I promised at the outset of The Raspberry Patch back on January 4 that in due course the main attraction, and really the raison d’être of the project, would begin: my Age of Spectacle manuscript. After thirteen essays beyond the January 4 introduction, a deliberately eclectic group offered up at a pace of about one a week, we have arrived to what I’d like to think of as the serious stuff. I mean by that the stuff I read and think about most these days and have been for at least four years, the stuff I think is most generally important, the stuff I am still actively struggling to understand and communicate to others.
Before actually beginning, which we’ll do in a moment in what will be an uncharacteristically short post for The Raspberry Patch (it’s been a complicated week), let me describe the scope and nature of what is about to come your way, and why I am bringing it to you by serializing a work-in-progress on a substack platform.1 Let me get to this last point first.
I have serious doubts that this Age of Spectacle manuscript will ever be published as a normal book. I began the project in 2019 under a different tentative title—Amerigeddon—and had a crack agent take on the project. I wrote a 30,000-word rump for my agent to peddle to trade publishers, as is common in this business, and he got nowhere. All the trade publishers he appealed to answered with the same assessment: argument is too complex, too many moving parts, asks too much of the typical reader, maybe more appropriate for a university press. Translation: We doubt it’ll get reviewed in the right places, meaning places that will lead enough people to buy it, and we’re not in business to commit financial suicide. Recommendation: Tell the author to simplify and streamline the argument, and to include fewer references to history, philosophy, and social science.
He did. So I tried to simplify and streamline, and to minimize all esoteric vocabulary, and we tried again. Some of the reworking was agonizing, but it was useful to my thought processes and it improved the product. But same result, well, resulted. I thanked my agent for his trouble, he was very gracious, and I came to the conclusion that at this stage of my life, on this subject, I did not want to dumb-down the argument, did not want to be made to put together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle using only 683 pieces.
Go to a university press? Impossible: I’ve never been a full-time academic, never really wanted to be one, and so have no standard credentials that any university press would expect or demand. It was never about the money, because even trade publishers these days don’t pay significant advances except to big-name popularizers and celebrity types, and royalties are nothing to depend on in any event. University presses of course pay nothing, expect you to do your own full-time marketing, and, with some notable exceptions, do everything in their power to make your prose sound as dull and thudding as they possibly can. Thanks but no thanks.
Two factors deepened my conclusion to write without prospect of a conventional publishing oucome. The first was that the core idea for The Age of Spectacle came to me like no other idea for any writing project has ever come to me in the previous half century. It came to me all-at-once, in a kind of soft flash, and I likened it on brief reflection to a constellation in the night sky. I saw in a single frame four or five bright stars in a pattern, with a few lesser lights scattered here and there in visual descant, and all the parts related to all the other parts in a balanced, harmonious and, above all, necessary fashion. This was not a linear thing, whether by dint of chronology or any other organizing principle; it was more like what Suzanne K. Langer once called a presentational symbol. It was more like a painting than a poem, if you like the arts, but unlike a painting that is static when it is completed, a constellation in the night sky exudes energy, motion, life. It was exciting, to me at least, and I was not willing to let that excitement be drained away by compromises whose purposes had nothing to do with bringing my constellation forward to become a reality.
The second factor was Philip Rieff. I knew Professor Rieff only very glancingly when I was a student at Penn, but I read all his books and essays over the years. He was a member of the Penn Sociology Department faculty almost by accident; had he been teaching in Europe he surely would have been in a philosophy department instead; among Penn liberal arts luminaries of that time he reminded me more of the indefinably trans-disciplinary Loren Eiseley than of his departmental colleagues like E. Digby Baltzell and Erving Goffman. He never undertook so much as a single standard sociological observation project.
None of that matters except insofar as Rieff’s iconoclastic nature continued into what one might call his advanced retirement. Toward the end of his life he wrote and published a final trilogy of books—My Life among the Deathworks, The Crisis of the Officer Class, and The Jew of Culture—and he made it clear in these books that he cared not one whit if only 17 people ever read and understood them. He was, he believed, ministering to a higher power: truth, the whole truth, as he understood it now, the final time he would be able to take a crack at it. (He passed away on July 1, 2006.) To conduct that ministry, especially for the first of the three volumes, he invented an entire new vocabulary, lest he be weighed down and judged by connections to others he either denied, disparaged, or in any event was determined to be free of. The texts of these three books are downright cryptic more than occasionally. But they are also deeply original, probingly provocative, and usefully irritating.
