THIS IS A PARADIGM SHIFT.
EVERYTHING YOU KNOW HAS CHANGED.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM
-Warren Ellis, NewUniversal, issue one.
I AM BECOME DEATH. THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon the explosion of the first nuclear weapon.
NOW WE ARE ALL SONS OF BITCHES.
-Kenneth Bainbridge, in reply.
THAT'S ONE DIDDLE YOU CAN'T UNDO, HOMESKILLET.
-Juno.
Warren Ellis is obsessed with the future. His techno-punk, "grinder" writings (Transmet, Doktor Sleepless) reek of a slavish apotheosizing of sci-fi. Not that this is a bad thing. Ellis is, rightly, a star of the comics world. And sci-fi, for all its flaws remains an invaluable tool for thematic mining. It deserves more credit than it is given. And, of course, for Ellis, a man driven by the future, sci-fi must be the vehicle for his ideas.
Much more so than most other comics writers, Ellis wears his philosophical heart on his sleeve. And that is clear, most of all, in his newest long-form comics series, Doktor Sleepless. Of course, the themes of Ellis past haunt Sleepless: body manipulation, dystopia, anti-heroes, scantily clad women, and, of course, Ellis's eternal question: what is the future?
This is of course, a rather silly angle of attack for this post. I'm trying to talk about Obama, and, instead, I'm talking about Warren Ellis and what is the future? But Ellis provides a way into the Obama phenomena--yes, plural, phenomena. Ellis's ratings--via his semi-autobiographical character, Doktor Sleepless--concern the future, and what it means to be authentic in his dystopian city of Heavenside. And Obama has positioned himself as an authentic leader for the future.
I've been trying to write this for about a month or two. And it's been hard going. The strands of all this are pretty disparate. But here are a couple of core assumptions we need before we go in:
(1) My generation (call them Millenials, Generation Y, Gen Pomo, whatever), in particular, a segment often called--pejoritivley--hipsters, are obsessed with authenticity and earnestness.
We don't know what to do with it. We position ourselves at the forward margin of popular culture, and, like some kind of self-cannibalizing snake, eating its own tail, we search for any sign of earnestness, any authentic thing. When we find it, we digest it; we turn it into an ironic facsimile of itself. This is our obsession. Find the authentic, turn it against itself, and move on.
Here's an example. The left radicals of my generation love Che Guevara. They wore Che tee-shirts. This became a signal of a deliberate rejection of mainstream culture (whatever the hell mainstream is these days...). Urban Outfitters sold tee-shirts. People who didn't know shit about Guvara wore them. Then, a shirts came out making fun of the Che phenomenon. Che, Warholized. Che, an actual gorilla (as opposed to a guerrilla) (I might further note that Urban sold those shirts too).
We can break this down. Che as authentic (those sexy radicals wear him). Che, appropriated by culture-at-large (everyone gets a shirt). Che, a symbol of ironic distence (Che, a gorilla). And, now, no one--except the pathetically out-of-touch--wears Che (we move on).
This cycle is even clearer in the way Hipster culture reacts to "hipster" movies. Call this The Garden State Effect. A movie is hyped as a hipster manifesto (Juno, Garden State). Culture-at-large gets a hold of if. Hipsters turn it into a joke. Hipsters move on. Something begins as quirky authenticity; it ends up a source of ironic jokes and derision.
Hipsters love a local band (local and largely-unknown equals authentic). Local band, propelled forward by hipster love makes it big. Hipsters move on.
I think you get the idea.
This obsession with authenticity is the driving force among the culture-makers of my generation. It is also the driving force of Obama's campaign. It is also the driving force of Warren Ellis's Sleepless. All right, let's synthesize!
