Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (New York: OR Books, 2021). (Amazon; OR Books)
I’ve started reading Žižek. But I started at the end with (what I believe is) his most recent book: Heaven in Disorder. According to a friend who is familiar with Žižek, this is one of his most readable and easy-to-understand books, so I think I made a good decision!
Mostly, it’s a collection of very short essays. Often, his essays are blog post size: three-four pages. There are a few longer essays but even those are less than twenty pages long.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is what ties together this collection. Žižek has a lot to say about American presidential politics as well, seeing that several essays reflect on the end of the previous administration and the election of Joe Biden.
As to the name of the book: Žižek talks about how “One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: ‘There is a great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.'” I don’t know if this refers to the Chinese view of the “mandate of heaven,” but that’s secondary to how Žižek uses it. He comments (p. 1), “Mao speaks about disorder under heaven, wherein ‘heaven’, or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today we should talk about heaven itself as being in disorder.” For Žižek this means that even the symbolic universes that held countries and cultures together are divided. The turmoil isn’t just “on the ground,” if you will but in the fact that “heaven is divided into two spheres” in a way that is similar to the Cold War, except that there’s one major difference (p. 2). He says, “The divisions of heaven today appear increasingly drawn within each particular country. In the United States, for instance, there is an ideological and political civil war between the alt-Right and the liberal-democratic establishment, while in the United Kingdom there are similarly deep divisions, as were recently expressed in the opposition between Brexiteers and anti-Brexiteers…Spaces for common ground are ever diminishing, mirroring the ongoing enclosure of physical public space, and this is happening at a time when multiple intersecting crises mean that global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever.” (p. 2) In other words, the pandemic demanded global unity but even within nations, there’s no unity: “heaven” is torn in two.
It’s a great collection. It’s thought-provoking as always and easy to read, as my friend noted, and as I’m recognizing as I’ve dived into The Sublime Object of Ideology, which takes a lot more work!
Nietzsche’s critique of Buddhi-Christian morality in places like “Genealogy of Morals” is that it is a slave morality meant to hold the powerful and capable down by the dictates of the masses. The herd is driven by ressentiment to hold in bondage the excellent and superior through sanction and shame. Thus we must transvalue all of these values by rising above them and overcoming the herd. Do you think that sentiments like Thurman’s prove Nietzsche right? Or is there another dialectic at work here? I have my own thoughts, but I want to hear yours.
Now, I’m not widely read on Nietzsche. I’ve encountered too many different interpretations to speak with confidence about his ideas like the Übermench, the will to power, or the death of “God”. But I do know of this received Nietzsche that’s understood by some critics to be an inspiration for Hitler, by some admirers as Ayn Rand’s continental counterpart, and maybe by both as an example of social Darwinism. So, I’ll try to speak, briefly and generally, about this received Nietzsche and whether his received philosophy rebuts people like Thurman and Thurman’s reception of Jesus.
First, I don’t understand personhood and individuality to allow for this received Nietzschean paradigm to work. This may be due to several years of introducing students to Buddhist and Confucian thought but as with the Buddhists, I can’t fathom reality without a recognition of our absolute interconnectivity. In fact, I place such philosophical weight on this idea, that Indian monism and Spinoza’s god have been ideas I’ve been giving a lot of thought. This isn’t to say that I’m a determinist or a Calvinist in the Christian tradition. I do believe in will. Whether or not we should use the term “free will” is something I’m still pondering. I might say we have “free-within-limits will,” which is something I presume most defenders of free will recognize but is something I want to emphasize. I can’t will myself to fly to the moon in my body alone; I can’t will myself to have the body-type necessary to qualify as a potential NBA or NFL or even MLB player. There are limits and those limits are determined, in part, by who I am as a person and the systems/societies/cultures of which I’m part.
Since our interconnectivity goes all the way down, I look at people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk not as a geniuses that rise above the system but as the eventual beneficiaries of a system that has evolved to create such people. If Bezos and Musk weren’t Bezos and Musk, someone would be them, because our forms of hyper-capitalism (or techno feudalism!) functions to create these people. Again, this isn’t to say Bezos and Musk didn’t contribute to their eventual standing, just to say that they didn’t will it independently of the system that made it happen and the people who build Amazon, Space X, etc.
