; it is a compass.) It’s stories that allow us to practice agency, or to prove we can exert our will upon the world even as the world exerts its own will right back. But most importantly, it’s stories that pick apart and discredit other stories, stories that no longer work — stories told to us by authority figures, say, whose authority is no longer so believable, and whose dominance is not so ordained, by money or by blood, after all.

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1. It’s not. Reality TV (again, for example) has plenty of style — it’s just a canned corporate style that’s easy to xerox and sell to networks and their viewers no matter how fuzzy and faint the ink gets.

2. Ultimately I think it is neurotic.

3. If an ideology has a name and specific adherents, it’s a lot harder to pretend it was always here, that human beings have always had these values — that is, that we’ve always defined our existence as a ruthless competition.

4. There are, as with any social media platform, exceptions or subversions in the way people use Twitter. The most obvious for the moment is, I think, the role that users across all social media platforms have played in discrediting the Israeli government’s narrative about Palestine — a role that I, personally, don’t think will hold much longer, as it conflicts with the neoliberal position on the use of Israel as a military satellite that creates economic instability in one of the most strategic and resource-rich areas in the world.