The Beautiful Soul of Steve Almond, or, Why The Baffler Will Never Be Funny

by James Livingston*

I  Indictment

I’ve seen a lot of Steve Almond online since The Baffler published his deconstruction of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  This is where he solemnly explained why their comedy is “almost entirely therapeutic”—how it has abandoned the “radical virtues” that animated the comic impulse once upon a time, when Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain satirized bourgeois propriety in print, and then, much later, when Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks took the stage to attack the moral idiocies of their time, always speaking truth to power.

Almond means to wake you from your lazy consumer complacency by demonstrating that there is only guilt in the affordable pleasure of Stewart and Colbert.  The joke’s on you, see, because you just don’t understand that your laughter sustains the “corporate plantation” that is Comedy Central, which is also Viacom—you might as well be laughing at a minstrel show off Broadway in 1854, thus validating the racism that sustained slavery.  Then as now, you’re “an audience gone to lard morally,” a mental condition, if I read the metaphor right, that matches up with your physical tendency toward obesity.

Almond accuses Stewart, particularly, of diffusing citizen activism by making it “more fun to experience the [Iraq] war as a passive form of entertainment than as a source of moral distress.”  But he also takes Colbert to task for mockingrather than rebutting Bill O’Reilly, for poking fun at the powerful rather than confronting them—the exception to this rule, of course, being the night of the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, when Colbert was the featured speaker.  Except that he didn’t actually confront anybody on that occasion, either.  Oh well.  How can you care about the intricacies of metaphor when the death of “political humor” is upon us?

II  Authenticity

This is a hilarious case of mistaken identity, or would be if Almond weren’t so fucking earnest.  He wants comedians, stand-up and otherwise, to renounce their vocations and be politicians—actually, he wants them to be activists, preferably starving artists removed from any “profit source,” like those loveable guys at The Onion used to be, back in the good old days before their commercial success.  If comedians make a good living from their brand of humor, they can’t possibly be on the side of “some poor schnook who works the assembly line at a factory then goes home to mow his lawn” (so much for the once-heroic working class, now demoted to rural idiocy).  No, they’ve become media celebrities who can “score easy points by playing the humble populist.”  They’re as comfortable as O’Reilly down on Maggie’s Farm, which NewsCorp secretly leveraged decades ago.

So, either Almond doesn’t understand comedy or he doesn’t understand the world we inhabit, the world of our common experience—and by “we,” Steve, I mean the people who, by circumstance or choice, mean to change the world, not denounce it, escape it, or destroy it.  That would be most of us.

In the world most of us inhabit, for example, Bruce Springsteen is not a millionaire who sells out stadiums—he is that, to be sure—he’s the guy with that strong work ethic, that musical talent, and that acoustic genius.  Like Bob Dylan, another millionaire, he hears things the rest of us don’t, and he puts these things into songs that always acknowledge the atrocities and absurdities of everyday life, but he won’t let us abstain from living it.  That’s why we often admire him, sometimes adore him, and always sing along.  He represents working-class America not in spite but because of his commercial success as an artist.  He also represents something more, the kind of American Dream that used to go by the name of the Commonwealth, the place where we strive to be our brother’s keeper. 

Nobody except maybe Steve Almond would accuse Springsteen (or Dylan) of being a corporate shill whose music somehow “diffuses” citizen activism.  But notice what such an indictment would presuppose, and notice, too, how Almond’s complaint against Stewart and Colbert requires these same presuppositions.

First, because Springsteen has made a fortune portraying the lives, the hopes, the dreams, and the furies of subaltern existence, he can’t be an authentic purveyor of such existence.  He has long since left the sociological category of the working class, so he can’t depict its ideological condition with any sincerity or accuracy.  By this perversely reductionist logic of identity politics, yeah, that kind, Stephen Greenblatt can’t properly interpret Shakespeare’s characters except for Shylock, and Mark Naison can’t accurately depict Communist Party activists in the 1930s unless they’re white.

Second, the only artists—comedians, musicians, critics, whatever—who can authentically express the real grievances of those who endure a subaltern existence are those who live it involuntarily, or those who have chosen exemption from the demands of that existence by becoming outlaws, hipsters, or, more quaintly, bohemians.  Those who have earned (or lucked into) release from that exemption by becoming commercially successful are automatically disqualified.  So the only voices Almond will accredit are the ones the rest of us can’t hear on the radio.  In effect, he insists that you can’t speak truth to power if you’ve got any.

Thus authenticity, which either requires or simply is abstention from the world as it actually exists—a thoroughly reified or commodified place—becomes the only aesthetic criterion left standing in Almond’s political complaint against Stewart and Colbert.  The joke’s on him, then, because the authenticity he wants from both entertainers and their audiences is unaffordable.  It is literally priceless, and therefore unavailable.

III  Hegelian Interlude

Almond makes an exception to his rule of authenticity by praising the wildly successful South Park, of course, and I’ll soon ridicule him for that—I mean, c’mon, this shit is subversive, political, even funny?—but for the time being I have to say that he doesn’t understand comedy because his consciousness is so unhappy.

