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Guess Who’s Coming to Marxism

I’ve recently started attending weekly meetings of The Platypus Affiliated Society here in Corvallis where we read a few essays and meet to discuss. We’ve been talking about Marxism and the New Left for the past several weeks and it’s been a great chance to develop my knowledge in an area I know little about.

 This last week, we read “Black Particularity Reconsidered” by Adolph Reed Jr., which libcom.org describes as, “[a]n in-depth 1970s analysis of how the management of black dissent by the black American middle-class/professional elite helped restructure capitalism to its own advantage.”

Without going into too much detail about the essay overall or the long conversation we had about it, I want to hone in on one area within it that I found particularly interesting. But first, a bit more background. 

As an undergraduate, I minored in film studies and also took a couple of African American literature and film classes. I even wrote and presented a couple of essays on the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and one of these essays was used as a sample for my application to Oregon State University where I eventually got my Master’s degree. So I was particularly excited by the following paragraph, and want to spend the rest of this post talking a bit about it as a way of working through some of my thoughts in a relatively informal setting:

Even popular cinema sought to thematize black life in line with civil rights consciousness in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), All the Young Men (1960), Raisin in the Sun (1961), Band of Angels (1957), and the instructively titled Nothing but a Man (1964). Those and other films were marked by an effort to portray blacks with a measure of human depth and complexity previously absent from Hollywood productions. By 1957 even the great taboo of miscegenation could be portrayed on the screen in Island in the Sun, and a decade later the cultural campaign had been so successful that this theme could be explored in the parlor rather than in back streets and resolved with a happy ending in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It is interesting that Dorothy Dandridge became the first black in a leading role to be nominated for an academy award for her role in Carmen in 1954 — the year of the Brown decision — and that the most productive periods of civil rights activism and Sidney Poitier's film career coincided. Poitier's lead performance in the maudlin Lilies of the Field won an Oscar for him in 1963, on the eve of the passage of the Public Accommodations Actl Thus endorsed by the culture industry (which affronted White Supremacy in the late 1950s by broadcasting a Perry Como show in which comedienne Molly Goldberg kissed black ballplayer Ernie Banks) the Civil Rights movement was virtually assured success.

I’ve talked a bit here and elsewhere about rhizomes and hegemonic power systems and the way that capitalist society (especially as enacted in the U.S.) coopts narratives and controls everything under it’s purview. While Reed is quick to place much of the blame for what he perceives as the failure of the Civil Rights Movement on its leaders, I believe there is something a bit more going on here. This catalog of films that portray the position of African Americans in America at this time illustrates the ability of capitalism to shift and dominate narratives in a way that is difficult for individuals operating underneath it. This isn’t to say that the system is powerful and domineering and controlling all elements of our lives (it is, but that’s an argument for another text and time). Rather, it is adaptable. Changeable. Malleable. It shifts depending on the needs and desires of its people. 

Let’s consider Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example. In this film, Sidney Poitier tries to marry a white woman and we spend the whole time watching her old, liberal father (Spencer Tracy) come to terms with it. Tracy bangs around his hillside home overlooking LA, testing the strength of his liberal determination in the face of such odds. Also significant is the fact that this was Tracy’s last film and he died shortly after. Essentially, a movie that is purportedly about a marriage between a wealthy white woman and an eloquent black male and the issues that they face ends up focusing on and old white male liberal coming to terms with his own liberalism and succeeding as he finally approves the marriage.

When I presented a paper on this film at a conference a few years ago, someone in the audience asked if, even with all these issues, this film could be considered revolutionary for its time. My response then, and doubly so now, is a flat, “No.” This film, and many others like it at the time, skirt the real issues and fail to really deal with the many racial tensions in the country that brought them to us. They operate under the veil of progressivism as a means of driving audiences to see them, not as a way to actually make change. In the end, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner reinforces white patriarchy and, especially, a sense of white liberalism that goes along with it.

