Time – Eva Hoffman
Eva Hoffman’s Time, the latest in Picador’s series BIG IDEAS//small books, carefully but playfully examines what time is or might be, how we might measure it, and what it means. Hoffman divides her big idea into four neat chapters, exploring time’s relationship to the human body, mind, culture, and finally, “Time in our Time.” Although the final chapter begins by asking “what kind of social or cultural time do we live in nowadays, and how does this affect the shape of our personal experience?” this question is perhaps at the core of the book, and hence central from its beginning, in Hoffman’s discussion of bodies.
Hoffman’s long essay begins appropriately with a discussion of the human as species, as animal, as a biological entity that must measure the passing of time against itself, against the passing of seasons, and the death of one’s kin. And while Hoffman draws on modern medicine and science in her discussion, citing DNA research and neuroscience, she’s just as likely to search for answers in Shakespeare or Wordsworth. So, while Hoffman brings up current leading scientific research, the heart of the book lies in her ability to temper hard science with what it might actually mean in human terms. For example, Hoffman uses poems by Emily Dickinson (twice) to illustrate the (traumatic) effects that time can toll on the psyche.
This multi-discipline approach has become the hallmark of the BIG IDEAS series, and its exactly what makes the books such a joy to read. Perhaps some might find a discussion of Alzheimer’s disease nestled against a reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to be distasteful, for many of us, the key to finding meaning in big ideas comes not just from the sciences, but also the arts. Hoffman might not have definitive answers for her big questions, but she has plenty of salient, concrete arguments, including a few we’re happy to get behind. After decrying the dissolution of the traditional Spanish siesta, Hoffman writes:
The Protestant ethos driving industrial development was grounded in the ideology of progress and a linear conception of time. It carried traces of the religious belief with which it was originally linked, and an eschatological vision of time in which earthly temporality inevitably moved towards a future where all our efforts would be judged. The work ethic at its height required great discipline of personality, and the sacrifice of presentt pleasures for future goals. It involved a systematic commitment to saving money, so that capital would accumulate, as proof of effort and virtue. The capitalist culture was a culture of the future par excellence; it encouraged its adherents to move through time with a long-term goal in their mind’s eye–or, conversely, with a sense of severe guilt and even sin if they failed to meet their objectives.
Not so in our own, thoroughly disillusioned epoch. After decades of expansion and its spoilages we no longer find ideas of human perfectibility, or even progress, sustainable. Rather, we seem to be driven by being driven. This is, no longer the work ethic but the ethos of conspicuous exertion, and under its aegis we willingly submit ourselves to temporal regimes that would have seemed rigid or even tyrannical by the standards of most other places and periods.
I’m not sure if everyone, at least here in the US, is as completely and savvily attuned to our “disillusioned epoch” as Hoffman suggests–surely many people still believe their drives result from a work ethic, rather than some ideological drive to be “driven.” Still, Hoffman’s salient observation points to the relatively recent exponential change in our relationship to time. She goes on to laundry list YouTube, BlackBerry, and other devices that abridge space and time, and therefore project the illusion of immediacy. Perhaps ironically, Hoffman’s essay contains no mention of Twitter, a program inextricably wed to the most incrementally insignificant accounting of time. While her book is brand new, undoubtedly in the time it took to produce her manuscript Twitter rose from fad to phenomenon; perhaps there just wasn’t time to discuss this new measurement of time. In any case, Time is an appropriate and welcome addition to what’s shaping up to be an enduring and noteworthy series. Recommended.
Time is available now from Picador.
Chris Adrian, 9/11 Lit, Thomas Pynchon, Beach Reading and More
I’m about half way through two books right now: Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Pynchon’s latest novel–I’ll talk a little bit about it in a sec–comes out in hardback from Penguin August 4th. Picador will release the first trade paperback edition of Chris Adrian’s latest collection of short stories on August 3rd. I’m really digging A Better Angel so far, but before I talk about it, I just wanna shill for Picador. They put out really cool, great-looking books from really cool authors like Roberto Bolaño, J.G. Ballard, Denis Johnson, William Burroughs, and DJ Kool Herc, and they also have a sexy little imprint called BIG IDEAS//small books that puts out some killer jams. They’re also really nice about sending review copies. Shill shill shill. I’m a whore, but I’m an earnest whore.
Anyway. Back to Adrian. Just finished “The Vision of Peter Damien,” a 9/11 story set in what seems to be nineteenth century rural Ohio. Damien, and then the other children of his small rural community, catch an illness that gives them unexplained, vivid hallucinations of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers. Adrian works in a mode of distortion throughout most of these stories so far, repeatedly employing metaphysical disruptions as well as playing with time and setting as a way of alienating his characters from each other and the reader. Adrian uses the temporal/metaphysical disruptions of “The Vision of Peter Damien” to respond to 9/11, creating an uncanny milieu for his readers. The cognitive dissonance here reminds me of other responses to 9/11, like DeLillo’s Falling Man, David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Suffering Channel,” and even Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Actually, Wallace’s essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” does a really good job of capturing all the problems of witnessing to, understanding, reacting to (etc.) spectacular disaster. Adrian’s story recapitulates the same paradoxes, injecting a motif of illness and brotherhood, contagious decay and redemption that seems to run through all of the stories collected here. I don’t have a larger comment about literature’s response to 9/11 yet, but I think that it’s fascinating to watch such stories emerge and evolve. We’re still seeing the various shapes, tropes, strategies, etc. that authors will employ to tackle (or chip at, or remark upon, or even elide) such a big historical marker. Full review of A Better Angel at the end of this month.
