Against Everything Read online

  ALSO BY MARK GREIF

  The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973

  Copyright © 2016 by Mark Greif

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Greif, Mark, [date], author.

  Title: Against everything : essays / Mark Greif.

  Description: New York : Pantheon Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016003116 (print). LCCN 2016016636 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871157 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101871164 (ebook).

  Classification: LCC AC8.5.G74 2016 (print). LCC AC8.5 (ebook). DDC 814/.6—dc23.

  LC record available at: lccn.loc.gov/​2016003116

  ebook ISBN 9781101871164

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mark Greif

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part I

  Against Exercise

  Afternoon of the Sex Children

  On Food

  Octomom and the Market in Babies

  Part II

  The Concept of Experience (The Meaning of Life, Part I)

  Part III

  Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop

  Punk: The Right Kind of Pain

  Learning to Rap

  Part IV

  Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution (The Meaning of Life, Part II)

  Part V

  The Reality of Reality Television

  WeTube

  What Was the Hipster?

  Part VI

  Anaesthetic Ideology (The Meaning of Life, Part III)

  Part VII

  Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy, or Heroes Without War

  Seeing Through Police

  Part VIII

  Thoreau Trailer Park (The Meaning of Life, Part IV)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Gabrielle and Simone

  PREFACE

  This book represents a decade of writing. These are essays I wrote for n+1, the journal I founded with friends to publish a kind of literature that didn’t exist elsewhere. Writers dead or famous have innumerable publications to air their views. If we made one venue for the unknown, might they say one thing as yet unsaid? Here are my published attempts. The additions are essays unpublished previously in English, inquiries I didn’t want to share without context in America. They all reflected an effort, in my twenties and my thirties, to try to figure a few things out. What I was living for, principally, and why so much around me seemed to be false, and contemptible, yet was accepted without a great collective cry of pain.

  This is not a book of critique of things I don’t do. It’s a book of critique of things I do. Habits in which I am joined by a class of people, call them the middle classes, or people in the rich nations, or Americans and Europeans and their peers the world over. Call them us, or call them you. I want to talk about you.

  A lot of books tell you how to do the things you are supposed to do, but better. This book asks about those things you are supposed to do. Do you really do those things? For the reasons that are supposed? What if our true reasons, yours and mine, are not the ones usually proclaimed? If the right reasons to do things, to be good and true and righteous, in fact are wrong? If the usual wisdom is unwise?

  I begin with the body. It’s the closest thing to us. In exercise, health, sexual desire, eating, childbearing. Youth and age. My notion is that once progress made it easy to acquire the necessities of bodily life, other forces set about making those needs complicated and hard. Much of daily life is turned over to life maintenance at the very moment you’d think we’d be free to pursue higher goals.

  Spectacles, sights and sounds, measures and sums, are made from former areas of privacy. This exposure to sight generates all sorts of new pleasures and new fears. But the ceaseless grooming and optimizing of ordinary life stands in the way of finding out how else we could spend our attention and our energy. Adventurers are always coming back to tell us the thrills of daring acts that re-create more of the same. “I stood on the precipice and leaped!” “Into what?” “Into the known!”

  Our hesitancy to know ourselves extends to things both bad and good. Identity theft has become such a general phenomenon these days, no wonder it goes so often unreported. The problem is not that others are stealing ours but that we are sneaking theirs. By the book’s end, I will have asked what we call “experience” today and what we name “reality.” Where glimmers of hope come from, especially within the popular culture, and why you might be embarrassed to own them. And what sight and the body could have to do with a nation’s armies, police, and democracy.

  I can imagine someone asking: “Against everything?” I’ll tell you what the impulse means to me. My mother used to take me to a pond, when I was small, because it was a place to swim and walk in the suburbs where I grew up. Its name, Walden, also named a scandalous book.

  My mother had never read the book. I was too young to read it. We circled the pond, many afternoons, and speculated. In olden days there had been a man named Thoreau. He walked and thought here. He had written in his book that the things people considered superior were often inferior. The best things might be in nobody’s possession. Trash was treasure. Work was overrated, insofar as most people worked at the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Walking without a goal was superior to running. Conversation was the true purpose of everything, even of solitude and reading and thinking.

  Our knowledge of his words was very dim. It came from short quotations reproduced on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and T-shirts: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Our ignorance, though, did not mislead us as to the sense of what the philosopher had meant. Absence of detail proved to be the best instruction conceivable. “I wonder what he would have thought of that?” said my mother as we passed every folly, driving to the pond or coming home: billboards, luxury cars, malls, political signage, mansions, families fighting in backseats, radio insipidity, entreaties to good behavior from the road signs, the infinite unlovely and inane.