Hegel invented the category of the “unhappy consciousness” in trying to explain the passage beyond the integrated character of the ancient citizen, who was somehow at home in his world.  (For all their differences with Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche followed his lead, and so did Wahl, Kojeve, Lukacs, Horkheimer, and Adorno.)  Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity served as both metaphors and historical instances of this passage—the secular chapters in the same story were Skepticism and Stoicism.  What they all shared, according to Hegel, was an inability, or rather an unwillingness, to read or inscribe their truths in the world as it existed. 

Release or abstention from the corruptions of this world was, then, the path to salvation or enlightenment, because the world had become the impediment to—never the condition of—truth as such.  So the unhappy consciousness typically produced a “beautiful soul,” the man who would be in but not of this world, the man who couldn’t recognize his own implication in its corruptions.

Comedy, defined either as the happy stupidity of humor—can you believe this shit?—or more broadly, as the narrative form that refuses to let things end at the stage of tragedy, is the place where we decide to get ugly and acknowledge that no one is exempt from the corruptions of this world: no more beautiful souls, comedians say, whether they’re writing plays and novels, or doing stand-up, or making fun of FOX News.  You can’t abstain from sin, evil, or power, they insist, so you might as well know that there’s no sanctuary.  Comedians always have to produceironic detachment from shitty circumstances because they begin there, in the world, in the same place the audience comes from. 

Now Hegel knew that a strictly tragic sense of life could issue from this disturbing idea that “the world is ruled by the Devil,” as Martin Luther, his chosen antecedent, explained the situation.  After all, once you acknowledge the universal reification and corruption of your time, intellectual resignation from it, and thus practical acquiescence to it, become perfectly rational: skepticism, stoicism, even cynicism and nihilism, then become the obvious retort to what we call faith, hope, or optimism.  In this sense, the “beautiful soul” isn’t a merely romantic conceit—every generation or so, it becomes a left-wing political imperative.  Ask Kalle Lasn and Chris Hedges over at Adbusters.  Ask Steve Almond over at The Baffler.

But in Hegelian perspective, comedy contains tragedy, and by doing so it gives us good reasons to have faith in each other and hope for our futures.  As Hayden White puts it in Metahistory: “Comedy is the form which reflection takes after it has assimilated the truths of Tragedy to itself.”  Hegel himself was more circumspect in The Phenomenology, and, I would suggest, more devious. 

The “unhappy consciousness”—skepticism, stoicism, early Christianity, etc.—was the form of self-certainty that could appear, in history and in philosophy, when the slave understood that the master was a dimension of his own personality rather than an external figure with absolute power over him, and, accordingly, when the master understood that he had already bought the slave’s knowledge of the world.  At that historical and philosophical moment, however, each was able to realize only an “inner freedom,” an emptysubjectivity that lacked material validation: “Self-consciousness which reaches its fulfillment in the figure of unhappy consciousness is only the torment of the spirit struggling to rise again to an objective state but failing to reach it.”  Or again: “It lives in dread of staining the radiance of its inner being by action and existence.”  As both Jean Wahl and Jacques Lacan suggested, this moment marks the birth of metaphysics.

But comedy as a narrative form works exactly this way, by taking the outward oppositions of tragedy—over here the hero (good), over there the villain (bad), these shall meet ere long and die appropriate deaths, probably at each other’s hands—and making them inward, by making them discordant dimensions of every character in sight.  Where once we witnessed master and slave, we now experience and recognize ourselves.  No more beautiful souls, because no one can rise above or stand apart from the administered inferno that is “the modern time” (Hegel from The Philosophy of History).  Everyone is always already beyond good and evil, because everyone just isgood and evil.

Hegel explained in the Aestheticsthat, like History itself, all dramatic action expresses the “one-sided aspect” of each character, actor, people or nation: “And this is so whether as in tragedy, they are opposed to such in hostility, or, as in comedy, they are displayed within these characters themselves, without further mediation, as a condition of resolution” (my italics).  Because the comprehension of the totality is unavailable to any character—and this is especially true of the great tragic heroes—passion, error, irony, and conflict are the regulative principles of both dramatic action and History itself.  But comedy gets beyond tragedy by treating these as matters of folly, evidence of our common experience, rather than evidence of concerted evil imposed on us from elsewhere by Fate, by the Gods, or by the corporate powers that be.

Toward the end of The Phenomenology, the Bildungsromanof self-consciousness, Hegel got pretty excited about the prospects of his comedic rendition of the human condition, even unto “the modern time,” which he dated from the 18^th century.  Hereafter, he thought, we didn’t have to be the disport of the Gods, the willing victims of Fate, the mute objects of History made by great men.  The “comic spectacle” on offer here was “the return of everything universal into certainty of self,” he announced, “a certainty which, in consequence, is [the] complete loss of fear of everything strange and alien, and [the] complete loss of substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external.”  He concluded:  “Such certainty is a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy, is not to be found elsewhere.”

IV  Fair and Balanced Bathroom Humor

Steve Almond wouldn’t understand a word of the previous nine paragraphs, and not because Hegel is either difficult or irrelevant to the content of comedy.  No, Steve wouldn’t understand because the radiance of his inner being will never be stained by the corruptions of worldly success, nor, I hope, by the indignities of work on any corporate plantation.  He is a beautiful soul.   