Far less serious is Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice, a detective noir painted in day-glo psychedelic swirls. Doc Sportello, at the behest of his ex-, is searching for a missing real-estate billionaire in the dope-haze of late 60s/early 70s LA (it appears to be set in 1969, as there are repeated references to “living in the sixties and seventies”). Pynchon’s new novel is a hard-boiled detective mystery, a psychedelic caper, an LA story, a comment on the decline of idealism and the emergence of media-unreality at the end of the 60s (because we needed another story about the 60s!), and probably a shaggy dog tale. The cover has gotten some criticism for its decidedly unliterary look, and last March I called it “horrendous.” I take it back: the campy cover, with its neon shock and beach-as-pastoral-idyll is lovingly ironic, satire that does not announce itself as satire and is thus always open to a straight-reading. Just like Pynchon’s novel, the cover can be read as an homage to both Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard (with a sly nod to all the Leonard ripoffs out there (glancing your way, Jimmy Buffett). As its cover suggests, this is a Pynchon book you can read breezily on a beach or airplane. Sure, it’s got the usual Pynchon trademarks–it’s overcrowded with zany, one-dimensional characters, it operates on a Looney Toons system of logic, it’s full of linguistic goofs–but it’s also incredibly easy to read (unlike, say, just about everything else Pynchon has ever written). It’s also a lot of fun. And to prove it’s a beach read, I’ll finish it this week at St.Augustine Beach, inebriated by strong margaritas and even stronger sun. Full review when I get back.
Bodies — Susie Orbach
In Bodies, feminist psychoanalyst Susie Orbach explores contemporary body issues within a global culture, arguing that bodies are “not in any sense matter of fact, the simple outcome of DNA,” but rather are the products of social and cultural construction. Orbach writes that her work aims “to bolster our resilience in the face of unprecedented attack and to bring sustainability to our bodies so that we can live with and from them more peaceably.” This goal is, of course, no simple task, as the course of Bodies demonstrates.
As a psychoanalyst, Orbach of course takes many cues from Freud, but in her introduction she clearly states the need to move beyond Freud’s theories (it’s all in your head) to an understanding of “the impact of contemporary social practices” — predominantly, in her book, the influence of a media-saturated, image-fueled Western culture on the rest of the world. At stake, Orbach claims, “is a transgenerational transmission of anxious embodiment.” In layman’s terms: we imprint our own desires and fears and hangups about the body–feelings generated in large part from our culture–onto our children.
To explore these problems, Orbach–like Freud–presents a series of fascinating case studies, including a man who elects to have his legs amputated in order to paradoxically feel “whole,” transgendered persons, and abused and neglected children. Orbach is particularly concerned with the drive toward “choice” — the concept that one might actively “choose” how one’s body is shaped, and, as such, she repeatedly engages the discourses of elective plastic surgery, modern weight-loss dieting, and eating disorders. Orbach confronts the reality that many of our “choices” are actually the products of “the new visual grammar” of mass media, the iteration of Photoshopped and airbrushed bodies that bombard our senses hundreds, thousands of times daily. She extends this problem beyond the West, to show the ways in which mass culture affects the psyche of the rest of the world’s denizens.
from Bodyworlds -- Gunther Von Hagen
For Orbach, a future of genetic alteration toward the perfecting of a culturally-constructed ideal is a horrible nightmare. Instead, she argues, our “sturggle is to recorporalise our bodies so that they become a place we live from rather than an aspiration always needing to be achieved.” In order to achieve this, Orbach avers that we “urgently need to curtail the commercial exploitation of the body and the diminution of body variety, so that we and our children can enjoy our bodies, our appetites, our physicality and our sexuality.” Orbach’s solution returns to her concept of “transgenerational transmission” — namely, parents need to understand their children’s needs for caring adult responses, and the myriad ways in which these responses will inform the child’s attitude about his or her own body.
In the U.S., Bodies has been published as part of Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series and it’s a perfect fit for the series: an engaging and relevant philosophical text rooted in a central academic argument, but written in a style that will appeal to a popular audience without dumbing down anything. Like the two books of the series we reviewed last year, Steven Lukes’s Moral Relativism and Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, we might not agree with everything the author has written here, but we cannot deny that this is an enthralling and important discussion. Highly recommended.
Bodies is now available from Picador books.
