Everywhere I Look, I See Myself

“At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around.”
Nilay Patel (The People Do Not Yearn for Automation, 2026)

“The first cycle of myth is the creation myth. Here the mythological projection of psychic material appears in cosmogonic form, as the mythology of creation. The world and the unconscious predominate and form the object of myth. Ego and man are only nascent as yet, and their birth, suffering, and emancipation constitute the phases of the creation myth. ´{ } In the beginning is perfection, wholeness. This original perfection can only be “circumscribed,” or described symbolically; its nature defies any description other than a mythical one, because that which describes, the ego, and that which is described, the beginning, which is prior to any ego, prove to be incommensurable quantities as soon as the ego tries to grasp its object conceptually, as a content of consciousness.
For this reason a symbol always stands at the beginning, the most striking feature of which is its multiplicity of meanings, its indeterminate and indeterminable character.”
Erich Neumann (The Origins and History of Consciousness)

“ As Bloch wryly stated toward the end of his conversation with Adorno, “People must first fill their stomachs, and then they can dance. That is a condition sine qua non for being able to talk earnestly about the other without it being used for deception. Only when all the guests have sat down at the table can the Messiah, can Christ come.”
Jack Zips (Grimm Legacies)

“I do not know myself how I paint it.”
Vincent Van Gogh (Letters)

“I get along with everybody. People love me, and you know what? I’ve been very successful; everybody loves me.”
Donald Trump (Interview with Anderson Cooper, 2016)

There is a sense of diminishing returns on nearly every western project, both political and cultural. And maybe not even just the West, but the planet. And AI has come to symbolize this entropy of imagination. AI is the latest cargo cult, a term I used in the title of blog post a few weeks ago. AI is coming to be perceived as the culmination of all things born of science. It is the crown jewel of *technology*. Except people increasingly seem to hate it. The term ‘smart’ is used for all things that use AI, however indirectly. One sees smart refrigerators, smart phone answering systems, smart toys and smart eyeglasses. There is a sense of AI as the final instalment of labour saving, of efficiency. It is the fulfilment of Taylorism. And yet, there is a deep ambivalence about AI running through western society today.

That this coincides with the rise of Trump is clearly not accidental, though the cause and effect are murky at best.

“Trump is always playing a role—Trump playing Trump—and that the real Donald Trump remains elusive, mysterious, and perhaps doesn’t even exist. Maybe he is a new kind of 21st-century personality, a character given over entirely to brand, illusion, and hyperbole—a reality TV character.”
Tom Singer, MD (Trump and the American Selfie)

Trump as a reality TV president. And AI, a technology that creates systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity AI, the empty parroting machines of advanced capitalism. I saw Melania speak the other day (alleged to speak five languages) and it was clear she is barely literate. Trump and Melania. Musil’s Man Without Qualities meets a high priced escort hired as first lady. Trump is actually nothing like the Musil protagonist (Ulrich), but there are themes in the novel that echo the phenomenon of Trump.

“Ulrich’s pathologies reflect the larger crisis of moral order in pre-war Austria, where the spirit of the time tended towards suspicion – of history, of anything not scientific or teleological, and of the value of human action itself. One of the central plots of the novel is the planning of the ‘Parallel Campaign’, a public (and futile) attempt to arrange a celebration of Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventieth year on the throne. The irony in the text revolves around layers of bureaucratism and nonsense, which lives on to this day. Every country seems to have its own iteration of a ‘Parallel Campaign’. “
Elaine L. Wang (The Best Book of 1930, Granta)

Now Musil is, alongside Bernhard and Herman Broch, and probably Thomas Mann and Robert Walser, a part of the Germann language pantheon of the early 20th century. In a New Criterion article on Musil, John Simon wrote of his work that all of it “was or became difficult. Simplicity was not for him: in style, thought, or life.” This was the literary before entertainment.

