just say no to freakonomic parenting

There’s a lovely passage in an essay by Cynthia Ozick about the trick of personal identity. She is writing about seeing herself as an old woman, and feeling a certain “generational pang” about seeing young people rise up in the literary world that she has long been part of.

“All the same, whatever assertively supplanting waves may lap around me – signals of redundancy, or of superannuation – I know I am held fast. Or, rather, it is not so much a fixity of self as it is of certain exactnesses, neither lost nor forgotten; a phrase, a scene, a voice, a momment. These exactnesses do not count as memory, and even more surely escape the net of nostalgia or memoir. They are platonic enclosures, or islands, independent of time, though not of place: in short, they irrevocably are. Nothing can snuff them.”

This exactness of the person is what so painfully escapes me, what so painfully is missing, when I read about parenting. Amy Davidson, in this week’s New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/parenting-in-an-age-of-economic-anxietyreviews what is surely the stupidest guide to parenting ever monstrously given birth to by a publishing house: “The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids” 

The title is merely the diving board of bad: from Davidson’s account, it gets badder and badder. Davidson’s review is a roundup of parenting books, and all of them share the characteristic that there is no exactness in them – either for the kids or the parents. The only desire the parents have is, apparently, order and peace. This is the setup from the getgo.

“Say that you have two children, or maybe three, and that they fight for what’s theirs. The contested objects are many: cake, Lego sets, the right to various household electronics or to name the family dog. And the children aren’t pleasant about it: they torment each other, and engage in guerrilla tactics distinguishable from those of ruthless insurgents only by their disregard for stealth, which might at least allow you, the parent, a little peace and quiet. Each of them has a story about fairness and what he deserves.”

The idea that contested objects are just there, and that adults are making no territorrial claims through those objects, seems pretty laughable. But it is laughable on a very political order: notice how the blank parents here are on one side, the side of the self evident, and the children on the other side, the side of the insurgents. Sound familiar? Yes, it is neo-colonialism coming to your living room. In that political environment, the freakanomics guide to childrearing is perfectly appropriate, since neo-liberalism is based on the premise that exactness is an obstacle – individuality is entirely defined by consumer choice. No voice, gesture or place that is immune from creative destruction and substitution.

Davidson, happily, is not endorsing the “game theorist” view of family management in her article, but she does, less happily, picture a family setting as a sort of blankness in which the libido plays no part. Parents are perfect little death drives, repetitious little automaton who only want peace. The peace, apparently, of deathly order. Children, as is weirdly common in articles about children, exist only as monsters of disorder. They are either stuffed and cute, or monstrous and quarreling. There is nothing to be thought about them – they do not give rise to thought.  Exactness here doesn’t have a place or name.

We are a long way from Spock and Dolto. I don’t like the journey, frankly, but I do find it noteworthy, inasmuch as it so exactly reflects the political moment.  

“What the book shares with the current parenting moment is the sense that trust is a commodity that’s in very short supply. Thomas, for example, is getting reasonable grades “in his elementary school’s gifted-and-talented program,” but is he really doing his best? Or is he “fibbing” about how hard he’s working, “thinking about Minecraft” when he should be hunkered down with his book project? Raeburn and Zollman suggest deploying the “principal-agent model” to manage the case of “possible underperformers such as Thomas,” with the caveat that, if the incentives are too great, he’d have good reason to cheat. Without measures like “perfect monitoring” and “credible threats” (“Parents and caregivers can use each other as Doomsday machines”), children will give in to a tendency to lie. In the world of game theory, this is not so much a moral problem as a practical one. Without constant child-control manipulations, the middle-class home will fall apart, and there are no limits to the anxiety this creates.”

I cant stand it. I just cant stand it, to quote charley brown quoting sam beckett.   

on not knowing what pokemon go is

To pay attention to pop culture takes energy – like anything else. One can choose to pay attention to, say, Taylor Swift’s feud with Kim Kardashian or not, but attention is not free, and the payoff is not guaranteed. Perhaps, in the end, the feud won’t amuse you. Perhaps it will even leave a sour feeling – you will feel like you didn’t want to go into it.

The pop culture rush, which is administered by thousands of media sites, is supposed to overwhelm any  prudence you might feel about your attention, and even make it laughable that you haven’t “given” it to some phenomenon that everybody knows about. Usually, the media sites can rely on shaming techniques among the audience, who will pick some certain piece of information and make the person who doesn’t know that piece of information feel embarrassed about his ignorance. Shame and information are linked from our earliest days. I see myself using shame, ocassionally, to make Adam know things. I find it weird, when I step back, that I do this. But I do.  Classrooms use this to the extent that a small, attenuated ring of shame is put around the “great books”, or about this or that piece of information in the sciences.

