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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.”
* * *