Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the meaning of visual composition that is almost unheard of in popular cinema. Indeed the compositions of many of his frames look more like seventeenth century paintings than twentieth century film stills. This attention to the details of the visual image, often at the expense of any illusion of narrative reality, has, not surprisingly, been met with very mixed reviews. For those used to the strong narrative focus and action-driven aesthetics of directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino, Greenaway’s work may feel overly intellectual, emotionally cold, or just plain boring. Those more interested in the potential visual and structural experiments that are still possible in film, however, will be much more likely to appreciate Greenaway’s attention to the power of the image. His emphasis on the visual and rejection of the illusion of cinema is more in line with the aesthetics of the avant-garde works of directors like Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Luis Bunuel. Like these directors Greenaway is unafraid of calling attention to the artificiality of his own work as art. For Greenaway, film is no more real than a painting or a sculpture and its aesthetic roots lay not in the theatre, but in the visual arts.

In this sense Greenaway’s career has been an ongoing battle against the prevailing decline of visual literacy. And in his latest film, the documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse, Greenaway makes explicit this belief in the value of thinking in visual terms and in learning how to see and better represent the world through a close attention to the images provided us by the great masters of painting. “Most people,” Greenaway argues, “are visually illiterate. Why should it be otherwise? We have a text based culture. Our educational systems teach us to value text over image, which is one of the reasons why we have such an impoverished cinema.” This intentionally provocative statement is nothing new however since Greenaway has been obsessed with the contrast, the conflict, and the occasional intersections between the visual and the textual, between words and images, since at least Prospero’s Books, released in 1991. Coming just seven minutes into the film, this argument operates like a thesis statement, setting the tone and providing a much needed context for the rest of this remarkable film.  

The focus of Greenaway’s documentary is the story behind Rembrandt’s well known and controversial painting Night Watch. Finished in 1642, Night Watch was one of Rembrandt’s last paintings before his disastrous decline as a painter. Although art historians argue there is little evidence that Night Watch had anything to do with Rembrandt’s withering popularity, Greenaway makes a different argument, positing a conspiracy of astonishing complexity. Without giving away too much, Greenaway’s essential argument is that Rembrandt’s highly evocative and visually rich portrait is “a painted piece of theatre,” full of hidden condemnations, ridicules, and most importantly, an indictment and an accusation of murder or, as Greenaway puts it, “assassination disguised as military accident.” According to Greenaway, Rembrandt’s famous painting of the Dutch militia company offers a symbolic depiction of the murder of Captain Piers Hasselberg, the commander, as Greenaway tells us, of the Thirteenth Company of the Amsterdam militia.

Greenaway, perhaps playfully or perhaps in earnest (it’s hard to tell), claims that his argument offers an answer and solution to many of the core mysteries that have surrounded the painting since it was unveiled in 1642. Like so many of Greenaway’s works the film is highly formally structured, based upon a set of thirty-three mysteries, which are explained in sequence. From an explanation of the culture of Dutch militia companies, to a discussion of the curiously phallic and homo-erotic placement of William Van Ruytenberg’s partisan, to the incredibly curious and unconventional golden girl who seems to be running through the center of the crowd, Greenaway examines these mysteries one at a time, building his case like a public prosecutor.

A Scene from Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'accusse (2009)

Clearly Rembrandt’s painting is a satirical criticism of the pretentious and arrogant Dutch militias, who by 1642 had largely given up fighting and patrolling and spent the majority of their time drinking, eating, and devising ever new ways of increasing their wealth. The ridiculous dress, the clumsy way they hold their weapons (many of them would never have had opportunity to use such weapons against an enemy) and the diminutive proportions of several of the figures seem to reveal what must have been Rembrandt’s thinly disguised contempt for the Bourgeois militiamen. But Greenaway’s argument takes these insults to a level beyond the plausible.

Playing upon many of these oft-noted visual insults, Greenaway constructs a series of convoluted and complex propositions to prove his point, sounding at times more like a patrician conspiracy theorist than an art critic. But perhaps this is the point. Although these arguments are not always convincing—indeed some of the claims are wildly speculative and there seems to be very little actual historical evidence to support them—historical accuracy is not what this director is after. Greenaway seems to take such pleasure in the story he is spinning and his insights are so dazzling and satisfying that their veracity hardly seems to matter. Greenaway’s real purpose, however, is not to prove his point, but to test how well Rembrandt’s Night Watch is able to evoke and support a story of such complexity and suspense—and indeed, the painting seems more than capable of this. Greenaway’s act of exegetic storytelling bring us full circle back to one of the central aesthetic arguments of his entire oeuvre, which is that the visual is itself a form of communication, and that images, even still images, may also contain meaningful narratives. It is the loss of this sense of visual narrative, Greenaway would argue, that has reduced so much of our current cinema to mere emotional amalgams of dialogue and action, with little, if any concern for the composition of the several thousand still images that make up a film. This, I would add, has also led to a fair share of very bad film criticism, so much of which is obsessed with discussions of narrative and action, often at the expense of any possible discussions of the image.

