Foundationalism

Kirk Cameron is a funny guy. He was a very successful actor on a popular sitcom, unintentionally makes LOL-worthy memes or recently made a film about rescuing the true meaning of Christmas... for consumerism. 

However, I recently discovered that the minister and activist made some serious insight that will help his fellow conservatives out of an interpretive problem. It's not the interpretive problem of discrediting evolution while worrying about diseases going airborne or claiming that while the Confederacy put white supremacy in its charter, the Civil War was only incidentally about slavery.

It's the problem of the founding fathers. Conservatives from jokesters like Sarah Palin to intellectuals like Newt Gingrich consistently argue that the Enlightenment Deists who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution were actually orthodox Christians who thought the state should always reflect the character of that tradition, at least that tradition as it appeared at the end of the 19th century.

Cameron's movie Monumental about a Puritan statue in Massachusetts effectively elides the discourses of the 17th-century pilgrims with the democratic patriarchs in 1776. The way he uses the term, the Puritans were the founders, and the terms can be used synonymously.

Indeed, if we want to think of the US as pious, homogeneous state always looking outward at its enemies as some conservatives imagine, we have to think of Plymouth colony, not the Philadelphia of libertines like Ben Franklin. Though, the collectivist and anti-consumption tendencies of that first WASP nest are probably more of a problem for Cameron's friends than the are a help.

Cameron's move also opens up the term "founders" to encompass more of the "original" characters of the settler-colonists that have had lasting influence in American history. We could see foundations in the educated Catholic elite in Maryland, the prison colony in Georgia, and perhaps most importantly, Atlantic slavery, with its impact on the musical-literary tradition that has perhaps done the most to shape American culture as it is marketed and understood in the world today as well as its shaping the world economic order.

Of course, the problem with the historical views of many Americans of most political persuasions is the obsessive focus on the founders themselves, by whatever understanding. While many religious traditions tend to venerate single father-figures, it is not clear that states or other political communities should do so.

In modern history, has not the extolling of the fathers of nations tended to signify troubled political climates rather than steady ones?

Of course, America's singular deference to its Constitution is the result of classical liberal sensibilities enduring in our politics rather than the cause of it. Nevertheless, I think our contemporary preoccupation with its fundamentals and the intentions and assumptions of its writers needs some new scrutiny.

I'm probably not alone in wanting a story with a general opening of the idea of foundation and an appreciation of how exemplary figures or texts are reworked in deliberative change. That would represent something different, whether in a film about something set in stone or not.

On Oversharing

It seems that "we haven't seen each other in a month" as the poet says. The Christmas whirlwind and some talks I had to prepare kept we away from the blog.

However, over break I learned that the Chambers Dictionary from Britain named "overshare" the word of the year for 2014. Though it's usually the Oxford dictionary that gains the headlines for the word of the year, last year they chose "vape"; nuff said.

In this post, I want to ask about what it is that bothers us about oversharing and what about it might be so particular to the time of the word's being coined. A theme I have been working with recently is the theme of enforced intimacy. In a way, oversharing is forcing an intimacy on someone else. I am thinking about intimacy in a modern society in which a) particular understandings of privacy that came to be seen as inviolable, and b) more and more is put into the realm of public scrutiny.

I think the problem with oversharing is that it cuts across two kinds of personal perception and social interaction that are not supposed to intersect in modern understandings. I think we today are more comfortable with intimacy and vulnerability among strangers in certain contexts, in a general and public sense, than we are being intimate with those we call our "intimates".

What does the naming of oversharing say about the boundaries of the self in 2014? What does it say about norms of intimacy and publicity in a society of oversharers? The word might have honored in England, but let's just imagine that such a society is the United States.

To think about this in an open, bloggy way, I have three artifacts I've enjoyed and thought about from America in 2014. They are the show Death, Sex & Money by Anna Sale on WNYC, Lena Dunham's book Not That Kind of Girl and Desiree Akhavan's film Appropriate Behavior.

Of course, the charge of having overshared in 2014 wasn't limited to Gotham women, but I think it is significant that the personal, overly personal or not, belongs to women. The Victorians set it up that way, and as Dunham says, to be of this sphere is to be socially coded as lacking gravitas, it is to be vulnerable to being dismissed if one is too much oneself.

The idea of "personal space" or "the space of the personal" is central here, and in exploring this in the three different works of 2014, I'm not looking to ask about who might be oversharing or how. My idea is to think about what the defining of the phenomenon might reveal about concepts like selfhood, vulnerability, sociality, exposition and the arts in everyday experiences of media that divert many of us. 

To start, Sale says that Death, Sex & Money is about "the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation", or any conversation. I can relate personally: growing up Episcopalian back east, sex, identity and vulnerability were issues that Swedes and Italians dealt with on the movie screen. We would watch them, keeping mostly to ourselves, and if we had an irrepressible comment it would be in terms of bare abstraction.

Anna Sale does go deep, albeit in the more Victorian mode of a dignified personal space. In the show, her sobriety and interrogative bearing do not inhibit the interviews, it seems to enable people from very different experiences to talk about what is supposed to be particular to themselves, trying to bear up to pain and uncertainty. The sharers go over, which is the point of the show, but they do it, or are edited to do it, with a dignity that smoothes the personal and public and private and universal divides. It is oversharing, but in such a way that I could imagine hearing it from a non-intimate and not cringe about it being somebody's business.