We’ve lived through the perfect example of the point that I want to make: the Covid-19 pandemic. Our current globalized system of trade and travel made it almost inevitable that this virus would spread across the planet. Were some decisions made by powerful people that may have contributed, like the discarding of the Obama Administration’s pandemic-playbook by the subsequent administration, factors? Yes. Were powerful individuals involved? Yes. But could have the former president made the decisions that were made by his administration had he not been elected and been elected in a system where the majority vote wasn’t the determining factor? No. He would’ve been just a famous TV star and wealthy real estate mogul with a Twitter account.
Systems are powerful realities that mean more for our understanding of the world than “great men”. Systems cause people sick with a virus on one side of the world to eventually impact people on the other side of the world—people they never met and never will meet. If, god forbid, nucular powers like India and Pakistan engaged in atomic war, it doesn’t matter than I live in Texas. I will feel the impact.
My person is not isolated; my person is determined by the networks of which I’m part and in turn contributes to those networks to influence others. This is why I mentioned Confucianism because I agree with the idea that rituals form us—doing the same thing over and over again becomes normalized for us and shapes us and changes who we’ll be, whether this is brushing your teeth, pledging allegiance to the flag of your country, or saying prayers.
Second, and related, while there’s no doubt that certain elites benefit from the social-power constructs of a given age, that does not follow that they themselves are inherently/ontologically “excellent and superior”. As I said regarding Bezos and Musk, as individuals they’re not completely accidents of the system but there’s nothing that says that those two men had to become who they became or that two other people couldn’t have arisen to create a massive online trading platform or a privatized NASA. I liken Bezos and Musk to men bench pressing with people holding up the bar on each end and then mocking the person next to them for being unable to lift as much weight.
A while ago I listened to a podcast series that explored how Blockbuster collapsed and Netflix rose to prominence (season 2 of Land of Giants). And yes, there were decisions and individuals to blame for how that happened—but as you listen to how everything unfolded, you realize that this sort of thing is more than any one person, and more than any one decision. And now, Netflix looks weakened. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the next to topple. If this happens, some individuals will play a part but no one person will determine Netflix’s survival or demise.
Third, I’d note that those in power are completely dependent upon the systems they inhabit and often are lucky that those systems aren’t easily toppled.Engels mourned the reality that London was full of people who had the combined power to overthrow a system that oppressed and used them but wouldn’t (couldn’t?). And history shows that most people stay in power because gaining unified mass and mass resistance is very difficult (once again, because systems are powerful). As the architects of the United States Declaration of Independence wrote, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” In other words, powerful people’s power is at the mercy of the basic, observable fact that it takes a lot for the masses to move together toward their own liberation. This doesn’t prove that the masses are full of weaker, less competent people; it proves that systems are difficult to change when people are used to them and the alternative is unknown. (Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, as it’s said.) Didn’t The Matrix teach us this? And Plato?
In summary, I don’t believe in the Übermench as he has been received. (I don’t know enough about Nietzche’s thought to directly address his concept.) I don’t believe in the “great men” of history, even Jesus. In fact, whatever its historical value, the canonical value of the Book of Acts for the Christian New Testament is that it decenters Jesus in order to center him. In other words, Jesus’ greatness is determined by, as the Fourth Evangelist (John 14:12) presents Jesus as saying, “I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” Jesus’ greatness is determined by the community and his absence. (Yes, I know that Johannine “absence” is still presence by the Spirit but that only adds to my point that Jesus-multiplied in his movement, i.e. Jesus-absent from his movement, is what makes Jesus great in the logic of the Gospel of John and the Book of Acts.)
I believe that the Buddhists are right that I have no-self outside of the variety of external contributors to the located collection I am. I believe the Confucians are right that I have no-self outside of the rituals and practices that form me, many which I receive, passively, from my society. I believe Thurman is correct in inviting the oppressed to see hope in the way of Jesus but also in inviting the oppressor to repent because the oppressive actions we do against others—others who are not ultimately as separate form us as we imagine—will harm us. There’s only so long that you can pour the pollution downstream before there’s no where for it to go—as the rapid change of our global climate is showing us in real-time. And you can contribute only so long to a culture of harm before you’re harmed by that culture—see how America’s belief that redemptive violence is the solution to everything has created a culture of violence here at home, where most Americans own more than one gun—not because they fear people from the other side of the world but because they fear their closest neighbors. This is what Thurman knew; what Jesus knew.
