Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Category: Essays (page 1 of 46)

David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2021

My two top books are both monuments of, and to, scholarship. The much-needed new edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy pays respects to a work that is close to my heart in its obsessive, searching, elephantine reach. Many years ago the writer John Crowley recommended two books to me: The Man Without Qualities and The Anatomy of Melancholy. He clearly saw me well. Mary Ann Lund’s book offers a good introduction to Burton if the monster tome itself seems unapproachable.

Susan Bernofsky’s biography of Robert Walser is simply the best literary biography I’ve read in some time, meticulously researched and beautifully written, the result of Bernofsky’s 30 years of deep engagement with Walser. The writing itself is exceptional, making it also the most literary literary biography I have read in many a year.

Otherwise, it was a good year for books, better than 2020 overall, with the exception of comics, where remarkable entries seemed quite thin (at least among established publishers). This possibly owes to the ongoing genteelification of the medium and the concomitant insecurities. But Brecht Evens’s long awaited new work is his greatest yet, beautiful and dense, with stunning use of color.

Keep reading, and happy new year, as happy a one as is feasible.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Anatomy of Melancholy
Burton, Robert (Author)
Penguin Classics


Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
Bernofsky, Susan (Author)
Yale University Press

LITERATURE

Be as Children (Dedalus Europe Book 0)
Sharov, Vladimir (Author), Ready, Oliver (Translator)
Dedalus


The Wife Who Wasn't: A Novel
Ifland, Alta (Author)
New Europe Books


The Symphonies
Bely, Andrei (Author), Stone, Jonathan (Translator)
Columbia University Press


Fetch Muse: Poems
Starks, Rebecca (Author)
Able Muse Press


Kapo (New York Review Books Classics)
Tisma, Aleksander (Author), Williams, Richard (Translator), Rieff, David (Afterword)
NYRB Classics


Trees
Everett, Percival (Author)
Graywolf


Impostures (Library of Arabic Literature, 65)
al-Ḥarīrī (Author), Cooperson, Michael (Translator), Kilito, Abdelfattah (Foreword)
NYU Press


At Night All Blood Is Black
Diop, David (Author)
Picador Paper


Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Tadeusz Borowski (Author), Madeline G. Levine (Translator)
Yale University Press


Terminal Boredom: Stories
Suzuki, Izumi (Author), Barton, Polly (Translator), Bett, Sam (Translator), Boyd, David (Translator), Joseph, Daniel (Translator)
Verso Fiction


Chasing Homer
Krasznahorkai, László (Author), Miklós, Szilveszter (Performer), Batki, John (Translator), Neumann, Max (Artist)
New Directions


The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Hohl, Ludwig (Author), Cohen, Joshua (Foreword), Lewis, Tess (Translator)
Yale University Press


Brief Lives of Idiots
Cavazzoni, Ermanno (Author), Richards, Jamie (Introduction)
Wakefield Press


Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People
Lönnrot, Elias (Editor), Korpela, Jukka (Introduction), Friberg, Eino (Translator)
Penguin



The Book of All Skies
Egan, Greg (Author)
Greg Egan


We All Hear Stories in the Dark [Trade Paperback 3 Volume Set]
Robert Shearman (Author), Michael Marshall Smith (Author), Lisa Tuttle (Author), Angela Slatter (Author), Steven Moffat (Author), Reggie Oliver (Illustrator), Reggie Oliver (Illustrator)
PS Publishing


The Stone Face
Smith, William Gardner (Author), Shatz, Adam (Introduction)
NYRB Classics


Storm
Stewart, George R. (Author), Rich, Nathaniel (Introduction)
NYRB Classics


Good Behaviour (New York Review Books Classics)
Keane, Molly (Author), Gentry, Amy (Introduction)
NYRB Classics


Rakes of the Old Court: A Novel (Northwestern World Classics)
Caragiale, Mateiu (Author), Cotter, Sean (Translator)
Northwestern University Press


McGrotty and Ludmilla (Canons)
Gray, Alasdair (Author)
Canongate Canons


PARADISE: Dante's Divine Trilogy Part Three. Englished in Prosaic Verse by Alasdair Gray
Gray, Alasdair (Author), Alighieri, Dante (Author)
Canongate Books


The Life Written by Himself (Russian Library)
Petrov, Archpriest Avvakum (Author), Gluck, Michael (Editor), Brostrom, Kenneth (Translator)
Columbia University Press


Anthology of Tang and Song Tales: The Tang Song Chuanqi Ji of Lu Xun
Victor Mair (Author), Victor Mair (Editor), Zhenjun Zhang (Editor)
World Scientific Publishing Company


The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories
Jull Costa, Margaret (Editor), Jull Costa, Margaret (Translator), Bunstead, Thomas (Translator), Bush, Peter (Translator), Phillips-Miles, Kathryn (Translator), Deefholt, Simon (Translator), Maude, Kit (Translator)
Penguin


