The body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies – but this is the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that sickens and dies. Because death is the absolute failure to which we all eventually come, it has not been the most favoured of topics for discussion in the United States. The US distributors of the British film Four Weddings and a Funeral fought hard, if unsuccessfully, to change the title.
In such a culture there can be no real tragedy, whatever terrifying events may occur from time to time. The United States is a profoundly anti-tragic society which is now having to confront what may well prove the most terrible epoch of its history. For tragedy, like its partner comedy, depends on an acknowledgement of the flawed, botched nature of human life -though in tragedy one has to be hauled through hell to arrive at this recognition, so obdurate and tenacious is human self-delusion. Comedy embraces roughness and imperfection from the outset, and has no illusions about pious ideals. Against such grandiose follies, it pits the lowly, persistent, indestructible stuff of everyday life. Nobody can take a tragic tumble because nobody is that uniquely precious anyway.
Tragic protagonists, by contrast, need to be bound to a wheel of fire before they can be brought to acknowledge that flawedness is part of the texture of things, and that roughness and imprecision are what make human life work. As a form, tragedy is still in thrall to the harshly unforgiving superego – to cruelly demanding ideals which simply rub our noses in our failure to live up to them. At the same time, unlike comedy, it understands that not all ideals are a sham. If tragedy risks crediting such lofty notions too much, comedy risks a certain populist cynicism about them. Tragedy is about wresting victory from failure, whereas comedy concerns the victory of failure itself, the way in which a wry sharing and acceptance of our weaknesses makes us much less killable.
In tragedy, much turns on the fact that we are not wholly masters of our own destiny. It is this which is hard to stomach in an American culture for which ‘I’ve made my choices’ is a familiar phrase, and ‘It wasn’t my fault’ an unacceptable one. It is this doctrine which has put so many on death row. In jaded, death-ridden Europe it is harder to overlook the great mounds of historical rubble in which the self is buried, and which cramp its liberty to become whatever it chooses. Cynicism, rather than square-jawed idealism, is thus more in fashion there. If the USA is the land of will-power, Europe is the home of Nietzsche’s will to power, which in some ways is almost the opposite.
What is immortal in the United States, what refuses to lie down and die, is precisely the will. Like desire, there’s always more will where that came from. But whereas desire is hard to dominate, the will is dominion itself. It is a terrifyingly uncompromising drive, one which knows no faltering or bridling, irony or self-doubt. It is so greedy for the world that it is at risk of pounding it to pieces in its sublime fury, cramming it into its insatiable maw. The will is apparently in love with all it sees, but is secretly in love with itself. It is not surprising that it often enough takes on a military form, since the death drive lurks within it. Its virile vigour conceals a panic-stricken disavowal of death. It has the hubris of all claims to self-sufficiency.
This annihilating will finds its reflection in the voluntaristic cliches of American culture: the sky’s the limit, never say never, you can crack it if you have faith in yourself. If the disabled do not walk, at least they can redesignate themselves as challenged. As with all pieces of ideology too loosely hinged to the real world – ‘life is sacred’, ‘all human beings are special’, ‘the best things in life are free’ – these solemn soundbites are believed and disbelieved at the same time. Ideology, like the Freudian unconscious, is a domain untouched by the law which prohibits contradiction. As long as the frenetically active will is in business, there can be no finality, and hence no tragedy. The cult of the will belongs with a callow, kitschy optimism, full of wide-eyed vision and the swooping of violins.
In this remorselessly up-beat climate, feeling negative becomes a thought-crime, and satire a form of political treason. Everyone is urged to feel good about themselves, whereas the problem is that some of them don’t feel anything like bad enough. Evangelical Christians avow their faith in Jesus, a failed inmate of early-Palestinian death row, by maintaining a manic grin even while being carted off to prison for fraud or paedophilia. With its impious denial of limit, its bull-headed buoyancy and crazed idealism, this infinite will represents the kind of hubris which would have made the ancient Greeks shiver and glance fearfully at the sky. It is, indeed, at the skies that some of the will’s champions glance fearfully these days, searching for signs of nemesis.
Those who support the American imperium do not have to respond to such comments. They can simply dismiss them as ‘anti-American’. This is a marvellously convenient tactic. All criticisms of the United States spring from a pathological aversion to Sesame Street and baconburgers. They are expressions of smouldering envy on the part of less fortunate civilizations, not reasoned criticisms. There is, it would seem, no reason why this tactic should not be extended. All criticisms of North Korea’s odious repression of human rights are merely diseased symptoms of anti-Koreanism. Those who rail against the execution-happy autocracy in China are simply being odiously Eurocentric.