“The word kitsch also comes to mind, a term of immediate reaction beloved of artists themselves like no other; without, however, at least so far as | am aware, its concept being defined or its applicability explained, except by means of the verb ‘verkitschen’, which in common parlance means something like “selling below value” or “dumping.” Kitsch, therefore, has the meaning of wares that are too cheap or throwaway, and I believe that this sense, of course transposed to the intellectual level, lurks in the word every time it is unconsciously used correctly. “
Robert Musil (On Stupidity)

But I digress. Sort of. Musil also wrote essays and criticism. And I can think of only Peter Handke among living artists (writers) with the same intellect and seriousness as those from the early period of high modernism. There is an inescapable sense of living at the end of something. I always loved John Berger’s description of the very earliest homo sapiens and Neanderthals, as ‘the people of arrival’. We are the people of departure. In some sense, anyway. Human society today is killing off much of the planet (though there remains an enormous amount untouched even now) and certainly killing off culture. Maybe killing off ourselves.

Now there is a wonderful piece in the current London Review of Books by T.J. Clark. He is 83 now. It somehow seems he should be older, actually. I mention it (and provide a link) because nobody else, literally, is writing art criticism like this anymore. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n08/t.j.-clark/v-is-for-vagina

It also reinforces my belief in the importance of culture. I posted, on social media this week, Russel Jacoby’s review of Gabriel Rockhill’s book. I have never had such angry responses. The fury of fan boys. As to the reason for this push back, I think it has to do with the gradual and inexorable growth of cultural resentment in the Western world over the last sixty years. Nobody is going to see the wisdom off what Clark says about DeKooning or Johns, or fellow critics like Meyer Shapiro. Clark notes Shapiro’s monograph on Van Gogh’s last painting (Crows over Wheatfield). Van Gogh painted it days before his suicide in July, 1890. Shapiro mentions another painting from that final year, a few months earlier, Road With Cypress and Star. I feel more affinity with the penultimate painting. It is both a Damacene allegory and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Van Gogh wrote to his brother a year earlier of his love for Cypress trees, their almost ancient Egyptian form and that they occupy this thoughts constantly.

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/review-rockhill-western-marxism-cold-war

“Suburb in Havana {a 1958 painting by DeKooning} is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants to show us how hard it had to work to get precisely nowhere. Why nowhere was where it wished to get to is a question it leaves to the viewer. Nowhere, alias Suburb in Havana, has many attractions. It is beautiful, colourful, internally coherent. It doesn’t ask its admirers to believe in it. Such a painting simply waits for the moment (which may be now) when its nihilism seems true to life.”
T.J. Clark (V is for Vagina, LRBs 2026)

This is true, yet Adorno would note its counter-revolutionary qualities are also the revolutionary part of both this work and DeKooning. And T.J. Clark would not disagree. Adorno said every artwork is an uncommitted crime. And I think here of Heiner Müller. For Müller was challenging theatre to step aside or away from its petty bourgeois framing. (something it hasn’t done, and in fact has gotten worse).

I noted last time that Wittgenstein said he saw all things through a religious lens. I actually think all artists do, and probably all people who have been psychically colonized by the hegemony of capitalist science (and tech). One of the many projects that feel at a sort of dead end is physics and cosmology. If AI is the last cul de sac of the Industrial Revolution, then the Hadron Collider is the final cul de sac for theoretical physics. Einstein was born in 1879. Van Gogh was born in 1853. Musil was born in 1880. Wittgenstein in 1889. Freud was born in 1856. All of the above were born in either Austria, Germany, or what is now called the Czech Republic, or Czechia, except Van Gogh who was born in The Netherlands. That famous observation that Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Tito all lived in Vienna at the same time (1913). Musil lived in Vienna, too, from 1918 to 1922. Herman Broch was born in Vienna in 1886. Arnold Schoenberg was also born in Vienna, and also lived there in 1913 (and for most of his life with intermittent exile in other cities).Egon Schiele born in Vienna, June 1890 (the year Van Gogh killed himself, and the very month he painted Crows) and died young at 28 in the influenza pandemic of 1918 (his teacher Gustav Klimt was also born in Vienna in 1857, and died there in 1918, like his student Schiele). Gustav Mahler, born Bohemia, but spent most of his life in Vienna, dying there in 1911. Now I mention all this because it is very hard to fully grasp how profoundly Western culture and arts were incubated in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechia, and all the rest of what is seen as Mitteleuropa. Or used to be. The point is that the rise of Hitler was also incubated there, and only twenty some years after the (roughly) end of the fin de siecle, he rose to power in neighboring Germany.