A Scene from Drowning By Numbers (1988)

 

Rembrandt’s J’accuse is not the first time that Greenaway has tackled the story of Night Watch. In 2007 Greenaway directed Nightwatching, which in retrospect seems a kind of dramatic preparation for the more documentary Rembrandt’s J’accuse. Indeed, Nightwatching makes almost the exact same argument as J’accuse, except that instead of exploring the thirty-three mysteries, Nightwatching focuses more on the painter himself and the psychological, aesthetic, and political maneuverings involved in the creation of this, his great masterpiece. Shot in the same kind of candle-lit chiaroscuro that was so popular in Rembrandt’s work, Greenaway manages to visually capture both the sense of mystery that the painting elicits, as well as the house-bound claustrophobia of Dutch life in the 17^th century. In fact, a good portion of Rembrandt’s J’accuse is borrowed footage from Nightwatching, adding an oddly self-conscious but effective dramatic element into the documentary. Greenaway’s obsession with Rembrandt is no surprise, however, seeing as how so many of Greenaway’s films are filled with similarly structured, intensely symbolic and portentous visual narratives, full of their own sometimes nagging mysteries. Consider, for instance the several odd time-lapsed scientific experiments in A Zed and Two Naughts or the highly elaborate games played throughout Drowning by Numbers.

Scene from A Zed and Two Naughts (1985)

Greenaway is, however, above all else a sensualist, a painter of the world and the human body in light and shadow, and although Rembrandt’s J’accuse is at times visually lush, it is precisely this sensuousness that Greenaway fans will find lacking in the film. This is in part because of the documentary nature of the film, but is also the result of Greenaway’s changing style. Ever since Prospero’s Books, which evoked an enormous amount of digitally composed techniques of text and image overlaid onto the screen, Greenaway has been obsessed with, and has explored in increasingly enervating excess, the possibilities of this technology. In films like Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, this technique has the effect of giving greater depth and detail to the shot or sequene in which it is employed, but here its use is increasingly distracting and often feels unnecessary. Indeed, the technological busyness of this film, as if looking at several monitor screens all at once, makes one miss and long for the slower, less frenzied, but still intricate compositions of his earlier work like A Zed and Two Naughts, The Belly of an Architect, or the always delightful Drowning by Numbers.

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It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material — whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance — and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many “good” teachers are not necessarily helping their students to be good learners. Often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in literature classes where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and, less frequently, others express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not “writing intensive.”

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes with this complaint — after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school — I cannot help but ask: if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college and college level writing? And what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain, or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that so many of us do as writing and communication fellows at CUNY, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as it has good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills the hallmarks of a liberal education? Shouldn’t every class then be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of Composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, stock brokers or Broadway dancers, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think, write, and communicate. And they should be asked to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement just two or three during their college career, only underscores the idea that the classes emphasizing these skills are another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all-too-often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn. The question we should really be asking ourselves is how we can get students to recognize and embrace the idea that writing is not something you do for a grade at the end of the semester or during a written exam, but rather that it is an essential part of the learning process itself. Requiring students to write only in designated “writing” classes undermines this important fact and reinforces the often problematic relationship that many students have with writing.  

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George Saunders’ latest book, and his first collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, is a testament to both his sanity and the depth of his empathic abilities as a writer. From his imaginative critiques of American foreign policy and the news media, to sketches of the uber-resort that is Dubai (UAE); the dilapidated border towns of Texas and Mexico; and the meditating Buddha boy of Nepal, Saunders brings a quiet dignity and respect for human suffering to everything he writes about. But Saunders is primarily a satirist and a highly comic writer with a sharp, often absurdist critical acumen. Indeed the very first essay of the collection, “The Braindead Megaphone,” offers a pointed critique of the American media establishment, setting the tone for the entire book, where each essay in one way or another deals with the problems of perspective and bias. In this title essay Saunders explores again the question that seems to dominate so much of his fiction: how much of the world is really our world and how much is it something that has been manufactured for us? Where does the line between product and person end? And how are our lives shaped by the messages we receive from the media?

Saunders’ central image of the braindead megaphone operates as a kind of absurd conceit for the present state of the American media establishment. The American media, Saunders suggests, is like a man with a megaphone, walking into a nice, polite cocktail party.