It would be easy at this point to throw up our hands and talk about the powerful hegemonic capitalist system that coopts every narrative until it is whitewashed for our consumption and entertainment. It would be easy to look elsewhere and cry for the revolution to overthrow this system, even as we struggle to do so. But there is something more insidious going on here that demands attention.

Narratives like this that exist within a capitalist society don’t come from the top down. Rather, they are reactions to current events. While Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wasn’t revolutionary, there were positive changes during the Civil Rights Movement. Not enough, and we continue many of these struggles today, but it is important to remember that capitalism will adapt around this. Hegemonic power systems will control these narratives if we aren’t careful. And it isn’t a matter of power that allows the systems to do this. It’s adaptability. It’s the ability to morph around the populace and defuse situations. It’s the ability to change without answering, to give the illusion of freedom while controlling these populations, and that’s much more dangerous.

Reed is slim on giving us answers to what we can do in the face of these systems. He has a short paragraph at the end, but it fails to give real solutions. So what can we do when capitalism coopts narratives of dissent? How can we make the changes envisioned in the sixties but never fully realized? How can we create change things for the better?

There are a few ways out that we’ve seen then and in recent years that operate outside of capitalism to some extent. I think the Occupy Movement is the best example, and there are some excellent essays out there that talk about the positive changes this movement caused in a short time. Anarchist movements also provide a good example of potential disruptors and potential futures, though not always in the way they are enacted. For example, I was also thinking the destruction of capital is a good way to attack capitalism, but, upon reflection, this brings a surge in consumption afterwards that reifies the system, which makes bashing in bank windows seem (if understandable) ultimately ineffective. Communes and off-the-grid communities could be another answer, though it is important to realize that they still operate within and benefit off of the capitalist system that surrounds them.

Ultimately, I don’t have any answers better than what Reed offered, but I will say that we need more than just criticizing the leaders that have failed. It’s necessary to consider why they failed and, in so doing, to consider the system the operated underneath. Though we still have Ferguson after Birmingham, I hesitate to place the blame on King. Instead, I think it necessary to look at the system under which he operated and the way it has coopted his narrative. Only then can we begin to enact the change that many before have envisioned.

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Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

A friend of mine recently asked me about semiotics and some recommended reading on the subject and I came up blank. I studied semiotics a bit as an undergrad or at least was taught a semiotic method by some of my professors when it came to essay writing, but I found myself not really knowing what that meant. However, while flipping through the large and rambling “Philosophy” section at my local bookstore, I ran across a slim volume under a “Postmodern Encounters” series titled Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life from Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio that promised to enlighten me about “the scholar who has contributed most to establishing semiotics as an interdisciplinary field.” Here are some thoughts.

I haven’t read any of Sebeok’s works, but this volume does a good job covering a lot of ground and I feel like it gives a decent overview to some key takeaways in a way that is fairly comprehensive. Mostly, it talks about the ways in which Sebeok diverges from other semioticians and thinks of semiotics as applying to biological sciences, human verbal and non-verbal signs, unconscious signs, multifarious signs, multiplicitous signs, and master signs (20-22). While I don’t want to simply repeat the book here, suffice to say that signs can be found in many places. This is the primary way I was taught semiotics (signs are everywhere to be interpreted by the seeking semiotician), but this seems to diverge from those who would just search for signs in anthropocentric arenas.

Which is the part of this investigation that I find most compelling. For the most part, I found this overview pretty dry and uninspiring. Lately I’ve been more interested in Posthuman theories, so the idea of moving away from anthropocentric readings is commonplace to the point of triteness. Towards the end of this book, however, things pick up a bit and become more interesting, and one line made me think of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s excellent book The Exploit:

“On the basis of this model, comparable to a diagram or a map, the human mind may orientate itself by shifting from one node to another in the sign network, choosing each time the interpretive path considered most suitable.” (Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life, 52. Emphasis mine.)

