Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries A Mind’s Odyssey JOSEPH NATOLI Cover image: Joseph Phillip Natoli, “Yellow Barque,” oil on canvas, 15" = 18", 2014 Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 Joseph Natoli All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Natoli, Joseph P., 1943– author. Title: Dark affinities, dark imaginaries : a mind’s odyssey / Joseph Natoli. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016021629 (print) | LCCN 2016036363 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438463513 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438463520 (e-book) Classification: LCC AC8.5 .N38 2017 (print) | LCC AC8.5 (ebook) | DDC 814/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021629 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Maybe the space of exile is one of the few spaces left in neoliberal societies where one can cultivate a sense of meaningful connections, solidarity and engaged citizenship. Exile may be the space where a kind of double consciousness can be cultivated that points beyond the structures of domination and repression to what the poet Claudia Rankine calls a new understanding of community, politics and citizenship in which the social contract is revived as a kind of truce in which we allow ourselves to be flawed together. —Henry Giroux, “Academic Madness and the Politics of Exile,” Truthout, November 18, 2014 Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xxi Introduction xxiii Chapter One William Blake: Prophet against Empire 1 Introduction, Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present 6 Excerpt from Mots d’Ordre: Disorder in Literary Worlds 10 Why Are We Not Roused to Action? 13 Chapter Two A Patient Appears at the Psychiatrist’s Office: The Turn to Phenomenological Psychopathology 19 Dark Affinities: The Father 22 Phenomenological Psychology and Literary Interpretation 31 The Code of Crisis and Disaster 37 Chapter Three The World Is a Book 45 Textual Studies and the Selection of Editions 47 Meditating on a Postmodern Strategy of Reading 48 Endless Deferment: The Inequitable Melee of Events and Words 50 Chapter Four Looking for Disorder in Literary Worlds 55 Mapping the Inconceivable: Disordering Taxonomies 57 viii Contents Chapter Five Postmodernity Is a Hoot 63 Go to Citizen Kane to Find Twentieth-Century Modernism: On the Edge of Postmodernity 72 The Deep Morals of Inglourious Basterds 86 Chapter Six At the Theory Carnival 95 Preface to Tracing Literary Theory 97 Preface to Literary Theory’s Future(s) 101 Chapter Seven Into the American Mass Psyche of the Nineties 103 Hauntings: Popular Film and American Culture 103 Hunting the Haunted Heart 108 Speeding to the Millennium: Film and Culture 1993–1995 111 Court and Culture: The Days of Our Life with O. J. 112 Postmodern Journeys: Film and Culture 1996–1998 117 That Rug Really Tied the Room Together 120 Memory’s Orbit: Film and Culture 1999–2000 129 After September 11, 2001 132 Hearing the Ping of Poverty—or Not 137 Chapter Eight Railing through Europe: “Is This a Postmodern World?” 1995–2010 147 This Is a Picture and Not the World 154 Chapter Nine A Long Journey to Find an Online Political Home 161 Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project 161 Political Affairs: “From each according to his ability to each according to their work” 165 Why the Rich Get Richer and Other Truth Stories 168 Bad Subjects: Politics in Everyday Life 171 The Leftist Psyche 172 The “Free Exchange of Ideas”: Our New Normal 178 Counterpunching 184 Gun Control, Illegal Aliens, Moochers, Planned Parenthood, Gay Marriages, “Big Brother” Government, and Obama 187 Contents ix Chapter Ten Popular Culture: What I Did at the Movies 193 Doing the American Hustle 194 The Hateful Eight: History’s Dark Bounty 201 Chapter Eleven I Roam into TV: Rebel Sons, Foodies, DBs, TV Pharmacy, and Sports 211 TV’s Rebel Sons: The Anger of Deep Revolt 211 Autopsy TV 222 Food TV 227 The Emergence of Greater-than-Human Sports . and Baseball 237 Chapter Twelve Dark Affinities 243 Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal 245 The Economics of Immiseration/The Politics of Seduction 253 US Higher Education: The New “Treasure Island” for Investors 258 Plutocracy, Gentrification, and Racial Violence 265 Chapter Thirteen Dark Imaginaries 271 What Climate Scenarios Do We Imagine? 272 A Modest Proposal, 2014 277 The Coming Transformation of Work to Leisure 285 The American Middle Class: The Political Chosen People? 