2 of 5
What, indeed, is our age likely to do with an author who put forward an argument for "the recovery of necessity," at the very same time that the techno-utopian computer wizard Ray Kurzweil, perhaps reflecting more faithfully the regnant moral theology of high modernity, is assuring us that "The Singularity"—the moment when man escapes entirely from the yoke of biological necessity—"is near"? What can our age make of an author who thinks that the most pressing political question before us today is not the increase of political "participation" but the recovery of the meaning of politics itself, as an avenue for the expression of genuine human freedom, and an escape from the relentless "instrumentalization" of life? An author who argues (much like the philosopher Charles Taylor) for a renewal of our appreciation of ordinary life, but who remains snappishly suspicious of any attempts to over-theorize such a move, contending—astonishingly, to modern ears—that "acceptance of ordinary life requires an acceptance of waste" and requires resistance to the transformation of ordinary life into a "locus of meaning"? Who admonishes us that "all things do not exist to be read," and that "experience does not have to be written to be valid"?
Let's stop there for a moment. What, you may ask, could Shannon possibly mean in opposing the exaltation of "meaning"? How can one object to "meaning"? Isn't this something approaching a modern sacrilege? Isn't "meaning" precisely that thing for which we are told "modern man" is perpetually questing? Yes, precisely so. But I think it may help flesh out Shannon's point to consider how it is embodied in a literary example drawn from Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer—itself a story of a questing modern man, the book's narrator, whose aspirations are diluted and diverted into his tendency to exalt the "textualization" of experience in movies.
The narrator is addicted to the movies because it is only when he sees something in the movies that he can feel it to have been validated as "real." When he and his girlfriend go to see Panic in the Streets, a 1950 movie filmed partly in the same New Orleans neighborhood where they are seeing the film, they emerge from the darkness of the theater with the certitude that the neighborhood is now "certified":
Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
Or consider a passage earlier in the book, in which the narrator observes a honeymooning young couple wandering the French Quarter of New Orleans. They seem unhappy, anxious, aimless, sensing something wrong, something missing—until they spot the famous actor William Holden walking on the street. The young man is able to offer Holden a light for his smoke, and in this brief, impersonally friendly interaction with the hyper-real figure of Holden, a radiant source of "certification" itself, everything suddenly changes for the young man and his wife:
share this page
RSS Feed