And later

“With some probability, sign processes building limitless interpretants may continue in machines independently of humans.” (63)

These statements are very clearly getting into posthumanist theory and moving away from anthropocentric models of sign interpretation that depend upon a person at the center interpreting the significance of multiple signs and the ways they interact with one another. This model considers signs as part of a network and lays them out as such, with none more important than the other but all interconnected and affecting one another continuously. For this reason, the human arguably becomes just another sign/node communicating with others that could cease to exist without much effect on the overall network.

For the most part, however, I find this book pretty uninteresting since I’m not really a semiotician. For those entrenched in this discourse, thinking of sign-reading in terms that apply more generally to multiple disciplines might be more compelling, though I’m doubting there is anything revolutionary here since most of the texts they reference are 20+ years old. Ultimately, this volume is worth a read for some basic info in a short space, and I would be interested in reading some of Sebeok’s works to find out more, but there’s little here to blow your mind. Looking for that from a book that brands itself as a retrospective of Sebeok’s life and work is probably asking a bit much, though, so it all depends on what signs you seek.

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A Look at John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester

I finished reading John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester and I still don’t know what to think. Don’t get me wrong, all the accolades are well-deserved and this is an excellent book. Figuring out how to communicate that to someone, however, is difficult. The book builds tension without a huge payoff (which would arguably cheapen the tension it builds). It leaves loose ends that feel like they were left untied on purpose and it’s our jobs as readers to make those connections after we’re done. It manages to be creepy without being grotesque. It’s uncanny.

I would like to point to some of the ways Darnielle accomplishes this as a way of working through the narrative, hopefully without giving too much away. First, there is the initial main character (Jeremy Heldt) and his narrative of being somewhat stagnant in his hometown. It’s impressive how right this narrative feels. Jeremy is 22, living at home with his dad, and working at the local Video Hut with little direction in his life. As someone who lived at home in Buncombe, GA and worked at the Piggly Wiggly until 22 myself, Darnielle nails this dynamic and much of what this situation feels like for the person caught up in it. Not that there is anything wrong with living and working in your hometown, but this instance lends to the tension of the novel when it feels like directionless stagnancy rather than a choice. 

Second, there are the dark currents that run under this small-town narrative. Maybe it’s because I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks lately, but something definitely feels off in all the small Iowa towns throughout the novel. There are picturesque farm houses and fields of corn, but you get the feeling that there is something very troubling happening just below this wholesome facade. We get glimpses of what this could be through the splices of tapes that characters encounter throughout the narrative, but we never get a full payoff of one singular event or example that we can point to as being the source or instance of this tension. Which leads me to my last point.

Much of the tension Darnielle builds is through the reactions that characters have to one another and the tapes they watch, and this feels like the most masterful part to me. After watching these home video recordings, characters appear disturbed and unable to figure out where to go from there. Should they call the police? Should they track down the people? Should they try to forget what they saw? The reactions always seem slightly out of sync with what is described on the tapes, which makes me feel like I’m missing something here and it is my job as the reader to track exactly what. I’ve tried to describe this to friends, and the best I can do is to tell them to read the book because you can’t lift out any single instance or element as indicative of the mood it builds in the moment. It’s uncanny. 

A few months ago I missed the opportunity to see Darnielle when he came through Portland. I never miss a Mountain Goats show if it comes in my region, but I’ve yet to attend a John Darnielle reading. I remember saying something to my friend along the lines of “John Darnielle > A lot of other writers and The Mountain Goats > Every other band.” While I still believe this statement to be mostly true (and I would also note that the experience of seeing a band live—especially The Mountain Goats—far surpasses that of seeing someone read, at least for me) the number of writers Darnielle is better than is increasing with each of his publications. This feels like his best work yet.

Powell’s has a good price on the book if you want to pick it up.