And that feels not at all accidental or a coincidence. Of course this has been noted many times. That is the German dialectic in a sense. Perhaps its the German language, too. Heidegger thought so. Here is an exchange with Heiner Müller, an interview conducted by Alexander Kluge.

“Müller:
The interesting thing about Seneca in relation to the Greek dramatists is that his plays were designed to be read, Seneca’s plays, they were read aloud.
Kluge:
They weren’t performed, they were closet dramas . . .
Müller:
And Elizabethan drama is actually based on the misconception that these dramas were written to be performed. They knew Seneca, but not Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. And in Seneca the atrocities take place on the stage, precisely because the plays didn’t need to be performed. And in the Greek plays, they take place off stage. There are just reports by messengers about the violence. And that’s the interesting thing about Seneca, that the violence takes place on an imagined stage.”
(On the Way to a Theatre of Darkness)

I said very much the same thing years ago, both while teaching and in workshops. And I wrote about it. The off stage. And even in Shakespeare’s time people wouldn’t suggest going to *see* Shakespeare’s new play but rather to go *hear* it. There has been a good deal of academic analysis of visuality and how its increased throughout the 20th century, especially intensified with the rise of television and film. Others have said there is actually less reliance on the visual. I think its more to do with the quality of the looking. Another thing Müller said was that he had no interest in ‘ solutions and answers’. And this is, I believe, always true and it has enormous importance for theatre and even literature. I can watch a mystery TV series and enjoy the formula to a degree and acting, and its a refuge in a sense. But I often don’t even watch the final episode where all is revealed. The mystery solved. I don’t care if the butler did it. I honestly don’t think almost anyone cares if the butler did it.

Now, Meyer Shapiro’s essays are all excellent, but he had a very particular affinity for Van Gogh. And because of 21st century marketing its hard to look at Van Gogh anymore with anything like objectivity. But Van Gogh’s influence is almost impossible to express. Anselm Kiefer’s landscapes are very directly linked to Van Gogh.

“The uncertainty of Van Gogh is projected here through the uncertainty of movements and orientations. The perspective network of the open field, which he had painted many times before, is now inverted; the lines, like rushing streams, converge towards the foreground from the horizon, as if space had suddenly lost its focus and all things turned aggressively upon the beholder. In other works this field is marked with numerous furrows that lead with an urgent motion to the distance. { } This perspective pattern was of the utmost importance to Van Gogh, cine of his main preoccupations as an artist. In his early drawings, as a beginner struggling with the rules of perspective and using a mechanical device for tracing the foreshortened lines which bewildered and delighted him, he felt already both the concreteness of this geometrical scheme of representation and its subjective, expressive moment. Linear perspective was in practice no impersonal set of rules, but something as real as the objects themselves, a quality of the landscape that he was sighting. This paradoxical scheme at the same time deformed things and made them look more real; it fastened the artist’s eye more slavishly to appearance, but also brought him more actively into play in the world.”
Meyer Shapiro (On a Painting of Van Gogh, 1946)

That perspective, those lines, are followed by Kiefer.