But Almond does love South Park, a show whose audience on the Viacom-owned Comedy Central is demographically more lucrative than either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.  That makes it a better “profit source” than what Stewart and Colbert have created.  So why does it get praise rather than derision from our beautiful soul? 

Because it confronts you, the moral lard in the audience—not, mind you, the powers that be—and because, like certain cable news networks, it’s fair and balanced in allocating blame to both Left and Right.  In other words, Almond praises South Park for performing in cartoons precisely what he excoriates Stewart and Colbert for speaking in person—granting legitimacy to every side of the political debate by debunking all sides, thus creating the aura of journalistic objectivity.  How can that be?  Read on.

South Parkindulges in a good deal of bathroom [sic] humor—perhaps inevitably, given that its protagonists are ten-year-olds.  But the show is far more radical than its polished stablemates [Stewart and Colbert] for the simple reason that it is willing to confront its viewers.  Parker and Stone savage both the defensive bigotry of conservatives and the self-righteous entitlement of the left.  They accomplish this not by riffing on the corruption of our media and political cultures, but by creating original dramas that expose the lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications of the viewing audience.

So the Left and the Right do deserve equal measures of doubt and of debunking, just like Stewart said in that interview with Rachel Maddow, from which Almond distilled the morally decrepit credo of The Daily Show (“civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity”).  Notice how this sudden reallocation of culpability makes you, the audience, the problem.  When reference to the “corporate plantation” explains nothing, because Parker and Stone as well as Stewart and Colbert work on the same farm, the moral myopia of the viewing audience must fill the explanatory gap.  Get it?  Your lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications are the proximate cause of the death of political humor.

What could be more reassuring?  It’s all about you.  Nothing is true, nothing is real, no matter who said it or created it, so you must doubt and debunk everything, every minute, no exceptions allowed.  That way, any promise or commitment is contingent on what happens next.  That way, you don’t get fooled by belief in anything.  The urge to objectivity—the desperate need to rise above these sordid times—creates a skepticism so radical that it becomes satire, and (surprise!) undermines itself.  The unhappy consciousness sounds almost funny because he bares his beautiful soul.

V  Almost Funny

Like I said, almost funny, as in the sentimentalities attending patriotic ceremonies, where universal agreement rather than universal discord is presupposed.  As I have written elsewhere, the conscious abstention from the new possibilities of visual representation in comics and film animation makes South Park a kind of radio show, almost all sound—every character is a little round cutout distinguishable mainly by voice.  It’s a television show for the blind.

But there’s something happening here that is worth remarking, and its name is shit.  This show is the most amazing study in anality since Jonathan Swift, or maybe Martin Luther, and it marks a moment in what we have come to know as globalization.  The world elsewhere intrudes on this benighted suburb as anal probes from outer space and as Father Christmas from the sewer (“Mr. Hankey”), the piece of shit that heals ethnic and ideological divisions with large doses of excrement.  Santa and Satan become interchangeable parts.

We could of course sanitize these large scatological investments by calling them “bathroom humor,” as Steve Almond does, or dismiss them as functions of the backward, frat-boy humor of the creators—we could say that the indefatigable anality of South Parkhas nothing to do with contemporary culture.  But that’s an evasion of what makes the show almost funny. 

Why does shit always represent the comedic principle of reconciliation and universality in South Park, for both the audience and the creators, if not for beautiful souls like Steve Almond?  What if Parker and Stone are onto something?  What if you, the audience, gets the running joke?

In the 16^th century, Luther explained that “money is the word of the Devil”—this Evil One was the modern Protestant version of the ancient and medieval Trickster, and he ruled the world—so that bondage to the new world of capitalism meant surrender to the Demonic.  The Devil and commodity fetishism always go together, as Norman O. Brown an Michael T. Taussig have more recently explained.  Like Luther, they have also explained that since money was more or less excrement—in dreams and in archaic cultures, money always appears as some kind of shit—this surrender to the Demonic was a way of dredging human beings in their own feces.  If the world is ruled by the Devil, everyone is at least unclean.

The unconscious Protestantism of South Park reanimates this recognition and acceptance of the demonic forces of globalized capitalism.  We’re all awash in our feces, it tells us—suburban Americans are no less subject to the financial forces driving globalization than Chinese or Mexican peasants—and in this sense the cartoon series is a primitive, ant-realist rendition of Karen Finley’s equally excremental vision of a world turned inside out.

But if everything has a price, no matter where you are on earth, then everything has turned to shit.  No brand of authenticity is any longer available.  The question South Park makes us ask, is, so what, or, now what?  The answer Parker and Stone have so far offered goes like this.  Darkness falls on our brightly painted suburbs—the excremental Other invades, “the blues moved in our town,” as The Sopranos’ theme song puts it—but we’re going to laugh about it anyway, because faith in the future of the American Dream isn’t any more rational than belief in the Devil.  This tragedy may well look like comedy before we’re through: keep watching.