Myself, in the last few weeks I have run into mentions of Pokemon Go whenever I look at a newspaper or magazine. Pokemon go jokes are all over twitter. Yet, so far, I haven’t given my attention to it even to extent of knowing what it is.  Of course, saying this is rather like reversing the poles, and making knowing about Pokemon Go shameful; but I am not trying to head there – instead, the question is at what point a critical mass in pop culture makes one feel that this is something I have to know. Especially if you are a writer trying continually to get a fix on the culture, this is the kind of question you do have to ponder. James Joyce assumed that  a free lance marketer in Dublin in 1904  would know about the semi-smutty stories of Paul de Kock,  and about the paper Tit-bits, and about many of the day’s popular songs.  Ullyses is one of the few novels ever written that tries to exhaust the question of what a character at a given date in a given place would know. Since 1904, the intrusion of popular culture – of images, songs, and games – into the sphere of private life has become exponentially greater.  Even Joyce refined his references. Would a Leonard Bloom in 2016 know, or want to know, about Pokemon Go?

So far, my answer is no. It isn’t as important, or at least it doesn’t float in the semiosphere with such importance, that 2016 would not be describable without it. But I don’t exactly know how I know this. One creates a filter for pop culture information semi-consciously. As much as we live in a hype world, we don’t have a firm idea of where these filters come from. 

london calling opening

Where'd I see this guy? 

Last night we went to the opening of the London Calling show at the Getty. I hated the title, since the Clash song – which the DJ played as we ate fish and chips and drank our wine – is about rioting and the ice age (Thatcherism), not the particular bourgeois fantasies enacted in the paintings in the show. Not that I am criticizing those fantasies, far from it – but there was no punk sensibility there.

The works by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kosoff, Lucien Freud, R.B. Kitaj, and Michael Andrews – composed, according to the curator, Julian Brooks (I think – I couldn’t hear the name of the gent who was supposed to lead the invitees through the justification for the exhibition), a school of London that showed that New York critics who, in the fifties, had proclaimed the death of figuration were wrong. It was a pretty plain aesthetic argument, and I think a false one. Abstraction not only submerged figuration, it produced the conditions that would assure that its resurrection could only be as a damaged style. Indeed, for all Brooks’s burbling about Lucien Freud’s work showing the finest appreciation of the human figure since Rubins,  what was evident was how under the influence of the bomb and the scrawl these painters generally were. Figuration as damage, as casualty: this was the response to abstraction I saw.

My favorite was the Auerbach room. These were truly physical pictures, documents not only of choses vues but the aggregation of material, the clogging, in the visual channel, the eye brought down from its angelic flight into the nervy impulse that organizes it as a thing on a stalk. I’d like to look at those pieces again. I suppose the most famous pieces are the canonical ones in the Bacon room, although myself, I prefered the bicycle pic – a reminder that Bacon was, after all, Irish. I thought of Flann O’brian’s The Third Policeman, that eccentric paen to the bicycle.

What else? L.A., as always, looks terrific from the terrace – the twilight coming in, the mist (or smog, or is it ash?) over the buildings.

Lovely night, really.  

Politics and pathology

On January 17, 1989, a man named Patrick Edward Purdy took an AK 47 into a schoolyard in Stockton, California and opened up on the children, firing 105 rounds. He then killed himself. He was wearing a shirt that was inscribed with the phrase, Death to the Great Satin [sic], and he’d carved the word Hezbollah into the stock of his rife, as well as the words freedom and victory.  Nobody, then or now, has ever claimed that Purdy had the least relation with either Iran or Hezbollah.

I have been thinking of Patrick Edward Purdy as I’ve been reading about the latest slaughterer of children,  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, in Nice. Although I understand why Bouhlel is being discussed as a terrorist, to my mind he is closer to the Stockton murderer than the team that attacked in Paris last winter.  That is to say: if Hezbollah had not been fighting with the US, and had not gotten its name attached to the blowing up of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, I do not think Purdy would have carved their name into his rifle. Perhaps his desire to die would have taken another form.  I suspect that the same thing holds true for Bouhlel. His rapid “radicalisation”, as the police are putting it, was an act not of politics in the broad sense that would include the terror attacks in Paris (and the terror strafing of Yemen city neighborhoods by Saudi jets), but in the narrow sense of politics as a personal pathology. Madness calls to madness in some damaged neural pathway in the killer’s head.

One of the great changes that I have noticed, in the transition from the Cold War world to the post Cold War world, is the fading away of  peace as a political goal. It used to be a standard piece of political boilerplate: every political  candidate in the West was for peace – even if on terms defined by the overthrow of the other side. And the same was true of Soviet boilerplate.  I never thought I’d miss Cold War hypocrisy, but I do. Nixon’s gravelly unction voice saying peace was better than nobody saying peace, ever. Plans for peace – another boilerplate phrase – have gone the way of central planning.

Peace doesn’t break out spontaneously.  

As I was crossing the street yesterday, holding hands with my boy, a truck stopped for us. And I measured it with my eyes as we passed by it and I shuddered.  

woolf and free indirect discourse

Everybody remembers Virginia Woolf’s takedown of Arnold Bennett in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Few remember Bennett’s own takedown of Woolf, which occurred in his review of Jacob’s Room. In that review, Bennett wrote, “I have seldom read a cleverer book than Virginia Woolf, a novel which has made a great stir in a small world. It is packed and bursting with originality, and it is  exquisitely written. But the characters do not vially survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness. I regard this book as characteristic of the new novelists who have recently gained the attention of the alert and the curious; and I admit that for myself I cannot yet descry any coming big novelists.”