Of course Kiefer travelled to the Netherlands as a young man, obsessed with Van Gogh. At age 80 Kiefer began a series of homage paintings inspired by Van Gogh. The influence has been there from the beginning of Kiefer’s career. Van Gogh had studied to be a Calvinist pastor. He was schizophrenic (though occasionally debated, as it is with other schizophrenic artists; -Holderin, Strindberg, and Agnes Martin). And Van Gogh seems to elicit a certain kind of obsession in some (Kiefer, Shapiro, Paul Cox, Heidegger, et al) that do few other artists. And here allow me some speculative associations with what I see as the quality of these obsessions. I have mentioned my admiration for the documentary Into Great Silence (made by Philip Gröning, 2006). And part of my personal obsession with this film is how attractive such commitment is, if that’s the word, and its not, really. Paul Bowles was asked once why he lived in Morocco right at the edge of the great desert there and he said ‘to be closer to the absolute’. I understand this and honestly I think all artists (and a good many non artists) feel the same way. A recent film of a rather more pedestrian sort, Last Breath, made me think of this. Its the retelling of the remarkable story of Chris Lemmons, a saturation diver (very deep sea diving done in order to maintain and repair deep sea cables). Lemons had his oxygen supply, a cord that runs from the ship, cut and the crew was unable to get to him for 45 minutes. His oxygen was officially cut off for 29 minutes. You are supposed to die. But he didn’t and in fact suffered no long lasting harm at all. And still works as a diver. What is interesting, besides Lemons own nearly impossible story, is why ANYONE does this for a living. These divers are not THAT well paid. And in order to dive that deep the divers spend 28 days in a hyperbaric chamber on board the ship breathing a helium-Oxygen mixture. They dive to 300 meters. Into blackness. And that is what is so compelling in the film. One intuits this is not done for money. It may not be done for any conscious rational reason. But it does take you close to the absolute.

“Fascists formulated their doctrines by looking back, first to their own recent past of success, a past already being described by them as the deeds and courage of living legend; and second, by framing the personal stories of their achievement, especially Mussolini’s, within the scope of Italian history. The cult of Mussolini, and the images of his self-mastery that “document” his strengths, transformed him into a model that all Italians should emulate. The images of his biography became a kind of scripture. Fascism’s success must have had an inexplicable, magical quality even to Fascists—perhaps especially so! How then to formally codify an account of what had happened?How were they to offer an intellectual explanation, a reasonable account for success when intellect, in any sort of philosophical (or rational) garb, was excused? One might consider Fascism a method, more than a philosophical system, because in ordinary language the term system is understood to mean a developed doctrine containing theories fixed in propositions or theorem. Mussolini, in less clinical terms, but crisper and more dramatic ones—such as a former journalist like him might write—stated, “The years preceding the March on Rome cover a period during which the need for action forbade delay and careful doctrinal elaborations. … A doctrine—fully elaborated … may have been lacking, but it was replaced by something far more decisive—by a faith.”
John McClain (Fascistic Style in Narcissistic Fashion)

Returning to Trump (and Hegseth, and Miller, and Rubio et al) it is useful to remember Mussolini (‘Make Italy Great Again’ was first the slogan of Mussolini’s fascist party). Today the Trumpian world view cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is now like a malevolent giant with blood drenched boots and teeth and hands, like the Jack and the Beanstalk giant, astride the earth. And I do not think this is at all hyperbole.

“We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them, And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ’em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ’em! [Laughter] But we’d get ’em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they’re the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well. What a job! What a job you’ve done … Those are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.”
Donald Trump (Speech to Knesset, Oct. 2025)

T.J. Clark uses this quote for a London Review of Books article.

“What, then, is the politics of the spectacle at present? A politics where nothing is hidden? (Or none of the things that used to be.) Why did such a politics come into existence, however fitfully, and why has it so quickly shrugged aside the previous protocols and constraints on state action? The following questions make a beginning. What would politics be like in an age where one empire continued to hold sway over the ‘international community’, as it had done for three or four generations, but had to react to its power weakening and sputtering, except in the realm of representation? Such an empire would, I think, stake everything on that remaining power, and treat us endlessly to the spectacle of its own dissolution. It would do so because it realised that its primacy in the matter of style – its ability to draw politics into the realm of celebrity and meme-esis, where its power remained absolute – was one to which its economic rivals had no answer. (They try, God knows. Those with strong stomachs might look online for recent Chinese high-pop renderings of the ‘Internationale’.) And style – more and more, given the present state of the market – is hard currency.”
T.J.Clark (The Job, LRB 2025)

Allow me a couple other quotes here from Clark’s piece because he is an astute observer of the Trump spectacle.