South Parkcontains an unhappy consciousness, then, but it excludes beautiful souls.  The laughter it allows is the nervous kind you stifle at funerals, weddings, and in confrontations with people you can despise or dismiss.  It’s almost funny.  Steve Almond thinks it’s important old-school political humor because the people it lets him despise or dismiss are you, the viewing audience.

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*James Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers University, is a frequent guest blogger here.  He blogs at Politics and Letters. 
--LDB

Against Irony

"irony, language device, either in spoken or written form in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the literal meanings of the words or in a situation in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs" (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As historians, most of us probably take pleasure in highlighting ironies of the past. On occasion I point out ironies (perhaps as a way of showing how clever I am). For example, in the first chapter of my manuscript-in-progress on the culture wars, I write: “Many radical feminists learned how to think about personal politics as members of various New Left organizations, especially SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This was ironic, of course, since politicizing the personal, taken to its logical conclusion, led many women to believe that the New Left organizations to which they belonged were chauvinistic. Stokely Carmichael’s notoriously misogynistic claim that ‘the position of women in SNCC is prone’ symbolized the need for women to prioritize their own liberation.”

But should irony be an epistemological or political commitment? Several of my fellow USIH bloggers seen to think so. In his excellent book, Freedom to Offend, Ray Haberski positions himself between the two poles of the debates over sex in art: between the censors on the one hand, and the first amendment absolutists on the other. Ray claims such a position is where irony lives. Similarly, L.D. Burnett has written the following at this blog: “Irony. Humility. Detachment. This is what history has to offer.”

In his comments on James Livingston’s recent post about the historian’s obligations, Dan Wickberg concludes with what I take to be a call for epistemological irony (even though he doesn’t use the word): “All we’ve got are the tools we’ve got; critique is a modernist, historicist form. This seems hardly a reason for despair—it just means that the chastened and humble form of modernism is a better one for living than the totalizing and assertive form of endless revolution and dynamic progress. Maybe we need a new Stoicism—stop thinking you’re stuck, and you’re not. But don’t jump off a moving train—the results can’t be pretty.”

Epistemological wariness of “totalizing” forms of thought is one of the calling cards of  the ironic detachment so central to postmodernism. Of course, ironic detachment was also one of the signal sensibilities of Cold War liberalism, a liberal variant obsessed with consensus, pluralism, technical expertise, detachment, and irony, a zeitgeist that found its apotheosis in Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. According to the so-called pluralist thinkers who dominated American social thought during the 1950s, the era of encrusted ideologies, whether expressed from the left or from the right, had been rendered outmoded by the age of affluence. Government by scientific experimentation was the new order. President John F. Kennedy certified this technocratic ethos in a 1962 speech in which he declared that the nation’s problems were merely “technical and administrative” and, as such, “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

The pluralist thinkers were wrong about a lot. The greatest movement in their midst—the civil rights movement—was inspired by an epistemological orientation more attuned to what educational philosopher Theodore Brameld termed an “audacious and cosmic vision.” More damning to the pluralist thinkers, their ironic detachment from the anticolonial movements of the world often served as cover for U.S. aggression. Furthermore, they were not detached in the Cold War. They were more often decidedly in favor of aggressive American policies against the Soviet Union and its sphere, as if the encrusted ideologies operant in Russia were justification for American foreign policies based on equally encrusted ideologies. Ironic indeed.

In his provocative piece in the current edition of The Baffler, Steve Almond criticizes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for what amounts to their ironic detachment from the horrors of our society. He writes:

“Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”

Stewart’s shtick, like all among the ironically detached, is to portray himself above the fray. Almond illustrates this by way of a conversation he had with his guest in 2010, Rachel Maddow:

“…during [the interview] Stewart trotted out one of his favorite canards, that ‘both sides have their way of shutting down debate.’ Maddow asked, ‘What’s the lefty way of shutting down debate?’ ‘You’ve said Bush is a war criminal,’ Stewart replied. ‘Now that may be technically true. In my world, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the Nuremberg trials. . . . But I think that’s such an incendiary charge that when you put it into conversation as, well, technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter.’ This is the Stewart credo distilled: civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity.”

Is this the same thing as saying ironic detachment at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity? I guess what I’m asking for is a defense of irony from those committed to irony. I’m honestly curious. (By the way, is it ironic to be committed to irony?)

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #3: Keith Woodhouse

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 3 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Keith Woodhouse, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. Monday's entry came from Eric Brandom, and Tuesday's from Adam Parsons. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]

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Before Occupy Wall Street, before the WTO protests in Seattle, before No Logo and Adbusters, there was The Baffler, taking on a corporate ethos slowly insinuating itself into American popular culture. The magazine first appeared in 1988 to fill what its founders viewed as an empty space in cultural criticism on the Left, a space opened up by the retreat of academics further into their particular niches and schools of thought. It ran intermittently from 1988 to 2001, and then even less frequently (fewer than one issue a year) through 2007. There was a brief revival in 2010. Now The Baffler has returned with the institutional backing of the MIT Press. The first new issue is out and is numbered 19, suggesting continuity rather than a fresh start.

