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“In prison, time is The Enemy,” wrote Dick Hebert, the undercover journalist, of the day he spent entirely indoors at the Atlanta prison farm. “It is slow-footed. It wants filling, and many of its prisoners find sleep the only recourse.” Is this also what happens, we wonder idly, tracing the curve of the sky with our finger, when the world outside becomes prison? Is our Jungle Cruise society, are their Mad Max fantasies, is our Disney world the collective dream of a culture of inmates?
This is, after all, the ultimate effect of the police. They knit together the prison and military into one inescapable complex. They stalk and corral and control the poor, confine them to suffocating ghettos, convert whole cities into open-air prisons, and stand at attention at borders, real and imaginary, with ever greater guns. It is so clear above the mid-Atlantic. The military has become the police, the police mimic the movies, the movies are all for children, and the children have no future. Time, The Enemy, drags everlastingly on. Can we, how do we, how dare we wish to abolish history?
We look to the forest as we descend upon Atlanta. Wispy ghosts of smoke plume lazily into the sky.
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Hundreds of people come to speak at this meeting: lawyers, neighbors, Black and white, community organizers, old Democratic women, militants from the forest dressed up in business casual. Long lines out the building down the block. Chants resonate through the linoleum atrium, loud and unified enough to almost make you believe in democracy, even if the city council meeting begins two hours late today, and the bailiffs pass around a clipboard with far fewer spaces to sign up to speak than there are people in line. The police forbid the people waiting to speak from eating and drinking. The speeches last fourteen hours, dignified and gracious and civil, and overwhelmingly against Cop City. At five in the morning, the city council votes to approve the funding anyway. The assembled public jeers as the council members file out of the chamber. The sun is already rising when everyone goes home.
If I had to make my own analogy, I’d say grieving is like being a lemon that someone has taken a zester to. “Ouch,” says the lemon. The lemon’s skin is raw. But the air grows a bit more fragrant and life appears fresh and vivid amid the pain.
The more meaningful your life is, the less happy it’s possible to be. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately. The more you occupy yourself with the Big Stuff—the tragic, the political, Life and Death and Truth—the less whimsical you can be, the less frivolous. Of course, that’s not how I felt when my life was simpler. Before I was carrying this weight around. Before my entire life changed. When my life was simple, I craved tragedy. I didn’t want happiness, I wanted sadness I could sublimate. I wanted things to happen that would give my life purpose and direction. This is not what my husband would say. He would say, “Duty to others is a relief. Your life should not be your own.” His love language is acts of service. Also, he has not yet suffered the death of a parent. Now that my mother is dead and my baby is born I know that hard stuff is actually hard.
What placed postmodernism more in the service of the corporation than of society at large was that it was client facing, not user facing: it established cultural conditions in which a corporate officer could choose to believe they were, Medici-like, acquiring a work of art with all its useful cultural connotations of wealth and taste, but without encountering the structural tensions between architectural avant-gardes and establishment patrons that were a risky feature of mid-twentieth-century patronage. Because they were designed for appearances from distances, the buildings of postmodernism were generally not places for a public, for a deep and inhabitable threshold between interior and exterior; they were not places that would require a literal and perhaps figurative negotiation between public good and private interest. The facade was now a pictorial membrane, to be looked at but never freely crossed.
And what of the era’s other strangely serene presiding figure, Reagan himself? As early as February 1989 the architectural historian Mary McLeod could write architectural history in real time by interrogating in the journal Assemblage what was already received wisdom:
“Postmodern architecture is the architecture of Reaganism.” Among many leftist architects and critics, this kind of statement has become a cliché. The proud historical nostalgia, the fabricated traditions, the pandering to a nouveau-riche clientele, the populist rhetoric that often sounds more paternalistic than democratic, the abandonment of any social vision — all seem related in some way to the conservative turn in American politics.