“What would a politics be like that was obliged at last to be fully part – helmsman and figurehead, spokesman and step-’n’-fetch-it – not just of capitalism, but of capitalism as form of life, capitalism as terminator of anything resembling society? This question more or less answers itself. It would be like Trump. It would flaunt its emptiness. The Alaska red carpet, the poker game with the Nobel committee, the Kirk apotheosis, surrender in the tariff war with China, the bunker busters that didn’t. It is precisely the lack of substance here that’s the point. Look what I can do to politics! Many of us had been waiting to see what a society would look like once consumerism had done its work, pumping out its pathogens long enough for ‘consumer society’ to be a completed reality, not just a convenient label. Now we know. But questions remain. Why is political visibility the imperative – with the word being a synonym for stream-of-politics, non-stop ‘events’, blurted overtness, un-secrecy, ‘great television’? Why in particular is Trump so confident that washing his empire’s dirty linen in public, gloating over genocide, widening his eyes at the thrill of mass murder, is now what can be done, and must be done, if power is to preserve itself?”
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

I have asked myself this question (not just in relation to Trump, but also to Israel: why do ‘they’ want us to know what ‘they’ are doing? Zionists in particular know they are offending the sensibilities of nearly every human on the planet and yet they go right ahead and keep doing it. They brag about committing atrocities. They laugh and mock at the grieving of their victims.) This is not unrelated to the narcissism diagnosis. Politics where nothing is hidden (per Clark). And yet, this malignant behaviour doesn’t change. In fact it inflates and grows.

“One of the characteristics common to the narcissistic personality is an inflated self-worth, which creates in the individual a tendency to view all things and all people in terms of themselves and their own needs. The phrase “everywhere I look, I see myself” comes to mind as an apt description of how the narcissist approaches the world.”
Kathryn Madden (The Hall of Mirrors)

And this returns me somewhat to fairy tales (of which I have been rather obsessed the last few months), and the loss of the spiritual, or mystical if you prefer. And when Müller speaks of the Greeks, of Sophocles or Euripides, I am reminded that western Academic educators tend to almost robotically follow the Oxford translations and interpretations of Tragedy, and this is, well, not ‘wrong’ exactly, but not really correct either.

“For Van Gogh the object was the symbol and guarantee of sanity. He speaks somewhere of the “reassuring, familiar look of things”; and in another letter: “Personally, I love things that are real, things that are possible … ” “I’m terrified of getting away from the possible… ” The strong dark lines that he draws around trees, houses, and faces, establish their existence and peculiarity with a conviction unknown to previous art. Struggling against the perspective that diminishes an individual object . before his eyes, he renders it larger than life. The loading of the pigment is in part a reflex of this attitude, a frantic effort to preserve in the image of things their tangible matter and to create something equally solid and concrete on the canvas.”
Meyer Shapiro (Ibid)

Van Gogh, Kiefer, the Greek tragedians, and Müller — and then fairy tales, and the cultural incubator of Modernism that was Vienna (and perhaps National Socialism, though there were many tributaries) –and Musil…

“It must also be understood that Musil, born in 1880 in Klagenfurth, southern Austria, was very much a product of the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna. This was an atmosphere in which, as the historian Carl Schorske put it, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was . . . both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefühlskultur [sentimental culture].” As Schorske went on to note, this revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—Hermann Broch called it a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life tout court. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,””
Roger Kimball (The Qualities of Robert Musil, New Criterion)

Everywhere I look, I see myself. And now we have Trump.

