Anyone that has studied anything in any of the humanities or social sciences departments of Western systems of higher education knows the standard form of the successful essay:
Text X ostensibly says Y, but in fact a closer analysis reveals that, in fact, it actually secretly says Z, and I will now step through why that is the case, point by point. (Followed by a step back to some meta level and a few dozen steps that inevitably can b traced back to continental philosophy.)
Though at first glance this may seem a bit of a stretch—after all, there are many more things to do in the humanities than analyze a text—in fact, it’s not. Not for a long time now.
You see, for half a century at least we’ve generally “understood” that any social object—that is, anything that at least one human mind experiences—is in fact a “text.” Naturally this includes people and their biographies as well. (Thanks, language and literature departments!)
And for a similar amount of time, we’ve also generally “understood” that all texts secretly carry with them the agency of some power, and are thus in fact exercises of, or themselves exercise power. (Thanks, social science departments!)
And so it is that that in effect, the entire project of the humanities and social sciences for the better part of a century in the West has been to point to just about anything or anyone that can be seen or that anyone cares about—including people and things that were previously considered beautiful, or sacred, or funny, or trivial—and demonstrate how it—or them—is actually a liar out to manipulate you for it—or their—own ends.
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Amazingly, all of this aggravated nonsense falls somehow under the auspices of “making life better.” Usually the claim is that power that’s out to manipulate you ought to be neutered (thus explaining why all art, science, people, and things also have to be neutered, given that they’re all deceptive texts in service of said power), or even more sadly that we are edified when we pursue Truth and thus it is imperative to demonstrate just what a totality of all that is is clearly Lies.
And so it is that we end up in 2024 with the West in collapse and wondering why there are so many conspiracy theories and why so many are so very angry, and of course everyone is marching around trying to “make the world a better place” by pointing their fingers at their fellow citizens, their social and cultural institutions, and all the traditions that have made them who they are, and trying to neuter the lot.
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In fact, anyone who tries to make the world a better place can only make the world a worse place. The meta is a poison. It’s amazing that one of the largest companies on the planet—and by all accounts one of the most poisonous and destructive—is, in fact, called meta.
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What you can not do in any modern humanities or social science department or journal article or even in idle humanities or social science chit-chat over wine with fat heads is naively say that you simply like a work, or simply don’t like it, or that you think it means exactly what it says.
The failure to elevate oneself immediately to the meta level in such situations isn’t just gauche, but is seen as evidence of some form of mental retardation, i.e. you look to be thirty but in fact you’re clearly seven, as you have taken something in life at face value. How embarrassing.
And in fact the most revered amongst us, the people who will make emeritus or who will run the hedge fund, never have to “elevate” themselves to meta because they have achieved a permanent meta state and are admired far and wide for it.
They never see what is in front of them; instead, they see the power that it secretly carries, the message that it secretly conveys, the shapes of the shadows that it casts and that are clearly the actual immanence of the thing in the world.
They never see naively, in other words—they see first, last, and always only the conspiracies that lie behind the toothbrush, the Shakespeare sonnet, the Coca-Cola can, and the waste management engineer.
And of course as they would freely admit, they, too, are a text, and their calling out of these conspiracies is just so much more text, and anyone who fails to regard both they and their statements first and foremost at this level of meta analysis deserves everything they have coming to them.
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In short, our best and our brightest know very well and have known for generations that all of it—the paintings and the people, the novels and the natal, the consumer goods and the calcuations that enable their manufacture—are lies all the way down, conspiracies all the way down, in the service of power.
And they can point to a dozen passages in Derrida or Lacan or Foucault or Lyotard or Saussure or Pierce and so on to make their case—not like the plebes who merely assert it naively. (Naivete, after all, is the enemy of those trying to make the world a better place; all accusations must be made in a state of engaged meta-level blase that borders on trance, but can’t be trance, because of course trance is naive.)
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And then we all sit around and muse about why the public is so suspicious, and so gripped by mistrust, and why we all feel a gaping hole in our hearts where the meaning and truth used to be.
It took me decades to turn myself into one of these monsters, and with luck, by the time I die, I will rediscover naivete and be able to say “gosh I like it because I think it’s pretty” or “gosh I like them because I think they’re nice.”
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When politics invades aesthetics and claims of Truth-capital-‘T’ you know you have a totalitarian culture on your hands. Fascist, communist, whatever. That’s one of the general conclusions drawn after Hitler and Stalin.
Maybe that’s the strong form of the argument, but I think at the very least what we’ve got here is something of a gravity vs. quantum mechanics problem for human being. Both history and experience tell us, if we’ll listen (but we won’t because that would be naive), that art and the analysis of art and the human using scientific methods simply does not work. It seems to work, but in the very moment at which the the Actuality is revealed, the subject instead suddenly vanishes. Analyze them this way and art ceases to be art; people cease to be people, and thus nothing is revealed. To examine anything outside of science using methods broadly drawn from science is to extinguish it. You call it a lie because it is one and it vanishes on you, and you become the liar calling out other liars.
Yet we know that the methods of science broadly work, as they have given us the Amazon Truck and the Smart Coffee Maker.
And so we have a core irreconcilability. It’s the pit that Marx and everyone else fell into on the way to the future. We know how to find Truth. We also know that to seek Truth using Truth methods in the domain of Truth is to extinguish Truth.
Maybe because there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But of course that can’t be, because it’s naive; that’s clearly saying something else, something that Power wants us to think…
(And here the professional philosophers and epistemologists jump in and begin crafting new chapters of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at me. They miss the point, but then missing the point is the point, because to not miss the point would be naive. I am calling them out here and now as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power, in the same way that they will be calling me out under their breath as a naive liar who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of my own power, in the same way that the left is calling out Donald Trump as a naive lair who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of his own power and the right is calling out Joe Biden and the CDC as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power…)
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Oh yes, there’s an anti-elite feeling about, and as a former “elite” I want to say—it’s fully justified. There are few things so vile as stealing the general supply of the numinous by way of cynical signs and wonders, then taking it out behind the shed and murdering it in cold blood.
We are going to suffer for our sins in the West. The die is cast.
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P.S. Get off my lawn.