He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate.

But he’s got that megaphone.

Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of megaphone guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing – but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying. As he changes topics, so do they. If he continually uses the phrase “at the end of the day,” they start using it too. If he weaves into his arguments the assumption that the west side of the room is preferable to the east, a slow westward drift will begin…

George Saunders

Saunders is not the first writer or critic to attack the stupidity and banality of the American media. Indeed, the idea of a stupid, irresponsible media seems to be a given among most intelligent Americans. It has even become the foundation for a whole cottage industry of satirists from the writers at The Onion to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Yeah, the media establishment sucks! So tell us something we don’t know. What makes Saunders’ essay so successful, however, is precisely the absurd and inventive, but deadpan way that he goes about his critique. Saunders is really a working class writer and this is both a virtue and a fault. His ideas are never any more complex than what the average fifth grader could comprehend with a little effort, and his language and vocabulary, like many satirists, are remarkably accessible and completely free of pretension. This often seems to work well in his short stories, carried along as they are by the brilliancy of Saunders’ imagination, but in these essays his language more often than not falls flat, and one is left with nothing but a few good ideas and some sketchy descriptions of faraway places. The ideas that he generates, however, can be intriguing. The story of the “Megaphone Guy,” as strange as it is, is woven into a larger, more complex and evocative analysis of the Iraq war and the 10 O’clock news and how these two abominable failures of American society are, in some sense, the result of our increasing inability to tell good stories. “Megaphone guy is a storyteller,” says Saunders, “but his stories are not so good,” and the consequences of bad storytelling can be devastating.

Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect…The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intents, equals the evil one will do.

The rest of the collection seeks to present a positive example of the kind of good storytelling that Saunders says he values and is largely divided between these kinds of strange political essays – including a remarkable and admirably earnest four page manifesto at the end of the book – a series of magazine-style feature articles, many that he wrote for GQ magazine, and literary analyses of predictable Saunders influences: Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mark Twain.

One particularly astounding and evocative image – the objective correlative of the entire book, really – can be found in his essay on Dubai titled “The New Mecca.” Here, in what he describes as an enticing but unsavory resort city on the Arabian Peninsula, among the most amazing wealth and privilege imaginable, surrounded by perfectly fabricated theme worlds, Saunders captures well the image of the international working poor who make this world of wealth and pleasure possible.

The dance floor is packed, the whole place becomes the dance floor, the rails are now packed with dancers, a Lebanese kid petulantly shouts that if this was fucking Beirut, the girls would be stripped off by now, then gives me a snotty look and stomps away, as if it’s my fault the girls are still dressed. I drop my wallet, look down, and see the tiniest little woman imaginable, with a whisk broom, struggling against the surge of the crowd like some kind of cursed Cleaning Fairy, trying to find a small swath of floor to sweep while being bashed by this teeming mass of International Hipsters.

As great as some of these essays are, however, many of them seem like mere distractions from Saunders’ true genius for short fiction. In fact, this reviewer at least, wishes that Saunders would stop taking money from GQ to fly all over the world and spend a little more time in his study with his own imagination, for, while the essays in The Braindead Megaphone are often very touching and sometimes brilliantly bizarre, Saunders’ political analysis in these essays is weak at best. In fact, his recent decision to go ahead with a glowing article for GQ (November, 2007) on Bill Clinton, despite the fact that the magazine killed an unfavorable article on Hillary Clinton in order to gain access to her husband, is a little more than problematic. Not to mention the fact that Saunders’ good nature, his empathy and his kindness are hardly sufficient weapons against the allure of global capital and corporate media such as GQ. Indeed, because he tries to be so fair-minded and open in these essays, he sometimes comes across sounding more like a starry-eyed philanthropist, in reverential awe of the sheer constructive power of global wealth, than a sharp-minded critical essayist. The fact that he has more than once mentioned Ayn Rand as one of his influences is, of course, no help either.

In Persuasion Nation, on the other hand, is possibly Saunders’ greatest, most daring, and most original collection of short stories to date. Like his other short story collections, including Civil War Land in Bad Decline (1996), and Pastoralia (2001), In Persuasion Nation offers a not so subtle critique of post-industrial America, where our lives, or what we think of as our lives are increasingly dominated and manipulated by the manufactured worlds of consumer capitalism.

Consider the opening story titled “I can Speak!™.” Framed as a rambling and oddly personal business letter in response to an unsatisfied customer, the whole story revolves around the merits of the “I CAN SPEAK!” learning tool, which, we soon learn, is actually nothing more than a talking electronic mask for infant children that can

Recognize familiar aural patterns and respond to these patterns in a way that makes baby seem older. Say baby sees a peach. If you or Mr. Faniglia (I hope I do not presume) were to loudly say something like: “what a delicious peach!” the I CAN SPEAK™, hearing this, through that hole, that little slotted hole near the neck, might respond by saying something like: “I LIKE PEACH.” Or: “I WANT PEACH.”