‘It is a fundamentally insane notion,’ observes a character in W. G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo, ‘that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex inter dependencies.’ The cult of the will disowns the truth of our dependency, which springs from our fleshly existence. To have a body is to live dependently. Human bodies are not self-sufficient: there is a gaping hole in their make-up known as desire, which makes them eccentric to themselves. It is this desire which makes us non-animal: wayward, errant, unfulfilled. If we lived like wild beasts, our existence would be far less askew. Desire infiltrates our animal instincts and twists them out of true. Yet it is because of desire, among other things, that we are historical creatures, able to transform ourselves within the limits of our species-being. We are able to become self-determining, but only on the basis of a deeper dependency. This dependency is the condition of our freedom, not the infringement of it. Only those who feel supported can be secure enough to be free. Our identity and well-being are always in the keeping of the Other.
‘To be self-willed,’ writes St Augustine in his Confessions, is ‘to be in one self in the sense of to please oneself, [which] is not to be wholly nothing but to be approaching nothingness.’ To exist independently is to be a kind of cypher. The self-willed have the emptiness of a tautology. They make the mistake of imagining that to act according to laws outside the self is to be something less than the author of one’s own being. Whereas the truth is that we could not act purposively at all except according to rules and conventions which no one individual invented. Such rules are not a restraint upon individual freedom, as the Romantic imagines: they are one of the conditions of it. I could not act according to rules which were in principle intelligible only to me. I would have no more idea of what I was doing than anybody else would.
The will, however, confronts one enormous obstacle: itself. It can bend the world into any shape it pleases, but to do so it needs to be austere, unyielding, and thus exempt from its own fondness for plasticity. This austerity also means that it cannot really enjoy the world it has manufactured. For freedom from limit to flourish, then, the will which thrusts us beyond those limits has to go. What is needed is a perpetually malleable world, but one without the intransigent will. If the world itself is to have all the free-floating nature of subjectivity, the robust human subject has to disappear. And this is the culture of postmodernism. With postmodernism, the will turns back upon itself and colonizes the strenuously willing subject itself. It gives birth to a human being every bit as protean and diffuse as the society around it.
The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-
inventing, ceaselessly adaptive. He thus fares splendidly in the disco or supermarket, though not quite so well in the school, courtroom or chapel. He sounds more like a Los Angeles media executive than an Indonesian fisherman. Postmodernists oppose universality, and well they might: nothing is more parochial than the kind of human being they admire. It is as though we must now sacrifice our identity to our freedom, which leaves open the question of who is left to exercise that freedom. We become like a chief executive so dizzied and punch-drunk with incessant travel that he can no longer recall his name. The human subject finally breaks free of the restriction which is itself. If all that is solid must be dissolved into air, there can be no exceptions made for human beings.
This includes the idea of there being firm foundations to social life. ‘Nothing we do,’ writes Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘can be defended absolutely and finally,’2 a statement which may be taken as a keynote of much modern thought. In a brutally fundamentalist era, this sense of the provisional nature of all our ideas – one central to post-structuralism and postmodernism – is deeply salutary. Whatever the blindspots and prejudices of these theories, they pale in comparison with the lethal self-righteousness of the fundamentalist. And they can of course be valuable antidotes to it. The problem is that the bracing scepticism of some postmodern thought is hard to distinguish from its aversion to engaging with fundamentalism at the kind of ‘deep’ moral or metaphysical level where it needs to be confronted. Indeed, this might serve as a summary of the dilemma in which cultural theory is now caught. Postmodernism has an allergy to depth, as indeed did the later Wittgenstein. It believes that part of what is wrong with fundamentalism is its pitching of the arguments at a universal, first-principled, a-historical level. In this, postmodernism is mistaken. It is not the level at which fundamentalism pitches its claims which is the problem; it is the nature of the claims themselves.
It is not as though everything we say or do floats in the air unless it can be anchored in some self-evident first principle. If someone asks me why I insist on wearing a paper bag over my head in public, it is sufficient explanation for me to say that I am self-conscious about my appearance. I do not have to go on to add that this is so because when I was a child my parents told me that I looked like a miniature version of Boris Karloff, and that they told me so because they were psychopathic sadists who took a perverse delight in ripping my self-confidence to shreds.
Nor do I have then to explain why my parents came to be as they were. ‘I’m self-conscious about my appearance’ is not incomplete as an explanation unless I trace it back to first principles, such as ‘some people are just psychopaths’. It will do as a baseline for the moment. As Wittgenstein advises us: if you are asked which is the last house in the village, don’t reply that there isn’t one because someone might always build another. Indeed they could; but that house over there is the last one for now. The village is not incomplete. Explanations have to come to an end somewhere.
This, to be sure, has its dangers. ‘If I have exhausted the justifications,’ Wittgenstein remarks in his simple-peasant persona, ‘I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.” ’3 But what if what I do is defraud the elderly of their life savings? Wittgenstein, it is true, is thinking of more fundamental matters than that. He has in mind the very cultural forms which allow us to think what we think and do what we do. Our spade rebounds against hard rock when we try to get a critical fix on the very form of life which constitutes us as human subjects in the first place. But we may still feel that this is too complacent. Quite a lot of what constitutes us as who we are does not go all the way down to habits we cannot even objectify. Wittgenstein is arguably being too anthropological about it.