Most issues of Sleepless begin with a lecture/rant by Ellis/Doktor Sleepless. Ellis writes:
It's 1991. Richey Manic is carving something into his arm because Steve Lamacq has suggested the Manic Street Preachers lack an essential authenticity. What's echoing in this backstage room is the voice of Ian Brown, still say "cos it's 1989. To to get real." in 1999, godspeed you! Black Emperor start releasing CDs sleeved in untreated cardboard. Intended or not, it denotes authenticity. Keeping it real. Like brown paper bags from Muji, founded in 1980: Full name Mujirushi Royhin, which means "no brand, quality goods." Godspeed You! Black Emperor didn't play the media game. Half of them were anarchists, and all of them hated the corporate-owned music industry. But of course they had a brand. You can't help but notice that Naomi Klein's book No Logo had a fucking logo on the front.
Godspeed's brand was authenticity. That's what they had to sell. And if they didn't sell records and gig tickets, then they were just twelve guys in Montreal eating Ramen until they died. Richey Edwards couldn't be Richey Manic, that Richey, unless he sold you on the concept that he was 4 real. Ian Brown and the Stone Roses couldn't be that band, the band of the moment with the authentic voice that turned out to be the band in the right place at the right time and raised everyone up--unless they were more real than you.
Around the turn of the century, Justin Timberlake began to carry around with him a group of black vocalists, whose job it apparently was, in live performances, to declare ho "real" Justin Timberlake was before he began to sing. [...]
Who wants to be real? [...]
Authenticity is bullshit. Never more so than today. We can be anyone we can imagine being. We can be someone new every day.
This is Ellis's paradigm shift. The end of authenticity. The end of the world. The end of a time in which one has to swear allegience to the false god of the real, the earnest. Ellis's Sleepless is, at its core, a polemic about the future. It's as if he's writing to the hipsters of the world, demanding that they end their obsession with the authentic. To do this would be the paradigm shift, and, as Ellis claims in Sleepless, "the echeton event--the end of the world. He would be the destroyer of worlds. The son of a bitch. Classic Ellis.
But Ellis wouldn't need to write this, were it not for our culture's obsession with authenticity. It does exist. It permeates every level of our discourse. What has been striking to me over this primary season is the way so many of my smart, plugged in, political friends hate Obama. They view him not as authentic but as an insipid political player.
It's the Garden State Effect, in politics. And it's wrongheaded. Someone told me that they don't trust Obama because of his oratory. It's crafted. Too crafted. Fair enough. His oratory, of course, is a signal that he is an authentic statesman, not a mere politician. It's a way of showing prescience without, you know, actually shwoing prescience. It's a way of talking about the future without actually talking about the future. I recognize this.
But, so what? I'm with Ellis, in a way (minus the dystopian, sci-fi stuff, which, while fun to read, doesn't lend itself well to contemporary, American political criticism). Authenticity is dead. We have entered a new realm. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Obama doesn't believe what he says. He's a snake-oil salesman with a silver tongue. Fine. He has positioned himself as a statesman, which means, he will try to act like a statesman. It doesn't matter if he actually is or isn't. He will try to be one. This is a good thing.
If we want to end the cultural masturbation known as hipsterism, lets weed it out of our politics. This irrational hatred of Obama because he's a politician who is trying to be more than that, is a sign of that same obsession with authenticity that led to Diablo Cody's meteoric rise and fall.
I don't care if Obama is "the real thing" or not. It doesn't mean anything. He is signaling what he wants to be--is trying to be. That is enough. It's all signs and symbols. And it is Obama's embracing of this fact that has inspired my generation.
I'm all for accepting that Obama isn't the savior of politics. But if we accept that, then we also have to accept that the backlash is just as authenticity-centered as his initial appeal.
Culture-makers need to stop looking down their noses at authenticity (while, also, of course, worshiping it). If we do that, we will have fulfilled Ellis's charge and become the destroyer of worlds. I say good riddance.
Ich. This isn't nearly as well argued as I would have liked. If I get some responses, I'll try to clarify. At least I finally posted this thing. It's been a long time coming.
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