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Thoughts on 1Q84

I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 since January and I just finished this week. To be fair, it’s over 1100 pages and I’ve pretty much only be reading it in bed right before falling asleep as a way from zoning out from work during the end of my second year of graduate school. And for this purpose it was the perfect book. It’s highly plot driven, incredibly entertaining, and completely immersive. The characters feel real and complex, even as they exhibit some standard tropes. The world of the novel is also incredibly detailed. Much of the narrative centers on routine, and you spend days with each character going through similar movements and motions, but this only helps solidify the world of 1Q84. Even if the narrative gets intense, you rarely feel disconcerted. There’s always the routine and everything will be okay because, no matter what happens outside, there are still simple home-cooked meals, routine exercise, and pleasant walks through the bustling city.

I also appreciate the magical realism aspects, though I think there could have been more of it and more explanation about it. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, there are elements sprinkled throughout that let you know this world isn’t normal, even in the beginning before we find out about many of the elements that make it so. My only regret is that they payoff we get as we see these more fantastical elements revealed don’t live up to the long build that Murakami enacts throughout much of the novel. Many of the elements of this fantastical world remain a mystery and, even more troubling, many of the references that he inserts are never explained. Sometimes it seems that he inserts symbols throughout the novel that hold little to no significance other than to exist within the narrative.

In this way, and few others, the narrative feels very postmodern. There are unexplained references, incomplete storylines, and the end of the novel feels less like an end and more like the narrative just stops. It’s never postmodern to the point of being jarring, though. It doesn’t so much feel fractured as it is fractured. The novel goes back and forth between 2 (later 3) characters, but each of their stories feels pretty straightforward. And the unexplained references don’t feel out of place or as if they were put there as intentional red herrings. Rather, the world that Murakami builds is so large, so complex, so detailed, that even in the scope of 1100 pages there is little chance for him to bring everything together in a satisfactory manner. Even without a big payoff at the end, however, the novel is definitely worth reading, if just to go along for the ride.

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I ain’t afraid of no patriarchy

Hello! Sorry that I missed last week, but I’m currently in the middle of Anti-Oedipus (which is a bit longer than the normal lit review fare) and am hoping to have a new post on that for next week. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I want to take a moment and talk about Ghostbusters. My partner and I went to see the new one last Friday and had a great time. We were laughing throughout as the new film has plenty of insider references to the older movies, some good jokes scattered throughout, and a skewering of the patriarchy that made me feel justified in spending my hard-earned money on the movie ticket. If not for the outrage and calling out to community that I saw here on tumblr, in fact, I probably wouldn’t have bothered seeing it. I don’t make it out to the movies often these days: the last movie I saw in theaters was Mad Max and Grand Budapest Hotel before that, so I’m averaging once a year or less. I was sold from the very first trailer of the Ghostbusters reboot, however, and incredibly pleased to see four female leads and a blockbuster that passes the Bechdel test, among others.

I was so impressed by the movie and still basking in the joy from seeing it that I got home and immediately read a slew of articles online talking about it, posting one to my Facebook page with the line “Definitely worth checking out.” Which is when I invited some criticism. A friend from high school started criticizing the film and, more importantly, the representation of women within it. We had a lengthy back and forth and ultimately found some common ground, but it did drive me to a realization I hadn’t previously considered. If this film had starred four male leads, I would not have liked it. I wouldn’t have bothered seeing it. And I probably would have been pretty critical of it. The plot is entertaining but ultimately contrived. The reversal of gender roles and overt sexualizing of Chris Hemsworth is funny, but it is almost purely a reversal of the same tired tropes. The skewering of the patriarchy was fantastic and entertaining, but it hinged on the underdog nature of the narrative and fringe internet groups calling for boycotting the film.

This isn’t to undermine the film or what it’s trying to do. I highly recommend that you go and see it. For a summer blockbuster, it’s entertaining and rewarding. It’s good to feel a part of something, and the attacks that this film and, more importantly, the actors face from MRAs and others are real. We should rightfully stand behind them and send the message to Hollywood that a movie starring four female leads can be economically viable. But I look forward to the day where I can analyze this film as closely as my highschool pal without doing the disservice to women that inherently imbues that line of thinking. I look forward to a time where films starring female leads are so numerous that we can examine them in the context of a more equitable system and society. In the meantime, I’m pleased to watch these talented actors kick ass on the big screen and heartily recommend that you do the same.