Of course the idea of a learning product that is also a mask is a pretty straightforward and amazing metaphor for our slow descent into a virtual fantasy world of consumer bliss and ignorance. In Saunders’ world, even our children, it seems, have become mere playthings by which we seek nothing more than entertainment and distraction. What is really terrifying about this story, however, is just how closely, in spirit at least, the “I CAN SPEAK!” resembles actual learning tools for children and how subtly Saunders develops the rising action of the story by slowly revealing the product’s actual function and rationalizing its use as the story progresses.

But now when childless friends are over, what we have found, Ann and I, is that there is something great about having your kid say something witty and self-possessed years before he or she would actually in reality be able to say something witty or self-possessed. The bottom line is, it’s just fun, when you and your childless friends are playing cards, and your baby suddenly blurts out (in his very own probable future voice): “IT IS VERY POSSIBLE THAT WE STILL DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND THE IMPORT OF ALL OF EINSTEIN’S FINDINGS.”

Baby Einstein™ anyone? Like all good futurists everything that Saunders writes about seems at once frightening and inevitable, waiting for us just around the next corner, in the next shop window, or displayed upon the next public television screen.

Saunders’ real genius, however, is his remarkable powers of empathy. The “characters” of these stories – if you can call them characters, since some of them are as abstract as a torn piece of candy wrapper and a self-conscious sitcom character – are always rendered with an amazing sensitivity to human error and stupidity. Even the non-human characters, of which there are many, are more than capable of extreme levels of suffering and joy, transcendence and brutal violence. Take for example, the longest story of the collection, “Jon.”

Jon is an adolescent boy, who we slowly discover, is one of a small minority of celebrity human product testers. Jon and the other adolescent boys and girls who comprise the “demographic category of White Teens,” reside entirely in a sealed off testing facility and spend their entire physical lives surrounded with new products and their mental lives plugged into a commercial world, where their every thought and their every feeling is grounded in one commercial cliché or another. When Jon imagines having sex with one of the girls at the facility, the only precedent feeling that comes to mind is an MTV television show.

Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV’s Hot and Spicy Christmas (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot ’n’ Nasty Positions before the end of “We Three Kings,” only then, sadly, during Her On Top, Thumb In Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me, saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

In any one else’s hands this would seem merely vulgar and degrading, and the reader would have no connection with these seemingly vacuous teenagers, but Saunders manages, even in this setting, to actually give his characters an emotional depth that is heart-breaking. By the end of the story, as Jon and Carolyn make the difficult transformation back into the real world it is hard not to sympathize and even identify with the sheer terror of that change.

If “Jon” can be understood as a metaphor for fortress America, protected from the “reeks and wrecks” of the working classes of the third world, “Brad Carrigan, American” is even more explicit in its condemnation of the absolute apathy that wealth and consumer culture breeds. In this story, Saunders explores the thoughts and emotions of a real life sit-com character. On the surface Brad Carrigan seems like a normal American man, with a beautiful wife, an incorrigible trickster of a dog (actually a sock puppet), and a Native American neighbor who likes buttered toast. But Carrigan, like all of us, it turns out is haunted by fears of being “cancelled” – in Saunders’ world this means being placed in the grey featureless back of a van until you slowly disappear into the void – and it doesn’t take long before Saunders characteristic dark humor begins to infect Carrigan’s world. In an absurdist plotline that recalls the best of Samuel Beckett’s work for the stage, Carrigan’s life slowly begins to collapse around him. As the Carrigans and Chief Wayne sit around watching other television shows, “previously they had never watched other shows on their show,” says Carrigan, the back yard morphs into “a vast field of charred human remains.”

‘We’re Belstonians,’ says one of the corpses, lying on its back, hands held out defensively, as if it died fending off a series of blows. ‘Our nation is comprised of three main socioethnic groups: the religious Arszani of the north, who live in small traditional agrarian communities in the mountainous northern regions; the more secular, worldly Arszani of the south, who mix freely with their Tazdit neighbors; and the Tazdit themselves, who, though superior to the southern Arszani in numbers, have always lagged behind economically…’

The corpse’s story goes on for another two paragraphs before Brad replies “Wow,” “That’s so complicated.” “‘It might seem complicated, if the person trying to understand it had lived in total plenty all his life, ignoring the rest of the world,’ says the corpse missing an arm, as a butterfly flits from his chest wound to his head wound.” Even in the face of the most gruesome and bleak landscapes, in Saunders there is almost always this butterfly, always some small if insufficient source of hope or comfort. Although Brad is indeed far too domesticated and comfortable to understand the byzantine nature of conflicts in places like Serbia, Darfur or the Congo, Brad’s humanity, despite being a fictional character, is challenged and changed by his encounter with these corpses, which, for the rest of the story he tries to protect from the stinging rain and (don’t ask) feral pigs that are trying to eat them. Although the story is an obvious critique of the ignorance and apathy of the average American, it still offers a surprisingly sympathetic view of Brad, who says finally, desperately “I just want to do something.”

