"Me" culture

Are you doing this as a thought experiment to cause us intellectual pain, or do you actually think that's the way the world is going?

I think that's essentially what liberalism is becoming -- a liberal imperial vision of bringing what we've got in the West to everybody, though of course in a multicultural sort of way. It'll be a multicultural global mall. Really huge food courts. Whether this vision is realistic or not, I can't say, but it's practically the only coherent international economic political vision out there that's capable of articulation and from which certain policies follow. I don't know if that's the way things are actually going.

But do I put it this way in order to cause this intellectual pain? Yes. It certainly causes me intellectual pain. Not to be able to think of a real alternative, I mean, like socialism used to seem to be. But maybe we should just sit with this for a while. We're surrounded by so many bogus solutions and predictions about the world, and there are so many spheres of activity you can rush into and feel you're doing something.

And do you think we're kidding ourselves?

Not necessarily. There are certainly lots of practical things you can do that make a positive difference to poverty, for example. But in grand political terms, I just don't know. I mean that. But I do believe that everything has to be thought through again for this age, from scratch: a theory of consciousness, what it means to be embodied, mind, what's property, what's power...

Think of how much time Marx on the one hand and Adam Smith on the other spent understanding early industrial conditions -- early and middle modernity -- before they issued forth with their policies and prescriptions. And the world we live in makes their world look like a peasant farmhouse setting by comparison. For me to spend 30 years studying and still not really know what to do -- that doesn't seem like a lot to me.

You devote the whole last chapter of the book to refuting our addiction to trying to find a solution to the problem, whatever that problem may be.

I think: Diagnosis first, prescription later. People listen to some analysis of society or culture for five or 10 minutes and then go "Oh, that's interesting. So what do we do about it?" Implicit in that question -- I can hear it in their tone -- is that if the author of the diagnosis can't come up with a plausible scenario for curing world poverty, or whatever, and can't trot it out in a minute and half ... then what is this?

But there does seem to be a subtle prescription in the book for how to escape from mediation on a local level: Opening yourself to accident and necessity.

Yes, I do believe that, in our mediated lives, what's left of reality are those kind of contingencies, intersections of chance and necessity. So if you've had a terrible illness strike your family or yourself, I don't care how many self-help books you read or support groups you seek out. The culture will try to introduce a mediated distance between you and cancer. But it'll fail, to a large degree.

The same is true of having children. The deal is, you don't choose. Before it happens, you make all these choices, but then bang! You have this person. From nowhere. The world used to be like that, but now it isn't. Now we choose everything. But we don't choose who our kids are. Yet. We're trying, though -- that's why the book ends with a riff on cloning. Because we're trying to make even that optional, mediated. I don't mean individual human beings are all longing to clone themselves. I mean that the logic of the culture is, so to speak, longing to clone.

We want to choose everything, but that effort gets constantly interrupted, momentarily, by accidents. They can be serious, like an illness, or it can be as simple as losing your car keys, or nearly tripping over something. Then as soon as you recover your balance, so to speak, you become what I call in the book a "method actor" again.

How so?

The basic idea with method acting, as it was developed by Stanislavski, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and since then practically everyone, is that you don't act: You react, you "live in the moment," as they say, even though you are onstage or in a film. The techniques are a lot like therapy because the goal is the same -- to get to real feelings and spontaneous expression. But the irony is that, at the very same moment that you achieve that, you turn real feeling and expression into performance. In the book I use this as a way to introduce the more complicated ways in which mediated people -- because they are so reflexive and so aware of their options -- actually perform their lives.

Is there something to be said though for playing these roles that we cultivate with gusto?

I'd go for that. A lot of stuff that right now might not look so good could turn out to be great. There's the possibility of turning this whole idea -- that we're constantly performing our lives and riddled with self-consciousness -- into a virtue. Maybe we look back on our grandparents -- who had little sense of who they were, compared to us, they were just there -- and envy the authenticity of their being: I feel like such a phony compared with my grandfather. But then, on the other hand, you could look back and say, poor man, he was practically a zombie. So I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that entertaining possibilities like the one you just did is what people should be doing.

Next Page: "No sane, fully mediated, urban blue-state person would expect anybody to commit to the life, death, no matter what, anymore"

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