Ethics and melodrama
Then last night, actually, it was our twentieth wedding anniversary. And I took Chiquita to see the show about Billie Holiday, and I looked at these show-business people, who know nothing about Billie Holiday, nothing, so they’re really kind of in a way intellectual creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling, I mean, you know, I was just sitting there crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling, I was just as creepy as they were! And that my whole life had been a sham, and I didn’t have the guts to be Billie Holiday either.
-André Gregory, My Dinner With Andre
I’ve been reading Irrelevant Narcissism on Marie Antoinette, and The Oh Zone on some sort of English assignment designed to teach her about making arguments. Apparently, in Marie Antoinette, young Kirsten Dunst suffers through a variety of coming-of-queenly-age ordeals, settles down into a life of bizarre regal scenesterism, and then suffers again at the hands of the Revolution. She is initially pitiable, because history is having its way with her. Then she becomes shallow and boring when she gets her own life to live. Then she goes back to being pitiable when the peasants burn her chambers and, well, cut off her head.
Meanwhile, over at the Oh Zone, miso is asking us about an assignment prompt that involves a woman (Beth) being separated from her lover, then having to prostitute herself to reunite with her lover, then being rejected by her lover for being a prostitute, and then shooting her lover in the head. The story is propped up by details like this: the reason that Beth has to prostitute herself is that she has to cross a river, and there is only one boat, and the boat is owned by a lonely evildoer.
What does all this signify? I risk being Marie Antoinette. I risk waiting to be made sympathetic, for that moment when the circumstances around me reach such operatic proportions that I can, for example, throw myself off a bridge to save 1,000 people. In short, we perhaps have ethical reserves ready to be deployed, and that feeling is only intensified by artworks like Battlestar Galactica, where every character is provided an occasion to rise to when the robots suddenly attack.
But what if we have no occasions? What if, as it does to Marie, the camera keeps its gaze trained on us even when there is no particular injustice being done? The risk is that it will find, in the absence of melodrama, an absence too of purpose, aside from the dull imperatives of getting work accomplished — but perhaps here too this is merely work undertaken without self-consciousness, without knowing whither it leads.
So often the ethical dilemmas presented in things like The Book of Questions involve rarified situations, like Spider-Man being forced to choose between saving a trainload of people, and saving his girlfriend (who is, of course, Marie Antoinette). If anyone asks you whether you would die to save a thousand people, I recommend answering, “Well, nothing is certain in the real world. I’d certainly be willing to risk dying.”
A better ethical question is this one: “You wake up. It’s November 13, 2006. Highs will be in the low seventies with a slight chance of rain. What do you do?”
Is this a question about occasions to be ethical or occasions to be heroic? Because it seems to me there are a plethora of occasions to be ethical in everyday life, even in the dull imperatives of getting work accomplished, if that work is part of a larger project (say, because you hope one day to deserve to educate the youth of America), which you allude to when you say “perhaps here too this is merely work undertaken without self-consciousness, without knowing whither it leads.”
Opportunities for self-sacrifice, indeed for the sort of self-sacrifice (martyrdom) you describe in your example (“throw myself off a bridge to save 1,000 people”), i.e. opportunities to transform the self into a figure of pure ethics through an act which abolishes the self in the moment of the ethical act, are probably rare. But if one’s ethical desire for a better world outweighs the desire for a heroic identity, this isn’t really lamentable. Unless the lack of opportunities for self-sacrifice can be attributed to deliberately taking oneself out of harm’s way (which I don’t think you’re suggesting) fewer occasions for throwing oneself off a bridge probably correlates to fewer attacks by Doc Oc.
Then again, I’m not sure if my comment is agreeing with you or disagreeing with you. In the paragraph that starts “what does all of this signify” it sounds like you lament the lack of such ethical situations (having to wait for an opportunity for sacrifice is a “risk” because we have “ethical reserves” which we might never get to deploy). But when you say in the last paragraph that the banal ethical decision is a better question, I think perhaps we agree.
There’s a song by Bishop Allen called “Come Clean” which includes the lines: “Well I never really had a mind / for an ordinary life / but I guess I’m gonna give it a try / so here goes.” I’ve had a pet theory for a number of years now that our generation, and in particular the middle class kids of our generation, were strangely poisoned by the “you can be anything you want to be” mantra of 1980s children’s media. I’m no expert in such trends, but it seems to me that in previous generations– certainly our parents’– one’s life choices were much more circumscribed (by gender, education, race etc). We, on the other hand, really could be anything we wanted to be– or so it must have seemed to the adults who raised us. Now I see among many of my peers something you might call “not-an-astronaut syndrome”– we are just not content in our mediocre lives because we were supposed to be able to be astronauts.
