The Draper-Cooper Continuum of Subjectivity

I apologize for posting so lightly over this past month.  I’ve got a couple of movie, book and television reviews to type up, but I thought I’d dip my toe back into the blogging pool by noting a few sort-of-related observations about subjectivity inspired by some dots connected by James Fallows and one of his readers with regard to Facebook and the recent resignation of Dave Weigel from his position as conservative movement correspondent at the Washington Post.

As far as the Weigel debacle is concerned, it seems to me that the Post wanted an uncritical hack but with Weigel they accidentally got themselves a real reporter smart enough not to suffer fools gladly.  That’s a bit beside the point I’d like to get to though.

As Fallows notes, Michael Zuckerburg, the evil boy-genius behind the plastic police state that is Facebook, has been catching some heat lately for the way the website nudges its users to exhibit themselves as much as possible to as large and public an audience as possible.  One good reason to gently corral the privacy options of facebook users in the direction of greater access is obviously to market that access to advertisers.  However, for Zuckerburg, profit doesn’t seem to be his only motivation.  According to some recent comments, he appears to think that his timely innovations have catalyzed nothing less than a revolution in subjectivity.  Witness the audacity of youth:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (quoted at Crooked Timbers)

His comments reminded me of a favorite exchange from the first season of Twin Peaks between Audrey Horn and Special Agent Dale Cooper, who is surprised as he enters his hotel room at the Great Northern to discover Audrey naked in his bed.  Coop does the right thing (of course).  He resists the sexual advances symptomatic of Audrey’s father issues and resolves instead to be the comforting, emotionally present confidant/analyst she needs:

Cooper: Now I’m going to go down and get us two malts and some fries downstairs. Then I want you to tell me all your troubles.
Audrey: That could take all night.
Cooper: The night is young. Now I’m going to get the food and you're going to get dressed.
Audrey: I can’t tell you all my secrets.
Cooper: Secrets are dangerous things Audrey.
Audrey: Do you have any?
Cooper: No.

That “no” at the end, the lack of pretense, of masks, and of secrets is the essential mark of Agent Cooper, it seems to me.  That disciplined, deliberate authenticity is what distinguishes him so radically from nearly everyone else in Twin Peaks and what enables the viewer to rely upon him so securely and without reservation throughout the series’ run.  It is the reason we find the conclusion of the show, rushed and weird though it was, so strangely devastating.

But Zuckerburg’s remarks also made me think of what I have previously written about Mad Men’s Don Draper:

Like Hitchcock's mad north-by-northwest man, Roger O. Thornhill (What's the O stand for?), there was nothing at Draper's core...nothing to resist or belie the succession of masks he wore.  Though he appeared selfish, Draper was in fact only the other of others.    Each mask was like an advertisement, modelled on someone else's desire, loving the one it's with.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that Cooper and Draper might define the two extremes of a sort of spectrum of subjectivity, ranging from the radical cored-ness of Cooper to the radical masked-ness of Draper.  Each represent such pure examples of each type so as to be capable of existing only in the abstract of fiction.

I’ll also observe that each extreme possesses its own form of psychosis: 

In the case of Agent Cooper, psychosis takes the shape of the paranoiac, whose every movement of thought, every fleeting whim, is rendered visible.  He surveils himself and keeps nothing private.  Does Diana, his confessor/secretary, really exist?  Does the guard at the center of the panopticon?

The form of Draper’s psychosis, on the other hand, is that of the schizo.  Who he is changes to fit the rhetorical situation.  His “true-self,” should such a thing be imagined, would be the obscure totality unknown to itself.  Its name is legion.

I may revisit this thoughts later, but this will suffice for now.

The Madmen Dialectic

The expelled are uprooted people who attempt to uproot everything around themselves, to establish roots.  They do it spontaneously, simply because they were expelled.  It is an almost vegetable process.  Perhaps one can observe it when one tries to transplant trees.  It can happen that the expelled becomes conscious of the vegetable, almost vegetative aspect of his exile; that he uncovers that the human being is not a tree; and that perhaps human dignity consists in not having roots--that a man first becomes a human being when he hacks off the vegetable roots that bind him.

--Vilem Flusser, "Exile and Creativity," trans. Erik Eisel

A few days ago over at the Valve, Scott Eric Kaufman posted a few thoughts on Mad Men, Matthew Weiner's multiple award-winning television drama set in the early 1960's.  According to Kaufman, the central conceit of the series is that the characters who staff the Sterling-Cooper ad agency "want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history--at least at first."  He then formulates a contrast between those characters who "learn to love and accept the modernity in their hearts"--thereby becoming us--and Don Draper who instead transcends (or perhaps merely fails to descend into) history--becoming art.