Yes, I’m still pondering TheMatrix Resurrections, even after taking in all the insights that Tripp Fuller, Donna Bowman, and James McGrath offered. Slavoj Žižek wrote a review that I needed my friend Nate Bostain to help me interpret: “A Muddle Instead of a Movie”. Hopefully, Nate will write a blog post I can link, because he had good insights for someone like me who struggles to understand Žižek. Then Wisecrack made a video that looks at the film through Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” that’s worth viewing: “Matrix Resurrections Hates Itself!” So, if you’re still geeking out on the fourth installment of this franchise like I am, I hope this provides you with some enjoyable reading and viewing…even if Žižek’s last paragraph leaves you as confused as I am.
I’ve written about the new film The Matrix Resurrections already (see “Lana Wachowski, The Matrix Resurrections, and our hypocrisy?”). But I’ve been inspired to write more. My friend and former colleague, Nate Bostain, compiled an excellent series of thoughts about/insights into Resurrections: “Resurrecting the Matrix: An Ideological Review”. And while I agree with the bulk of what he wrote, I have one soft- contention. Nate writes about Resurrections, “I loved it almost as much as the first one. It is the true sequel to Matrix 1. Matrix 2 and 3 are largely non-necessary for the story arc (although I love them too in their own peculiar and awkward way).” I must respectfully disagree that The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions are unnecessary. In fact, it was rewatching the whole trilogy that made The Matrix Resurrections the film that it is for me. I don’t think it would’ve had the same impact without Reloaded and Revolutions. Let me see if I can explain my rationale.
While I wouldn’t say that Lana Wachowski has denounced the original film, I do see in the subsequent films a concern being expressed by her and her sister: a concern that people will take the original premise—that of freeing your mind and liberating yourself from the falsehoods of this reality in favor of the real “real”—too seriously. If you google something like “right-wing red pill meme,” you’ll see dozens on articles, including a recent one by Derek Robertson for Politico that attempts to explain how the new film is trying to undo some of the damage of the original: “‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Tries to Un-Red Pill America”. I won’t go down that rabbit hole but do check out some of those articles if this interpretation of the Matrix is new to you.
In Resurrections, Neo is skeptical of this concept of “the real”. He says, “‘Real.’ There’s that word again.” I sense that this is Wachowski talking to us. And this makes many viewers, especially those used to the clean-heroism of the Marvel Universe with its good v. bad binary, uneasy. (Note: that “binary” is a theme in this film, and I don’t think its message is limited to the fluidity of gender.) Bugs, an embodiment of Matrix-fandom, says, “That’s it, isn’t it? If we don’t know what’s real, we can’t resist.” And in Resurrections, the once clear enemy—the machines—aren’t clearly the enemy anymore. As Nate noted, even Agent Smith can have a heroic role now.
This is the great contribution of Reloaded and Revolutions: the sequels took us out of the seat of the hero and implicated us. They humbled anyone who thought they were enlightened, who thought they had escaped Plato’s cave, who thought they achieved special gnosis, and made us recognize that the story may be more complicated. We’re all a part of the Matrix, even Neo. Whether that Matrix is rogue-capitalism, the military-industrial complex, or something else that can be interpreted as dehumanizing, we’re not free from it, even if we criticize it, or fight against it. But that means that if old rivalries between Neo and Agent Smith can become tentative alliances, and if the humans and the machines can find peace, then any of us can be the hero given the context (and any of us can become a villain, I presume). And it means our best path forward might be a bit of epistemological skepticism. The definite non-solution seems to be having a savior complex (unless like Neo in Revolutions there’s some “cruciformity” and self-sacrifice involved.)
There’s a sense in Resurrections that something has gone wrong in the reception history of the Matrix franchise. What went wrong is that the corrective that the sequels attempted has failed—and part of this is because many people, myself included for a time, brushed aside the second and third films because they didn’t shock our brains like the original. People still ooh-and-aah at the “originality” of the first film. During what I found to be a brilliant several minutes of Resurrections, where Neo begins to have an existential crisis as “Matix IV” is being planned, one character says of the original “video game,” i.e. the original film, “What made Matrix different? It F’d with your head!” This is what we missed. I remember, after watching The Matrix for the first time, spending several days in a philosophical spiral trying to understand what “reality” was. This is what many wanted from Resurrections, and they’ve been disappointed. As the now humbled Merovingian says, meta-critiquing the critics by being their frazzled voice: “Art, films, books were all better! Originally mattered!” But the Wachowskis didn’t want the message to end with the original. They didn’t want to just “F” with our brains. They didn’t want us to see ourselves as the Neo of the original film. That’s why they spent two films deconstructing the first and why Resurrections continues this project, even if it irritates much of their fanbase.
