Reoul Eshelman
Life in a postmodern
world is experienced by most people as being intimidatingly complex. We are
surrounded by constant, shifting streams of information conveyed by electronic
and digital media that often make it difficult to tell truth from falsehood or
reality from fiction. Given this sort of complexity and undecidability about
what is real and true, people living in postmodern culture have limited means
to assert themselves as individuals. One effect of this is a kind of culturally
induced paranoia, when people are no longer able to tell when their own
personalities begin and where media-induced influence ends. The postmodern way
to deal with this is to ironically “go with the flow.” By freely acknowledging
the fact of our own dependency on outside sources we at the same time establish
a perspective that creates a critical distance to them. This ironic, hyper-critical mode dominated
art, literature, and academic writing for decades. It placed a premium on intellectual
cleverness, on trying to derive power from a critical description of our own
powerlessness.The comic end result of this kind of attitude can be found in
films like the Coen brothers’ Burn after
Reading(2008), which presents us with a paranoid vision of a world populated
by dumb, cartoon-like characters and manipulated by an incompetent CIA. The only thing that winds up making sense in
this senseless mess is the ironic attitude itself.
Needless to say, this sort of attitude has itself become
tiring (the Coens’ movie is simply a symptom of that more general exhaustion). In
the last 15 years or so, an artistic counter-movement to this kind of radical postmodern
irony has developed that I call performatism.One of the ways performatist works
of literature and film try to get away from this ironic, hyper-intellectual
mode is to make us identify with fools and their simple, persistent behavior.
This trend can be traced back to films like Rain
Man (1988) and Forrest Gump (1994),
but it can be seen in novels with autistic heroes like Mark Hatton’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-time(2003), in Jonathan SafranFoer’sExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close(2005) or in television series
like The Big Bang Theory or The Office. The foolish characters in
these workstend as a rule to be positiveand to evoke our strong sympathy in
spite of their seemingly stupid or awkward behavior. The reason for this is
that fools have certain qualities that make them ideal points of resistance to
postmodern irony and media culture. One such quality is, paradoxically, their
inability to communicate well with others. While this has obvious
disadvantages, it also means that foolish characters are themselves resistant
to the constant flow of information flowing through and dominating everyone
else. Their “stupidity” makes them able to resist not only media culture, but
also irony of all kinds—unlike postmodern individuals they are always “serious.” The fools’ inability to communicate well
almost means that they work by example rather than by getting involved in
discourse with others. If other people follow their example, thismeans that
social relations are established on the most basic, intuitive level—below the
threshold of the media-based discourse that infiltrates the thought of all
“intelligent” people.
see his book Ethics.
An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, originally published in France in 1993).
What is important is not outside opinion but being faithfulto the truth process
once it has been set in motion by an event of some kind. Fictional fools are especially
interesting in this regard because they are events and truth processes all
rolled into one. Because of their odd, unreasonable behavior they change and
challenge the conventional situations that they’re in, and they single-mindedly
stick to what they’re doing no matter what everyone else around them thinks. Fools
naturally exhibit what Badiou calls “ethical consistency” or “disinterested
interest.” This means that they are able to subordinate all sorts of
individual, often selfishinterests to pursuing a goal that is greater than
themselves. The curious thing about fools, of course, is that they are unaware
for the most part of what they are doing. To be successful (at least in works
of fiction) they need the support of an Author. I write Author with a capital
“A” because he or she takes on a godlike quality vis-à-vis the fool. The fool
needs the support of the Author to succeed, and we feel this when we read a book
or watch a movie with a positive outcome for the hero. The “foolish” state of
truth has a religious feel to it, even though religion may not be a direct
topic or theme.
We can quickly see how this works using a popular
Indian example, VikasSwarup’s novel Q
& A (2005), the basis for the
Oscar-winning movieSlumdog Millionaire.
The hero, Ram, isn’t strictly speaking a fool, but the character is a very
close cousin to the fool, called a picaro. Picaros come from the outskirts of
society (in this case it is the Mumbai slums) and are usually looked down upon
by that society (the host of the quiz show and the police think that Ram is a
“moron” because he is uneducated). Picaros traditionally move freely through different
social levels (as does Ram), and, because their own personalities change very
little, they act as a positive contrast to the corruption around them, even
though they are often rogues (Ram in fact wants to kill the talk-show host,
though for good reason). And, the way that
Ram answers the questions (by chance he knows the answers directly from life)
suggests that there is some Higher Force helping him—he has a Christian, a
Hindu and a Muslim name, in case there is any doubt about this!
Q & Aand
works like it are part of a much larger trend in contemporary culture. This
trend, which can be found not only in popular novels and
movies but also in highbrow philosophy, stresses the human ability to act in a
goal-oriented way, “stick-to-it-iveness,” and faith as positive ethical features.
Fools and picaros are the ideal bearers of this new ethics because they
condense all its features into one package, as it were. Even though we as
“intelligent” people may not be prepared to follow them in all respects, the
positive ethical example they pose to us is becoming more and more important as
we move away from postmodernist irony and into a mode of performatist belief.