The Spirit of Controversy: and Other Essays (Oxford World's Classics)
Hazlitt, William (Author), Mee, Jon (Editor), Grande, James (Editor)
Oxford University Press


Samuel Johnson: Selected Works
Johnson, Samuel (Author), DeMaria, Robert (Editor), Fix, Stephen (Editor), Weinbrot, Howard D (Editor)
Yale University Press

HUMANITIES

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues
Nightingale, Andrea (Author)
Cambridge University Press


Lucian, True History: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary
Clay, Diskin (Author), Brusuelas, James H. (Editor)
OUP Oxford


Expanding Horizons in the History of Science: The Comparative Approach
Lloyd, G. E. R. (Author)
Cambridge University Press


Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide (No Limits)
Ganeri, Jonardon (Author)
Columbia University Press



St. Matthew Passion (signale|TRANSFER: German Thought in Translation)
Blumenberg, Hans (Author), Müller-Sievers, Helmut (Translator), Fleming, Paul (Translator)
Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library


Cassirer (The Routledge Philosophers)
Matherne, Samantha (Author)
Routledge


Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music
Sulzer, David (Author)
Columbia University Press



The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens
Billings, Joshua (Author)
Princeton University Press



Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
Nirenberg, David (Author), Nirenberg, Ricardo L. (Author)
University of Chicago Press




Plato's Sun-Like Good: Dialectic in the Republic
Broadie, Sarah (Author)
Cambridge University Press


A User's Guide to Melancholy
Lund, Mary Ann (Author)
Cambridge University Press

SCIENCE AND TECH




Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
Wilczek, Frank (Author)
Penguin Books



The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness
Solms, Mark (Author)
W. W. Norton & Company



SOCIAL SCIENCE

Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life
Miller, William Ian (Author)
Oxford University Press



Information: A Historical Companion
Blair, Ann (Editor), Duguid, Paul (Editor), Goeing, Anja-Silvia (Editor), Grafton, Anthony (Editor)
Princeton University Press


Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing
Thompson, John B. (Author)
Polity


The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
Prasad, Eswar S. (Author)
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press



The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis
Fligstein, Neil (Author)
Harvard University Press

HISTORY AND POLITICS


My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová
Juráňová, Jana (Author), Kalinová, Agneša (Author)
Purdue University Press


Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organisation
Creemers, Rogier J. E. H. (Editor), Trevaskes, Susan (Editor)
Cambridge University Press


The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Yang, Jisheng (Author), Mosher, Stacy (Translator), Jian, Guo (Translator)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Plokhy, Serhii (Author)
W. W. Norton & Company


Cicero: Political Philosophy (Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought)
Schofield, Malcolm (Author)
Oxford University Press


India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750–2000
Markovits, Claude (Author)
Cambridge University Press


China's Leaders: From Mao to Now
Shambaugh, David (Author)
Polity


Hobbes's Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations
Martinich, A.P. (Author)
Oxford University Press

COMICS

The City of Belgium
Evens, Brecht (Author)
Drawn and Quarterly


Donjon Monsters T13: Réveille-toi et meurs
David B. (Drawings), Sfar, Joann (Contributor), Trondheim, Lewis (Contributor)
DELCOURT


Alberto Breccia's Dracula (The Alberto Breccia Library)
Breccia, Alberto (Author)
Fantagraphics


Trots and Bonnie
Flenniken, Shary (Author), Hathaway, Norman (Editor), Flake, Emily (Introduction), Hathaway, Norman (Designer)
New York Review Comics


Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics)
Panter, Gary (Author), Rudick, Nicole (Afterword), Ruscha, Ed (Foreword)
New York Review Comics


Lewis Trondheim's The Fly
Trondheim, Lewis (Author)
Papercutz


Dungeon: Zenith vol. 4: Outside the Ramparts (4)
Trondheim, Lewis (Author), Sfar, Joann (Author), Boulet (Illustrator)
NBM Publishing


Nuft and the Last Dragons, Volume 1: The Great Technowhiz
Milton, Freddy (Author)
Fantagraphics


When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers
Krimstein, Ken (Author)
Bloomsbury Publishing

ART

Myself and My Aims: Writings on Art and Criticism
Schwitters, Kurt (Author), Luke, Megan R. (Editor), Grundy, Timothy (Translator)
University of Chicago Press


Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original
Warburg, Aby (Author), Heil, Axel (Contributor), Ohrt, Roberto (Contributor), Scherer, Bernd (Contributor), Sherman, Bill (Contributor), Wedepohl, Claudia (Contributor)
Hatje Cantz

Do the Cthulhu: Monster Mashes and Cannibal Dances

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one knows how to do the Monster Mash, and that the song only describes people doing the dance and not how to dance it.

