If in the 1990s Burger King advertising said “sometimes you have to break the rules”, now Kellogg uses a trans woman to advertise its cereals. The two anecdotes are used by David Rieff (Boston, 73 years old) to support the thesis according to which, at least since the end of the 1960s, the countercultural rebellion has been playing into the hands of the interests of large companies, that is, of capitalism. The writer, historian and war correspondent presents in the essay Desire and Destiny, the awakening, the decline of culture and the victory of kitsch (Discussion) a fierce criticism of a left that, in his opinion, has forgotten unions, work and class to embrace other causes such as race, gender or the environment.
This could be an approximate definition of “woke culture”, that derogatory term born in the United States to disqualify diversity, equity and inclusion policies and their derivatives in the world of culture and academia. For Rieff, the result is a perverse paradox: “A world whose good intentions will destroy what is good in this civilization, without ameliorating its many cruel and monstrous aspects.” And as an expression of this paradox, the author highlights in the book the speech given by Angela Davis, historical leader of the Black Panthers, in front of Goldman Sachs, the financial giant of Wall Street. Or Black Rock, the largest investment fund in the world, with the rainbow flag on trans pride day.
This new essay by Rieff follows the line of his latest books, marked by the disappointment or traps that can hide behind ideas such as progress or development. Rieff doesn’t consider himself a leftist. He is rather a pessimist or “an anti-utopian”, although one of his first teachers was Ivan Illich, the lucid priest and pedagogue close to anarchism, whom he met in the experimental university he founded in Mexico in the 1970s. He was then a disciple in Paris of the philosopher Emil Cioran, the great pessimist. Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a symbol of American high culture and home to the totemic mother, Susan Sontag, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. War correspondent in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda or Afghanistan. Reiff’s life and work are those of an intellectual globetrotter, as demonstrated by the excellent Spanish with which he answers questions in this interview at the publisher’s headquarters in Mexico City.
Ask. Did you learn to believe with Illich and disillusioned with Cioran?
Answer. I never shared his faith. He, as a Christian, still had hope. But optimism and hope for me are completely different categories. Optimism needs empirical justification. Hope is a moral, metaphysical category. There is no need for proof or probability. I would never be against hope, even if I don’t share it. I have always been a pessimist, the underlying theme of my work is a sort of spinal anti-utopianism. This is why I have never been able to side with the left. I think that to be a serious leftist, both morally and politically, you need to cultivate a certain optimism.
Q. Does this pessimism also have to do with your family biography?
R. Well, my mother was very left-wing.
Q. But his father was one of the great American experts on Freud, as we know, the master of suspicion and messenger of bad news.
R. I think my father was right in his idea of Freud as a conservative thinker. The funny thing about my background is that I had a very conservative father and a radical mother. Maybe that’s where a lot of my confusion comes from.
Q. Very psychoanalytic. Has it never been analyzed?
R. No. I had a total psychological breakdown when I was 30, I went to a psychologist to get some pills. But I have never psychoanalyzed myself. I have an Argentinian partner, but we can’t discuss psychoanalysis. It is a forbidden topic
Q. In the book he talks about the awakening as a mixture of Freudian subjectivism, Mao’s contempt for the past and for the new man, William Blake’s spiritualism and Schumpeter’s insatiable capitalist appetite and its creative destruction.
R. Regardless of the fact that it is a mixture, it is an absolutely legitimate emancipatory idea. It has to do with the biblical idea that “the last will be first and the first will be last”. It seems to me fundamentally to be a moral reform movement. This tradition has been followed much more by left-wing thought. But the Wake is the only movement that considers itself revolutionary and does not have an economic analysis. It reminds me more of Calvinism, the Catholic counter-reformation of the 17th century. Judith Butler or Wendy Brown identify as left-wing and anti-capitalist, but pose no threat to the system. Large companies are very comfortable incorporating a vision, e.g. light of the awakened.
Q. What is it referring to?
R. I think, for example, of Silicon Valley’s reaction to anti-Israel demonstrations. Google or Meta won’t walk away from a million-dollar contract with an Israeli contractor. But they can agree to be friendly with Trans Pride. The only space in our society where they have power is culture. And for me this rejection of the cultural past, except for the hidden culture of the victims, is not anti-system, it is rather anti-culture. The artist’s moralism is the classic example. Picasso was a son of a bitch. And by your logic, a horrible person can’t make art. This is the anti-principle of the art. For the revival, the pyramids of Tenochtitlan should also be censored because they were places where the horror occurred.
Q. He has received criticism for playing into the hands of Trump and other authoritarian leaders.
R. Yes, there are very intelligent people who told me “why are you involved in awakening when there are these infernal right-wing populisms?” My answer is simple. The assault on cultural history is something very serious to me and will outlast Trump. There’s a phrase that says: culture is a conversation that took place long before you were born and will continue long after you die. For the awakened, everything is a prologue to their moral reform.
Q. I think of feminism which focuses on the care and vulnerability of life. Isn’t this a criticism of the capitalist logic of profitability at any cost?
R. Yes, but for me this is completely privileged. Awakening is a rather luxurious movement. It is no coincidence that his most important creations were in faculties and museums. I also think of the feminist phrase from the 1960s: “the personal is the political.” They are psychoanalytic ideas. They assume that a moral change will lead to a fundamental economic change as well. I don’t believe it.
Q. His mother did a lot to popularize that phrase, right here in Mexico, at a conference in 1971.
R. Well, this already existed in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Lenin’s companion, Alexandra Kolontai, already thought so, but she disappeared from the communist debate especially after the 1930s. But maybe I’m not just pessimistic, I’m also too materialistic. This is an almost Brechtian book, in the sense that morality comes after material things. “Food first, morals second,” was his phrase.
Q. There is a nostalgic left that aspires to working-class culture, to factories. Don’t you think that today that working class would be represented, say, by a migrant and precarious woman who works, for example, driving an Uber?
R. Yes, but those workers today would be better served by a union. There are no longer factories like in the nineteenth century but the problem of wages is still valid. Obviously we are in another world. But I think in the awakening there are, let’s say, anti-materialist ideas that represent contempt for people’s material needs. They are fantasies of privileged people. But hey, I’m not a leftist and I don’t want to use the weapons of classical Marxism. What worries me most is the fate of culture, of great culture. And I think the effects of the awakening will be that we won’t see art like the avant-garde envisioned, but rather Taylor Swift and K-pop.
