“I am the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers.”
“Most of all, we at war with ourselves.”
“Mr. West has not entirely lost his prankish streak (one hors d’ouevre, Bries Nutz, alludes to a vulgar track on Dr. Dre’s 1992 dank classic The Chronic). But overall, Per ‘Ye is almost too successful in its fusion of the hip-hop and the high end, the culinary equivalent of a bassoon dropped over an 808 beat. ‘The question this restaurant answers, hnehmean, is have you ever had fine dining like a pharoah,’ ‘Ye said. He grinned, revealing a set of dentures the polished copper of fine pans. ‘I put the parfait in a sarcophagus.’”
“Man I can’t believe that happened! I was only watching this show because of the Khal’s horse now that he’s dead I’m quitting! I’m quitting this show and canceling HBO! BOYCOTT HBO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BOYCOTT HBO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“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…
”
“Eat the fly! Eat the fly!”
“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.”
“Man I’m telling you, it’s like my mama always said. «On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,» you see what I’m saying? You just remember that il faut bien supporter deux ou trois chenilles if you want to connaitre les papillons, aight?”
“Man why can’t people ‘Like’ me unless I create a separate page for myself? Because the Subject is a void, there is nothing there to ‘Like’ in the first place. I must objectify myself in order to be recognized as a valid entity (e.g. artist, band, or public figure). Reification, Facebook suggests, is a prerequisite to any form of social life, and that’s bullshit, HNEH?”
“A sidenote. Tom Schulman, who wrote the screenplay for What About Bob? also wrote Dead Poets Society, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, and both wrote and directed 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. Did anyone sense an artistic continuity between those four movies? I am becoming more conscious of things like this all the time, HNEH?”
“Only orphans and first-generation Americans have true Freedom. The rest of us either do what our parents did or consciously rebel against it.”
“This is your one and only chance to suck the dick of Kanye West.”
“There’s no use in spending all day waiting around for the catastrophe of your personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. Some days you gotta drop a bassoon on that bitch!”
“One day I’mma have all the Kit Kat bars.”
“If I have any control at all over my afterlife, I’d choose to spend eternity inside a Mary Tyler Moore Show establishing shot.”