These are the reasons why in Reloaded and Revolutions we discover that Neo isn’t “the One,” at least in the sense that the original implied. There’s no outside-the-system messiah to save us. We learn in the sequels that the Matrix had gone through several renditions already, each with “the One,” planned by the Architect as a way of managing an anomaly. Neo is necessary, as “the One,” to keep the system functioning. The system planned for him. And Resurrections even hints that the Matrix gains even more power from his angst and frustration.
We’ve learned from the past three films that the messianism of the original isn’t enlightening at all. Instead, these forms of messianism are fed to us as a way of, paradoxically, maintaining the status quo. When Neo escapes the Matrix in the original it’s just a matter of time until he realizes he’s still under its control and always will be. Likewise, many self-proclaimed messiahs, and even basic fans who see themselves as Neo in some way, are just as much a part of the system that they hope to overthrow.
So, if Wachowski has deconstructed our romantic visions of heroes and enlightenment, where do we go next? Are we being told to just be satisfied with our own individual matrixes because “escape” isn’t really an option? Maybe all we have are the stories we tell ourselves to make us feel better. As Agent Smith says, “That’s the thing about stories. They never really end, do they? We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told, just with different names, different faces.” I don’t know where this franchise goes from here. I imagine Lana Wachowski would enjoy mic dropping at this point, letting the series end here (though Warner Bros won’t allow that, guaranteed). But if it continues, as it likely will, the ending of Resurrections opened the door for a new and more expansive interpretation, though it comes from a cryptic statement toward the end.
At the end, when Trinity and Neo are talking to the Analyst, something caught my attention. The Analyst says to Trinity and Neo:
“Here’s the thing: the ‘sheeple’ aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty.”
Neo and Trinity respond in a way that shows that they accept this premise but then they tell the Analyst that they’re in the Matrix to “remake your world”. So, they concede that they may not be able to “free” everyone from the Matrix but maybe that isn’t the goal. Maybe the red pill isn’t as important as Morpheus made it to be. Maybe Trinity and Neo will stay in the Matrix themselves, reshaping it. What’s the subtext here? I don’t know. Maybe Lana Wachowski doesn’t know either. But one thing we do know is this: the past three films have partially renounced the first, so if we’re to appreciate the genius of these stories we must accept that the first film got us in the door to hear the message that the Wachowskis really wanted to deliver—a message you can’t understand without the sequels.
In my recent post on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the flâneur, I reminisced on my days in San Francisco. I lived there, inconsistently, from summer 2005 until late summer 2009. I had the privilege of experiencing life in Parkmerced, Hunters Point, Excelsior, and for a few weeks, I did stints at friends’ places on Haight and in Outer Richmond near Sutro Heights. These were my post-college, pre-marriage days when I was really discovering myself, buying most everything on credit, and living under the delusion that San Francisco was to be my forever-home.
My first job in the City was at the Starbucks on the corner of Van Ness and Bush (pictured above via starbuckseverywhere.net). I had a sniff of big-city fame because of a bomb threat that happened at our store. Sadly, my old blog, “Fog City Narrative,” is proof that not everything on the Internet is eternal. I can’t find it. Nor can I find the SFist article that linked to my blog narration of the following events, or the SFist article that congratulated me when I moved on from my job at Starbucks. (This indicates someone at SFist read my blog and that was my shot at San Francisco writer-fame. As you are aware, it never materialized!) Those were the two places on the web where I was loosely connected with the events I’ll narrate here. Thankfully, there are some online news articles to collaborate! On the morning of January 9th, 2006, I was sent to make a run to a nearby bank to deposit money from the store. When I returned, the police were taping off the area. I wasn’t allowed inside. My assistant manager was crying and shaken. Apparently, she was the one who has discovered an object that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) determined was an explosive before determining that it wasn’t. What do I mean by this? Well, a series of news stories will show you.
The first stories matched my experience, written mostly on the 9th or 10th of January. They reported that (A) an explosive was found; (2) it was detonated with a water canon. SFPD Sgt. Neville Gittens is quoted saying things like the object “would have caused damage if it exploded” and that “This was a good device. If it had exploded, it would have caused injuries or damage”. See e.g. SFGate; East Bay Times; CNN; CNN Money.
