I suspect almost all of it.
Maniacal Slovenian monster-brain Slavoj Žižek once made a perverse, semi-relevant point about the movie Titanic; he argued that people are so out of touch with their true feelings that they mentally construct fantasies they don’t even want, simply to feel like they have control over their unknowable desires. “How is the catastrophe [depicted in Titanic] connected to the couple, the rich upper-class girl and the poor lower-class boy?” Žižek asked. “After making love, they go up on the deck and embrace again and then she tells him, ‘I will stay with you and abandon my people.’ At that moment the iceberg hits the ship. What’s the point? I claim the true catastrophe would have been for them to stay together, because it wouldn’t work and they would split. It’s in order to save that impossible dream that the ship must sink.”8 Žižek is essentially arguing that because we cannot understand what we want from ourselves and from other people, we construct fictional placeholders that help us feel secure within our emotional confusion. We assemble and embrace false feelings in order to feel normal. In the same way, our inability to comprehend literal messages prompts us to pick arbitrary versions of media that become stand-ins for truth.
The cinema verité on Friday Night Lights only works because I know what it is (and because I have pre-accepted what it signifies). I know its self-reflexive flaws are supposed to indicate that what I’m seeing is closer to reality, so I automatically make that jump with my consciousness. In other words, this entire style of filmmaking only exists to remind me that what I am watching is supposed to be life. And I’m used to this; I am used to things that are constructed solely to make me feel like I am experiencing something natural. State parks and zoos are like this. The personality of Michael Moore is like this. The small talk made between strangers, the noises people make during intercourse, and compliments given to small children are all like this. I don’t know if I could enjoy a genuinely literal TV show about high school football, or if I could spend my life with a wholly literal person.
4A There are many aspects about Ralph Nader that intrigue me, but none more than this: As far as anyone can tell, he’s never had a single romantic relationship in his entire life. None. No ex-wife, no former girlfriends, no secret gay lover, no hookers, no one-night stands with savvy nineteen-year-olds who are hot to take down the Federal Trade Commission. You cannot even find a photograph of Nader that someone might misconstrue. There’s just nothing there. And people have certainly tried to find this information. In fact, people have tried to make this happen: When he was fighting the auto industry in the 1960s, it’s rumored that General Motors hired women to accost Nader in grocery stores and attempt to seduce him, all in the hope of discrediting his single-minded efforts to ensure that new cars didn’t explode on impact. With the possible exception of Morrissey, I cannot think of a higher-profile figure so adamant about appearing asexual.
This makes sense.
It makes sense that Nader could not function inside a romantic relationship, as those are always nonliteral relationships. All romantic relationships are founded on the shared premise of love, a concept defined differently by all people. Conversations between couples are theatrical and symbolic; the first thing anyone realizes the moment they enter a serious relationship is that words (especially during fights) never represent their precise definitions. Nader would be paralyzed by the content of wedding vows—he would want to qualify everything. “In sickness and in health” would become “In sickness, with the possible exclusion of self-contained vegetative states, and in health, assuming neither party has become superhuman or immortal.” It would be a deeply wonkified ceremony, probably held in rural Oregon.
Rivers Cuomo is not asexual, but he has had a lot of relationship problems (or at least he used to). I assume those problems were manifestations of his literalism. Love songs from Weezer usually paint Cuomo as a self-deprecating doofus, and they feel commercially smart because the main character seems like an idealized reflection of the bespectacled hipster nerds who buy his albums. But if the Weezer consumer ends up being a reflection of Cuomo, it’s purely an accident—he’s usually just explaining himself in very specific ways. He does (or at least did) look like Buddy Holly. He did, at one point, grow tired of having sex with people. His interest in Asian girls is not affected—those are the women who consistently arouse him. In the song “Across the Sea,” Cuomo explains how he received a letter from a female fan in Japan9 and became obsessed with the paradox of being loved by someone who was completely absent from his life (at the time, he was depressed and attending Harvard). He sings, “I’ve got your letter, you’ve got my song.” He’s having a one-to-one communication with this woman in a public setting, which is why everyone thinks he’s so emo. But it’s more than that. Cuomo is ignoring the basic principle we all assume is part of the creative process; he is not “creating” anything. If someone wants to analyze the nonsonic elements of “Across the Sea,” they are not performing music criticism; they’re psychologically profiling Cuomo in a totally clear-cut fashion. The only thing that can be deconstructed is the person himself.10 This is why Weezer songs are not taken seriously, or at least not as seriously as they deserve to be. People don’t want to think about singers as humans; they want to think of them as entities who create songs for humans. Moreover, they want to decide how sincere the creator is supposed to be— and the only way to do that is to start with the premise that the message is not the message. It cannot be literal. If it’s literal, the process is already over.