  It was my task to do the wondering. The pact between us was that “he” knew how to question and discredit anything we might think of—things we doubted, but also things we did. My portion was to figure out exactly what his critique and alternative could be. I had to show how every commonplace thing might be a compromise. The standards universally supposed might not be “universal.” Or they simply might not suit a universe in which my mother and I could happily live. I chattered—childishly, I guess, but buoyed by a medium other than youth and age—while kicking my sloppy sneakers against the dash. I taught myself to overturn, undo, deflate, rearrange, unthink, and rethink. “But it isn’t really possible,” my mother would warn. “You can’t go down to the root. Some things don’t change.” “I’ll bet he would think it’s possible.”

  The most important thinker for me, ever, was thus just a principle when he mattered most, and his period of greatest importance was when I had not read him. I knew a “philosopher” to be a mind that was unafraid to be against everything. Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness. And to attempt this was to try to be our friend, my mother’s and mine.<
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  I finally read Walden when I was seventeen, about to leave home to start life on my own. The book was more implacable than I could ever have imagined, and more hopeful and loving. I had with it the experience I’ve had with only a handful of books, of knowing I didn’t deserve to finish it until I would no longer have to cast down my eyes, abashed, in the presence of its words. That kind of growing up, I thought uneasily, could take a lifetime.

  I identify with my mother, as she was then, an adult, who knows that many things don’t change, and with myself, as I was then, a child, who knew that life was not worth entering if it couldn’t become better than it is. And I speak as myself now, still learning to be different than I am. To wish to be against everything is to want the world to be bigger than all of it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, while an ocean of possibility rolls around us. No matter what you are supposed to do, you can prove the supposition wrong, just by doing something else.

  I

  AGAINST EXERCISE

  Were “In the Penal Colony” to be written today, Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine. Instead of the sentence to be tattooed on its victims, the machine would inscribe lines of numbers. So many calories, so many miles, so many watts, so many laps.

  —

  Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym. The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work. But with the gym we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure. We leave the office, and put the conveyor belt under our feet, and run as if chased by devils. We willingly submit our legs to the mangle, and put our stiffening arms to the press.

  It is crucial that the machines are simple. The inclined planes, pins, levers, pulleys, locks, winches, racks, and belts of the Nautilus and aerobic machines put earlier stages of technical progress at our disposal in miniature. The elements are visible and intelligible for our use but not dangerous to us. Displaced, neutralized, they are traces of a necessity that no longer need be met with forethought or ingenuity.

  A farmer once used a pulley, cable, and bar to lift his roof beam; you now use the same means to work your lats. Today, when we assume our brains are computers, the image of a machine man, whether Descartes’s or La Mettrie’s, has an old and venerable quality, like a yellowed poster on the infirmary wall. Blood pressure is hydraulics, strength is mechanics, nutrition is combustion, limbs are levers, joints are ball-and-sockets.

  The exercise world does not make any notable conceptual declaration that we are mechanical men and women. We already were that, at least as far as our science is concerned. Rather, it expresses a will, on the part of each and every individual, to discover and regulate the machinelike processes in his own body.

  And we go to this hard labor with no immediate reward but our freedom to do it. Precisely this kind of freedom may be enough. Exercise machines offer you the superior mastery of subjecting your body to experimentation. We hide our reasons for undertaking this labor, and thoughtlessly substitute a new necessity. No one asks whether we want to drag our lives across a threshold into the kingdom of exercise.

  Exercise is no choice. It comes to us as an emissary from the realm of biological processes. It falls under the jurisdiction of the obligations of life itself, which only the self-destructive neglect. Our controversial future is supposed to depend on engineered genes, brain scans, neuroscience, laser beams. About those things, we have loud, public, sterile debates—while the real historic changes are accomplished on a gym’s vinyl mats, to the sound of a flywheel and a ratcheted inclined plane.

  —

  In the gym you witness people engaging in a basic biological process of self-regulation. All of its related activities reside in the private realm. A question, then, is why exercise doesn’t stay private. It could have belonged at home with other processes it resembles: eating, sleeping, defecating, cleaning, grooming, and masturbating.