Then they found a suspect a couple of days later: a homeless man named Ronald Schouten. The media continued to report things like “The SFPD bomb squad confirmed it was definitely an explosive device” and concluded, regarding Schouten (Sgt. Gittens again), “There is no connection to any terrorism or anything against Starbucks…Everything at this point and time indicates that this particular individual acted alone and this is an isolated incident.” See e.g. SFGate; CBS News; East Bay Times; Fox News.
Then they determined, contrary to what was said the day of the event, and the subsequent days, that the explosive wasn’t an explosive but just a flashlight. Jaxon Van Derbeken on the San Francisco Chronicle opened his article with this paragraph: “San Francisco authorities struggled to explain Thursday how they concluded that an object left in a Starbucks bathroom was a bomb, when tests revealed it was nothing more than a flashlight with corroded batteries.” He reports regarding Sgt. Gittens, “Gittens defended the department’s handling of the matter, saying that in the post-Sept. 11 world, police are inclined to err on the side of caution.” And then Van Derbeken relayed off-the-record confirmation: “[Gittens] would not confirm that the device was simply a flashlight. But authorities speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed that was the case.” See e.g. SFGate; CBS News.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the SFPD probably was just overly cautious and then further tests revealed the object wasn’t what they thought it was. But I admit being very weirded out by the whole experience back in 2006, mostly because Starbucks sent a representative from Seattle to talk to us and tell us how to avoid the media and then the story changed quickly. I admit that in 2006, I entertained the idea that Starbucks and the SFPD were trying to prevent fear by walking back to their original announcement. In the Bush-era, Starbucks was a corporation that some people in the Bay Area were targeting. The attacks on Starbucks stories in San Francisco in 2003 are referenced in several of the above-linked articles. Would bomb threats be bad for business? Yes. But does a grand conspiracy theory make the most sense? No. I mean, CBS reported that Ronald Schouten said:”I love that Starbucks,” Schouten said in an interview with the station. “The people are saints. They know I’m homeless. They let me drink coffee for 50 cents. I love those people.”
And this bomb-threat-that-wasn’t tells us something about epistemology. It tells us that even when we find out that what we thought we knew and experienced isn’t true the first move shouldn’t be toward conspiracy. Is there a reason for conspiracy in this particular situation? Sure, in light of 9/11 and the vandalism of 2003. Is it likely that people working for Starbucks and the SFPD could’ve pulled off this switch of stories within a few days if it were a lie? Maybe but unlikely, especially with off-the-record confirmation that it wasn’t an explosive. Is it more probable that the initial, cautious investigation was overly cautious and that a man who was homeless just dropped a weird object he had found causing concern in a city that already had a tense relationship with corporate power during a particular era of American politics? Yeah, it seems that this makes the most sense.
But a conspiracy would’ve made for a really fun story, right? I do wonder what happened to Schouten. When you google his name, he, unfortunately (or fortunately) shares it with a famous professor of psychiatry. I hope everything worked out for him.
I respect what Lana Wachowski did with The Matrix Resurrections. She has reminded us that almost every story we tell ourselves (in this era of film) that is about being liberated, bringing change, and envisioning a new world are funded by the people with the money and the power, like Warner Bros. The tools we use to communicate and critique culture are made available to us by Meta, Twitter, Apple, and Google. There’s a tension here.
For this reason, San Francisco was the perfect setting (note that Mayor London Breed, who just announced she’ll be using more police force in San Francisco, cameoed as liberator!). A bastion of progressive politics, a city hated by the right-wing, is not really liberating. It’s just as dominated by power and money as anywhere in the world. It’s just as exploitive of the poor as anywhere. It’s just as much a police state as any other city. We may hear more hopeful, tolerant, kind stories from that part of the world—maybe via Netflix!—but again, ultimately, the stories we’re telling are brought to us by people, institutions, and corporations who must not fear that they’ll cause any real shifts in the status quo, because they’re the status quo. And we’re the status quo.
Am I saying this as if enlightened? No. I typed it on my iPhone. Is my interpretation of Wachowski requesting that we accept Biden-style—no, Pelosi-style—incrementalism? Not really. But I do think this film can be harsh because it undermines our messianism and self-identity. It reminds us that maybe the Matrix is more like a Matryoshka Doll than Plato’s cave. And it argues that we don’t really want revolution because revolution and social overhaul usually come only through violence, through war. As Niobe says to Neo: the only thing as loud as the noise of the Matrix is war. And nobody wants that. So, I’m looking forward to the fifth movie and I’ll probably give Sony, or Disney, or whoever my money when I go watch the new Spider-Man soon.