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Pokémon Go (into another place that isn’t filled with death and violence)

A friend and colleague of mine (Zoë Bossiere) recently published an article in the Washington Post where she discusses Pokémon Go and the ways that it potentially overpowers important conversations surrounding events such as Brexit, police shootings, Black Lives Matter protests, recent terror attacks, and more. Pokémon Go has emerged in the middle of a violent and terrifying summer, and Bossiere expresses concern that the game distracts us from these events in a way that will make it more difficult to change these situations. In this week’s post, I would like to take Bossiere’s article one step further and ask: would Pokémon Go have been as successful if not for the violent events leading up to it? Would it have exceeded 15 million downloads in the first week (more than Pokémon X and Y sold in the past three years) without people looking for an escape from the tragedies they face every time they log onto Facebook or turn on the television? What kind of history is this type of escapism operating within?

The Evidence

Some make the case that nostalgia for the franchise incentivizes an incredible desire to consume anything Pokémon, but I would like to point to the franchise’s diminishing sales up unto this point. Since the release of Pokémon Red and Blue, each major release has fared worse than the last:

Pokémon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow 59.52 Million Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal 42.21 Million Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald 34.38 Million Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum 25.23 Million Pokémon Black/White and Sequels 24.12 Million Pokémon X/Y 14.7 Million Pokémon Go 15 Million (in first week)

One could argue that the franchise remaining exclusive to Nintendo consoles to this point have impacted these numbers (Nintendo’s handheld sales peaked with the DS) or that this game being “free” (you can spend money on in-game items) increases its downloads or that the appeal of virtual reality increases potential users, but I think it is more complicated than that. This is the first time in the history of the franchise that a Pokémon game has “shipped” more units than a previous title, and it did so in the first week. The number of available devices and the free price point are important, but they don’t explain the way that this game has captured our collective attention in such a quick and encompassing way. You can’t log onto Facebook or turn on the news without a new story about Pokémon Go. There is something more here than an old franchise receiving a new breath of life.

Popular Culture as Escapism

Which brings me back to my question: are people looking for an escape? In the seventies when George Lucas tried to get funding for Star Wars: A New Hope, he famously had to search for money and make the film on a shoestring budget (11 million) before it blew up and became the highest-earning film in North America within a year of its release. It’s important to note that the film was released in 1977, two years after the end of the Vietnam War, and provided an instance of American culture on the big screen where audiences could reimagine cowboy stories in the safety of a narrative staged “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…..” In a more contemporary example, The Secret Life of Pets just had a fantastic opening weekend that A.V. Club directly connects to these same recent events.

We have a history of escapism, and it’s important to recognize it as such. I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon of naysayers decrying Pokémon Go, and I think there is plenty to praise about the game. Going outside is great. Feeling connected to something from our childhood is fantastic. Building community is excellent. Self-care can be (as Audre Lorde famously said) an act of self-preservation and thereby an act of political warfare. But it’s important to recognize when it is happening. It’s important to remain conscious of our personal escapism and our motivations for doing so. It’s important that we keep the idea of a better world alive and remain ready to act on that idea when necessary, even as we work with others to try and catch ‘em all.

Sources

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/13/i-love-pokemon-so-why-do-i-hate-pokemon-go/ 2. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2016/07/13/report-pokemon-go-downloads-top-15-million/87022202/ 3. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36780797 4. http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon#cite_note-sales-3 5. http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Best_selling_handheld_consoles 6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pok%C3%A9mon-go-just-introduced-virtual-reality-to-the-world_us_57855d75e4b0e7c8734f03c0 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(film) 8. http://decentfilms.com/articles/starwars 9. http://www.avclub.com/article/weekend-box-office-one-talking-pet-movie-says-numb-239388

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Dark Deleuze and Toxic Rhizomes: Revolution in Arborescent Times

As promised, this week I’m looking at Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze. This book is a tiny volume (70 pages) but it packs in a lot of material. It’s part of the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series that stands somewhere between digital and print, completed ideas and brainstorming, final book and beginning manuscript. You can check out their website for more info.

