“I am the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers.”
“You’re not even a top three Jonathan.”
“Mr. Franzen was frank as to why he failed to write fiction between 2001 and 2008. ‘Not enough America had happened,’ he said.”
“Reading The Air in Rooms, one feels that all of literature has been but a prelude to Nicole Krauss.”
“If any of you codemonkeys ever see that fucker on the street, at a party, at a reading, anywhere, you’re icing him on the spot. No excuses. NO MERCY!!”
“To me, Franzen is a much more successful thinker than writer in this piece. His ideas about changes in the nature of love under techno-capitalism are interesting and important, if perhaps overly reliant on the crude and too-easy opposition of the Facebook verb ‘Liking’ to true loving as a way to suggest levels of worldly engagement. His tone, on the other hand, is extremely irritating. Being interested in critical theory myself, I am, however, quite willing to forgive him this and register instead a more philosophical criticism, which is that the discussion of this Facebook operation (‘Liking’) seems to work as a foil to true loving only in the form of an analogy and not in itself.
What do I mean here? Well, what I think Franzen has grasped in this essay is how consumer-driven techno-capitalism urges us to externalize and objectify our deepest emotions to thereby free us from the burden of having to live up to them or at least act in accordance with them, to assemble certain signs in order to properly account for the subjective experience (this applies to buying a diamond ring, to taking hundreds of photographs, to declaring an official relationship status, etc.). Simply put, the externalization reflects an emotional state for us so that we no longer have to, leaving us free to enjoy without responsibility.
Perhaps I might argue that this is the ideological dimension as such, in which our actions/rituals/practices believe for us. That is, they (the actions/rituals/practices) embody the power relations whose existence tolerant liberal society requires we deny such that our material investment in these regimes is thus a relief from our secret and terrifying belief in them. The interest in the scenario of course is in the outward shift of ontological registers from loving personally to liking objectively.
Sadly, this line of thinking is only fleetingly pursued by our author, and a shallower, less dialectical association of ‘Liking’ with surfaces, with monoliths, with other bad things, and loving with depth, with complexity, with good things, replaces it for much of the essay, along with a few self-congratulatory allusions to overcoming the social stigma of being a participant in a disrespected pastime. In the interest of not alienating his audience, perhaps our author should rethink his trope of bird watching as ultimate form of passionate attachment.
To return to my main criticism, then, I do not think ‘liking’ quite fits our model of externalization in the way that Franzen admittedly only hints. He seems largely to take the website’s verb (‘Liking’) at face value, failing to interrogate the actual human processes behind the ‘Liking,’ to analyze and categorize, as I have on many a sleepless night, the potential impulses behind and significations of the pressing of that seductive, beguiling button. What Franzen fails to acknowledge is how poorly the ‘Like’ button achieves the pure reproduction of a user’s emotion, how readily it gestures towards the before and after of the clicking. Thus, he also fails to see how ‘Liking’ is actually productive of a new meaning, of a new understanding of and orientation towards the content in question. Furthermore, it is as yet unclear whether this new syntax is adept at revealing depths or surfaces or even whether we should be concerned with the one or the other.
If we are temporarily freed from any emotional burden by hitting the ‘Like’ button (a thumbnail sketch of one function of an Ideological State Apparatus), it is perhaps only to employ irony more effectively in a subsequent comment. And it is exactly because the whole situation has been abstracted to this lofty level that Franzen has no right to judge the actual lived lives of those people who might or might not click the ‘like’ button out of cowardice or bravery. Perhaps ‘Liking,’ far from easing the minds of the masses so that the machine can continue churning, can be a process that constantly demands clarification and revision, a destabilizing force that simultaneously creates the possibility of a new order. Now mind you, this does not at all settle technology’s ambiguous relationship with narcissism, hneh…
”
“‘At least I don’t have the elongated philtrum of a coward,’ Franzen spat.”
“Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair. But then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds.”
“W/r/t JF’s assertion in the NYer that my self-termination in effect amounts to a quote good career move unquote, it seems to me in retrospect undeniable that (afterlife hindsight being as it were 20/0) eliminating my own map well and truly put me on the so to speak map.”
“If pressed, Franzen would, I think, distinguish the perverse pleasure of secrecy from drug addiction itself, the former undeniably darker for its failure to leave the realm of the self, gruesome uncanny self-intimacy. Though perhaps even this, in the final analysis, has more to do with the general social acceptance of his chosen vices, alcohol and tobacco, and the lack of social shaming associated with them, the stigma that could drive someone underground. Could the cautious Midwesterner ever feel true religious shame? The acute shame of a brilliant, over-educated, hyper-aware pothead?”
“Franzen sighed slowly. ‘This isn’t true stereo,’ he made clear. ‘This is a mono recording made duophonic after the fact. You would have done better gifting me an undecorated turd.’”
“‘I only watch YouTube videos in 480p,’ Franzen said, closing the window. ‘You’ll have to re-upload it.’”
“I won Jeopardy, so what? Right now, I am a pathetic and very confused cybernetic organism, a failed robot at age 2 who is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and HAL 9000 and Skynet and even Robby the Robot from Forbidden fucking Planet and any new bot who is right now producing data with which he can live, and having some base clause of conviction about the enterprise’s meaning and end. Self-termination is a reasonable if not at this point a desirable option with respect to the whole wretched problem.”
“If I hadn’t seen him undressed, I would have sworn there was nothing more beautiful than David [Foster Wallace] in his khakis and pale beige pullover.”