I don’t compare myself to Philip Rieff; few people have his depth of intelligence, his expanse of knowledge across a dozen disciplines, his creative imagination—or certainly all three of these qualities. But I thought, damn it, if he can write like that, for those purposes and in that way, so can I. Not that I mean to be cryptic or otherwise purposely difficult, or that I actively want to limit my readership to 17 people. Not at all. Subscribers to The Raspberry Patch now number many times 17 people, and I think I’m in my rights to expect that at least 18 readers will find what follows interesting enough to stick with, hopefully, all the way to the end. But like Reiff, I want to tell you the truth, the whole truth, as I see it now about something that matters to me and presumably matters to you, as well. Nothing else really matters within the four corners of the forthcoming pages.
Hence, I will not write down to anyone in what follows. I will not spare anyone’s feelings if a point needs to be made. I will not be reluctant to challenge readers when that becomes necessary, and I dare say that most if not all readers will find themselves challenged, usefully I hope, sooner or later. I will not create an artificial ideological consistency where it does not exist, just to be easier to follow, because my thinking does not fall into any standard ideological box. Raspberry Patch readers already know my basic epistemological orientation to the subject matter if they have they read, or if they go back and read, “The Phenomenological Factor” from January 22.
There are actual new ideas in The Age of Spectacle, and I think they are correct, but to be honest I am still working through many of them, testing them against evidence and logic as opportunities arise. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons for rolling out the text here, so to force myself to rethink the material in light of ever-developing circumstances as I slice and dice it for substack presentation. So while I may sound confident in presenting my arguments and evidence, a blushing humility will lie not far beneath the surface, and even sometimes between the lines.
So what will be on offer here today? I’ll start with my title and my tentative subtitle—a real mouthful I may reconsider later on—then provide my working table of contents to give you a synoptic feel for what my night-sky constellation looks like to me, and finally as a kind of tease just a paragraph or two from my introduction….which of course I will pick up and continue next time.
Don’t worry if you miss a part as we move along, because this is substack: Subscribers can always go into the archive to read previous posts if they so desire. But it’s true: While future posts may occasionally seem to stand alone as essays, they will not really be fully intelligible without what has gone before them. That’s just the nature of any coherent book, which I hope and trust this will be. And now…..launch!
The Age of Spectacle: How Affluence, Aspirational Amnesia, and Entertainment Technovelty Have Wrecked American Culture and Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
2. Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
3. The End of Modernity
4. From Deep Literacy to Cyberaddiction
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
8. The Mad Dialectic of Utopia and Nostalgia in the Infotainment Era
9. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the Future of American Politics
EPILOGUE
10. What Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
American politics have become deranged because of a shift of mentality in the culture, and that derangement has manifested itself in acute political dysfunction, in turn advancing the deeper mentality shift by seeming to validate its premises. The cultural change is where the real variance lies; the political manifestations are epiphenomenal.
Magnifying, integrating, and bringing to full scale the sources of cultural change is the digital tsunami now hard upon us. The avalanche of mediated two-dimensional screen-delivered images that we willingly bring down upon ourselves almost without respite is rewiring and confounding our Stone-Age brains, for most of us without our conscious awareness of it. The novel, unplanned man-made environment we now inhabit is overwhelming our evolutionary inheritance, making most of us easy prey for the power of algorithm-armed concentrations of essentially unaccountable corporate power.
No technological determinism or inevitability is at work here; contingency, choice, and agency are as alive and real as ever. Nothing about market economics or capitalism has made anything inevitable either. That is too-easy old-think. The novel truth is that we are experiencing a cultural mentality shift linked to technology-driven mass-neurological dynamics that is unprecedented in human experience. The reason is simple enough: Prior technological innovations have only indirectly affected human cognition because they were designed and functioned as substitutions for human muscle, but the cyberlution has been designed and functions as substitution for aspects of human thought. . . . .
The Age of Spectacle, No. 2…..NEXT TIME……..
I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that some of the material in The Age of Spectacle appeared in redacted, shortened form in The Cosmopolitan Globalist, as follows: “Age of Spectacle I: The Spectocracy,” January 6, 2023; “Age of Spectacle II: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated,” February 27, 2023; “Age of Spectacle III: The Neuroscience of the Spectocracy,” May 2, 2023, and “Age of Spectacle IV: Beyond Ripley, The Politics of the Unreal,” June 17, 2023. The originals from which the Cosmopolitan Globalist editor worked have changed since, so anyone who read these four shortened essays last year will find only hints of them repeated in The Raspberry Patch going forward.