Is there anything that does go all the way down? For much modern theory, the answer is ‘culture’. For Nietzscheans, it is power. For some anti-theorists, it is belief. We cannot ask where our beliefs come from, since the answer to that question would itself have to be couched in the language of those beliefs. We have suggested that one possible answer, though one highly unpopular these days, is human nature or species-being. Nature is not a term one can easily nip behind. Once we have informed the Alpha Centaurian anthropologist that making music and feeling sad are just in our natures, there isn’t much more we can tell her. If she asks, ‘But why?’ she simply hasn’t grasped the concept of nature.
This is a form of essentialism, at least when it comes to human beings. Radical thinkers nowadays are thus deeply distrustful of it, since it seems to suggest that some things about human beings do not change. And they are absolutely right. Some things, like the fact of death, temporality, language, sociality, sexuality, suffering, production and the like, do not change, in the sense that they are necessities of the human condition. But we have wondered already why the anti-essentialists should assume along with the fashion designers and TV programme schedulers that the absence of change is always undesirable. There may be the odd tight-lipped puritan around who thinks it desirable that human beings should neither speak nor have sex, but most of us are not of this persuasion. The more astute anti-essentialist, as we have seen, accepts that such things are abiding realities, but claims that nothing of much significance follows from this. What matters is culture – the diverse, conflicting forms which these universal truths actually assume in the course of human history.
This is true in one sense, and eccentric in another. How could anyone imagine that the various cultural forms assumed by, say, death matter more than the reality of death itself? Why should the fact that some people are buried standing up while others are treated to ceremonial rifle fire over their coffins seem more important than the astonishing truth that none of us will be around in a century’s time? Which would be likely to strike the immortal Alpha Centaurian anthropologist as more noteworthy? Anyway, the fact that something is natural does not automatically make it acceptable, which is part of what the anti-essentialists seem to fear. Death is natural, and probably some forms of sickness, but many of us would prefer to see the back of them. It would be preferable if black mambas could not travel as frighteningly fast as they can, but short of hanging weights on them it seems that our hands are tied. In any case, the human essence is all about change. It is because we are labouring, social, sexual, linguistic animals that we have history in the first place. If this nature were to alter radically, we might cease to be cultural, historical creatures altogether. The anti-essentialists would then doubtless be in something of a dilemma.
The problem with a foundation is that it always seems possible to slip another one underneath it. As soon as you have defined it, it seems to lose its finality. It may be that the world is resting on an elephant and the elephant on a turtle, but what is the turtle resting on? You can tough this question out and claim, as the anti-foundationalist famously did, that it’s turtles all the way down; but all the way down to what? As Pascal points out in his Pensées: ‘… anybody can see that those [principles] which are supposed to be ultimate do not stand by themselves, but depend on others, which depend on others again, and thus never allow of any finality.’4 The tormented protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground complains that ‘any primary cause I have immediately drags another one in tow, and that one is even more primary, and so on ad infinitum’. What you would need, to avoid this infinite regress, is a foundation which was self-evident and self-justifying. You would need a self-founding foundation. And it was traditionally the task of philosophy to come up with plausible candidates for this role.
To invent the idea of God is the swiftest solution to this problem. For God is by definition what you cannot dig deeper than. He is, as Spinoza remarks, a ‘self-causing Cause’, having his ends, grounds and purposes entirely within himself. This, however, was not a solution destined to last. For one thing, God proved too fuzzy, nebulous a foundation. He was not a principle, an entity, a definable being, or even a person in the sense in which Al Gore is arguably one. God and the unive
rse do not add up to two. For another thing, if God really was the foundation of the world, he had clearly rustled the whole thing up in a moment of criminal negligence and had a lot of hard explaining to do. Quite why he needed to provide us with cholera as well as chloroform was not entirely obvious. The whole project had clearly been insanely over-ambitious and required some radical retooling. It was hard to reconcile the idea of God with small children having their skin burnt off by chemical weapons.
There were reasons other than God’s apparent brutality, however, which brought him into disrepute. What you needed from a foundation was a sense of why things were necessarily as they were; but God was no adequate answer to this. Indeed, in one sense he was exactly the opposite. The idea of Creation meant that he had manufactured the world just for the hell of it, as a quick glance around the place is enough to confirm. He did not need to do it. Being God, he does not need to do anything. The creation is wholly contingent. It might just as well not have been. This is one thing that is meant by the claim that God transcends his world. God is the reason why there is anything at all rather than just nothing. But that is just a way of saying that there really isn’t any reason.
Besides, God had committed a fatal blunder in fashioning the universe. He had made it so that it could be free, meaning autonomous of himself. For the world to be his creation meant that it shared in his own freedom, and thus was self-determining. And this applied especially to human beings, whose freedom was an image of his own. It was in this sense that they were fashioned in his likeness – an odd claim otherwise, since God presumably does not have ovaries or toe-nails. Paradoxically, it was by being dependent on him that they were free. Freedom, however, cannot be represented. It is elusive, quicksilver stuff which slips through our fingers and refuses to be imaged. To define it is to destroy it.
After Theory Page 19