The Case of The Case of California
A cult classic that explores the concept of "California"-now back in
print!
— University of Minnesota Press
Rickels' depth of scholarship enables him to assemble a diverse
collection of references and private discussions, many of them as yet
untranslated from the German. California presents an intriguing
"back door" history of psychoanalysis and the twentieth century.
— Edward Parkinson, The Semiotic Review of Books
I love cultural studies. I love the idea that there is such a thing
as "culture" and that its worth studying. And I especially love when
scholars tear themselves away from their own sense of dignity and decide
to really dive into it. Sometimes you can smell the unchained
enthusiasm,
like the dense smog off a rutting animal. There are authors for whom
pop culture is an environment. They breathe it. It moves through
gill-like structures on the sides of their necks. The best of those are
people like Slavoj Zízek, and even Roland Barthes, who slide just as
eloquently through a wet landscape of theory.
Laurence Rickels lives in California. Certainly, this gives him the
opportunity and the insight to write a critical review of Californian
culture. There is no reason to think that he is unqualified to take up
the task. With a background in Literature and Psychology, he's learned
his theory incredibly well. What is unfortunately lacking in
California is the conversational ease that is necessary to make such
concepts feel like more than exercises. I find myself pining for Zizek.
Rickels seems an outsider to the fluid environment that I want him to
inhabit.
Where Zizek is concise, building his arguments in ever tightening
loops of dense theoretical material, Rickels is scattered.
California is a collection of difficult sound bytes that carry enormous
systems of information in them which they are unable to divulge. It seems
clear:
Rickels is a brilliant man. But who cares? There is an attempt at
ease in California that is forced and, well... uneasy.
Don't misunderstand. It's not Rickels's choice of content, his
impressive array of theoretical weaponry or his "diverse collection of
references" that loses me. It is, pure and simple, his writing. In
writing California he made a decision to move rapidly from one
significant case to another with no narrative or hypothesis to elide them. He
seems interested in presenting me with the many ways in which he can
draw disparate historical arguments together. A fine ambition. He wants
me to know that he sees the way that the Frankfurt school predicted
and, to a certain extent, ennobled the quirks of American consumerism.
Also a neat thing to know. But somehow I only come away with a sense
that it is Rickels own ideas that are at stake here and they seem
unfocused and diffuse.
In a chapter entitled "Toxic Shock" for example, he says, "According
to Benjamin, the culture industry processed or developed shock through
the work of mourning into inoculative doses against it which Disney
films also administered. Via shock inoculation everyone's assimilation to
the
technomedia and the masses proceeds by controlled release - and not by
fastforward into mass psychosis." This is followed up 6 pages later
with a quick reference to Jonestown and "the inward turn" of sadism.
It's simply not clear enough. The brilliant examples that he offers
of American excess and its effect on popular and academic culture are
not conversational metaphors but case-studies with no background;
pop-culture name-dropping without a justification. How Jonestown and Mickey
Mouse are related via Benjamin and his notion of Mitsein and
Dasein is worth knowing. But Rickels will not share the
connections, only their connectedness.
This is a sad state of affairs. As a fan of such connectivity, I
desperately want it to work. I want to care about the links that are
being made. In fact, the book is filled to capacity with wonderful
characters. He takes us through th e lives of a host of fascinating people:
Goethe, Thomas Mann, Heidi Fleiss, Walt Disney. He walks us through
the Winchester Mansion, Jonestown and Hitler's Brain. We are accompanied
all the way through by Freud, Jung and Lacan. But California is
a book made up of fractals. Each chapter, taken on its own, is as
incomplete as the book itself.
Finally, I suppose my real objection comes from a lack of
follow-through. Can't we linger on Mickey and Walter without being
distracted by new and exciting speculations on Thomas Mann's secret
homosexual fantasies? Give me the juicy details of one or the other, not the
tantalizing, but ultimately unfulfilling, promise of both.
It's been 10 years since The Case of California was
introduced to an eager and hungry PoMo culture. Perhaps I mistreat it by
removing it from the context of Cultural Studies in 1991. Although we are
participants in a young field, we've come a long way since those heady
days.
It's important that theory has managed to form its uneasy alliance with
pop culture and Rickels has done significant labor in the slow
breakdown of the walls between High and Low culture. But in the end, in 2001,
it is not the novelty of those connections that make the endeavor
succeed
or fail, it is the ability to speak to a reader through masterful
writing. Conversation is an artform that takes more than novelty to work
well. It involves letting go of ones pretensions and giving the
impression of ease. The best practitioners drink the connections like
Kool-Aid, but it seems to be an environment in which Dr. Rickels
cannot breathe.