5 “And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us,” wrote David Foster Wallace in 1993, long before this kind of problem had occurred to someone like me. “The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. Irony is based on an implicit, I don’t really mean what I’m saying. So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
When I began writing this essay, Wallace was still alive. And because he was still alive (and because I wanted to write about the absence of literal messages instead of the proliferation of ironic ones, and because I knew I could never compete with the intellectual intensity of his work), it was my original intention to not mention him at all. But then he killed himself. In the wake of his suicide, it seems wrong to neglect referencing his views on what people mean when they say anything in public. Yet I suspect that the (very real) problem Wallace saw in ’93 has evolved into something else entirely. It’s not that we all collectively agree that asking someone what they really mean is banal; it’s that we now assume that the real meaning of every statement is hidden by default. We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it’s too weird to imagine people who aren’t casually lying, pretty much all the time.
Every time I publish a book, I get asked if what I wrote is actually how I feel. If I write a review about Chinese Democracy, people will ask if I really like Axl Rose as much as I claim and if I’m being honest in the way that I describe liking his music. The same thing happens when I write about Saved by the Bell or ex-girlfriends in Minnesota or fictional characters with no ties to reality. The subject matter is irrelevant. My response to these questions is never the same. Sometimes I say, “Yes.” Sometimes I say, “Sometimes.” Occasionally I argue that the things I write are “thought experiments,” or that I am only concerned with the technical practice of writing (with little care for the content), or that I am only interested in forwarding my ideas (and artistically unattached to the manner in which they are presented). Now, all of these answers are partially true. But the deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naïve. How do we know how we feel? I’m likely much closer to Žižek’s aforemen
tioned description of Titanic: There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel. Very often, I don’t know what I think about something until I start writing about it.
However, I do know this (or at least I think I do): When I am in the active, physical process of writing, I am writing literally.
It is always a literal, present-tense depiction of what is cognitively happening in my mind. Now, once a given sentence exists, that might change. Sometimes it changes just four seconds after I type it. But I still believe that sentence should be read in the literal context of its creation. I often wonder if we would all be better off if we looked at all idioms of art in a completely literal fashion, all the time. It would be confusing as hell for the first twenty or so years, but I suspect the world would eventually make more sense than it does now. At least we could agree on whatever it is we’re pretending to understand.
I am no longer afraid to believe what I read, so I will go first.
Q: a lot of the criticisms regarding your work have been tied to its length. How do you feel about that?
A: I’m never sure how to respond to this question. There are certain accepted lengths that works of fiction and nonfiction are supposed to be, and almost everyone sticks to those general parameters. Some writers will go slightly further and some writers will write slightly less, but almost no one exits the format entirely. Those kinds of restrictions never bothered me, but they never interested me, either. I am exclusively interested in new thoughts. I only care about ideas and notions that no one else has ever thought before—not reactions to other media, but unique creations that come exclusively from one source. So if I can get to that New thought in twenty-five or thirty words, that’s all I write. But it usually takes longer. And it’s generally impossible.
Fail
1 There are certain rules I try to follow as a writer. One rule is to never place the word and directly following a semicolon. Another is not to write positively about diabolical mathematicians who murder people through the U.S. mail. As a consequence, I’m nervous about saying anything non-negative (or even neutral) about Ted Kaczynski, simply because there are always certain readers who manage to get the wrong idea about everything. For most of the world, the fact that Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others negates everything else about him. There is only one socially acceptable way to view the Unabomber: as a hairy, lumber-obsessed extremist whose icy brilliance was usurped only by a sinister lack of empathy. Writing about Kaczynski’s merits as a philosopher is kind of like writing about O. J. Simpson’s merits as a running back—at first it confuses people, and then it makes them mad. I would advise against it. You absolutely cannot win.
But who wants to win?
Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It’s the most important aspect of my life that I hate. The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large. I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact, and—on balance—the exponential upsurge of technology’s social import has been detrimental to the human experience. Obviously and paradoxically, I’m writing these sentiments on a laptop computer. And because I’ve felt this way for years (and because I’ve e-mailed these same thoughts to other people), there are those who tell me I’m like Ted Kaczynski.1 The only thing everyone knows about Kaczynski (apart from the violence) is that he was an enraged hermitic technophobe who lived in the woods. His basic narrative has been established: He left academia for rural Montana, he spent seventeen years sending anonymous letter bombs to innocent people he’d never met, he demanded that his thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto be published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he was apprehended in 1996 after his brother and the FBI deduced that Kaczynski was the Unabomber. All of that is true. This is why the Unabomber matters to historians: He’s a fascinating, unique crime story. But the problem with that criminal fascination is how it’s essentially erased the content of his motives. Kaczynski believed he had to kill people in order to get his ideas into the public discourse. He was totally upfront about this: “If [I] had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted,” he plainly writes in Industrial Society and Its Future. “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” On the most primitive level, this goal succeeded. But not the way he hoped. Because Kaczynski sent bombs to people, nobody takes anything he says seriously (they might in three hundred years, but they don’t right now). Despite the huge circulations of The New York Times and The Washington Post and its ever-present availability on the Internet, the “Unabomber Manifesto” is an unread, noninfluential document. And that’s regrettable, because every day, the content of Industrial Society and Its Future becomes more and more interesting. It’s like an artless, bookish version of the Kinks song “20th Century Man,” amplified by a madman who’s too smart to be reasonable. I will grant that it contains a lot of problematic fascist ideology (not surprising, considering that the author was a problematic fascist who shared both the good and bad qualities of Martin Heidegger). But it’s not nearly as insane as it should be, at least relative to how we view its author. I can easily imagine a distant, dystopic future where it’s considered the most prescient work of the 1990s.
