i just started a master's program basically in critical theory. i actually don't even like theory that much, but i figured it was a good idea because i haven't read very much and i want to start a phd in the next couple years. i'm not a very insecure person intellectually, and i am certainly not insecure about my education nor my intellect, but it always makes me feel weird to talk about theory. i feel like for a long time it was something that was only of interest to the worst men i knew - that it was some kind of trick, that a casual conversation about foucault or baudrillard was scattered with landmines that would reveal that i'm actually not well educated or not very bright. i think it comes from high school, from doing high school debate. as i got older, theory seemed to be the exclusive domain of the most irritating people i knew, mostly men. the women who were interested in hegel at my university were fine, but most of the men i knew who were into theory were awful. they talked about critical theory as if it were a cudgel to wield against the less enlightened--like it was all sort of a game. when it came to things like gender performance and race theory, it seemed absurd to me to take it lightly. if you deal in these sort of things, you should at least take them seriously, right?
i've been reading sally rooney and gwendoline riley, and i've been thinking about what it means to love someone else. a small question, obviously. i want to be in love, i want my life to be suffused by love, i want to have that sort of unthinking giving-myself-over to another person. i want to let someone else's whims rule entirely over my emotions, to feel things sublimely.
but also - what does it mean to love other people more generally, not the specific stomach-twisting urge of romantic love directed toward one person but a diffuse glow laid over the whole world? i've been writing a friend very long emails about this for about the last month, which i will excerpt here:
"[The emails in BEAUTIFUL WORLD WHERE ARE YOU] read to me as a genuine ongoing conversation between Alice and Eileen about what it means to be a human adult in the first world in this century, which is to say to experience both a wave of technological advancements which make life easier (everything from dishwashers and cheap clothing to prepacked foods and public transit) and the knowledge that these advancements are not only unequally distributed, but that in fact our access to them is predicated on the suffering and oppression of others. We use our iPhone to surf the internet to find out that the blue cobalt used to make its battery was mined using forced child labor, and then the battery eventually stops working and we have to buy a new one anyways just to be the sort of human who can live in this privileged and precarious world, so we can check our work email on the bus or text our friends to coordinate a night out.What really spoke to me about the book is how it articulates how painful it is to be a person who cares about others. I don't know, maybe that's not the phrase, it sounds self-indulgent. But how do we go on living knowing that we benefit from harm caused to others, and that there's practically no way to extricate ourselves from that system? I don't know if I am entirely with Rooney on her specific conclusions--that love, towards our friends and our families and our communities, is the only way out--but I find her commitment to them quite moving.
It's interesting that you mention relating to Simon and his faith, because we actually get quite little from his point of view in the book. We learn actually much less about his faith than about how Alice and Eileen feel about it, and about the difficulty of finding a moral center for your life outside of God (Worth noting here that Rooney herself is a communist, God bless her and keep her), despite the fact that almost everyone in the novel except Simon finds the idea of God absurd. If God is dead, what are we left with? I think it's a Catholic thing, maybe, or an Irish thing (this is not a problem that Jews have, or the problem re: God being dead that Jews have is a different one, which I can explain some other time). I did find it interesting that for all their political and moral commitments, Alice and Eileen seem to not actually be doing all that much politically out in the world. Simon is the one who works in politics, trying to make the world a better place, but he has very little faith in his own ability to do so. It's odd to me that SR would write a book that fundamentally has very little faith in the ability of people to make actual change -- there's no implication in the book that anything anyone does will actually make a difference, and Simon's political work is just that--work, which provides him a spiritual reward (unending work, because he needs thankless work and to make a martyr of himself to be happy) without the promise of any actual progress. A more charitable reading of the book would assume that Alice does some political work with her books (though she doesn't seem to think so from the tone of her emails) and that Eileen is simply too poor, but I don't know, it feels like the book presupposes that nothing we do politically actually has any effect, that we have to figure out how to live in this terrible and wonderful world (as described above) without any real hope of changing it. I suppose in that case it makes sense that the conclusion that our two narratrices / heroines eventually reach is that all that matters is love. What else is there, if we've given up hope otherwise?
"I think it would be great if going to the bar with friends was a universal experience; what I have a problem with is that my trip to the bar is carried along by an invisible machinery, a machinery which is constructed so as to go largely unnoticed, a machinery which crushes people less arbitrarily lucky than I (born in the US, born white, born wealthy, born able-bodied, etc ad infinitum) under its wheels. Benjamin writes in On the Concept of History--the essay with the Angelus Novus, the one I love-- that "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Of course, Benjamin is writing in the context of historical materialism -- his argument more generally is that historicism sympathizes with the victors of any given struggle; "Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." I think his argument about the nature of history applies here too, though, that "civilization" as we know it is a papering-over of all of the forms of brutality which have created it, a form of wilful ignorance of all the backbreaking labor which enables the production cultural treasures. I think it would be wonderful if everyone had the same opportunities for joy, I think it would be wonderful to be able to live my modern Western life without guilt, but as it currently stands it's impossible. "
"What I mean more is that I feel guilty for just living the life that I do, that every aspect of my life is a monument to the suffering of others and most of the time I don't even think about it--if I thought about it, I'd never be able to get anything done, I'd just be crushed under it all. I can't decide which is worse. I try to buy the most ethical eggs at the supermarket while my tax dollars send bombs to kill children. I cried the other day watching a video of a Palestinian man being reunited with his mother after being freed from years of imprisonment in Israel. I cried watching a video of Palestinian children playing in the rubble of their community, a little boy giving the camera a sweet little kiss. I cried! So much! And then I closed my laptop and went downstairs to make dinner. I feel guilty for how blind I was for so long, and how little I can actually do. I think one of the worst conditions of modern life is a constant awareness of death and pain, and our own complicity in it, and the fact that we actually can't really do jack shit about it, because all of our institutions have been hijacked by capital (can they really be hijacked, though, if they were built to be that antidemocratic in the first place?). It's turtles all the way down. Anyways, I'm repeating myself. "
the end of it all is just to say -