From the issue dated October 26, 2001
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Closing the Curtain on 'Perverse Modernism'By MARTHA BAYLESHow much has changed since September 11? One way to answer is to ponder the impact of the terrorist attacks on the arts (fine and not so fine) and on the amorphous realm called "entertainment."
To say yes is not to find a silver lining in a dust cloud of death. No improvement in cultural tone is worth the life of a single human being, let alone thousands. Nonetheless, something is happening here, and we might as well know what it is. To begin with the uncured ills. Chief among these is sentimentality. For any serious artist or critic, it is dismaying to watch the stark emotion and noble deeds of the first few days get processed into the mannered kitsch of Mariah Carey's recycled pop ballad "Hero," sung on the September 21 telethon, America: A Tribute to Heroes. Sentimentality occurs on two levels. The first is that of the unknown New Yorker who tried to sweeten catastrophe by inscribing a fence in Washington Square Park: "They are not dead, they are just sleeping." The second is that of elites who, seeking their own advantage in the situation, milk popular sentiment: a photo montage of disaster, with heart-swelling music, promoting a network-news show. This will not change. Sentimentality is a favorite dish of the American palate, and there's not much we snobs can do about it. The good news is that the worst snobs, the ones most inclined to sneer, have been forced to admit that cultivated taste is not the most important human virtue. The graves of true heroes are sometimes adorned with plastic flowers. Another uncured ill is the tendency of experts, left and right, to attribute dangerous and unprecedented powers to electronic media. According to certain critical theories, which are on life support in American universities, the masses are so overdosed on TV and movies that they can no longer tell the difference between the screen and real life. At the extreme, you have the sociologist Jean Baudrillard's stale conceit of "hyperreality," a Matrix-like dream world in which reality has been replaced by media "simulacra." Baudrillard's theory is intriguing to think about, and anyone who has watched a disaster film cannot help but note -- and then discount -- the eerie parallel between the way such films look on the screen and the way the World Trade Center conflagration looked on TV. To anyone who was in lower Manhattan, deafened by the roar and choked by the tsunami of debris, the comparison pales into insignificance. Surely even a French theorist can understand that. Nevertheless, a certain type of clever pundit can always be counted on to revive "hyperreality" in a crisis. Take the Persian Gulf War. The brevity of that conflict, the small number of American casualties, and the manner of its televising led Baudrillard himself to quip: "The Gulf War did not take place." Others dubbed it "a simulation," "infotainment," and "a war ... contrived to look like a video game." All to the disgust of one participant, Alex Vernon, a U.S. Army tank commander who wrote recently in The Wilson Quarterly that this "rhetoric of simulation" obtusely assumes that "the hundreds of dead coalition forces and the thousands of dead Iraqis, the maimed, and the sufferers of Gulf War syndrome can apparently restore their lives with the push of a button." The same obtuseness can be found in Neal Gabler, an otherwise sensible writer whose 1998 book Life the Movie recycles Baudrillard's 20-year-old theory under a new name, "post-reality." Writing in The New York Times on September 16, Gabler opined that "the frame of reference," for both the suicide bombers and their worldwide audience, "was the movies." A frame of reference, perhaps. But the frame of reference? It's possible the terrorists watched Die Hard and The Siege. It's possible their hatred of the United States was shaped as much by movies as by flying lessons, fast food, and grim, anomic rooming houses. But when Gabler suggests that American movie images "colonize" these young men's imaginations, he ignores how much more their imaginations were colonized by the apocalyptic teachings of the madrassahs. As for the American people, Gabler says we are so "schooled in movies" that for us "the collapse of the towers" was "only the opening sequence." Knowing the formula, we also knew what would come next: "the solemn rescue, the bonding and resilience in the face of disaster, the grieving before the steeling of resolve." Am I being too sensitive, or does this verge on insult? Were the hundreds of individuals who during those terrible hours died to help others acting out of media-conditioned reflex? What if they had been reading Homer (and for all we know, some were)? Then would their deeds be so cavalierly reduced to monkey-see, monkey-do? The template of heroism we carry around in our heads is frequently depicted in the movies. But so what? The movies didn't invent it. On the contrary, our model of heroism echoes back through uncountable repetitions to the dawn of human history. The same could be said of the ecstatic visions of would-be martyrs "opening their chests to Allah" just before impact. Film is a particularly vivid mode of storytelling. But that's all it is. The stories come from us. Which brings me to the cultural ill that might be cured. In popular culture, we have all witnessed the stampede of certain well-known bottom-liners from anything remotely connected with the attacks: MTV cuts a slang compliment to a female singer as "da bomb"; NBC replaces Fear Factor with Friends; the Clear Channel urges its disc jockeys not to play "questionable" songs ranging from Black Sabbath's version of "Suicide Solution" to Peter, Paul & Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane"; Warner Brothers delays the release of Collateral Damage, a Schwarzenegger shoot'em-up about a firefighter battling terrorists; Rush Limbaugh calls for "unity" with "liberals." Does this mean the entertainment industry is backing irreversibly away from its three staple ingredients: violence, vulgarity, and vitriol? It would be nice to think