There’s so much suffering . We have so much and others have so little. So I was just thinking that, you know, if we took a tiny portion of what we have, which we don’t really need, and sent it to the people who need it…

Naive, yes; but Saunders is tapping into a deep-seated anxiety here implicitly at the heart of every zombie film ever made. How can we live our lives, our little peaceful suburban lives, when the dead refuse to remain in the ground?

Again, Saunders genius lies not in any original or deep intellectual engagement with these problems, but rather in the way that he captures, ironically, humorously, absurdly, the emotional resonances of our age, our futility, and our deepest despairs.

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Roberto Unger’s latest book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is no less than a call for a completely revitalized, repoliticized, and – some would say paradoxically – radicalized form of philosophical pragmatism. For Unger, pragmatism has lost touch with its more radical roots and has managed to become “the philosophy of the age” not through its success in challenging existing structures of thought, or by making institutional change possible, but by “shrinking” from these real challenges. Pragmatism, according to Unger, has become “emasculated,” the mere plaything of academics, and has thus lost much of the radically transformative potential that is implicit in its central tenets. It is exactly this transformative potential that Unger sees as the vital element of a revitalized pragmatism and the lodestone for the future direction of philosophy more broadly.

Although the book is deeply indebted to the major pragmatist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially John Dewey and his ideas of democracy and social reconstruction, Unger’s book spends surprisingly little time discussing the work or the ideas of previous pragmatists. For instance Unger spends only 12 pages discussing John Dewey, mentions William James and C.S. Pierce only a handful of times each, and gives little more than a passing mention to George Santayana and Ludwig Wittgenstein – most of this in one short chapter. Meanwhile Cornel West (Unger’s colleague at Harvard University) and Richard Rorty, two of the most notable and oft quoted of the new pragmatists, appear only in spirit. This lack of attention to actual pragmatist philosophers may initially put off those like myself, who opened Unger’s book eager to discover a potentially new approach to some by now very old ideas, but despite the lack of detailed analysis of previous pragmatists, there is still plenty to consider here for anyone interested in both the legacy and future of pragmatism as a political philosophy. Indeed, Unger spends so little time discussing previous pragmatist thinkers, it seems, precisely because he is too busy eagerly developing his own ideas about the future cultural and political potential of philosophy.

Pragmatism, suggests Unger, is not merely a collection of philosophers or even a philosophical program per se; it is instead best defined as a philosophical tendency, a way of thinking that values but ultimately fails to do justice to the “central themes” of “agency, contingency, futurity,” and “experimentalism.” For Unger, pragmatism offers a useful beginning, it offers the hope of real personal empowerment, effective democracy, and cultural transformation; but the failure of pragmatism, like other philosophies, is that its initially radical ideas, it’s attacks on what Unger calls the “perennial philosophy,” have been undermined by a seemingly benign but actually destructive adherence to a form of naturalism that places man within a larger natural realm to which he must ultimately remain bound. For Unger, this “god’s-eye view” of the universe, which insists on looking at humanity as situated within a larger determining natural or metaphysical structure – rather than focusing on humanity from the perspective of man – is precisely the problem with pragmatism as its currently understood.

“We are accustomed to imagine the immediate context of human life in society and culture as a little place within a big world–nature, the universe, being. What we think of that world, and what we think of our thinking about it, seem, according to this habit, to be what matters most in the definition of a philosophical position. Thinking about us and our relationship to man-made constructs seems a mere sideshow.”

This god’s-eye view of man, as Unger describes it, is not only philosophically untenable, but undermines the human potential that pragmatism in its purer sense offers to the individual human agent. Unger uses the example of John Dewey. Central to Dewey’s philosophy of experience is the idea of an agent that is intimately and constantly engaged in the creation and reconstruction of her environment. Dewey describes aesthetic experience as simultaneously a “doing” and an “undergoing”; thus, in Dewey, there is a constant interchange between the self and the world, an interchange that in these moments allows for an almost unlimited potential of before unknown forms and new relations. But introduce the god’s-eye view of the naturalist, the view of man as merely part of a larger series of natural forces, not of his own making, over which he has only limited or technological control, against which he is “merely a tool of natural evolution,” (35) and what was a radical philosophy becomes only an ameliorative one. Dewey’s ideas become merely the tools to adapt to, but not to actually affect, change.