Yet the Monster Mash can be known. Its own lyrics say as much. The cost—one’s sanity, surely—may just be too great.

For you, the living, this mash was meant too
When you get to my door, tell them Boris sent you

Then you can monster mash
(The monster mash) And do my graveyard smash
(Then you can mash) You’ll catch on in a flash
(Then you can mash) Then you can monster mash

Monster Mash (Bobby Pickett)

The Monster Mash describes a realm in which those who know do and those who do know, a realm in which a “flash” will immediately grant you the terrible knowledge both of the dance and of the creatures who perform it and their realm. Once one sees beyond the veil, once one crosses beyond the threshold of Pickett’s “door” of perception, there is no turning back.

Outside the ordered universe that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

That flash of Lovecraftian gnosis, in less macabre presentations, is central to the history of dance crazes more generally. Despite the Swingers’ egalitarian claim that it ain’t what you dance, it’s the way you dance it, the privileged knowledge of dance moves has been central to the history of musical exhortations to hit the dancefloor. As with so many in-group declarations (Actor’s Equity, say), the only way to become a member is to already be one.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band captured this paradox in their 1969 performance of Monster Mash, in which Viv Stanshall describes a mash that has not yet taken place. As the monsters wake up and begin to dance, the temporal paradox causes the song to self-destruct at the very moment Stanshall begins the countdown to the actual mash:

“The countdown begins now…”

The song becomes its own sequel, in the style of Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation.

The Monster Mash is atypical in not being explicitly prescriptive. It hints at what is behind the veil but only offers a polite invitation and a seductive peek. Most songs about dances do indeed exhort the listener to perform their titular dances, and many go further by shaming those ignorant of the moves, drawing a line between populist inclusiveness (everyone can do this dance!) and elitist exclusion (if you don’t do this dance, you are a loser!).

Now here’s a dance you should know!
When the lights are down low!
Grab your baby, then go!
Do the Hucklebuck, do the Hucklebuck
If you don’t know how to do it
Then you’re out of luck!
Shove your baby in, twist her all around
Then you start a twisting mad and moving all around
Wiggle like a snake, waddle like a duck
That’s what you do when you do the Hucklebuck

The Hucklebuck (Roy Alfred, lyricist)

The song berates the listener for not already knowing the Hucklebuck, as a precursor to the actual instruction. The promise of secret knowledge lures in listeners, and a line is drawn between the elect and the hoi polloi. (The Fall, at the peak of Mark E. Smith’s obsession with H. P. Lovecraft, would ridicule this pretense to exclusive coolness by rewriting it as “Hassle Schmuck”.)

In the classic Honeymooners episode “Young at Heart,” Ralph Kramden hears the song exactly once, after which he somehow has acquired that elect knowledge and can mysteriously dance fluidly and confidently. Ralph has crashed through the barriers separating him from Jackie Gleason and Gleason’s other characters and momentarily partakes of their knowledge. Unusually for the show, Ralph wins over Alice with his new knowledge. He conquers his momentary humiliation when Alice sees him dancing, and she symbolically accepts his pin to join him inside the circle of dance knowledge, so he can continue to revel in his sudden gnosis:

“This is one of those numbers that tells a story.”

Once subject to revelation (to apocalypse, literally “uncovering”), there is no turning back. Not even Alice Kramden can manage it. She too succumbs.

M. T. Anderson, author of Symphony for the City of the Dead and The Pox Party, has traced this rhetorical apocalypse back to very early in the recorded era (as well as to the envoys of Dante’s Vita Nuova):

Let’s examine the question of the division between dance and song (and lyric). Take the Charleston, for example:

Caroline, Caroline, At last they’ve got you on the map
With a new tune, a funny blue tune, with a peculiar snap!
You many not be able to buck and wing
Fox-trot, two-step, or even swing
If you ain’t got religion in your feet
You can do this prance and do it neat… Charleston! Charleston! …

Like “The Monster Mash,” it slurs the difference between the dance and the song (i.e. itself) which elicits the dance. They both posit somehow an imaginary song and moment, anterior to themselves, when the dance becomes wildly popular — as if the dance proceeded the song, and the song merely announces, like John the Baptist at the river, the glory of another mover and shaker. But in fact, in each of these cases, the song is the appropriate vehicle for the dance. The song exists in a loop of self-promotion, declaring a past triumph that cannot have come before itself, the express vehicle of the dance — because you dance the Charleston to the “Charleston,” the monster mash to “The Monster Mash.” It is fundamentally unlike, say, the waltz, which can be danced to any one of a thousand waltzes, or indeed anything in 3/4 time.

