Cached from http://web.archive.org/web/20060619190439/
http://www.newpantagruel.com/2006/05/sacred_ordersoc.php

Lifewords: A Review of My Life among the Deathworks

BY JESS CASTLE

Reviewed in this essay: 

Philip Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.


“Culture is the form of fighting before the firing actually begins.” So reads the first of countless bold pronouncements about culture, authority, and identity to be found in Philip Rieff’s first full-length book since 1973’s Fellow Teachers. The return of this once-prominent social theorist was worth the wait. Even those readers familiar with his previous writings are likely to be overwhelmed by the scope and range of My Life among the Deathworks. It is Rieff’s most ambitious work to date, and although that ambition turns out to be problematic, it is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain new perspectives on our ongoing culture war.

The essential starting point is the useful model of comparative cultural analysis that Rieff lays out in the first chapter and uses throughout the rest of the book. First world culture, which is “pagan and in the majority everywhere,” has as its defining characteristic a “primacy of possibility,” or pop—a broadly inclusive concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal dreamtime to Plato’s Forms. These governing primacies of possibility, being metadivine in their primacy, also contain the hidden limits of possibility: the Greek gods and goddesses, Rieff points out, were themselves subject to fate, which is the defining motif of the first world culture. Second world culture is grounded in “the traditions out of Jerusalem” in which the principle of the world’s creation is not a mythic, metadivine reality, but a divine revelation that commands obedience and places clear and absolute limits on possibility. Second world culture’s defining motif is faith. The third world culture of late modernity and postmodernity recognizes no governing divine or metadivine presence, and is characterized by recyclings of the mythic motifs of first world culture in sinister, fictive primordialities like race, class, and sexuality (though these primordialities are ontologically unmoored, unlike the pops of pagan culture), and by its relentless assaults on the divine revelations at the heart of second world culture. The motif of this third world culture is fiction.

For Rieff, the unprecedented aspect of this third culture is that it makes no effort to translate sacred order into social order, which is for him the true task of culture. Rather, it is devoted to the destruction of previous cultures’ sense of sacred order, especially the sacred order of second culture, inseparable as it is from divine commandment. As he puts it, “I intend to describe that unprecedented condition of fighting against the cultural predicate that organized all human societies until almost our own time. That predicate I call sacred order.”

It is important to note that these cultures, though they correspond to periods of actual cultural production, are also used by Rieff to describe inward dispositions that exist synchronously and compete for dominance in our selves—though the third culture is now dominant. The third culture disposition has been introduced by cultural elites, mostly artists and writers. Accordingly, much of the book is devoted to deconstructions of their “deathworks.” Deathwork is Rieff’s term for “the resolution, in life and/or art, of a particular world creation.” More plainly put, deathworks are cultural creations that function as hidden assaults on true culture. In his analyses of third culture deathworks, Rieff seeks to expose the de-creation—the undoing of sacred order—that constitutes the central task of late modern literature and art. Rieff gives brief, dense readings of Duchamp, Picasso, Joyce, Kafka—and the list goes on. He writes, “I hope to take the reader behind and beyond contemporary reality by juxtaposing events and works that do not appear, on first reading, to be related. Call it deconstructing radical contemporaneity.” These readings are intended to allow the reader to see clearly through late modernity and enter sacred order, to which we have been blinded by so many images destructive of it. Rieff’s breakdowns of deathworks are deeply compelling, and their logic hard to dispute.

Turning to the more synthetic aspects of the book, much of Rieff’s tragic take on the ascendant third culture of the West is rooted in his view that it can provide a coherent basis for neither authority nor human identity. In first and second world cultures, human identity and its manifestations in action could always be located somewhere in what Rieff calls the “vertical in authority,” or via. That vertical in authority is the space between sacred and social order, which is in turn the space Rieff equates with culture itself. Our actions take place in sacred order—whether those living primarily in the third world recognize it or not—and can always be characterized as raisings, lowerings, or shufflings from side to side in that vertical. “Human life takes the shape of a cross.”