The implicit contradiction in Dewey’s thought between a world of total possibility and a world limited by the structures of naturalism is exactly the problem with pragmatism as it has been received. “A radicalized pragmatism,” says Unger,

“more faithful to its own intentions, must resolve this ambiguity decisively in favor of the agent and his ambitions. But how? The naturalistic picture of the confined and dying organism contains a powerful truth. A philosophy that takes sides with the agent must not deny this truth. It must, however, reveal how we can redirect thought and reorganize society so that the vision of the agent able to use contingency against constraint becomes more real, and the picture of the toolmaker made into a tool of natural processes indifferent to his concerns becomes less real.”

This critique of a dogmatic naturalism is central to Unger’s argument. “Our most powerful interests turn out to be engaged in this denaturalization of society and culture, in this radicalization of experimentalism, in this turn from fate to invention” (7). And it is precisely this attempt to re-imagine a society founded on the principles of continual reconstruction and revision that provides the starting point for a radicalized form of pragmatism designed, ultimately, to inaugurate a new global political culture. Indeed, as other critics have noted, Unger’s philosophical and political concerns are really unavoidable responses to the crises of globalization. As more and more of our daily experience becomes directly informed by larger cultural and societal structures – the nation state, the free market, the Byzantine and labyrinthine legal systems under which we live – a concern for the continual reconstruction of those structures becomes paramount.

According to Unger, Western philosophy has been at odds with what he calls, borrowing Leibniz’s phrase, the “perennial philosophy.” This philosophy, which was articulated in the west most notably by Plato, affirms an attainable real somehow outside of experience and culture, knowledge of which provides insight into the way things really are, and has, although continually challenged by later western philosophers since Kant, withstood all attempts to get beyond it. From Kant’s subject-centered categories of the understanding, to Hegel’s “history of our individual and collective self-construction,” (5) to a shrunken form of pragmatism, bound by naturalist tendencies of thought, the “perennial philosophy” has nonetheless continued to re-assert itself. In this way it has become an impediment to actual cultural and social change. These “rejected options,” as Unger calls them, form the base of a concerted, but ultimately failed resistance to the perennial philosophy. The potential of a truly unbounded pragmatism lies in the radicalization of this dissent against the perennial philosophy and, in an appropriately pragmatic way, Unger spends the rest of the book outlining the philosophical plan for this radicalization of pragmatism, considering its implications for philosophy, society, politics, and democracy.

Unger begins this process, ironically enough, by turning first to a discussion of the failings of American pragmatism. Although Unger argues that pragmatism ultimately fails because of its various compromises with naturalism and its concessions to the claims of the “perennial philosophy;” its radical foundations nonetheless offer a useful structure to begin again. This structure, Unger argues is founded upon four “central themes,” as he calls them: “agency,” “contingency,” “futurity,” and “experimentalism.”

In recognizing the innate transformative potential that individual experience offers when it operates within human society, its resistances and its claims, its transgressions and its transcendences, pragmatism values the individual agent and thus the concept of “agency.” For Unger this recognition of the dignity and value of individual experience as both an end and a means of transformation is central to his belief that we must see the world outside of us from within the human world and abandon our ideas of understanding from the god’s-eye perspective of the “perennial philosophy.” As agents, we then experience the concepts of “contingency” and “futurity” as immediate facts that we live in a world where time and chance are not ephemeral categories but are experienced as real forces that exert their influence upon us.

“Even the most intimate and basic aspects of our experience are colored by the dogmas of culture and the institutions of society. We cannot rigidly divide our experience into the personal and the collective, the transient and the permanent. Historical time seeps into biographical time.”

In other words, our lives are limited, but importantly, they are limited largely by circumstances that we have the power ultimately to transform. Pragmatism, especially as it is articulated in Dewey, insofar as it asserts the need for continual reconstruction and the satisfaction of the needs of the human agent, recognizes this contingency as fact. Our attempts to then effectively deal with this contingency require a sense of futurity, an ability to think about the future world as different from the world we experience today, a sense of moving beyond the current constraints of our existence into new possibilities. “Futurity should cease to be a predicament,” says Unger, “and should become a program. We should radicalize it to empower ourselves. That is the reason to take an interest in ways of organizing thought and society that diminish the influence of what happened before on what can happen next.”