Reviewing a magazine is an odd practice because while all magazines strive for coherence within articles, far fewer attempt coherence between them. The Baffler is different, as the new editor-in-chief, John Summers, makes clear in his introduction to the issue. “Our mission” Summers writes, “is to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence” (p.8). In the case of issue 19 that debunking is aimed generally toward technology, the high-tech industry, and what the geographer Richard Florida likes to call “the creative class.” The notion that the twenty-first century is a time of unprecedented and accelerating technological breakthroughs is, according to Summers, a bunch of crap. Placing all those supposed breakthroughs in historical perspective, he says, leads to the sneaking suspicion that the tech industry has succeeded “mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products…that have been kicking around history for quite some time” (p.8). It is, it turns out, an era of low expectations, or of moderate expectations cheaply satisfied.

The centerpiece of the issue – the longest article, and the inspiration for the cover art – is David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Graeber starts with a simple question: Why haven’t we gotten all the cool stuff promised to us by mid-to-late-twentieth-century depictions of the future, stuff like invisible force fields, hoverboards, interplanetary travel, and flying cars? He offers a rich and complicated answer, reaching back decades and involving a constellation of influences.

Graeber starts with a central irony: despite the serious claims of many 1960s intellectuals that fully mechanized factories would liberate human beings from menial work, it was not technology but outsourcing that freed many Europeans and North Americans from the assembly line. By the 1980s consumer products were increasingly made not at home in high-tech factories by robots but rather abroad in low-tech factories by displaced rural workers. If Marx was right that profits can be extracted only from human labor, Graeber notes, then there are powerful incentives in place to avoid at all costs the 1960s fantasy of automated production.

Market imperatives mixed with political ones determined the nature of technological innovation in the United States. The moonshot was probably largely responsible for unreasonable expectations about commercial space travel and vacationing on Mars, and for Graeber it was little more than a public relations effort to prove that capitalism could out-innovate communism. Once the United States had established its mastery of outer space, it was free to funnel the vast majority of its technological development funding into military research to insure its mastery of the planet’s surface as well. The story that the big-government scientific projects of the 1960s gave way to the entrepreneurs-in-a-garage breakthroughs of the 1980s, Graeber explains, is inaccurate. The government continued to spend many of the nation’s research dollars, but in an effort to create military and surveillance hardware that could project American power and undermine working-class politics. Government research bore our missiles aloft but left drivers on the ground.    

Still, as long as research is being done, for whatever reason, shouldn’t there be a slow parade of inventions and discoveries? Yes, probably, Graeber says, but the problem is that we have shifted from “poetic technologies” to “bureaucratic technologies”; instead of thinking freely in order to create whatever people dream about, researchers think within the confines of what can be easily proven to work and defended from criticism, and that’s only when they are not buried by paperwork. This hyper-bureaucratic state of affairs is a consequence of partnerships between government, academia, and private business, partnerships suffused with corporate thought. It is a mistake to assume, Graeber suggests, that bureaucratic inefficiency is a product of government; it is equally a product of market-based business practices that eschew free-range, curiosity-driven work in favor of immediate applicability.

On this point, Will Boisvert agrees fully with Graeber. His contribution, “Future Schlock: Creating the Crap of Tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab,” is a sharp case-study in bureaucratic technologies. The much-ballyhooed MIT Media Lab is supposed to be an incubator for innovations in consumer products, at least according to its many journalistic boosters. According to Boisvert it is in fact a junkyard of trivial and ephemeral doodads. A toothpaste that signals the temperature and weather through its taste. An alarm clock that runs away from its perch in order to force its owner out of bed. A remote-controlled teddy bear. Interactive wallpaper. Guitar Hero.

The real innovation, Boisvert tells us, is the lab’s business structure. Corporations fund the lab but cannot direct its work, and receive only non-exclusive rights to whatever eureka moments occur. That way the lab at least seems independent while it accepts private cash, although companies can fund individual graduate students, can use faculty members as “consultants,” and can place their own people on research teams. Corporations have funded specific university research for decades. But the result of the Media Lab’s generalized corporate funding is an even greater drive to demonstrate the marketability of the lab’s work, if only to build a track record. And the Media Lab is not an anomaly; similar institutions exist at several universities, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California.

Graeber and Boisvert both look at the contemporary technological landscape and see a desert. It’s a desert filled with gizmos, but a desert nonetheless since so many of those gizmos are little more than distractions or novelties. Graeber has an explanation for this: defenders of capitalism are trapped between two competing impulses. On the one hand, they want to suppress the idea of any sort of liberatory technology (or, really, just differenttechnology) that could re-order the economic hierarchy, and so they want to limit the notion of technological possibility. On the other hand, they want to reinforce the belief that capitalism brings technological innovation, and so they want to encourage the understanding that innovation is happening all the time. The tricky balance between these impulses is to stir up excitement around minor products with negligible features, like phones that play video games and televisions that play two channels at once.

But despite their disdain for just about everything sold by the average electronics retailer, Graeber and Boisvert are not Luddites, and neither is The Baffler. The magazine is not criticizing technology but the ideas and systems behind the technology we find today. There is even a longing for a more heroic technology that murmurs in the background of issue 19. Graeber laments the decline of poetic technologies with ambition and substance. Capitalism cannot hold them back forever, he says. “Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed” (p.84). New, important technologies will arise despite the fact that “The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises, even if – as the environmental crisis demands – the fate of the earth depends on it” (p.82).