This circularity, I think, is an excellent example of the Kardashian effect, a phenomenological moebius bootstrapping in which your fame comes only from announcing your fame. It is a fame simulacrum with an empty core, pointing back at an event which was not an event, deixis without a referent; an ouroboros conga line.

M. T. Anderson

Yet as the Swingers suggested, there’s always been an egalitarian, anti-gnostic tendency, taken to an extreme by the much-covered Land of 1000 Dances (Cannibal & The Headhunters, Wilson Pickett, and many others), which casually rattles off dance names in its lyrics, making it simultaneously parasitic on the other dances it cites (as there is no actual Land of 1000 Dances dance) and utilitarian.

Children, go where I send you
(Where will you send me?)
I’m gonna send you to that land
The land of a thousand dances

Got to know how to Pony
Like “Bony Maronie”
You got to know how to Twist
Goes like this

Mashed Potato
Do the Alligator
Twist, twister
Like your sister

Then you get your Yo-Yo
Say, hey, let’s go-go
Get out on your knees
Do the Sweet Peas

Roll over on your back
Say, “I Like It Like That”
Do the Watusi
Do the Watusi

Then you do the Fly
With the Hand Jive
Then you do the Slop
The Chicken and the Bop

Then you do the Fish
Slow, slow Twist
Then you do the Flow
Got to move solo
Then you do the Tango
Takes two to Tango

Land of 1000 Dances (Chris Kenner)

Here is a song to which you can do every dance! You must dance the waltz to any waltz, where no other 3/4 dances are available, but you can dance any dance to Land of 1000 Dances (save the waltz). Ignorance is not a problem: do whatever dance you want, and you’re in luck no matter what. Kenner is thorough, but Cannibal and the Headhunders dropped over half of the dance names for that nagging “Na na-na na na” vocal hook, illustrating just how irrelevant the specific dance moves were. It ain’t what you dance, it’s the way you dance it.

Na na-na na naaaaaaa

Yet from flattening nondifferentiation inevitably arises the urge to differentiate, and this populist trend did not last. It took the arch-romantic Bryan Ferry to fight back against the democratizing power of the Land of 1000 Dances. He posited a dance so simultaneously ubiquitous and inaccessible that knowledge and performance were reserved for those touched by the demiurge of creativity and genius: the Strand. Ferry goes further: the Strand is not a dance, but “a danceable solution,” a Platonic meta-dance that subsumes all (and exclusively) cool content, not merely dances.

Not Terry Wogan

In the end, Ferry proclaims that all concreta, whether dances, flowers, or paintings, fall away before the abstractum of the Strand:

There’s a new sensation
A fabulous creation
A danceable solution
To teenage revolution
Do the Strand love
When you feel love
It’s the new way
That’s why we say
Do the Strand!

Do it on the tables
Quaglino’s place or Mabel’s
Slow and gentle
Sentimental
All styles served here
Louis Seize he prefer
Laissez-faire Le Strand
Tired of the tango
Fed up with fandango
Dance on moonbeams
Slide on rainbows
In furs or blue jeans
You know what I mean
Do the Strand!…Oooh

Had your fill of Quadrilles
The Madison and cheap thrills
Bored with the Beguine
The samba isn’t your scene
They’re playing our tune
By the pale moon
We’re incognito
Down the Lido
And we like the Strand.

Arabs at oasis
Eskimos and Chinese
If you feel blue
Look through Who’s Who
See La Goulue
And Nijinsky
Do the Strandsky.

Weary of the Waltz
And mashed potato schmaltz
Rhododendron
Is a nice flower
Evergreen
It lasts forever
But it can’t beat Strand power
The sphinx and Mona Lisa
Lolita and Guernica
Did the Strand

Do the Strand (Bryan Ferry)

The Strand’s form can inhabit a wide variety of content, but only content meeting forever-unspecified conditions of total coolness. There’s no teaching the Strand; those who can partake of it do so through some unconditioned gnostic revelation. Some will never and can never know the Strand.

But perhaps they are better off. Cthulhu knew the Strand too.


The punk era atomized the tension between elitism and populism, often by just ignoring it, but occasionally subverting it. Aside from the singular Fall example above, Cabaret Voltaire’s “Do the Mussolini (Headkick)” turns the exhortation into a vague incitement to actual violence, playing on the ambiguity of that most general verb “to do.” Similarly, A Certain Ratio’s “Do the Du” takes an excellent, funky groove and puts lyrics of intimate agony on top of it which seem to have nothing to do with dancing.

The way I read it, doing the “Du” (“you”) is indeed a gnosis, but one of mutual annihilation between two partners locked into each other and away from the world. Dancing to it is running the risk of entering that nightmare. It’s the Monster Mash all over again, except the monsters are two ordinary lovers.