Postmodern architects were self-consciously attempting to make history by remaking history, and at speed: to retroactively de-radicalize modern design into just another in a long secession of formal styles, and to instrumentalize historicist associations to add the suggestion of gravity and authority to new structures that were materially flimsy and significantly unconcerned with their users’ experiences. Like Reaganism, architectural postmodernism can be understood as a delivery system for a powerful affect. Its genius was in enlisting a compelling combination of explicit optimism and tacit pessimism — even nuke-’em nihilism. “There was something at once exhilarating and resigned in this rediscovery of history,” noted McLeod of postmodern architects’ radical retrograde; “it suggested that the present was no better than the past, that aesthetic and political choices might be arbitrary.” Today these two attitudes — of insistent cheer and the putative realism of the would-be world-weary — align all too clearly with Reagan’s deployment of retrograde aesthetics and affective nostalgias in the service of a revolutionary unmaking of American governance. Postmodern architecture as the architecture of Reaganism: perhaps this is that rare cliché that has only become ever more searingly true over time.
Of course, the Eighties have some bearing on the present world. The demise of organized labor, the decline of real wages, and the diminution of consumer industries faced with third world outsourcing; the primacy of finance and the shift toward mass incarceration justified by draconian drug laws; the negative trade balances, federal deficits, and tax cuts evened out by massive foreign purchases of Treasury bonds—these interlinked phenomena form the basis of contemporary governance, and even casual political historians today know how they were first ramped up during the Eighties, and by whom. But our good materialist perspective of the Eighties may be too exact, too sure. The uniform, relentless quality of neoliberal policies as applied once the Nineties began is projected back onto their pivotal decade; the shaky and experimental elements of the eventual consensus in its fledgling years have been effaced by the foreknowledge of its universal triumph.
For all his mordant skepticism regarding the motives, tactics, speech acts, capabilities, and apparel of the Sixties left, DeLillo had always taken seriously its assertion that US society as it actually existed was indistinguishable from the ideal of an exceptionally prosperous and long-lived fascism. It’s no more a coincidence that “Hitler studies” is housed in the same campus building as the department of “American environments” than it was that the Nazis modeled their rallies on American football games, their race laws on American apartheid, or their geopolitics on American frontier expansion. One man’s Nazi German theory is another’s white American practice, and both of these men are Jack Gladney. What surges forth in Jack’s experience of the nation—college gatherings glimpsed as upscale fascist rallies, reading Mein Kampf at the Dinky Donut while his wife and her ex-husband catch up—is far from a call for political counterforce. It’s a profile of the supine human spirit framed as a taxonomy of language, overdubbed by an anthology of whiteness framed as a catalog of noise. The commercial gabble and the misremembered trivia, the portentous lectures and the genocidal shrieks, the desperate love, the still more desperate phobias, the murderous aggression phrased in balancing accounts and Heideggerian cant, the accented rants of the nuns without faith like oneself: where do they all lead one, if not toward death? However, in centering his existential narrative on Gladney’s spongelike consciousness, DeLillo is conducting, perhaps inadvertently, psychological tests with political undertones.
Some time after, not long, at the same Barnes and Noble, I chose to read White Noise. One year later I owned all his books and suspected I was meant to be a writer. Literature, I found, was like a high school. Certain people hang out with each other; there is gossip and grades. I read The Corrections and Infinite Jest; I read Pynchon from V up to Gravity’s Rainbow. Perusing the internet, I discovered that these books were called “systems novels” (because they were about the System); that certain critics greeted “systems novels” with vituperation; that certain critics liked them and aspired to be their authors. These people, of course, were all white, were all part of a system, but what can you do? Time comes for us all. Not everything cool or important remains as it is. The literary culture of the Aughts would dissipate, as if to say: Keep working and engaging and the tide will turn. The best words care for something other than mere coolness, and they always win out in the end—remember Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, DeLillo, Morrison.
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The artists of the Eighties acted fast. They had to: there would be no future otherwise. But in battling the retrograde Reaganite look of the System, they knew they were its bastards nonetheless. They took on organized religion by altering its iconography, not destroying it. Consensus uncoolness, delivered through media, was countered by coolness more media-fluent. Faced with dead forms, they formed live ones in their image. You, too, have become a zombie; all the more reason to dance better than the others. I’m a government man. I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. The evil Frank Booth, in Blue Velvet, looks straight at the camera: “You’re like me,” he says. You’re part of what you fight: it’s the acceptance of this fact that breathes a spirit of unsqueamishness, engagement, and humility—the beauty of a dark truth brought to light—into the best art of the flagrant Eighties.