The idea of massive technological enterprises as solutions to environmental crisis was once anathema to environmentalists, but the scale of global warming is so great that environmentalists may become the greatest advocates of large-scale technological change. They might, as Boisvert does, think nostalgically of a time when technology was big and bold and beneficial. “Back then,” he remembers, “we did not expect machines to be us; they were bigger and stronger and faster than us, and we revered them as they remade the world in ways we had never imagined” (p.98). Given the right motives, that remaking could be for the common good.

Or, maybe, environmentalists would agree more with G. Beato, who writes about Synthetic, L.L.C., the maker of Hipstamatic, in “Disposable Hip.” Beato likes Synthetic not only because the company is the rare tech-firm that makes a profit by selling its product rather than charming venture capitalists, but because of its newest invention, Hipstamatic D-Series. While the original Hipstamatic app imitated the pictures taken by Kodak Instamatic cameras, the D-Series will imitate the entire experience, by including only twenty-four exposures in a “camera” and preventing the camera’s users (the cameras can be shared online) from actually viewing the pictures until the roll is done. Rather than offering consumers unlimited use and total convenience, Hipstamatic D-Series will sell them the idea of limits. “What Hipstamatic D-Series makes clear is that scarcity can once again be ours,” Beato writes (p.110). It is a technology that makes a virtue of less rather than more.

One of the few articles in issue 19 of The Baffler that reads as thoroughly critical of technological fetishism of any kind is Robert S. Eshelman’s “Revolt of the Gadgets.” Eshelman takes on the popular narrative that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests were victories for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones. That sort of lazy, class-unconscious reporting, he says, robs the people who were doing the protesting of agency and simplifies or ignores the economic and social issues behind the protests. No doubt he’s right. But while Eshelman is appropriately upset with all the attention paid to websites and telephones during the protests, I imagine he would be willing to admit that technology can play an important supporting role, at least, in social uprisings.

Eshelman might agree, in other words, with Graeber and Boisvert and Beato that the problem is less technology itself than its production and reception. He might even agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, by far the most techno-optimistic of The Baffler’s contributors. In an excerpt from his novel 2312 Robinson describes a future in which the solar system is colonized with “ terrariums” that replicate Earth’s basic environmental conditions and allow people to live on other planets. In Robinson’s imagining, colonists leave behind them not only Earth but the planet’s capitalist economy as well. The rest of the solar system becomes an opportunity to set up a non-market economy, regulated by a single computer program run on a quantum computer that determines precisely how much should be produced and where it should be distributed. A revolution on Mars helps establish the new economy system-wide, and capitalism retreats into a largely unregulated “marginal economy” that exists mainly for recreational purposes. This is as heroic and as poetic as technology gets.

The Baffler #19 is a magazine critical of the technology industry but hopeful for technology. It is also a magazine concerned with the technological present and future but oriented primarily toward the past. Despite the last line of John Summers’s introduction – “We have seen the future, and it doesn’t work” – The Baffler looks mostly over its shoulder. Some articles, like Graeber’s and Boisvert’s, are about the present but look wistfully back to a more hopeful technological era, to what Boisvert calls the “heroic Machine Age,” when flying cars were still just over the horizon. Other articles are more explicitly about recent or not-so-recent history. Rick Perlstein considers the rise of Ronald Reagan and concludes that his success was less a matter of social and economic policies than of his unrelenting optimism. Chris Lehmann reviews the early-twentieth-century work of novelist Ernest Poole, and finds that the current recession and Occupy Wall Street’s response echo Poole’s own proletarian stories. Jim Newell looks to his own past in a funny remembrance of his experience parroting monetary theory in front of Ben Bernanke in the final round of the Fed Challenge – a sort of Model U.N. for economics geeks – several years before Bernanke’s own, real-world Fed challenge.

A historical sensibility frames the whole issue. Early on there is an excerpt from a memo written by the economist James Galbraith in the summer of 2008 and sent to the Obama campaign, warning of the potential economic calamity to come. The memo went unanswered. Near the end of the issue is an excerpt from an article by James Agee depicting the lives of Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression – the article that would eventually become the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – sent to Fortune Magazine in 1936. The article went unprinted. The inclusion of Agee’s piece not only gestures toward the past and another example of boom-and-bust capitalism, but also portrays a much more technologically innocent – or impoverished - time. After reading about websites and iphone apps and consumer gadgets, it is all the more moving to read Agee’s spare and matter-of-fact descriptions of horse-drawn wagons, roadside picnics, and picking and storing cotton. On the weekends the three farming families that Agee follows might go by wagon to Moundville, a city of 500, where once in a long while the local school would show a movie, something few members of these families had ever witnessed.

The historical orientation of The Baffler#19 may be in part the influence of John Summers, the new editor-in-chief, himself a historian. But I think it is something more than that, and points to one of the few shortcomings of an otherwise great issue. The Baffler hasn’t found its sweet spot: it doesn’t seem quite sure of what it is doing. It knows what is wrong: the “wreck of dogmas, bound in shallows and miseries,” in Summers’s words, that got us here, and to which we risk returning when the recovery comes. “The Market is understood not as a fallible mechanism…” Summers writes, “but as metaphysical truth incarnate” (p.6). That critique, though, is well established by now. Occupy Wall Street has furthered it, as have some labor unions. Left-leaning journals have said it repeatedly. Even the president has made vague suggestions in that direction, if only for rhetorical purposes.