Before jumping into a discussion of this book, I think it would be helpful to give a brief overview of some basic ideas from Gilles Deluze and Fèlix Guattari, especially regarding their discussions of rhizomatic networks that they outline in A Thousand Plateaus. Rhizomatic networks are most easily envisioned by thinking about plants. Mushrooms, for example, are connected underground by a vast and complicated root system. If you see a ton of mushrooms in a field, chances are that they are one living organism connected underground rather than hundreds of distinct and individual plants just happening to grow beside one another. (Check out this SciShow video for more info). In fact, the largest living organism in the world is a fungus in Oregon that is over 2 miles across. Arborescent models, on the other hand, are more closely associated with trees (redwoods, aspens, poplars, etc. aside as they all grow rhizomatically) as a coherent root system grows into a single fruiting body above ground. These models can be applied in a plethora of ways when examining contemporary culture, such as when considering the rhizomatic internet that ties us all together, the arborescent governments that co-opt narratives under overarching power structures, and late-capitalist advertising that uses both methods to reach and manipulate consumers.

In Dark Deleuze, Culp investigates contemporary readings of Gilles Deleuze (and by extension, Fèlix Guattari) and the ways these discussions are applied in contemporary culture. Specifically, Culp argues that “joyous” readings of Deleuze are co-opted by capitalists and anti-capitalists, status quoians and revolutionaries, concrete thinkers and metaphysicians. The founder of Buzzfeed, for example, is well read in Deleuze and Guattari, Frederic Jameson, and queer theory and has written against late-capitalist media and advertising. Joyous readings of Deleuze that focus on creation of rhizomatic networks for the sake of creation and consider our ever increasing levels of connection as adequate in and of themselves discount the revolutionary nature of Deleuze’s writings and (to use a phrase from A Thousand Plateaus) arborize these networks under hegemonic power systems. In contrast to these joyous readings, Culp offers Dark Deleuze to destroy the world. Dark Deleuze inverts these joyous readings and calls for the destruction of systems that consider creativity and connection ample (a mindset that is also soundly criticized by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in The Exploit). In order to reignite the revolutionary nature of Deluze’s work, Culp presents a Dark Deleuze focused on the destruction of contemporary ways of engaging with the world.

In this book I wish only for more. 70 pages is incredibly short to cover the ground that Culp discusses, and this book is quite dense. It’s the nature of these kinds of books that they stand somewhere between a fully fleshed out idea and some initial thoughts, and I hope that this becomes part of a larger project. I would love for Culp to take his time with Dark Deleuze and fully detail what this looks like in our contemporary world. What will the revolution look like? How does one enact the changes and actions he calls for? What comes after? The answers to these questions might be unclear, but I’m excited to consider them after reading Dark Deleuze.

Works Cited

Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

Galloway, Alexander and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print.

Buy the Book

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/dark-deleuze

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What’s the point?

For this week, I wanted to say a bit about myself and my purpose for this blog. I recently graduated with an MA in English Literature. I don’t want to stop doing the work I started as a grad student, but I also would like to avoid the PhD, at least for a while (have you looked at the market for English Professors lately? It’s terrifying!). So this blog is a way of keeping myself engaged and holding myself accountable. I will aim to write a reviewy type thing (this will likely change as I continue doing it) every other week, hence last week’s take on Adam Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television. During the off-weeks—such as right now—I will plan on writing something else. I don’t know what this will be exactly. Journal entries detailing what’s going on in my life? Reflections on the world? Comments on other current events? I’m keeping it open.