In this rather short passage, the emphasis is on cleverness and originality, while, on a lower note, is the idea that this is a novel from and for a small world. The British have a peculiar aversion to the clever – it is a sort of disease, the kind of overthinking that can be overcome with mugs of ale and a lot of greasy food. Underneath the patronizing tone, though, is a serious point. Novels are about – centrally about – creating characters that leave a vital trace in the mind. They “survive” in the mind, having lived on the dead page. This was the principle upon which Bennett rested his confidence that all the cleverness in the world would not make a great, or a “big”, novel; it never occurs to him that something clever and original and that stirred a small world might be a counter-example. It might be that the possibilities of the novel were not exhausted or defined by making characters that survive in the mind. In which case, to go further, perhaps novels are not centrally defined by characters at all, but by a set of relations – for instance, of observations, of style, of the essay and the sketch – that make them, vaguely but definitely, novels.  

That would be one line of defense for Jacob’s Room; but Woolf chose another line, by challenging Bennett’s sense of character and how it is manifested – how, that is, from the dead paper it becomes a live ghost in the mind.

Woolf’s case is built on the division between the external and the internal. For Woolf, Bennett’s mistake is to make the former supreme, and to make the latter a metonym of it. First the house, then the furnishing, then the homeowner. Woolf’s objection is that the homeowner gets lost in the lavish description of the home and the furnishing. Instead of becoming vital, the homeowner becomes a mere token of a type – instead of a character, you have a chess piece. Woolf’s idea is that the motion from the external to the internal is ultimately subordinate to the opposite and primal movement – from the interior, from consciousness, to the exterior, the vast material dross of action and accumulation.

Woolf’s method has been taken to be a defense of subjectivism and of blurred description. These are in turn taken to be morally inferior to objectivity and clarity. However, the most cursory reading of Jacob’s room shows that the exquisite writing takes its sharpness from the external world. In fact, the writing is much less the kind of inward mullling of motive that takes up so much of James.  Woolf’s novel goes out into the streets of London, and into cafes, and into bedrooms, and is far from psychological in the traditional sense.  One has a clear scenic vision of things being experienced.

So what is the dispute about?To my mind, the internal/external division, which was at hand for Woolf, doesn’t quite get to the argument that she is making (which is a bold thing for me to say – and a sort of shitty thing as well, as though Woolf could not think through her own defense. I don’t think that – which would be as patronizing, on my part, as Bennett was on his - but I do think that the categories she was necessarily dealing with had to bend under her treatment in ways that resisted her message  – and that they could not bend enough because the vocabulary she needed wasn’t at hand).  I think what she is ultimately shooting at is what  linguists in the 1960s called free indirect discourse. Pasolini wrote about free indirect discourse in an essay collected in Heretical Empiricism, where he connnects it – that is, the appropriation and collaging of language (in accent, grammar, word choice, etc) – to the epic and the choral.  And to history – to what a Marxist would call dialectical materialism: “It is  certain that every time one has free indirect discourse this implies a sociological consciousness, clear or otherwise, in the author…”

Woolf was long ago stereotyped as impressionistic and lyrical – with the implication that it is other realistic novelists who have the  sociological consciousness. She wrote, so goes the rap, within her “small world”. But I think this is the difference in character building that her essay/reply to Bennett is talking about and taking apart. And I think what she is doing in practice is just this kind of epic scrounging in the fragments and accents of group consciousness.  Groupings – of the people in the Park in Mrs. Dalloway, or around a dinner table in To the Lighthouse, or in the London street in Jacob’s Room – are the central tableau against which consciousness happens in Woolf. One can speak of a collective consciousness, or at least a networked one, that gives us a much different notion of character than that bourgeois heroic one of Bennett’s.  This is where the lateral, seemingly random connections of free indirect discourse take on the task of character building – because what makes character is just this possibility of linguistic appropriation and use, this epic stealing of the words of another. It is not that this level of speech gives us a communism of understanding; instead, it is the ground of the possility of misunderstanding that makes individuality a fleeting thing, a task forever to be reenacted. Individuality is caught in the moment of misunderstanding others. That’s the paradox.  That we have moments of sympathy, of love, or of understanding, is not excluded by this, but the misunderstanding comes first, inherent to the particularity of the subject.  This is why Bennett’s method is so heavy and ultimately, for Woolf, counterproductive. Bennett’s materialism pretends that language is secondary, when the process of leaving a vital character in the mind is a linguistic one. What changed, Woolf implies, is that one has to be clever -- or one is forced to be vacant.  It is the great claustrophobic vacancy of description so dear to the hearts of the inheritors of the 19^th century novelistic tradition - that she wants to get rid of. It is not character they create, but dust collecting bric a brac.