The last and most important of these central themes that Unger articulates is also the most Deweyan: “experimentalism.” Indeed, Dewey’s entire social philosophy is in many ways founded upon the idea of experimentalism as intelligent practice. In How We Think Dewey says that:

“The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past, upon routine and custom, to faith in progress through the intelligent regulation of existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex of the scientific method of scientific experimentation. The empirical method inevitably magnifies the influences of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of the future.”

For Unger, like Dewey, “experimentalism” is a fundamental means of progress and represents what Unger calls the “social embodiment of the imagination.” It is the very concept of the “new” working itself out in society.

Any attempt to create a culture of experimentalism and to institute a radicalized version of pragmatism would however, Unger argues, first require “the development of an unsettling conception of humanity,” one that finally accepts and celebrates the personal over the impersonal. This celebration of the personal, although it is dependent on a conception of the individual as a self-possessed and context transcending agent, continually transformed through struggle with society, is, importantly, more than mere individualism. This conception of humanity does more than simply value the liberties or freedoms of the individual, but requires instead a movement away from thinking about the world as somehow already complete, existing independent of and distant from our individual selves, our actions, our desires, and our needs, towards a world where our individual experience is embraced and judged meaningful. It does not see the self as separate from the world, but as intimately engaged with it, and requires that we give up the classical emphasis on the value of impersonal knowledge over subjective experience and that we embrace the concept, already so prevalent in the literature of the last 200 years, of ourselves as transforming agents within a world of our own creation.

The religious moral and aesthetic movements that have shaped our civilization and through it set the world on fire, have wholly reversed this priority [of the impersonal over the personal]. They have affirmed the precedence – in fact, in knowledge, and in value – of the personal over the impersonal. It is our own world – the world we create through action – that we can understand more intimately and confidently; the rest of reality we master only by an overreaching that we cannot avoid and cannot trust. Having made our own world, we can remake it. We can, as Marx said, ‘make the circumstances dance by singing to them their own melody.’

Although Unger spends a fair amount of time discussing the ways in which these core philosophical conceptions work themselves out in relation to self-consciousness, experience, and what he calls “the antinomies of time and objectivity,” the truly interesting part of Unger’s book is the way that it heeds the author’s call to actively consider the implications of this new way of thinking, and how best to put that thought into practice.

Like so much of Unger’s other more recent work, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is, at heart, concerned with practical solutions to the problems of the world and this practical concern is exemplified by the titles of chapters eight, nine and ten: “What Then Should We Do?” “Society,” and “Politics.”

The first of these three chapters, “What Then Should We Do?” both articulates the problem as it stands and offers a broad solution to that problem. If we are to overcome the obvious allures of the “perennial philosophy,” if we are going to institute a culture of “resistance and reconstruction,” we must first understand “the causes of division and unhappiness in our experience” that drives the desire to instead seek out the comforts of the fixed and the settled.

Like so many of Unger’s philosophical formulations and statements, these causes come in a nicely packaged set. The first problem we must overcome is the struggle between the manifest and the hidden worlds of reality, between our need to “save the appearances,” to “enhance and deepen the visionary immediacy of the world,” and the irresistible endeavor of thinking about the world in causal terms. Because a world of complete appearance would be without struggle or meaning, we find ourselves forced to try to understand “more and more of the world causally.” This causal understanding

“threatens, however, to move us further and further away from the vindication of the manifest world, raising the specter that our phenomenal experience may, under its light, seem an allegory or a hallucination. The more we penetrate the causal background to this experience, and represent it in the time-resistant language of mathematics, the further away we move from the experienced reality of time, difference, and action.”

The other two sources of our unhappiness revolve around our pervasive need for others as well as our own struggles to overcome our “rigidified selves” and their routines. This need for others, Unger suggests, is always associated with the threat of subjugation. “The price of connection may be dependence and submission…telling us how, in our assumed roles, to think, feel, speak, and act.” At the same time, in our efforts to transcend our circumstances, we continually find ourselves struggling against the oppressive nature of the essential repetitions and habits of our own personalities, without which we are incapable of self-definition. In short, Unger asks the question:

“How could we begin to overcome the conflict between the enabling requirements of self-affirmation: to be connected to others, and yet not to pay, for this connection, the price of subjugation and depersonalization; to be able to engage in a particular society and culture and yet not to surrender to it our powers of resistance and transcendence?”