Here I want to touch on how ‘we’, the society itself, narrates itself. The novel came of age as a * Bildungsroman*, the novel of formation. Franco Moretti has an entire book devoted to this bourgeois form of story. And I will return to that in a moment.

“The traditional novel, whose idea is perhaps most authentically embodied in Flaubert, can be compared to the three-walled stage of bourgeois theater. This technique was one of illusion. The narrator raises a curtain: the reader is to take part in what occurs as though he were physically present. The narrator’s subjectivity proves itself in the power to produce this illusion and—in Flaubert—in the purity of the language, which, by spiritualizing language, removes it from the empirical realm to which it is committed. There is a heavy taboo on reflection: it becomes the cardinal sin against objective purity. Today this taboo, along with the illusionary character of what is represented, is losing its strength. It has often been noted that in the modern novel, not only in Proust but also in the Gide of the Faux-Monnayeurs, in the late Thomas Mann, or in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, reflection breaks through the pure immanence of form. But this kind of reflection has scarcely anything but the name in common with pre-Flaubertian reflection. The latter was moral: taking a stand for or against characters in the novel. The new reflection takes a stand against the lie of representation, actually against the narrator himself, who tries, as an extra-alert commentator on events, to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding. This destruction of form is inherent in the very meaning of form.”
Theodor Adorno (Notes on Literature)

Contemporary film is the legatee of the *Bildungsroman*. Theatre is not (or doesn’t have to be, though certainly there is a lot of pseudo theatre that embraces the idea of the novel).

“All this compels us to re-examine the current notion of modern ideology’ or ‘bourgeois culture’, or as you like it. The success of the Bildungsroman suggests in fact that the truly central ideologies of our world are not in the least – contrary to widespread certainties; more widespread still, incidentally, in deconstructionist thought – intolerant. normative, monologic, to be wholly submitted to or rejected. Quite the opposite: they are pliant and precarious, ‘weak’ and ‘impure’. When we remember that the Bildungsroman – the form that more than any other has portrayed and promoted modern socialization – is also the most contradictory of modern symbolic forms, we realize that in our world socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of contradiction. The next step being not to ‘solve’ the contradiction, but rather to learn o to live it, and even transform it into a tool for survival.”
Franco Moretti (The Way of the World)

There is an interesting intersection here between a tendency in contemporary culture for ‘solution’ (related to the scientism cult) and genre narrative. The crime story, the mystery or detective pulp novel. In which the genre intercedes or interrupts the interrogation of subjectivity with, as Jack Webb used to day, ‘just the facts’. On some meta level the best crime fiction, however, solves nothing at all (Chandler or Highsmith, Cain, or Hammet). The best crime fiction suggests there never is a solution.

The lie of representation. This is crucial here, for contemporary narrative no longer interrogates the subjectivity of its narrators. Representation is no longer viewed as a ‘lie’. I am speaking here of the entertainment realm and mostly Hollywood.

“When, in Proust, commentary is so thoroughly interwoven with action that the distinction between the two disappears, the narrator is attacking a fundamental component of his relationship to the reader: aesthetic distance. In the traditional novel, this distance was fixed. Now it varies, like the angle of the camera in film: sometimes the reader is left outside, and sometimes he is led by the commentary onto the stage, backstage, into the prop room. Among the extremes—and we can learn more about the contemporary novel from them than from any “typical” case—belongs Kafka’s method of completely abolishing the distance. Through shocks, he destroys the reader’s contemplative security in the face of what he reads. His novels, if indeed they even fall under that category, are an anticipatory response to a state of the world in which the contemplative attitude has become a mockery because the permanent threat of catastrophe no longer permits any human being to be an uninvolved spectator; nor does it permit the aesthetic imitation of that stance. ”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

The reign of ‘entertainment’ forgets Kafka. Adorno adds a few paragraphs later:

“The literary subject who declares himself free of the conventions of concrete representation acknowledges his own impotence at the same time; he acknowledges the superior strength of the world of things that reappears in the midst of the monologue.”