While keeping it open, however, there are a couple of rules I would like to follow. First, I will publish a piece every Friday. Second, each piece—whether book review or blog post—will be around 500 words or so. That’s it. The books will vary in length, subject matter, period, etc. based on what I’m wanting to read at the time. Next week, for example, I’m planning to look at Andrew Culp’s fresh-off-the-press Dark Deleuze. After that I may jump into Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, since I haven’t read it before, and review it in sections until it’s done. The key thing here is that I do what I want, read what I want, and write what I want. I’m publishing it online as a way of holding myself accountable, but this blog is for my own personal entertainment and edification.

That being said, I did not choose Tumblr as a venue at random nor do I take this community for granted. Tumblr is an amazing community that helped me through some incredibly rough times before grad school, and I’m excited to rejoin it with a sense of purpose and idea of what I’m doing. I see Tumblr at the forefront of contemporary literary criticism in a lot of ways, especially in regards to popular culture. Conversations around the Harry Potter series, for example, consistently unearth new discoveries and interpretations. Discussions of contemporary television shows redefine the ways we consider these series. Fandoms emerge and form around multiple media and alter our interactions with their preferred texts.

I want in. Tumblr is a fantastic place for literary criticism, and I want to add my voice to the chorus. I want to bring in some of the literary theory and philosophy that I’m interested in alongside contemporary conversations online surrounding these media. I, too, want to be at the forefront of this line of thinking, and I want to read and write what interests me and, hopefully, what interests you as well. Thanks.

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Do you want ants? Because this is how you get sociopaths.

     Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television is part of a trilogy from Adam Kotsko that examines specific characteristics of pop culture icons. This slender volume discusses shows as wide ranging as Southpark to 24, The Simpsons to Mad Men, Seinfeld to Dexter as Kotsko examines sociopathic figures in television and the functions they serve in our late capitalist society. Kotsko divides the sociopaths of these shows into three categories: The Schemers who indulge every whim for their own entertainment or childish desires and motivations; The Climbers who manipulate societal and cultural norms (not to mention other people) in order to advance their own agenda and succeed within this system; and The Enforcers who appear relatively selfless as they exploit and violate societal norms for the greater good, even as—as is the case in Dexter—few would actually endorse their methods. Kotsko explores each category in depth with a plethora of examples and considers how each one comments on our late capitalist society.

     In this examination, Kotsko performs close reading of these shows and details specific characteristics that support his claims. For shows I was familiar with, I found myself cheering him along (sometimes out loud), such as when he discusses the ways that Archer subverts gender stereotypes through Malory and Lana who are allowed to be just as terrible, scheming, and self-indulgent as the male characters of the show. All the times I watched Archer while avoiding writing my thesis I thought I was indulging in a guilty pleasure; turns out I was subverting the patriarchy all along! For shows I wasn’t familiar with (I’ve never seen The Wire and it features prominently), Kotsko fills in the gaps enough for me to follow along, and there is always Google for anything else I wanted to know. Kotsko grounds his close reading in psychoanalytical examination of the characters, arguments about how they relate to other sociopathic characters in television and literature, and considerations of what it means to exist in our late capitalist society.

     Throughout this close reading, Kotsko remains focused on his own views and ideas. I know it isn’t really his point in this collection, but I would have liked to see more theory brought in. I’m particularly thinking about how these sociopathic characters all exist within a hegemonic power system that they cannot escape and that ultimately includes all of their voices within itself as it adapts around them. It seems that Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of rhizomatic networks would align well with the way these systems operate and might suggest that it says more about our society than it does about these individuals that their voices are so quickly coopted. I also wonder what would happen if we compared these characters to older sociopathic literary figures. We’ve had sociopaths represented in popular media since Shakespeare’s Othello, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and even Jay Gatsby, and each of these characters operate somewhat differently and reflect something unique about their own time and place. That being said, this is an excellent collection, and getting into these other conversations could ultimately detract from its accessibility, uniqueness to our own time and place, and close careful consideration of sociopathic characters in late capitalist television.

MLA Citation

Kotsko, Adam. Why we Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television. Washington: Zero Books, 2012. Print.

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