I think Albert Camus (along with his translators) was the dead philosopher who was my traveling companion in 2021. I read The Plague, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus this year. The first book helped me get my head around the expressions of human nature that I’ve been observing since the beginning of our current, ongoing pandemic; the other two helped me survive a vacuum created by the deconstruction of certain epistemological certainties that came with the religious ideological baggage I’ve been carrying with me since my youth. (And no, I haven’t abandoned Christianity nor become an atheist, but my thoughts on my mother-religion and “god” are ever-evolving.)
I’m beginning to think that this year might be the year I get to know Walter Benjamin. Now, as with Camus, I’m not saying I will know their writings at any level of expertise. My professional life requires that I do most of my reading in fields related to biblical studies and religious studies, which already stretches me out far beyond any level of “specialist” comfort into my necessary role as a generalist who keeps up with scholarship on the Hebrew Bible over here, the Gospels over there, American religion over here, the concept of “religion” over there, etc. But I do like to have a dialogue partner, even if the dialogue is minimal, and maybe not as deep as I’d like.
Benjamin was put on my radar by a recent episode of the “What’s Left of Philosophy?” podcast: “Wake Up and Choose Divine Violence”. I listened then I went and found Benjamin’s essay “A Critique of Violence”. Now, I’m still reading it, and processing it, and eventually, if I feel like I know how to say anything about it, I may write something here. For now, I’m captivated by a different idea over which I’ve stumbled that Benjamin seems to have gotten from his analysis of the writings of Charles Pierre Baudelaire. It’s the concept of the flâneur.
Apparently, the flâneur was/is a “stroller” in the crowd, especially the crowds found in the arcades of Europe. But, if I’m understanding things correctly, we must interpret them in contrast with the active crowds going here and there, busily, as cogs in the urban machine. In fact, in Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he begins his exploration of the flâneur through the prism of writers/thinkers who despise or mourn the state of the urban crowd. For example, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels mourns how “two and a half million human beings” could be in one place, which “has multiplied the power of these two and a half million people a hundredfold,” and yet all they do is hurry “past one another” as if “they had nothing in common” except the agreement to stay out of the other’s way: “their only agreement is a tacit one: that each should keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each person in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space.”*
Benjamin says of Engels, “Engels is dismayed by the crowd. He responds with a moral reaction, and an aesthetic one as well; the speed with which people rush past one another unsettles him. The charm of his description lies in the blend of unshakable critical integrity with old-fashioned views.” ** Other writers such as the aforementioned Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe appear, in Benjamin’s estimation, to have a similar distaste.
In Benjamin’s essay “The Return of the Flaneur” (1929), he makes an interesting comment that there’s a difference between someone who is visiting a place, a tourist, and a native of a city. He writes, “If we were to divide all the existing descriptions of cities into two groups according to the birthplace of the authors, we would certainly find that those written by natives of the cities concerned are greatly in the minority. The superficial pretext-the exotic and the picturesque – appeals only to the outsider. To depict a city as a native would call for other, deeper motives — the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts. The account of a city given by a native will always have something in common with memoirs; it is no accident that the writer has spent his childhood there.”*** I read this to mean that the flâneur is someone who comes to know a place intimately. They’re not there just to work and go home; they’re not there as tourists to take pictures and leave. A flâneur is there to know a city; to love it.
Later, Benjamin writes this:
“Just as every tried-and-true experience also includes its opposite, so here the perfected art of the flâneur includes a knowledge of ‘dwelling.’ The primal image of ‘dwelling,’ however, is the matrix or shell-that is, the thing which enables us to read off the exact figure of whatever lives inside it. Now, if we recollect that not only people and animals but also spirits and above all images can inhabit a place, then we have a tangible idea of what concerns the flâneur and of what he looks for. Namely, images, wherever they lodge. The flâneur is the priest of the genius loci. This unassuming passer-by, with his clerical dignity, his detective’s intuition, and his omniscience, is not unlike Chesterton’s Father Brown, that master detective.”****
All of this is relevant to me as it reminds me of the city I call “home” in spite of having lived there for maybe five years of my life: San Francisco. I’ve told people that they must visit “the City,” as we Northern Californians call it. Some have. They may enjoy it, a bit. Others think it’s ok. Some think it’s dirty. I think it’s the greatest city in the world. But why?