Lena Dunham's business, on the other hand, is everyone's business, and the pain and uncertainty she's imposing has something of an older tradition of collective art. Sale is not controversial: she doesn't put her topics out there with the heat, weakness and desperation all can engender. Dunham, on the other hand, is trying to do the opposite. She is trying for catharsis in the acutely explicit, the cringe as people have been sayin. Once the pain is felt, we can move beyond it to something important. What Aristotle meant by "catharsis" was that pity and fear were the gates to collective feeling, but neither Girls or Not That Kind of Girl has something that specific in mind.

What I remember most about the book is not the important parts about consent and power, or family or child sexuality. It's rather the long lists of everything she ate when she was on a diet and had to put everything into her phone.

She was trying to resolve her difficulties of fit, into clothes, into relationships in this extremely banal way that none of us would tolerate hearing about from a friend. But when she makes these difficulties public it means something else, it's a call to pay attention to how pressure is placed around us. It may not be a profound calling, hyperactive dieting is not as serious a disorder as there could be, but the whole picture is out when it is overshared.

Akhavan is trying to make a picture also. In an interview on Death, Sex & Money, she says this year's Appropriate Behavior is a professional, intentional, comedic remake of an earlier film, The Slope. Much like this year's, that film is about trying to make sense of a relationship and its end. The Slope was supposed to be creative therapy for Akhavan and her partner, but ended up a record of their split. Akhavan films and stars in it like Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives.

What interests me about this year's picture is not that one kind of intimate suffering is sad while written a slightly differently it is funny. It's rather what that is possible when one creator takes control from a distance and commits to fiction: it's just Akhavan this year and not her partner. This change coincided with other alterations: a thinly-disguised avatar instead of a real name, ethnic caricature instead of hurting family drama. By her account, she put more fiction in with the explicit pain.

The bigger point I find here is that the exercise of fiction that makes oversharing something else. I'm not talking about fiction in the general sense, not what Aristotle understood of drama that has many contexts in world art history. I mean the specific Western individualistic author-centered personalism unique to modern society, to bourgeois society, the society with divisions troubled by oversharing.

When we are untroubled by oversharing, we have two adjacent selves: 1) a non-interacting consumer of others' narratives who is quite open to depravity and misery, to non-normative divisions of piety and profanity, and 2) the equanimous person concerned with the propriety of placements and categories of modern life. These are clearly divided personae in the same person, a person who can be intimate with strangers but not friends. 

When the word "overshare" was coined in 2014, I instantly knew what it meant, but what it pointed to seems stranger and stranger to me.

Aging Gracefully

If you're watching a fancy public-broadcast period drama and you hear a character comes from a "very old family", you might be struck by an absurdity. Aren't all families by definition the same age?

Of course, we know what the character means; she means that the family in question has been established for longer. She means the family has a kind of memory developed from continuity of property and status. She is implying that such a privilege is the exception among families rather than the rule.

Recently, I saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia for the first time. Watching this wonderful and difficult play, I thought about a physical manifestation of the idea of an old family: the grand old English home in which the time-hopping action of the show takes place. I was struck by how particularly English the humanist ghost-hunting is, taking place within the physical structure and contoured by ideas of inheritance of things present. It would be difficult to write such a play in, say, Morocco, even where they have plenty of academics and plenty of beautiful old homes.

Now, Stoppard's play has nothing to do with the non-West, or non-England, and his awareness of his characters' privileged parochialism is clear.

Nevertheless, I think it is significant how masterful works like Stoppard's about themes like the past's habitation of the present depend on a specific kind of intimacy with that past. This comfortable familiarity with old grandeur reflects not just wealth, but the patterns of modernization that affect division of West from non-West, of Western and non-Western "heritage".

In this, I think it is not simply that a few English families legally own the places their ancestors have lived in for centuries. Nor is it only that wealthy families in the non-West, like Edward Said's, have tended to lose their grand old places to settlers. Nor is it only that much of public space in the former colonies like Pakistan or South Africa is organized around control, segregation and tourism into which a postcolonial elite has tended to move comfortably. Nor is it that all the big cities in the Global South have undergone dispossessing transformations like Beijing.

It is rather that the past was disposed very differently in the West than the non-West, even as discourses of heritage and history are supposed to be universals. These concepts flourished creating continuity in the West: an institutional long march to modern maturity. This is in contrast to the world-changing interruption elsewhere that meant continuity, physical or institutional, could not be understood as it was before.

It is wrong to think, as I can hear friends cautioning me, that everyone in the West or non-West looks at the present reminders of the past with the same essential difference. It is wrong to think that modernization has fixed everyone's mind, foreclosing other possibilities. It is wrong to think creativity like Stoppard's comes only in the comfort of the surroundings of the past brought with freedom and empire.

However, for me, in whatever tunnel-visioned state I saw it, Arcadia had as background a relationship between place, time and space. This relationship is about being able to look back on what is one's own. In this ease, of course, tragedy is possible, like in the play. But to believe that one's own past has the integrity of continuity into which one can look back, and to have such a belief validated by the imbalance of history, is something I try to think about even in the presence of a structure of composed with great beauty.