So Kafka and Van Gogh, operating under very different strategies, are reclaiming the concrete world of ‘things’. Van Gogh saw the object as the *symbol* of sanity. His own sanity but of course ours as well. In Kafka’s world the very idea of reality or unreality is obliterated. It is what it is. It is interesting that many on the left, claiming CIA influence on places like the Iowa Writers Workshop argue that ideas were abandoned and replaced with ‘just’ the concrete. What they posit as default for literature is something very close to the *Bildungsroman*. This is a strikingly bourgeois idea of fiction, of narration. What Gordon Lish via Raymond Carver instituted in Iowa was closer to newspaper reportage, closer to Black Mask fiction (written often by ex newspaper stringers) or to Kafka. It was a reaction to sentimentality and mushy adjectives.

Kafka is paradoxically the precursor to Jim Thompson or James Cain. The ideas embedded in a Patricia Highsmith narrative are deeply existential. The best fiction of the mid 20th century, in writers like Flannery O’Conner or even late Hemingway, or Highsmith, is many things, but it always includes an anti-bourgeois sensibility (and by sensibility I am speaking of a relationship to commodity society). The culture industry wants to forget a writer like Iceberg Slim, or like David Goodis, and instead promote (indirectly via academia often) people such as David Foster Wallace (and there is some very good DFW, but the point still holds) or Toni Morrison. (or Updike or Cheever, too). One reason Tony Kushner is so palatable for the bourgeois audience is the form. There is a profound distance between the form of Heiner Müller and that of Angels in America. And as a sort of side bar here, the white bourgeoisie under advanced capitalism find artists like Mapplethorpe to be immensely useful as ‘outlaws’ (in his case for homoerotica) because they actually are decidedly middle brow. Mapplethorpe actually offends nobody. Artists such as Mapplethorpe gleaned early on that he was marketing his own personal attractiveness and comliness, and not the photographs of objects in assholes.

“The Castle lets itself be touched, but only by one who has fallen into a deep sleep brought on by an obsessive quest for contact with the Castle.”
Roberto Calasso (K.)

In Kafka, that collapsed aesthetic distance turns everything into a fairy tale. The objective is stubbornly there, but the idea of the objective is being questioned.

I wrote at the top that we are a sort of people of departure. More accurate would be to say, as Clark does, a people of endings.

“But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle.”
T. J. Clark (V is for Vagina; LRB)

The best modernist art (and a lot of the lesser) is metaphysical. That (the metaphysical) is a necessary condition of collapsing the aesthetic distance (per Adorno). Even the later artists of stature, a Pinter or Handke are metaphysical. A play such as The Homecoming cannot be discussed without understanding it is metaphysical — it is a play that feels today both Freudian and Old Testament. Kushner’s work feels aesthetically exhausted now. It feels pandering a bit, too.

“The transition from drama to novel- the representation of a successful Bildung -requires then a pliant character: no longer ‘alone’, and still less at odds with the world, he is the well-cut prism in which the countless nuances of the social context blend together in a harmonious ‘personality’. “
Franco Moretti (Ibid)

A harmonious personality. This is the goal of psychoanalysis after it arrived on the shores of North America and began to focus on adjustment. The search for truth to be forgotten, as many things must be forgotten under advanced capitalism. This is the bourgeois culture of affirmation. And in the narratives of this post Bildung, the TV and film scenarios, the idea of solutions, the solving of crimes, or the re-knitting of the social fabric, is always the third act.

“It’s like George Eliot’s story ‘The Lifted Veil’. Suddenly the inner thoughts of power are projected onto the screen in everyone’s hand – all the drivelling banalities, the selfishness, the contempt for others, the lack of interest in anything the world has to offer except personal gain, the malice, the ignorance, the ludicrous certainties.”
T.J. Clark (Ibid)

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