Something about SEK's analysis sounds a false note.  For one thing, It seems to me that the contrast between Draper and his contemporaries has become not more but less stark.  What made him so different at the start and what explained his "inscrutability" in the first season was not his literariness but rather his lack of essential identity (the two qualities are perhaps not mutually exclusive).  Like Hitchcock's mad north-by-northwest man, Roger O. Thornhill (What's the O stand for?), there was nothing at Draper's core...nothing to resist or belie the succession of masks he wore.  Though he appeared selfish, Draper was in fact only the other of others.    Each mask was like an advertisement, modelled on someone else's desire, loving the one it's with.  We alone bore witness to this infidelity to character--at least at first.

But over the course of the series we've watched Draper grow invested as a husband, father, and professional.  His brother commits suicide.  He wife discovers his cheating.  His company is bought out.  The effect of each of these cataclysms has been to draw him gradually into his body, to fill his empty center with stable priorities, to force him to take up permanent residence in particular masks.

At the same time, those characters who seemed at first the most static types have been undergoing the reverse process.  Betsy imagined herself the perfect wife of her perfect husband; Pete was defined by the name of his father, and Joan was the sophisticated mistress.  Each was guided in their own way by a certain idea of perfection, and each has undergone the shock of having those ideal egos turn alien on them.  Betsy gets wise to Don, Pete's father dies, and Joan is raped.  What they all were, they can no longer pretend to be.

So Don is different from the others insofar as the development of his character has consisted of his putting down roots whereas Betsy, Pete, Joan and others have each in their own way become uprooted.  But because rootlessness is, for Don, also a sort of ideal, the discrepancy between art and history, or between the ideal and the real, is what gives a common shape to the modernity that resides in each of their hearts.

The Dystopian Future of the Past is Now!

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time. (Times Online, 9/29/09)

Some Dutch scientists backed by a sausage manufacturer have grown "a soggy form of pork" in a petri dish.  Where to begin?

Leaving aside a mostly silly dislike I have for the Netherlands (Rembrandt and Van Gogh...Awesome; pirate capital of consumption and Infernal setting of Camus' The Fall...not awesome), I think this begins with Chicken Little.

In 1952, Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote The Space Merchants, a novel I've been meaning to re-read.  It's sort of a satire of consumer-advertising culture, prescient in lots of ways, that follows Mitchell Courtenay, a future-day Don Draper, as he descends from the halls of Madison Avenue power to the dystopian subterranea of "Luna City" or something like that.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about the novel is when Mitch is escorted deep beneath a food-processing plant by a worker who is secretly also a member of the conservationist, dissident underground:

I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling.  "Concrete and lead.  It shields cosmic rays.  Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer."  He spat.  "No good to eat for people.  You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast and--" He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meant by "catch."

He swung open a door.  "This is her nest," he said proudly.  I looked and gulped.

The "Gallina" (AKA Chicken Little) is a 100-ton mound of growing flesh, fed from nutrient tubes and pruned by Mexicans with light sabers for general consumption by the people of the moon.

Now Space Merchants is undoubtedly a more sophisticated satire than I recall, but I remember being repulsed by the very idea of Chicken Little when I was younger.  Some kind of blob of meat, fed with tubes and and prone to cancer?  So unnatural and alien, thought I.  But, to quote Augustine, such a fool I then was.

According to a PETA rep quoted in the article, "if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal, there's no ethical objection."  So for someone who likes the taste of meat but draws some sort of line between animative and vegatative souls, this laboratory pork potentially solves a lot of problems.

But in fact, I'm not entirely sure what line or lines I draw.  I eat most of the usual meats, generally without compunction.  (Although I have been staying away from shrimp for the last several months, purportedly in support of mangrove swamps, but also because my brother once referred to them as the cockroaches of the sea, which maybe means that my ethics are always really aesthetic judgments in disguise).  Occasionally I try to determine a line.  Would I eat a dolphin?  Blue whale?  Elephant? Monkey? Mountain gorilla?  What if s/he knows sign language?  What about a friend of mine who died in an accident?  If something wanted to eat me after I died, I don't think I would mind.  Either that or worms anyway.  Is there a cognitive/non-cognitive line I would draw if I could decide what cognition was?  

It's probably true that the more like a human being an organism is, the more distasteful would be the idea of me eating it, which isn't to say that there's anything natural about this distaste, but I wonder if whatever explains that distaste might also explain the uncanny valley?  On the other hand, I also don't want to eat a bowl of spiders.