290 Chapter Fourteen Portrait of Generation Next 295 To Gaga Is to Dada 297 The Twitter Moment 303 Living Backward: The Millennials’ Alice 312 Our Millennial Age of Magic 319 Chapter Fifteen Occupy Wall Street 325 Epilogue to the Kindle Publication of Occupying Here & Now: The New Class Warfare 325 Psychomachia: Battles within the American Cultural Psyche 329 x Contents Chapter Sixteen Travels of a New Gulliver 337 In Which the Author Introduces Himself and Then Sets Out 339 The Author Is Admitted to the Academy, Inhabited by Enormous-Headed Giants; Visits the Wick, the Great Augury, and The Singularity Club; Meets a Terrorist, and Then Ends Badly 342 The Author Comes to the End of His Travels 344 Bibliography 349 Index 353 Preface You could say that the wily Odysseus’s will to reach home could not be overcome by any arrangement of Chance or others—Sirens and Cyclops included. I would call this a millennial reading, one emerging from a readership encouraged by their own personal will and freedom to choose their own destiny. The Odyssey I read is rather different. It is one in which forces and conditions outside Odysseus’s power to control, circumstances that Chance and others create that he must reckon with, shape both the choosing and the chooser. We become more than what we personally design ourselves to be, and that more very often means that we become less than we designed. One of the wonders of cyberspace is that it offers us an alterna- tive world within which we can pursue a politics that meets our own preferences, reduce society and the social dimension of life to friends we choose, pursue answers on Google to all our questions—but not very often to questions that exceed our own liking, interest, or erudition. Why wouldn’t Odysseus now stand as an exemplar of that knowledge of The Secret, which tells us that if you will something strongly enough, the entire universe will conspire to fulfill your wishes? My mind’s odyssey over the past half century did not remain true to a charted course I had proposed long ago. What I call “my mind,” at every stage reacted and reorganized itself according to what time, geog- raphy, and Chance put before it. There was no rudder pushing a personal will through all waters on an undeviating passage. My mind now is like a painter’s palette that over time reveals where the brush has been, or like carved rock formations in tide pools, which are the shape they are because of wind, sun, rain, and the ebbing and flowing of the ocean’s mighty force. When you scan the physiognomy of a mind, you see countless encounters with a culture within which that mind is embedded so that any retelling of the odyssey of that mind is, at the same time, a revelation of a culture. xi xii Preface In my case, that is US culture, which we arrogantly call “American,” although the fact that I was raised in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn, a bilingual community in which neither English nor Italian were schooled, fashioned affiliations in many things, which were far from the American cultural norm. My own father was born in the United States, but through odd circumstances—I call it the play of Chance—was educated in Sicily and returned to the United States as a teenager; and so the entire immigrant- family experience was mine, transmitted through my father. There is a certain subaltern psychology that develops, preconditioning the mind toward skepticism and even dissent. On a dark imaginary level, the Jew- ish Algerian Jacques Derrida was always deconstructing the French social order of things that marginalized him. The appearance of a Derrida at a certain moment is an exposition of a culture at a certain moment. The whole notion of a coherent, autonomous, and controlling subjectivity contends with the notion that we are variously positioned within the circumstances of our surround and no account of my mind can mean anything without reference to this. The discipline to apply what brains I had came from the surround, as my father and my uncles encouraged me from early age to do well in school and grasp an opportunity denied to them. And so an intention-less intelligence was directed toward academic success. At Brooklyn College, I came under the influence of Jewish intellectuals who had escaped the Holocaust. History, politics, and economics were represented not as neutral social sciences but very much affected by socio-economic and political arrangements of power. So-called objective critique was always already interpreting within the interpretive frame of what was being critiqued. I was, early on, in every way, prepping for the skepticism of both Heidegger and Derrida, a skepticism that extended to the utopian view of Reaganite “supply side economics” as well as to both Marx’s view of the inevitable course of history and the inevitability of a timeless communist utopia.