Time is a Hammer: The Death of Criticism in Contemporary US Culture

Far from being the end of the world and the end of pre-existing tensions, new and old maladies keep appearing, reappearing, disappearing, and emerging from long-forgotten shadows. People in the US hardly seem poised to think anymore. Our desires hook into machines and the machines mold, reconfigure, and animate those desires and alternative ones, too. Is creativity happening today? In some isolated cases, definitely yes. Definitely in Chiapas. Definitely in several insurgent movements. In some dusty old corners, theory is still trying to happen. The works of people like Jordan Peele come to mind. But, creativity hardly seems to be happening at any level above mere particular cases. The lack of instances of creativity seems to prevent creative reflection on particular works of art. The particular has gobbled the general.

At the expense of wearing more tread on a well-worn trope, many people seem to find inspiration only in a distorted rearview mirror. And, not only in aesthetic choices. Domestic and international politics increasingly look like microwaved corpses of supposedly simpler (often more-fascist) times. Hardly anyone seems the least bit interested in acquainting themselves with history. Everyone’s busy, everyone’s moving–five minutes from becoming a billionaire and retiring on a sailboat headed to Cancun. Do people still argue? Is there anything like a public sphere to speak of?

Not long ago, people decried the pervasive cynicism lacing all the satire on TV and elsewhere. By now, we’ve largely forgotten that this was–just moments ago–all around us. Nothing was treated as serious; everything was a joke and no one expressed a clear argument. In place of debate, creative professionals produced shock effects and edgy jokes. No one addressed issues head-on. Then, David Foster Wallace, following work by Fredric Jameson, suggested that we really needed “new sincerity”: post-postmodernism. Did it work? Today, it seems that all of the radical affirmation and wholesomeness has merely led us to the obversal form of the problem with empty satire. If, before, people couldn’t argue because they were too busy laughing at decapitations, now, people can’t argue because they’re too busy signaling earnestness, engaging in self-care, and exclaiming the virtues of all possible phenomena. Everyone smiles. Instagram is a parade of the same photos of well-known tourist spots and interchangeable cocktails on simulacraic beaches. Some people classify these smiling “spiritual” Buddhas under the signifier “toxic positivity,” but no one seems to have a suggestion for how to get past this. Meditate more, maybe?

It’s as though we’re now collectively incapable of thinking. We went from negating everything to affirming everything, and neither has left room for discussion. The internet works this way. There’s no deliberation over what ought to come up for search terms. There’s no intention to create the conditions by which people confront opposing views. If, by “thinking,” someone means something to do with self-reflection in the midst of decision-making, machine learning doesn’t work this way. It replaces reflection and discourse with recursive algorithmic inductive reasoning. In this case, history isn’t a text; history is the raw material out of which machine learning algorithms produce incomprehensible (and, therefore, uninterrogable) new commands. With the replacement of reflection by recursion, people have little to do other than to perform “common sense” and to cancel the other whose sense feels uncommon. This seems to be happening in each opposing corner.

Where culture bars people from engaging with one another’s concerns and suggestions, machines keep collecting little bits of data in order to sell real and virtual goods and services. Financial services and insurance industries offer the privilege of shuffling documents between terminals in exchange for millions or billions of paltry fees. The conceit on which their profits are founded is, Things get really bad. No one seems to be publicly arguing about this (in a good week, maybe Bernie Sanders grants the catharsis of a good anti-corporate tirade).

Instead of criticizing, people watch increasingly short videos–can’t you imagine that, in 2040, kids will entertain themselves with clips that last a fraction of a second? We’re entertained by less and less. I keep hearing people say that they refuse to watch two hour-long films. More than ever, art repeats itself and gets away with it because hardly anyone really remembers that there was art in the past. The Fast and the Furious is getting a ninth sequel. NINE!!! THE FIRST ONE WAS STUPID IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! No one seems to have anything new to say. Popular art is almost always polysemous and lacking a critical edge. If any mass-distributed work of art contains a message that might subvert the prevailing order, the artistic vessel is always saturated with plausible deniability, leaving the audience likely to misinterpret and misuse.

There’s no longer good and bad. There’s data and profit. There are images and wholesome vibes. There’s no criticism, no debate. Few clamor for theory. Even fewer want syntheses. Everywhere repetition and recursion. How did the past come to seem more like a hologram and less like a series of events? In spite of all their myriad flaws, for a long time, thinking was clearly an important part of many of the dominant cultures. Even if they were embarrassed or resentful, even poor people valued sophistication. Today, professional snobbery rarely slinks down into the streets. Thinking is now generally relegated to the most exceptional political movements and impossible-to-find (because they’re mostly unpopular) art spaces. Idiocracy is a film that’s only 16 years old. I would suppose that the sequel is in cellophane.

In light of the roles of speed, efficiency, proliferation, and rates of profit (or rent, as the case applies)–especially insofar as they dislodge and bar any shared sense of the historicity of the present–I think that one can reasonably say that time is a hammer. In Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he noted that people in the US had lost their sense of their place in the social hierarchy and also their sense of their history. By the 1980s, Jameson was suggesting what he called “cognitive mapping”: the rearticulation of people’s sense of their role in the broader configuration of the social whole. Such an undertaking necessarily would require understanding the histories of the dominant aspects of the present, but outside maligned ivory towers, who today has time for this? In the hands of our 24/7 capitalist decisionmakers, time is a hammer.