The ultimate riposte to the whole song-and-dance dilemma, though, is The Table’s “Do the Standing Still (Classics Illustrated),” a dance that is not a dance, one performed by corpses over a lyrical bed of quotes from Silver Age Marvel comics, a tribute to all those misfits who stay home from discos in their rooms at night reading Jack Kirby.

It’s the real monster mash.


APPENDIX:

Songs for further reference:

  • The Terminals, “Do the Void”
  • The Method Actors, “Do the Method”
  • The Homosexuals, “Do the Total Drop”
  • Electric Six, “Newark Airport Boogie”
  • Kontakt Mikrofon Orkestra, “Do the Residue”
  • XTC, “Traffic Light Rock”

A special honorable mention goes to Electric Six’s “The Number of the Beast,” which enthusiastically describes the secret knowledge to summon an otherworldly beast, but the knowledge is not dance moves but mathematics. Plato would approve.

When I look out my window
I’m amazed by the curses I see
I’m bound by what I don’t know
And what I don’t know is looking back at me

So make your counting count
Get the precise amount
It’s beyond rudimentary
I need an abacus
’cause I’m bad at this!
Ain’t been to university

Now clear the decks and solve for X!
Slide to the right and solve for Y!
Square root of eight–Triangulate!
From West to East: the Number of the Beast!

When I crunch up your numbers
I’m afraid of the outcome I see
I’m tired of supernumery [sic]
And I know he getting tired of me

Now clear a path!
Do basic math
And feel my wrath
Feel my wrath

Electric six, “The Number of the Beast”

The Bloodsport of the Hive Mind: Common Knowledge in the Age of Many-to-Many Broadcast Networks

Common knowledge is that which I know and that which I know everyone else knows. That, at least, is the easiest way to put it for my purposes here, which is how a large number of people came to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election—and subsequently constructed an intellectual edifice around this conviction that led to the January 6 Capitol riots.

It’s a commonplace now that we live in a fragmented age of filter bubbles in which everyone can locate a collection of online resources which will reinforce and support their views. That’s not enough, however, to get us to the point of gross norm-violating behavior. The news niches that provide reinforcing fodder to the left, right, and everywhere in between do so with an implicit antagonism toward other niches. Such conflict is their lifeblood. Readers are aware that as they embrace one point of view, there are others that, however erroneous and dangerous they may be, still coexist.

It’s only with the growth of communities of people interacting that most people gain such courage in their convictions to defy that which authoritative sources (media, political, corporate) deem to be acceptable narratives and acceptable norms. These communities generate more than validation of one’s preexisting beliefs. They generate the common knowledge that I know that many others feel the same as I do, others to whom I am joined in a community.

David Lewis gave the most well-known account of common knowledge in 1969:

Let us say that it is common knowledge in a population P that X if and only if some state of affairs A holds such that:

1. Everyone in P has reason to believe that A holds.
2. A indicates to everyone in P that everyone in P has reason to believe that A holds.
3. A indicates to everyone in P that X.

David Lewis, Convention (1969)

In other words, in an imagined group of people P, you get common knowledge of “Trump won the election” only if you have a situation in which every member of the group is not only given reason to believe that Trump won the election, but also that everyone else in the group has reason to believe (and likely the same reason to believe) that Trump won the election.

from Common knowledge, coordination, and strategic mentalizing in human social life (2019)

Gilbert Harman posed a simpler, self-referential version of self-knowledge that removes the more complex “state of affairs” variable:

Mutual knowledge might be explained as knowledge of a self-referential fact: A group of people have mutual knowledge of p if each knows p AND WE KNOW THIS, where the THIS refers to the whole fact known.

Gilbert Harman, Review of Linguistic Behavior (1977)

Historically in offline society, the second condition is the most difficult to attain. If there is consensus in the truth of some belief X in a community, that is likely a product of the ambient environment surrounding the community, attained through news, one-on-one discussions, and so on. But the knowledge that everyone else knows X is harder to glean. It can be asserted, but unless X is some fact/norm blatantly reflected in the behavioral cues of everyone one encounters (say, “You should always wear clothes in public”), the bar for X crossing into common knowledge is rather high.

Online social spaces, by their very structure and nature, lower the bar drastically by providing many-to-many broadcast channels. One rarely communicates to more than a handful of people at a time in offline, everyday life. Online, any space such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, a blog with comments, or a message board by default provides broadcast capabilities to every individual who contributes. To post X to an online community P on any of these networks is to communicate several things:

  1. I believe X.
  2. Everyone in P knows I believe X.
  3. Everyone in P knows everyone else in P knows I believe X.

In real life, everyday expressions of X only communicate (1) and provide a fraction of push on (2), and so no common knowledge is produced. In an online community, however, communications generate all three and provide far greater momentum toward common knowledge. Any person’s post can serve as a proxy for the unexpressed beliefs of any other person in that community. By observing how others react to someone else posting that they believe X, an observer can be implicitly validated (or rejected) within the community if they also believe X.