The creator/identity is the presiding presence above the via; and this highest identity, of the Creator, is the only source of true authority. The creator/identity is also the predicate of true human identity (the forward slash is an indicator of how the first metamorphoses into the second)—from which the self takes its sense of its own inviolability, unrepeatability, and incommunicable inwardness. Rieff calls this true self that is conscious of its place in sacred order, the sacred self; its radically watered-down, third world descendant we now call “identity.” This sacred self, he maintains, is ever harder to find in our third world culture, with its vision of the self as a role-player on an endless series of contingent stages. That vision has led to “characterological instabilities” that were largely unknown in second culture. In that culture, sacred identity and sacred authority—the roots of culture planted deep in the self—provided a set of stable responses to the traumas of life. “Identity and authority are inseparable from adherence to the commanding truths, however modest that adherence might be.”

For Rieff, then, the not-I/I of second culture identity possesses a strength that third world-dominated selves cannot attain—no surprise to anyone who has read his earlier works. Whatever one thinks of Rieff’s concept of the sacred self, his descriptions of it can be quite powerful. Consider the following passage on Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Whatever the shatterings Hopkins felt threatened his and other sacred selves, perhaps precisely because of that threat, he composed the greatest passage on the God-relation of identity since Galatians 2:20. Despair shatters itself against the hard truth of Hopkins’s sense of identity.

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This, Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
               Is immortal diamond.

Whatever the Jack, joke, mortal trash of our lives may be, our predicative relational identity, Not-I/I, supplies the resistant hardness of sacred self Hopkins blazons in everyone’s honor, each Not-I/I an “immortal diamond.” When I read Hopkins, as when I hear a Bach mass, I am an honorary Christian. The aesthetics of truth form alliances, profoundly elective affinities, that the intellect stripped of feeling inclines to reject…. Intellection must address the matter of its feeling.

Such evocative passages cast doubt on third culture’s assertion that “there are no truths, only rhetorics of power and self-interest.”

Rieff ends his account of the third world self with two seemingly paradoxical claims. The first is that contemporary culture is producing more and more world-men and women, who assimilate everything in the world to their own egos and fail to recognize the Not-I. The second claim is that the “final solution” to the self-limiting nature of identity offered by third culture is actually a doctrine of self-erasure. For Rieff, third world selves—performative and therapeutic, hence relentlessly inward, yet also trapped in collectivizing primordialities like race, gender, and sexuality—are unable to perceive where the I ends and the Not-I begins, and seem to end up destroying both.

The paradox just described is, in its sweeping pessimism, a good segue into a brief consideration of the weaknesses of My Life Among the Deathworks. For one thing, Rieff displays no real concern for the question of how exactly the fate of high culture is bound up with the fates of those not likely to encounter much of it. That ideas and symbols are terribly powerful—and that they eventually “trickle down” in diluted, distorted, and vulgarized forms to a public that doesn’t read Wallace Stevens—is doubtless true. However, Rieff’s failure to discuss how these processes actually occur makes his work unlikely to convince anyone who approaches it skeptically. It also provides him with no internal checks on the wildness of his rhetoric. I found myself wondering, for example, how many of the selves I see on the street every day are really “trapped” in “their one instrument of confrontation: therapies of transgression.” Rieff does grant that our selves inhabit different cultural worlds, implying that vestiges of the sacred self survive, but his descriptions of the contemporary self are so consistently dark as to pre-empt the subtle analyses allowed for by that caveat. There is, in short, much more to be said about our current psychocultural travails than Rieff has said, and his grand, apocalyptic writing sometimes obscures the depth of these problems rather than illuminating them.

One wonders, then, about Rieff’s potential to persuade anyone who has not had the experience of being either a real Christian or an honorary one. James Davison Hunter says in his introduction, “It is possible that Rieff’s theory of culture will be utterly incomprehensible to those incapable of feeling intellect, those whose intellection is only or primarily performative. In our day, their number is legion.” That difficulty of persuasion seems more than possible: it seems inevitable for anyone who so vigorously opposes the dominant culture and still chooses to argue from the deeply personal standpoint of the “feeling intellect.” Rieff’s deeply feeling intellect is of course inseparable from his momentous insights, though, and if his newest work cries out at times for greater moderation and clarity, it also gives the reader an almost impossibly rich set of speculations and diagnoses. My Life Among the Deathworks is indispensable reading for its intended audience of “those who sense their own conscription into the wars that characterize the present condition of our cultural life.”

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