Many people whose taste I respect and opinions I value are nonplussed by my participation in a critical enterprise dedicated exclusively to what they consider superfluous cultural excreta. They consider symbological fiction to be, at best, indicative of phenomena which, they seem to think, are apprehensible by more elevated means. "Why do you need to read a Dan Brown book - and not just read it, but read it closely, with annotations, even multiple times, in order to delineate certain operations of the culture industry, or ideology, or whatever you want to call it?" they ask. "Can't you get all that from Adorno? Isn't that more fun?" Until I gave the whole thing up as essentially futile, I tried to persuade them that the consensus that books like this are to be read, if at all, then quickly and superficially - say, on a plane - is no accident. In vain I remonstrated that their apparent vapidity is precisely what enables their subterranean functionality. Open the black box of symbology, I said, and you will find illuminating assemblages. My words fell on deaf ears.
This latest sortie in my apparently incomprehensible and Quixotic campaign can only make things worse. My only consolation is in my fellow-travellers, one of whom gave me the "Review Copy" of L. Ron Hubbard's Under the Black Ensign to which the next few posts will be dedicated. Another gave me my first copy of Battlefield Earth, which spurred a similarly doomed adventure. (All traces of that foray have now been erased from the server, presumably after a "Cease and Desist" suit filed by some Scientologist lawyer.) I hope these colleagues will not join the ranks of my alienated friends if I insist that we engage, at least briefly, with the only writer of ephemeral fiction to undergo full apotheosis. Even if he cannot, strictly, be called a symbologist, I hope we will derive further insights from applying to his work the dictum to which (as I have argued elsewhere) the methodologic insights of Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault can be reduced, namely, that if something or someone just looks stupid, you're not looking hard enough.
As a fellow traveler through the dark night of the symbological soul, I know how difficult it can be to plunge headlong into the deep hermetic drift and the icy pools of overinterpretation. I confess there are times when I fail to shout my critique from the rooftops, but choose to smile and take refuge under the misimpression by some that this is a mere hobby. But not today! So, in the words of Edmund Husserl, "Lock and load!"
ReplyDelete