Many-to-many broadcasting allows, uniquely, for common knowledge to come into being far more easily in the absence of authoritative mediation and without a centralized locus of communication. Everyone in P is, by default, announcing their beliefs with a megaphone, and unlike in real life, the online community P can hear everyone’s megaphone. No one is conversing; everyone is broadcasting.

The result is discursive mob rule. For any significant belief X, momentum quickly builds up in a positive feedback loop to the point where X can reach common knowledge, and does so in the absence of any central authority. The much-vaunted moderation demanded by social network critics is not a sufficient impediment to this momentum, since moderation is very rarely invisible. If moderation removes statements of belief in X, that is tantamount to validating that many others believe that X. Moderation helps the push toward common knowledge of X along just as much as the posting of X does.

Many-to-many broadcast networks can even provide the illusion of greater unity of belief than actually exists, since not all members of a community use the megaphones. If a minority of members proclaim belief X, where X is something like “It would be a great idea to invade the Capitol building,” and there is little stated dissent, the silent votes of abstention or dissent do not get counted in the assessment of common knowledge. Where in real life there is a massive void of ignorance of what other members of one’s community think in one direction or another, in online communities the slant goes toward whoever is most aggressive with their megaphones.

Combined with the low barrier of community creation and the balkanization of online communities into self-selecting and self-reinforcing belief networks, the positive feedback becomes overwhelming, but only after many-to-many broadcasting is in play. A steady diet of clickbait and red meat can provide preoccupied partisans, but do not by themselves ensure radicalization because the concepts being promoted remain at the fairly simplistic level of soundbites. The achievement of QAnon was something beyond that which Fox News or Rush Limbaugh could ever have accomplished, because the actors playing Q only provided the barest of breadcrumbs around which the many-to-many broadcast dynamics forged a common knowledge belief system. This belief system possessed (and still possesses) a coherence, complexity, and sheer resistance to outside intrusion that could not have been possible without a far lower barrier to its constituent beliefs passing into common knowledge than was even possible until recently.

The hive mind is here, and its workings are a bloodsport.

Trump Diary: Election Eve

There is surprisingly little left to say about Donald Trump. He has proven to be remarkably consistent in who he is, and people’s reactions remained remarkably consistent even in the face of some severe events. I wondered four years ago what it would take to have the bottom fall out of Trump’s support, and I still wonder that now.

Whether it’s Trump’s embrace and abandonment of everyone from Steve Bannon to John Bolton, his endless ability to bring out the worst in both his supporters and his opponents, or his careful management and exploitation by Mitch McConnell (the true Machiavellian here), Trump ceased to surprise many years ago. With impeachment, China, COVID-19, Amy Coney Barrett, right wing protests, left wing protests, and anything else, Trump has always turned to the same playbook and things have played out exactly as one could have predicted.

After an initial period of massive uncertainty during which it was uncertain how far the Trump team’s authoritarian tendencies would go, the would-be revolutionary Bannon faction was slowly purged from Trump’s sphere, and a sense of limits was established. Talk of executive branch coups died down, at least until this year. The Trump presidency settled into a regular cycle of constant pushing at the margins and endemic corruption, but little in the way of active dictatorship. Trump prefers things to come easily to him. When they don’t, he either ignores them, or when he can’t (as with COVID), he turns to self-pity rather than grand schemes.

Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, they’re highly thought of, but nobody likes me? It can only be my personality, that’s all

Donald Trump, July 28, 2020

Trump remains exactly what he was. In mid-2016 I compared him to Robert Musil’s Moosbrugger, calling him a non-politician with primeval charisma but an indifference to rationality and semantics.

Trump has no motive other than to be the dominant and not the dominated. The GOP convention paraded a roster of fearmongers to put people in a desperate and anxious frame of mind, all the better to paint Trump as their savior. Yet Trump offers no concrete plan of action, nor does he secretly possess one: he offers only the spectacle of himself.

Moosbrugger and Trump are, ultimately, only whom the rest of us perceive them to be. Such figures only desire that we perceive them as great. Because they are empty in and of themselves, they are constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for anything they do, or of having any intuition that words and thoughts should accord with an external reality. Trump’s profound and sweeping ignorance of all things outside himself serves his narcissism; knowledge would only put constraints on his ability to be what people want him to be and what people will love him for: “So there he sat, the wild, captive threat of a dreaded act, like an uninhabited coral island in a boundless sea of scientific papers that surrounded him invisibly on all sides.”

Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump

Subsequent events only reinforced my impression of Trump:

Because Trump reacts to appearances, and cares only about his own appearance rather than accomplishing anything in itself, an issue truly does not register with him until it is public. And once it is public, he can’t let it go, whether it’s his 3 million popular vote loss or the size of the crowds at his inauguration. The news media, in turn, mindlessly feed this bottomless hunger by magnifying whatever the object of Trump’s angst is so that he sees it even more. It’s a codependent feedback loop.