Moral Relativism — Steven Lukes
Moral relativism is the belief that ideals of right and wrong and good and bad are contextually determined by one’s local culture, as opposed to a theory of morality that holds that good and bad exist as absolute, metaphysical values existing cross-culturally, values intrinsic to one’s humanness. At the same time, individuals, even those (sometimes especially those) who see moral relativism as the overwhelmingly rational, sensical position, nonetheless are inextricably tied to their own sense of right and wrong, and this sense often leads them into a position of judgment–and perhaps action–against, over, and/or in reaction to the perceived wrongs of other cultures and societies.
In his new book Moral Relativism, NYU sociology professor Steven Lukes employs an interdisciplinary approach to tackle one of the biggest sticking points of contemporary thought. Using a variety of methods including philosophy, anthropology, history, and literature, Lukes addresses the fundamental conflict of moral relativism: that what’s right and good in one’s own culture may not be right and good in another’s culture, yet a will remains to believe in ideals of universal human rights. Lukes uses a number of timely concrete examples, including female genital circumcision, Islamic fundamentalism, and mass immigration, to assess the costs and payoffs of holding a view that says that no absolute morality exists. Perhaps the most fascinating part of Moral Relativism is Lukes’s negotiation of Western (or globally Northern, as he saliently points out) human rights actions as an extension of colonialism, with the one-time colonists imposing their values–again–upon the one-time colonized.
Lukes concludes that “the question Who are we to judge other cultures? is a bad question.” Arguing that the “postcolonial and multicultural contexts of our time do not require us to see the discourse and practice of human rights as ethnocentric,” Lukes takes up a position–well-argued–that a moral fundamentalist might claim is simply a liberal humanist wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Which, of course, is the problem with the book. It’s a fantastic argument for moral relativism, one that points out that no one–no one–is absolutely relativist, and that, in fact, being a moral relativist entails recognizing that within cultures certain perceived absolutes exist. The idea that right and wrong are relative doesn’t mean that right and wrong are arbitrary or don’t exist–it simply means that ideals of right and wrong have to be reconstituted within different systems of social and cultural order. Yet Lukes’s book isn’t going to convince the types that need convincing. Still, those of us who think that moral relativism is simple common sense will find plenty of concrete, contemporary, real world ammunition here in case we feel like arguing with a–gasp–moral fundamentalist.
Moral Relativism, available now, is part of the new BIG IDEAS // small books series from Picador Books.
Violence — Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek describes Violence as “six sideways glances” examining how our preoccupation with subjective violence (that is, the personal, material violence that we can see so easily in crime, racism, etc.) masks and occludes our understanding of the systemic and symbolic violence that underwrites our political, economic, and cultural hierarchies. Žižek believes that a dispassionate “step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and promote tolerance,” and that a rampant “pseudo-urgency” to act instead of think currently (detrimentally) infects liberal humanitarian efforts to help others. This is where the fun comes in. Žižek delights here in pointing out all the ways in which we fool ourselves, all the ways in which we believe we’ve gained some kind of moral edge through our beliefs and actions.
I use the words “fun” and “delight” above for a reason: Violence is fun and a delight to read. Žižek employs a rapid, discursive method, pulling examples from contemporary politics, psychoanalysis, films, poetry, history, jokes, famous apocryphal anecdotes, and just about every other source you can think of to illustrate his points. And while it would be disingenuous to suggest that it doesn’t help to have some working knowledge of the philosophical tradition and counter-traditions to best appreciate Violence, Žižek writes for a larger audience than the academy. Yet, even when he’s quoting Elton John on religion or performing a Nietzschean reading of Children of Men, Žižek’s dalliances with pop culture always occur within the gravest of backdrops. Within each of Violence’s six chapters, there’s a profound concern for not only the Big Questions but also the big events: Žižek frequently returns to the Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as major points of consideration. This concern for contemporary events, and the materiality of contemporary events, is particularly refreshing in a work of contemporary philosophy. Undoubtedly some will pigeonhole Žižek in the deconstructionist-psychoanalytical-post-modernist camp (as if it were an insult, of course)–he clearly has a Marxist streak and a penchant for Lacanian terminology. Yet, unlike many of the writers of this philosophical counter-tradition, Žižek writes in a very clear, lucid manner. There’s also a great sense of humor here, as well as any number of beautiful articulations, like this description of the “dignity and courage” of atheism:
[A]theists strive to formulate the message of joy which comes not from escaping reality, but from accepting it and creatively finding one’s place in it. What makes this materialist tradition unique is the way it combines the humble awareness that we are not masters of the universe, but just a part of a much larger whole exposed to contingent twists of fate, with a readiness to accept the heavy burden of responsibility for what we make out of our lives. With the threat of unpredictable catastrophe looming from all sides, isn’t this an attitude needed more than ever in our own times?
I’m inclined to answer, “Yes.” Highly recommended.
Violence, part of the new BIG IDEAS // small books series from Picador Books, is available August 1st.
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