When I lived there, I was a flâneur. I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, and I had been hired at Starbucks but had a few days until I was to start work, I decided to just walk the city. I walked from my apartment near San Francisco State University (Parkmerced) past Lake Merced all the way north along Ocean Beach until I passed Sutro Heights. I walked along the beach until I had to climb upward (I believe the tide was rising) and found myself walking the trails through Lands End. I ended up in Sea Cliff where I had my one brief passing with Robin Williams as he was leaving his home there. I kept going through the Presidio and didn’t head south until I reached Fillmore. Then I kept going south until eventually, very late in the day, I made an appointment I had with some friends at a coffee shop on Ocean Avenue. If you look at a map of San Francisco, I traversed so much of the city. As a kid from a small town like Napa, I was in awe of each neighborhood. Each neighborhood was its own story with its own history. I knew then that I’d live there until the day I died. I was wrong.
But when I did live there, even on the bad days when I had to sell my car to afford rent, or wake up at 3 am to walk from Parkmerced to a bus stop in West Portal that took me over to a drop off on the corner of Market and Van Ness, so I could walk up Van Ness to Bush for an opening shift, I loved it. When I lived in Hunters Point near Candlestick and had to catch a bus on 3rd Street to take me to my temporary job downtown, I loved it. When I lived in the very boring Excelsior District, I had my coffee shops, and my favorite local book stores and a sense that this was my city and everything was meaningful and new. Now, I will confess that my final days there were days where I was a bit burnt out on struggling to get by in a very expensive city. I knew I needed to leave, temporarily, but I also knew I’d be back as soon as I was refreshed. I was wrong.
But my love for San Francisco has not disappeared, even if I’m in permanent exile. To this day, I’ve dreamt of having the time and opportunity to research and write histories of San Francisco. (One of my favorite books of all time is David Talbot’s The Season of the Witch.) Amazing considering I’ve lived in San Antonio, TX, longer than I did San Francisco…but there’s a reason why there’s a cliche based on a song about leaving your heart in San Francisco. And I think it has something to do with this idea of being a flâneur, a wanderer and wonderer, who imagines the stories of the places in the city you stand, and cares little about what the tourist sees when you can see decades of history in one building, or one corner, or one mural. And for some reason, sadly, as much as I appreciate San Antonio, and liked Portland, OR, I’ve never felt about those cities the way I feel about San Francisco. I think, at least with regards to San Antonio, it’s just too much sprawl. Can you be a flâneur here? If so, I failed to become one.
There’s so much to say about this idea. I have nothing further to offer at the moment though, of course, Wikipedia is a perfectly fine entry point. And some brighter minds have said clearer and more insightful things, such as this doctoral dissertation in German Studies at the University of Vanderbilt by Curtis Lee Maughan titled “The Return of Flânerie: Walter Benjamin and the Experience of Videogames,” which honestly I really want to read now that I’ve stumbled over it. Also, this random sample chapter made available by Blackwell but without the name of the author: “The City Observed: The Flâneur in Social Theory”. Also, this website by Blake Miner where he tries to put into practice the concept of the flâneur: A Flaneur Life. And there’s even this Danish documentary on YouTube, created by Torben Jensen, that talks about all of this (in subtitles for English speakers).
*This quote comes from The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. Florence Wischnewetzky [1886], pp. 68-69, found on pp. 321-322 of this PDF. ** This quote comes from p. 322 of the above-linked PDF. *** I found a translation of this essay online. This seems to be the safest place to download it: scribd.com. **** From the above translation/PDF.
The school year has begun, so of course this blog has gone dormant. Sorry!
I do want to mention/recommend a few books I read as summer break was ending:
Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (Amazon; Bookshop)
I’m sure there are a million reviews of this book available already, so all I’m going to say is this: as a high school teacher who has a front row seat to the Hunger Games that is college admissions, I wish each of my students and their families would read this book. Sandel exposes the flaws of the meritocratic worldview: not only that it’s not real (the hardest workers don’t receive the best rewards) but also that it harms even the “winners”.
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Amazon; Bookshop)
Storm is brave. He attempts to do something constructive in an era that is dominated by deconstruction. The main focus of the book is this (to oversimplify): how does the humanities move past postmodernism without denying postmodernity’s critiques and returning to modernistic thinking. This book could be a game changer when it comes to epistemology and it offers a new constructive approach to several topics that are desperately needed in the humanities since we’ve poisoned ourselves for a generation by telling everyone why our fields of study are flawed and not really real. For example, modernity sought a concrete definition of religion. Postmodernity helped us realize this is quixotic and that there’s no “form” of religion (to draw Plato and then Wittgenstein into the discussion). But something important still needs to be said about things like “religion,” even if it lacks concreteness. Storm offers a way forward.
Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals (Amazon; Bookshop)
On Ash Sunday 2020, I became a vegetarian. I’ve been looking for a philosopher to give me words to help me think about this change because it’s not dietary as much as ethical as relates to how we treat animals and the environmental impact of animal consumption. Korsgaard’s attempt to ground animal ethics in a Kantian framework has a lot to offer. Her writing has begun to reshape my understanding of “the good,” how humans relate to other animals in our differences and similarities to other creatures; and why we humans shouldn’t think of ourselves as superior to other creatures. Yet, Korsgaard notes that what makes us different also makes us responsible and while she concludes things like vegetarianism is ethically ideal and that factory farming is deeply immoral, so also draws the readers into ongoing conversations about topics like breeding animals away from being predatory; whether we should have pets; whether we should leave all animals to be wild, among other topics. It’s the type of book I plan on reading again in the future.
Like many others, this ongoing pandemic (yes, it’ll still happening for those who don’t check the news) has motivated me to read the writings of the French philosopher, Albert Camus. (For reasons probably related to my last name, I enjoy the French philosophers, including those despised by others, such as Foucault and Derrida…though I’m not so arrogant as to claim that I always understand them!) Currently, with one hand, I’m reading The Plague(Le Peste in French but no, my French reading skills are not where they’d need to be for me to enjoyably read Camus in his mother-tongue), and with the other, The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Myth de Sisyphe). But it is The Plague that drove me to Camus being that I want to engage something philosophical that reflects our current crisis.
I was asked how Camus holds up the twenty-first century. My quick summary is this (which I’ll unpack over a series of posts): Camus’ observations regarding human nature could be commentary on how people have reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic but advancements in human technology create a stark difference between Camus’ fictional plague and our present and real one.
Today, I pause to reflect on some of his comments about war and pestilence. These are fitting as we’re technically ending the American war in Afghanistan which has been going since I was in college. I share some quotes from Stuart Gilbert’s translation.
In Part One, Camus’ narrator, whose identity is hidden until later in the book, comments:
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plague as wars in history yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
The Plague, pp. 36-37
When news came out of Wuhan that something strange was happening there, someone I know who was from there was telling me about it, but it seemed a world-away. I don’t think I felt worried until suddenly many were dying in Italy. So, I can’t claim to be an exception to Camus’ observation. I didn’t foresee this. Others did. The Obama Administration did. Bill Gates did. I guess they’re the exceptions to the rule.
Likewise, I don’t plan for war, even as many fret that America will one day trip into our second civil war as our growing partisanship grows violent. If this happens, I know I’ll awaken one day saying I had heard this was possible but couldn’t imagine it actually happening much like we knew something like what happened on January 6th was possible but we didn’t expect that!
Camus’ narrator comments further:
When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
The Plague, p. 37
Remember when President G.W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”? We want wars to end sooner than wars end. Likewise, as vaccination rates increased, we began to grow comfortable. I even went placed, indoors, without a mask…for a few weeks. But like Iraq, “Mission Accomplished” has proven premature, and the Delta variant has proven human arrogance mixed with ignorance can prolong any misfortune.
But this shouldn’t be surprising. Camus captures this in explaining his fictional townspeople:
In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away, and, from one had dream to another, it is men who pass away, and humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken the precautions. Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed pestilences were impossible.
The Plague, p. 37
How this depicts everything from what we’ve heard of and heard from our last president in early 2020 to the people dying of this virus even now who express deep regret for failing to get a vaccine that was free and available at your local CVS or Walgreens! And as infuriating as these people may be, they are different from the more cautious of us only in degree. Any one of us who lives as if we’re captains of our own ship—as if the sea has no say in our fate—entertains a similar folly. The person speeding and weaving through busy traffic to get home a few second or minutes faster than they would had they sat in their lane in traffic exhibits the same hubris as the person who presumes that this virus won’t get them. It’s easy to fail to be modest thereby denying the reality of reality—until you get sick or wreck your vehicle. (And this isn’t to mention those who take precautions, or who drive defensively, who still get sick or in a wreck!)
Finally, Camus’ narrator comments, and I end with this:
They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
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