The original run of The Baffler worried – rightly – that in a time of relative peace and relative prosperity the Left was easily seduced by corporate cool, and the appearance of a sleek, trouble-free post-industrial society. Because The Baffler started at a time of Left-Wing complacency it had an especially pointed critique. Corporate values had infiltrated liberal culture and The Baffler took it upon itself to point this out.

The new Baffler has a more difficult task. At a time when the Left is energized, or at least paying attention, and when everyone has a blog to stand on and shout from, it’s not clear what street corner The Baffler is laying claim to. It’s worth pointing out, for instance, the disappointment behind both Silicon Valley’s successes and the glamour of the creative class, and The Baffler does this as well as anyone. But fables of techno-utopia are not nearly as hegemonic as were the fantasies of post-industrial society in the 1990s. For every celebration of the latest dot-com there is another weary sigh that the internet, in the end, is just a massive waste of time.

All the looking back that The Baffler #19 does, then, is probably a matter of taking stock. “How did we get here?” is the question of the moment. Even Thomas Frank, one of the magazine’s founders, seems somewhat perplexed. In a piece on the unburstable bubble of Washington, D.C. consensus called “Too Smart To Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly,” Frank usefully runs down the several examples of common wisdom in the capital that proved totally wrong over the past decade and for which there was no fallout whatsoever. Surely, he suggests, this sort of fatuousness can’t go on much longer, before admitting that of course it can, and wondering “what kind of blunder it will take to shatter this city’s epic complacency, its dazzling confidence in its own stupidity” (p.16).

The next step for The Baffler is probably to get past the “How did we get here?” question to mapping the terrain of “here.” This is especially crucial at a time when liberals are wandering through a dark political woods with little sense of direction. It’s what the old Baffler did so well, and the new one undoubtedly will too. John Summers and the magazine’s staff clearly know what they’re doing – the first issue of the third time around is packed with good writing and packaged well. We’ve seen The Baffler’s future, and it works.

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #2: Adam Parsons

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 2 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Adam Parsons, a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University. Yesterday's review was by Eric Brandom, and tomorrow's will be authored by Keith Woodhouse. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]
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In his editorial introduction to the newest issue of the revived Baffler, John Summers (who will, I hope, forgive me for perhaps reading too deeply into his remarks) sounds like no one quite so much as Voltaire responding to the Lisbon earthquake. “Has the market god,” he thunders, “ever appeared so remote and mysterious as it does in the present crisis?” While the ostensible theme of the issue is technology, in many of the pieces, as in Summer’s introduction, the real question is theological: where, as Summers asks, is the god of the market? Why have its priests (who, with their “mind-cure” homiletics, read as decidedly mid-century Protestant clerics) failed so miserably to produce a brave new world with their endless ministrations?(p. 7)

Few of the authors wax so openly theological as does Summers; the exception is Barbara Ehrenreich, who examines the relationship between early human religiosity and new, mystical ideas about the curative power of animals. Nevertheless, many of the entries in this issue are devoted to attempts to answer the question of why, after all the assurances, after all the predictions, there has been no deus ex machina in the late capitalist world; of why our societies are left waiting on hilltops like so many bands of disappointed Millerites. None are more focused on this question than David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Citing a “sense of disappointment” bred by the failure of a “generational promise” made to the children of the Cold War that technological wonderment lay in their future, he argues that even our most impressive inventions are merely Baudrillardian hyper-real simulations of objects and activities we had once dared to imagine ourselves making, as it were, flesh (p. 66).


Rather, Graeber argues, what technological advances have accrued have been either mundane or politically expedient, and often both. Information technologies have not created a “workless utopia,” but, on the contrary, have allowed for the large-scale precarization of a workforce which is at the same time driven to work longer hours and to relax the work/leisure boundary. Advances in more tangible fields like robotics - once central to the techno-utopian dream - have instead been turned to political ends. The most pressing political end, of course, is the preservation of neoliberalism, which he imagines future historians describing as a “form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones,” a system concerned with its own perpetuation rather than with its viability in any substantive sense (p. 75). However (and here we return to theodicy) it has become eminently clear that neoliberalism has failed not only to provide the kind of future which it has promised, but also to provide the basic goods - a rising middle class, intellectual and technological innovation, geopolitical stability - which it offers to justify its present stranglehold on power. To succeed this dead god, Graeber offers the promise of spontaneous creativity. This offer comes, of course, as no surprise to those familiar with his political activities.

A similar hope animates Kim Stanley Robinson’s excerpted novel 2312, which imagines a humanity who, having expanded to fill the solar system, have constructed for themselves an economy which is equal parts Kurzweil and Belloc. In this interplanetary Mondragon, humans occupy themselves with pastoral fantasy writ large, constructing entire private biomes in hollowed-out asteroids. Notably, Robinson alone in this issue offers a concrete and winsome view of the future. The other piece of speculative fiction, Chris N. Brown’s strange and compelling short story “Edge Lands,” imagines a more sinister possibility in which the creative impulse has canvases both larger and more alive, but is restricted to an elite class of self-referential and self-modifying socialite high artists.