so, but this retreat has already proved temporary, an evasive maneuver carried out for the usual mixture of high-minded and self-interested motives. Already the industry is getting back to business as usual. Don't Say a Word, a kidnapping thriller, and Training Day, a violent police drama, did well at the box office, and test audiences responded enthusiastically to Universal's November CIA film Spy Game, featuring an exploding office building. Nonetheless, there is one strain in the culture -- both popular and elite -- that just may be permanently affected. I call this strain "perverse modernism," because it grew out of older modernist movements like German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, and Dada. I also call it "the culture of transgression," because its most direct ancestor is the anarchist belief that the right outrageous gesture, made at the right moment and magnified by the media (a century ago this meant newspapers), would cause the repressive social order to implode. The literary scholar Roger Shattuck traces this perverse strain of modernism to late-19th-century Paris, where anarchists assassinated prominent citizens and exploded bombs in public places. One such figure, a young man "of illegitimate birth and hysterical disposition" named Vaillant, threw a nail bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. No one was killed, but Shattuck recalls the tribute paid to Vaillant by the literary critic Laurent Tailhade: "What do a few human lives matter, si le geste est beau?" In the same spirit, the early-20th-century Futurist guru Filippo Marinetti called war "the world's only hygiene" and judged "the destructive gesture of the anarchist" one of four "beautiful ideas worth dying for." (The other three were "militarism," "patriotism," and "scorn for women" -- all elements in the Futurist affinity with fascism.) This cult of aestheticized violence was dampened by two world wars. But in the 1960s it sputtered back to life, as a new generation of artists vowed (in Marinetti's phrase) "to spit on the Altar of Art." Proclaiming their hatred of commercialized culture, various 1960s art movements revived the Futurist (fascist) dream of the bold, in-your-face stroke that will destroy social complacency. The Viennese "actionist" Hermann Nitsche, for example, poured the blood of freshly slaughtered animals over the nude trussed bodies of fellow performance artists. Other actionists, such as Rudolf Schwartzkogler in Austria and Gina Pane in France, took the logical next step of public self-mutilation. If this sounds esoteric, it is. But it wasn't long before these impulses were crossing over to popular culture. Helped along by Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Malcolm McLaren, and countless other visual artists who admired the subversive popularity of rock, perverse modernism became the guiding aesthetic of punk, and from there it spread to the rest of what has since been considered "cutting-edge" popular culture. Scratch the surface of Iggy Pop (as Iggy Pop himself often did), and you will find Gina Pane, hacking herself with razors "to reach an anaesthetized society." Peer down Hannibal Lecter's throat, and you will find the poorly digested remains of Hermann Nitsche. This révolté impulse has long been severed from any viable expectation of result. Indeed, there is a noticeable vacuum at the heart of today's transgressive culture where the old anarchist dream once resided. Nonetheless, a great many people still believe, consciously or unconsciously, that sudden disruptive shock is the purest form of creativity. Hence the compulsion not just to dwell on sex, suffering, and death (the stuff of great art, after all) but to dehumanize them. To turn them into obscenity, by which I mean not pornography but a way of depicting these primal human experiences that is unfeeling, indifferent, detached from the consequences of actions, and contemptuous of moral concerns. How else, in this jaded overloaded age, Epater le bourgeois? By now the reader will have made the implicit connection: Perverse modernism is not the only feature of 21st-century life that can be traced back to anarchism. The other is terrorism. This is not to suggest that perverse modernism causes terrorism, any more than heroism in the movies causes heroism in real life. In both cases, we must search for the common ancestor. That is precisely what the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen did on September 17, when he remarked on North German Radio that the crashing of hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center was "the greatest work of art ever for the whole cosmos." Comparing the attacks to a concert requiring elaborate preparation, he offered the following rave review: "You have people who are that concentrated on a performance, and then 5,000 people are released into the afterlife in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing." Here in pure form we see the moral stupidity of the contemporary arts culture. But (waxing optimistic) here we may also see the beginning of recovery. When a stunned reporter asked Stockhausen whether he considered the attacks a crime, he said yes, "because the people didn't consent. They didn't come to the concert. That is obvious. And no one announced to them, 'You could die.'" If the difference between art and mass murder is "obvious" to Stockhausen, then perhaps the aesthetic principle he embraces of art being a law unto itself, above and beyond all other human considerations, will join the rest of the rubble on the way to Fresh Kills. As for the terrorists, the implication is striking. Their horrific deeds are a perversion not only of Islamic jihad but also of a certain strain within Western civilization -- the object, ostensibly, of their hatred. The pundits have been saying that irony died on September 11. Not this one. Martha Bayles teaches in the literature department of Claremont McKenna College. She is the author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (University of Chicago Press, 1996). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B14
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education