I mention all this because it could be a source for the feeling you describe. What you hit on here at the end is, I think, the only way to deal with it.
JuniperJune, “not-an-astronaut syndrome” is just hilarious. I completely agree that our society makes the line between ambition and fantasy much too porous, by suggesting (in accordance with the falsities of the American Dream), that any fantasy is a legitimate ambition.
Matt, I hope that my post expresses, simultaneously, a frustration with the lack of the heroic possibility, and a desire to confront ethical obligations in the theater of everyday life. I don’t know either whether we disagree, but perhaps I can clarify the point by saying that I’m not in favor of the “common sense” abandonment of the heroic. I’m saying that it is in the nature of our current ethical situation to feel the need to transform everyday life, perhaps through a series of small acts that amount to a qualitative leap. Art about destiny (everything from Marie Antoinette, to Spider-Man, to Harry Potter) suspend the everyday instead of transforming it, and perhaps do more for our illusions, than they do for us. Or that would be true of Marie Antoinette were it not for the gross, perhaps deliberate unattractiveness of the film’s middle.
I’m really embarrassed that you managed to sum up my feelings for the movie much more succinctly than me. The point was originally going to be about why class-based criticisms of Coppola’s movies miss the point (not to mention the fact that those pronouncements also tend to sound like the speaker’s entire netflix queue consists of documentaries about about labor practices in underdeveloped countries). And then I actually saw marie Antoinette and got sidetracked. Oh well.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Joe. It helps clarify your position, but still leaves a few things unclear to me. I think it would be helpful if you could specify:
1) What do you mean by the “common sense” abandonment of the heroic, and why don’t you favor it?
2)What precisely is it about our current ethical situation that creates a need to transform everyday life? What makes this need quasi-universal (i.e. what make this “our” need arising from “our” ethical situation)?
3)On what basis do we move from a feeling of a need to transform everyday life to an ethics of the transformation of everyday life? On what basis does the transformation of everyday life count as an ethical act?
With regards to number 2, I guess my presumption is that the feeling of a need to transform everyday life is a product of the existence of the suffering of the other, to which our everyday life provides an inadequate response. Isn’t something lost when we root the transformation of everyday life in modernity’s displacement of the self (and thus the need to reclaim the self through acts of heroism) rather than modernity’s displacement of the other?
Thus with regrads to number 3, my concern remains that an appeal to heroism sort of misses the point of the call to ethics. It’s not that I can’t identify with the feeling of a need to transform everyday life, with the feeling of having an unrealized ethical potential, with the desire for heroism expressed in so many of your posts. Indeed, I think your ability to imagine possibilities for heroism in everyday life while simultaneously acknowledging the inadequacy of any act which constitutes the self as a hero creates a lot of the appeal of your writing for me (I’m think of: 1.the cowboy and the stripper, a post which simultaneously yearns for and rejects the iconicity of figures like Cowboy Bob; 2. the end of your post on Norwegian Wood; 3. the treatment of popular culture as a source of legitimate intellectual engagement, in posts like the one on fashion on the recent one of The Killers, which in addition to opening these texts up a sources of insight has the additional consequence of imbuing our everyday practices with a sort of dignity), but my concern is that the part of me which most desires this sort of heroism is the least heroic part of myself. The desire for heroism-as-such falls flat–indeed, heroism seems possible only insofar as the ethical act is undertaken for the sake of the other and not for the sake of heroism. Rather than grouding the ethical act in our primordial being-with, the other becomes a mere figure in a drama of the self (in your spiderman metaphor, indeed even a mere a number, one in a thousand, expressing the magnitude of the ethical act rather than its origin). Compare this with spiderman (as long as we’re on the subject) who laments, indeed rejects, his powers, has no desire for heroism, wants to live an ordinary life, but responds to the responsibility which comes with his great power because he becomes a victim, because he shares a sense of victimhood with those he saves. Spiderman is a perpetual ironization of the figure of the hero, since wanting to be like spiderman means precisely wanting to not want to be like spiderman. The heroic act ceases to appear as an opportunity for self-constitution and instead emerges as a reluctant response to the exigencies of a world of supervillains, who are, after all, ultimately personifications of our sense that human suffering is the product of human agencies almost but not quite resembling our own.