February 14, 2017

His neediness and insistence on recognition in the absence of accomplishment became an active impairment to actual accomplishment.

Trump is driven by insecurity and narcissism to the point of constant distraction. Even leaving aside the wiretapping craziness, he apparently has a great man chart comparing himself to Obama, and he doesn’t feel he’s stacking up well.

March 14, 2017

With the decline of the Bannon faction, I raised the question of whether Trump would let himself become an establishment stooge or whether he would lash out against those who sought to use him for their own ends, McConnell and Paul Ryan chief among them.

Second, there is Trump himself, hobbled, humbled, and humiliated, but still defective and unpredictable. For now he seems to be guided by Jared Kushner above all in his desperate turn toward Goldman Sachs and McMaster, but when this turn fails to yield him love and success, as it will, it’s difficult to predict what will come next. At the center of the Trump administration remains the void himself, reluctantly allowing himself to be remade in the establishment mold, but still fundamentally incompetent and narcissistic and stuck in the midst of a party at war with itself.

April 22, 2017

Trump chose to become a stooge. The establishment Republicans still do not like Trump and consider him a pain, but they fundamentally made peace with him and brought him more or less under control. Republicans complain far less about Trump now than they did in 2017. That, more than anything else, is how pseudonormalization prevailed, and how a constant stream of Never Trumpism and petty scandals replaced a genuine factional war within the Republican party. Despite an inability to pass meaningful legislation beyond the tax bill, the Republican party as a whole won many battles in the early years, the judiciary chief among them, and winning heals.

And the stoogedom was likely decisive in letting pseudonormality prevail over periodic crisis points. The most significant one in the post-Bannon period was the firing of James Comey, treated as a constitutional crisis at the time, now a distant memory as merely the beginning of a blandly uneventful impeachment–itself a distant memory. At the time, I inclined toward believing that Comey’s firing would still recede into pseudonormalization.

Yet despite Trump’s engorged persecution complex and the sclerotic executive branch, I’m skeptical that we’ll reach the crisis point soon. Things could still calm down and we could return to another pseudonormalization period.

May 19, 2017

When that proved true, future “crises” lost their punch and relevance, even as they happened. By October, the cycle seemed established:

Patterns that were set in place by April or May have played out without too much alteration in the underlying dynamics.

For the news, this means alternating cycles of “Trump has done something newly awful and unthinkable” and “Trump is for the moment behaving and merely being his usual bad self” (palace intrigue, governmental incompetence, etc.). 

For the administration, it means alternating between the creeping whiff of Muller’s detectives and ham-fisted attempts to accomplish anything whatsoever.

For the country, it appears to be a slowly increasing sense of detachment, as the promises of revival or totalitarianism fail to be realized. Even when an escalating event occurs, such as with Charlottesville or North Korea, there is no longer a sense that any tipping point has been reached.

October 16, 2017

And so it has remained. The most severe effects of the Trump administration are likely to be felt years down the line, not immediately, a consequence of the ongoing internal destruction of a government that once functioned rather well.

…and the Opposition

If there is one assessment that does need to be brought up to date, it’s that of the opposition. I have long said that Trump brings out the worst in both his supporters and his opponents, by enabling a damaging sort of Cortisol Politics:

Cortisol politics produces rhetorical excess and insincerity, sloganeering generated by the moment. It causes words to lose their meanings. It turns politics into an intrinsic game of manipulation, since reason is bypassed in favor of emotional appeals, primarily to negative emotions.

Cortisol Politics, July 8, 2018

That has proven true to a depth beyond which I’d conceived. Trump has nurtured a resistance “movement” that has often turned into a performative pantomime where righteous speech trumps meaningful action. There was a remission after the midterms and the change of power in the House of Representatives provided a symbolic and occasionally meaningful mooring for those who bemoaned an all-Republican government, though much of what the Republican wanted could be accomplished in the Senate and Presidency alone. But the election brought it back in full force.

If you believe that at least some of Trump’s excesses could have been tempered by smarter action on the order of the initial fight against the travel ban, then the majority of the last four years have been a cause for disappointment and even despair, as impulsive recrimination has replaced strategic thinking.

Schrödinger’s slogan (c/o David Shor)

A slogan such as “Punch a Nazi!” simultaneously communicates empty machismo and blatant insincerity, neither especially inspiring. Complementing it were “We don’t really mean it but maybe we do” slogans like “Defund the police!” and “ACAB,” and amorphous calls for reparations, which functioned more as triggers for internecine conflict than rallying cries. Reparations holds particular resonance because its most prominent early advocate, Ta-Nehisi Coates, admitted to millennial uplift intent:

When I wrote ‘The Case for Reparations,’ my notion wasn’t that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, March 20, 2019

The inflated hopes of reparations and “Pack the Court!” are partly just a consequence of cortisol politics, but also an indicator of the tension and exhaustion of constant political awareness. Some good may nonetheless come out of this hot air, but the missed opportunities are galling.