Self-referentiality among the would-be cultural elite is not, however, a dystopian fantasy, suggests Maureen Tkacik. On the contrary, we can have all we want right now, in the form of so-called “Thought Leaders,” or, as Tkakic calls them, the “Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic” (p. 114). In particular, she is concerned with tracing the similarities between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journal Encounter and the array of centrist think tanks within which Atlantic editor David Bradley seeks to position his publication. More interesting, however, is the compelling, if occasionally tacit, case she makes for the intellectual affinities between contemporary centrism and the “mind-cure faith” of Bradley’s childhood in Christian Science (119). Convinced of the societal irrelevance of productive labor, she argues, they are also prone to “level the playing field between reality and fiction” (p. 120).

A similar leveling, argues Will Boisvert, has occurred in that Vatican of technological research, the MIT Media Lab. Comically juxtaposing the lab’s inflated descriptions of new technologies (“seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources”) with the mundane devices themselves (in this case, new ways to pick TV channels at a bar), Boisvert, like Graeber, bemoans the absence of real innovation. The devices produced by the lab are not only lacking in novelty, but also in any of the grandeur of a previous age of invention. These are not monuments of ingenuity but “feeble, feckless gadgets” who “simper and cringe at our dieting travails;” in large part, they are simply more efficient tools for the perpetuation of narcissism (p. 98). Boisvert’s indictment of the gadget is something of a shared theme. G. Beato, comparing the iPhone apps Hipstamatic and Instagram, complains of their ability to manufacture and market scarcity itself as a good: we can, their structures inform us, have unlimited information for free, but we must pay to limit that same information. The virtualization of goods which our gadgets enable now requires us to pay more for the absence of goods than for their presence. As always, capitalism provides us with the means to manage the crises it causes - but for a price.

Robert S. Eshelman’s attack on the cult of the gadget is even more pointed: talk of a Facebook revolution in Egypt is not only exaggerated, he says, but wrong, an attempt to put a technocratic mask on working-class agitation centered around trade unions. In his telling conclusion, Eshelman quotes from the memoir of Egyptian Internet activist Wael Ghonim, who is explicit about the inability of social media to connect with working-class Egyptians. According to Ghonim, the Egyptian revolution was “not an Internet revolution... In the past, revolutions happened, too” (p. 106).


If one were to judge only by the contents of the latest issue of The Baffler, in fact, one might think that revolutions and the conditions which cause them happened only in the past: either the temporal past of the earlier United States or the displaced past which Westerners so often imagine for the second and third worlds. The poor and the dispossessed are present everywhere here, and often compellingly so, but they are never our poor: never the poor of east Kentucky, or of suburban Paris, or of Washington Park in Chicago. Rather, along with old-fashioned Egyptian trade-unionists, the reader encounters the poor of Ernest Poole’s socialist novel The Harbor, of post-Communist Russia, of Depression-era Alabama, and of 1930s India. In themselves, these pieces are often impressive, but taken as part of the whole, they reveal a striking absence (or, perhaps, an absence of striking - but I digress).

Analysis of the present political situation is mostly limited to bemoaning failure. Jim Newell closes an otherwise excellent memoir of his time as a member of a championship-winning Fed Challenge team (a sport which is both nerdier and more strange than one might imagine) by moralizing about the damage a “single Randian ideologue” like Alan Greenspan can do (p. 35). Thomas Frank seems genuinely shocked that, in the years leading up to the crash, mainstream economists and pundits were so consistently wrong in ways so consistently beneficial to the wealthy. Even Rick Perlstein’s fantastic analysis of Reagan’s appeal is framed as a lamentation: in this case, for Americans' easy succumbing to the Gipper’s seductive moral imprimatur, which offered a way to escape the self-criticism which the aftermath of the Vietnam War was demanding of them.

The most serious attempt at a concrete prospectus is, to return to the metaphor of religion, atheistic. James K. Galbraith, writing in 2008, advises neither a recourse to the arcane machinations of the Federal Reserve nor the breeding of a better and more moral class of experts but, instead, a return to “collective action on the grand scale”(p. 27). This, he argues, necessarily entails the demilitarization of industrialized economies, both to allow the devotion of resources to the construction of infrastructure and to remove incentives for technological solutions which, like coal power plants, are militarily preferable but socially and environmentally disastrous.

Galbraith is so starkly different, in fact, that one is almost tempted to think that the entire issue is intentionally arranged to make Galbraith seem more attractive. However, even if that is not the case, the revived Baffler works remarkably well. The volume is skillfully edited and, even when it is absurd, not for a moment dull. Marked by a visual style that is almost nostalgically postmodern, it manages to create the same sense of disorientation which its contents so frequently criticize. Perhaps there is some irony here - after all, isn’t the freedom from endless and disorienting stimulation, a la Hipstamatic, precisely what G. Beato suggests we are paying for when we pay for curation?