  Exerciser, what do you see in the mirrored gym wall? You make the faces associated with pain, with tears, with orgasm, with the sort of exertion that would call others to your immediate aid. But you do not hide your face. You groan as if pressing on your bowels. You repeat grim labors, as if mopping the floor. You huff and you shout and strain. You appear in tight yet shapeless Lycra costumes. These garments reveal the shape of the genitals and the mashed and bandaged breasts to others’ eyes, without acknowledging the lure of sex.

  Though we get our word “gymnasium” from the Greeks, our modern gym is not in their spirit. Athletics in the ancient institution were public and agonistic. They consisted of the training of boys for public contests. The gymnasium was closest to what we know as a boxing gym, with the difference that it was also the place adult men gathered to admire the most beautiful boys and, in the Athenian fashion, sexually mentor them. It was the preeminent place to promote the systematic education of the young, and for adults to carry on casual debates among themselves, modeling the intellectual sociability, separated from overt politics, that is the origin of Western philosophy. Socrates spent most of his time in gymnasia. Aristotle began his philosophical school in the covered walkway of a gymnasium.

  The Socratic and Peripatetic methods would find little support in a modern gym. What we moderns do there belonged to mute privacy. The Greeks put their genuinely private acts into a location, an oikos, the household. To the household belonged all the acts that sustained bare biological life. That included the labor of keeping up a habitation and a body, growing food and eating it, bearing children and feeding them. Hannah Arendt interpreted this strong Greek distinction of the household from the public world as a symbol of a general truth: that it is necessary to keep the acts which sustain naked life away from others’ observation. A hidden sphere, free from scrutiny, makes the foundation for a public person—someone sure enough in his privacy to take the drastic risks of public life, to think, to speak against others’ wills, to choose with utter independence. In privacy, alone with one’s family, the dominating necessity and speechless appetites can be gratified in the nonthought and ache of staying alive.

  Our gym is better named a “health club,” except that it is no club for equal meetings of members. It is the atomized space in which one does formerly private things, before others’ eyes, with the lonely solitude of a body acting as if it were still in private. One tries out these contortions to undo and remake a private self; and if the watching others aren’t entitled to approve, some imagined aggregate “other” does. Modern gym exercise moves biology into the nonsocial company of strangers. You are supposed to coexist but not look closely, wipe down the metal of handlebars and the rubber of mats as if you had not left a trace. As in the elevator, you are expected to face forward.

  It is like a punishment for our liberation. The most onerous forms of necessity, the struggle for food, against disease, always by means of hard labor, have been overcome. It might have been naive to think the new human freedom would push us toward a society of public pursuits, like Periclean Athens, or of simple delight in what exists, as in Eden. But the true payoff of a society that chooses to make private freedoms and private leisures its main substance has been much more unexpected. This payoff is a set of forms of bodily self-regulation that drag the last vestiges of biological life into the light as a social attraction.

  —

  The only truly essential pieces of equipment in modern exercise are numbers. Whether at the gym or on the running path, rudimentary calculation is the fundamental technology. As the weights that one lifts are counted, so are distances run, time exercised, heart rates elevated.

  A simple negative test of whether an activity is modern exercise is to ask whether it could be done meaningfully without counting or measuring it. (In sports, numbers are used differently; there, scores are a way of recording competition in a social encounter.) Forms of exercise that do away with mechanical equipment, as running does, cannot
do away with this.

  In exercise one gets a sense of one’s body as a collection of numbers representing capabilities. The other location where an individual’s numbers attain such talismanic status is the doctor’s office. There is a certain seamlessness between all the places where exercise is done and the sites where people are tested for illnesses, undergo repairs, and die. In the doctor’s office, the blood lab, and the hospital, you are at the mercy of counting experts. A lab technician in a white coat takes a sample of blood. A nurse tightens a cuff on your arm, links you to an EKG, takes the basic measurements of your height and weight—never to your satisfaction. She rewards you with the obvious numbers for blood pressure, body-fat ratio, height and weight. The clipboard with your numbers is passed. At last the doctor takes his seat, a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss. In specialist language, exacerbating your dread and expectation, you may learn your numbers for cholesterol (two types), your white cells, your iron, immunities, urinalysis, and so forth. He hardly needs to remind you that these numbers correlate with your chances of survival.

  How do we acquire the courage to exist as a set of numbers? Turning to the gym or the track, you gain the anxious freedom to count yourself. What a relief it can be. Here are numbers you can change. You make the exercises into trials you perform upon matter within reach, the exterior armor of your fat and muscle. You are assured these numbers, too, and not only the black marks in the doctor’s files, will correspond to how long you have to live. With willpower and sufficient discipline, that is, the straitening of yourself to a rule, you will be changed.