Although these problems are existential in nature and Unger admits that there are no quick solutions and any change in our relationship to these ideas would require more than a single lifetime of cultural effort, there are political moves that we can take now to make that change less destructive and dividing. Central to this political solution is to create a culture “whose practices and discourses turn against themselves, and shorten the distance between the reproduction of the existent and its reorganization.” This is the same idea, more or less, that Unger mentions earlier in the book when he describes the structure of a culture founded on the central theme of “experimentalism”:

“The overriding criterion by which to measure our success in approaching an experimentalist ideal in politics is success in making change less dependent on crisis. A calamity – often in the form of economic collapse or armed conflict – can break any order. Even in the partly democratized societies of the contemporary world, those who would reform the established social order will ordinarily need to count on crisis as their ally. To render politics experimental is to dispense with the need for this ally. It is so to organize the contest over the mastery and uses of governmental power…that the present arrangements and practices multiply opportunities for their own revision. Change becomes internal.”

Indeed, this institutionalized change is central to Unger’s politics and Unger’s politics are closely related to his conceptions of the future structure of society. This society, which Unger refers to as “the perpetual reinvention of the future,” should embrace as its fundamental reform the process “by which we shorten the gap between our context-preserving and our context-transforming activities.” In other words, a society founded on radical pragmatism would embrace experimental change as a virtue rather than a thing to be feared and avoided. Unger alternately calls this form of society “experimentalist cooperation” and “democratic experimentalism,” and argues that this kind of society is already best exemplified in the innovative and cooperative practices of some of the best businesses and universities. But these forms of society are, Unger argues, highly exclusionary, and available to only a small portion of the people on the planet, many of whom live outside of formal society in conditions of extreme poverty. Like Dewey, Unger sees a democratization of these processes as a vital way of reorganizing society in a more fundamentally meaningful, just, and efficient manner. But this reorganization requires certain fundamental conditions of educational and economic equality, solidarity, and cooperation in order to be successful. That means:

“No accumulation of entrenched inequalities – whether of opportunities and resources or of respect and recognition – must be allowed to subsist that has as its consequence to deny any group or class the occasions and the means for action and engagement.”

In an even more explicitly political gesture, Unger ends his discussion of society by arguing that any future vision of society must side “with the classical liberals and progressives against the liberals and social-democrats of today in two decisive and connected respects.” First of all, Unger says this society must create a diffusion of power and opportunity so that the increased power of each individual is guaranteed, and secondly that it “diminish the dependence of transformation on crisis,” by rejecting the idea of any single blueprint for society and seeking instead to create that society through a series of cumulative changes. If this sounds a lot like progressivism, that’s because, in many ways, that is exactly what Unger is calling for in his politics. What makes Unger’s progressivism different, however, is that it takes as one of its central aims, the construction of a society that successfully integrates transformation as a part of its structure and thus allows for even further progressive change.

This new kind of progressivism is founded on challenging the ingrained assumptions about the irreconcilable differences between “revolutionary politics” and “routine” politics. For Unger revolutionary politics is really a myth, whose convulsive consequences actually become an alibi for the continued practice of the ameliorative routine politics of social democracy. In other words fear of revolution drives even more the perpetuation of entrenched, unbending systems of order, within which ameliorative moves are all that is possible.

“With its fantastical idea of changing the whole, the notion of revolutionary politics becomes in practice an alibi for its opposite: the humanization of an order we no longer know how to reimagine or to remake.”

What Unger argues for, however, is a rejection of this dichotomy and an embrace of what he calls “revolutionary reform.” “The real revolutionary politics,” says Unger, “is revolutionary reform…What we should want is a form of political life enabling us to change everything in social life, one thing at a time. It may be gradualist in its method, but revolutionary in its outcome.”

For Unger, the institution of this revolutionary reform requires a radicalization of democracy. This means dramatically increasing the level of democratic participation so that we may “strengthen in the political life of the people the sense of effective individual action, overcoming the sense of futility of political action and shortening the distance between politics and the rest of social experience.” It also means a series of important reforms and innovations, including: combining the features of direct and representative democracy; upholding and revitalizing the liberal principles of fragmented constitutional power, without giving into the conservative desire to keep real political change at a minimum; create greater diversity of political options by allowing certain sectors of society to “opt out” of the dominant political system without repercussions; and valuing and strengthening the capabilities of the individual as a source of continued transformation. “A democracy reorganized in the light of [these] five institutional ambitions…splits the difference between citizens and prophets as well as between practical tinkerers and citizens. The conception of political life it proposes is not a crushing of private concern by public devotion; it is rather a pushing outward of the range of our ordinary interest.”

Unger’s vision, as many other critics have noted, is remarkably romantic and his ideas can seem at times, to be decidedly Keatsian, valuing and recognizing the paradoxically liberating fact of ourselves as dying organisms. Indeed, although Unger spends a significant portion of the book discussing the practical implications of his ideas, it is the visionary and literary nature of his language that stands out, and this book, like all good philosophy, is as much a part of our literature of ideas as it is a political or philosophical text.

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