I continue to think that the main target of attack should have been Fox News, which functions as the main buoy for positive opinions on Trump. For those who find this to be too selective, I’d happily sacrifice CNN and MSNBC as well if Fox News went with them. The failure of the “resistance” to focus on the institutional strength of Fox News, instead engaging in a cult of anti-personality around Trump, led to a colossal waste of effort.

But faced with the pseudonormalization of Trump, the “resistance” collapsed into increasing incoherence and infighting. No factions were immune. Bernie Sanders, having run a shockingly effective insurgent campaign in 2016, ran a far less successful one in 2020.

Into this enervated bouillabaisse came Joe Biden, the face of Delaware, the DLC, and everything else the left wished to leave behind. The forced enthusiasm for him is more transparent than it was for Hillary Clinton four years ago. For vice president, Biden chose a figure who had attacked him for not supporting busing, only to effectively renounce busing herself the following day.

“I think of busing as being in the toolbox of what is available and what can be used for the goal of desegregating America’s schools,” she responded.

Asked to clarify whether she supports federally mandated busing, she replied, “I believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district.”

In a tweet Wednesday, Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield knocked Harris for her response, writing, “It’s disappointing that Senator Harris chose to distort Vice President Biden’s position on busing — particularly now that she is tying herself in knots trying not to answer the very question she posed to him!”

Harris says busing should be considered, not mandated, AP, July 4, 2019

A small incident, but one that sums up so much of the state of Democratic politics. The only more apt choice for VP would have been Condoleezza Rice.

Combined with the corporate coopting of fashionable resistance (MSNBC, Gillette, Oreo, you name it) and the resulting free advertising that can bypass even the most stringent adblocker, the rule for the left/resistance/opposition has become less “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” than “The master’s tools are great for remodeling the master’s house.”

The problem may ultimately be many people’s inability to accept the lack of control over the intrusion of national politics into their lives, an intrusion made incessant and violating by the ubiquitous presence of online media and cable television. Thirty, even 20 years ago, you could escape from the news for most of the day–you often had no choice but to do so. Now to do so requires active effort and one which most people do not take. The constant reminders of the existence of an unacceptable fact (Trump’s presidency, or for the other side, the supposed threat of forces arrayed against Trump) instill the conviction in many individuals that they can actually affect this fact in a meaningful, macroscopic way, and that therefore they must do so.

People want to feel good about themselves. The avenues society provides for doing so can be productive, non-productive, or destructive. Over the last four years, the actual causal efficacy of feel-good action has sharply declined across the board, even as people’s demand to participate in such action soared. An anonymous insider in Occupy echoed this problem:

One veteran organizer involved in New York’s Occupy movements, who asked not to be named, said, “Occupy is outside the authority of existing institutions. It’s a magnet for people who are needy and even pushy, abusive, and exploitative.”

Arun Gupta, Seattle’s CHOP Went Out With Both a Bang and a Whimper

The result has been a mutant politics combining the most ineffectual aspects of liberalism (empty utopian platitudes and lifestyle activism) and leftism (exclusionary and elitist self-policing and casual sanctioning of violence), resulting in a torrent of self-defeating sanctimony which has exhausted even its advocates—especially its advocates, in fact. Tired of chasing chimeric scandals to no gain, tired of punching Richard Spencer while Mitch McConnell runs the table, a once-promising self-organizing “resistance” ultimately has very little to its credit. The mobilization against the travel ban at the beginning of Trump’s presidency remains its greatest achievement, and one worth remembering.

If the upcoming election is disputed or stolen, perhaps the resistance will recapture some of the focus and efficacy it possessed in early 2017. It is a slim hope.

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: The Four Frontispieces

I read Lanark as a very young adult and, like many others, was marked by its naked emotion, honesty, and despair. Gray’s death at the end of last year, after a long and successful career as an artist and writer, struck me hard. As a celebration of his life and work, I am posting an essay written for an anthology on Gray’s artwork which never materialized, on the sources of the frontispieces for Lanark’s four books and the uses to which Gray put them.

Revisiting Lanark at twice the age I was when I originally read it, I can step back from my heart and better see how intricately Alasdair Gray had crafted the inhuman machinery into which Duncan Thaw and Lanark fall. Coded with symbolic meaning, the four prints constitute Lanark’s most forceful allusions to modern history—and deliver Gray’s rejoinders to that history.

Continue reading
« Older posts

© 2024 Waggish

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