One last reference which I hope clarifies or complicates the spiderman reference and also helps to express my reluctance to lament the lack of opportunities for heroism. From Sartre, in Les Mots, recounting his narcissism of his childhood games:
“I played all the characters: as knight, I slapped the duke; I spun about; as duke, I received the slap. But I did not embody the wicked for long, because I was always impatient to return to the major role, to myself.” (127)
In his autobiography, Sartre takes on both the role of the “child monster” and the hero who delivers it a crushing blow. The point is to invent ethical situations in the fantasy realm of play so as to constitute a self in the imaginary act of vanquishing them. This is the bourgeoise hero that Sartre devotes his life to vanquishing, the irony being that the “hero” character now becomes the villain to be vanquished, and the self who undertakes to vanquish it in turn is reconstituted as a hero in the act of vanquishing it (as the fantasy realm of childhood play is replaced by the fantasy realm of the autobiographical novel). Sartre can never escape from the villainy of his desire for heroism because his effort to overcome the figure of bourgeoise heroism is rooted in the very desire to be a hero. But the positive result of this at least is to set up a rigorous and constant process of self-examination, and thus to instill a permanent process of self-ironization at the heart of the figure of the hero.
cute cute cute. i love the little epigraph in the beginning. fucking cute. i like the way you wrapped up marie antoinette and my ethical quandary. i like the idea of ethical reserves.
rainy. hmm. today i thought the same thing. you know what? I regally scenestered my suitjacket, possibly underdressed, but wore legwarmers and too much pink to boot – risktaking abound.
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miso, I am seriously confused by your comment. offended, even. what exactly is ‘cute’ about this post, or even just this paragraph?
But what if we have no occasions? What if, as it does to Marie, the camera keeps its gaze trained on us even when there is no particular injustice being done? The risk is that it will find, in the absence of melodrama, an absence too of purpose, aside from the dull imperatives of getting work accomplished — but perhaps here too this is merely work undertaken without self-consciousness, without knowing whither it leads.
are the pop culture references cute? even that confuses me — how is anything about My Dinner with Andre cute?
and seriously, are you self-styling yourself a risk-taker by playing marie antoinette and talking fashion on a post about ethical choices in everyday life? you know I love legwarmers but c’mon now.
whoa. I was tlaking about the epigraph. I don’t know what My Dinner with Andre is. I was talking merely of that quote: Then last night, actually, it was our twentieth wedding anniversary. And I took Chiquita to see the show about Billie Holiday, and I looked at these show-business people, who know nothing about Billie Holiday, nothing, so they’re really kind of in a way intellectual creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling, I mean, you know, I was just sitting there crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling, I was just as creepy as they were! And that my whole life had been a sham, and I didn’t have the guts to be Billie Holiday either.” which I happen to find every cute, in that miserable existential way reminiscent of “cute” misanthropes. I don’t know what context it was in though. You have to admit that these sorts of characters are ripe for poking fun at. It’s also a luxury. A damn luxury to fucking worry about whether you’re a sham – and also a pointless question if you’re aware of the fact that you’re a sham. because that in itself indicates that you’re kind of not. but if you are, then work on it, and don’t reflect on it enough that you become miserable and defeatist.
RE: LEGWARMERS: I was taking the piss out of myself as “risktaker” vs the seriousness of ethical choices. It’s NOT comparable. It was more delineating the ridiculous choices that we have in every day life as opposed to the “Rarified” situations that force us to call upon our “ethical reserves”.
I was contrasting the two in the bitter way also, questioning my sincerity about ethical choices. I am burdened by as many ethical quandaries as the next person; but am uncertain about my ability to effectively or knowledgably deal with them. And i think it’s kind of pompous to think that you adequately can; glosses over the concept of ethical quandary.
does that explain things? are you not offended now?
anyways i think that point about having “no occasions” is an important one. of having no opportunity to actualize these ethical situations – however, the personal is political. I think it’s important to realize that situations such as my english assignment ARE rarified, but they are applicable in the sense that they represent our belief and attitudes in a way, or force us to clarify them. Which does provide opportunities to rectify injustices, even if it’s only in our heads.
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