As I read it now, three things strike me:
1. As it turns out, I am nothing like Kaczynski. In fact, I represent precisely what the Unabomber hates about humanity, as do most of the people who embody the target audience for this book.
2. Just about everyone who hasn’t read Industrial Society and Its Future assumes it’s a screed against technology, and sometimes it is. But it’s mostly about the concept of a specific type of political freedom. Kaczynski is not interested in feeling free; Kaczynski is interested in a kind of freedom most people don’t even realize is possible.
3. Industrial Society and Its Future was written by an isolated man living in a cabin without electricity during the 1980s and early ’90s. The text mentions the Internet several times, but one has to assume it was impossible for him to fully understand what the Internet would eventually become. Yet Kaczynski’s core ideas about this specific technology are competitive with those of virtually everyone who’s written about it since. He couldn’t have fully understood what he was writing about and his language is often unsophisticated, but his sense of the web’s inherent problems is natural and spot-on.
He was a bad person, but sometimes he was right.
2 The psychological profile of Ted Kaczynski reads like an origin story for someone who’d eventually become one of the Watchmen: Born in 1942, he’s smart and weird. His IQ in fifth grade is 167. He’s so smart that they skip him from sixth to seventh grade, and this ruins his life. He’s teased constantly and has no friends. The socially retarded Kaczynski is accepted into Harvard at the age of sixteen and immediately excels at math, specializing in the field of geometric function theory. But something unorthodox happens while at Harvard—he takes part in a psychological experiment that’s based on deception. Participants in the study believe they are being asked to debate philosophy with a collegiate peer, but the “peer” is actually a lawyer whose sole purpose is to aggravate and attack the unwitting applicant; Ted has unknowingly volunteered for a stress test. When the reality of the hoax is eventually explained to Kaczynski, he feels betrayed and outraged. This experience seems to change him. At his eventual trial, Kaczynski’s lawyers will argue that this was where his hatred of authority truly began.
After earning a PhD from the University of Michigan, Kaczynski takes a post as an assistant mathematics professor at the University of California–Berkley in 1967, but he leaves the position in ’69 without explanation. Two years later he starts living in a remote Montana cabin; six years after that he
starts mailing homemade bombs to people. Because his early targets were either universities (UN) or airlines (A), authorities dubbed him the Unabomber. Part of the reason he was able to avoid apprehension for almost twenty years was his ability to embed the bombs with misleading clues: He kept using the code word wood in the missives, sometimes inscribed the random initials “FC,” and once included a note to a nonexistent person named “Wu.” Since these were the only clues the FBI had, they always pursued them to the ultimate extreme (which was always a dead end). Our only visual aid was the most recognizable police sketch of the twentieth century, a preposterously generic image that suggested (a) the Unabomber didn’t like the sun in his eyes and (b) he owned at least one hooded sweatshirt. Had Kaczynski’s own brother2 not figured out who the Unabomber was after the manifesto’s publication, it’s plausible that Kaczynski would never have been caught.
Now, before I go any further, I want to stress that I am not a “fan” of the Unabomber. None of the bombs he sent were justified. Every person who was hurt was hurt for no valid reason. But I still want to think about the reasons why he sent those bombs, and those reasons are found in Industrial Society and Its Future. He became a domestic terrorist so that people would consume this document. In and of itself, that relationship is immaterial (a manifesto doesn’t become important just because its writer is merciless and desperate). The main thing one can deduce from Kaczynski’s willingness to kill strangers is that he is an egotist. That said, the fact that a document’s creator is an egocentric murderer does not preclude the work from being worthwhile (Phil Spector shot a woman in the face, but that doesn’t make the harmonies on “Be My Baby” any less beautiful). The fact that Kaczynski has a deeply damaged psyche doesn’t mitigate its value at all: Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.
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