April 9, 1998

Note to Satirists

Since there is no longer any room for satire—making ridiculous the real—, the real having long since become ridiculous: cynical, biting or sarcastic-yet-funny social commentary must make do with less, taking advantage of this novelty, to make itself ridiculous yet real, the latter of which is now to be its saving grace in a culture of unleashed inanity.

Real idiocy, real outrageousness is laughable. Lukàcs demonstrated that the epically meaningful was preserved in the form of the modern novel—no longer an explicit, textually legible meaning; not a meaning that could be read in the surface, on the page, but one only understood at the end, and only at the end of a successful novel which managed to appear to resolve the fundamental formal problematic of the novel: the requirement that the novel’s meaning be embedded in the text as if by an encryption algorithm, decipherable only synchronically in the total message, although the key can be completed in the last bit or sentence or word: a metalegible formal coherence, the coherence of content becoming progressively less necessary—and attainable.

If one would point up immanent contradictions of contemporary society—in which even the memory of the surface accessibility of the epic of life has been obliterated and thus in which nothing is comprehensible on its own anymore (especially after the introduction of rhetoric, logic, historicism, dialectics, sociology, conscious class conflict, and quantum physics) and in which the code is not necessarily forthcoming, even after a patient period of waiting, because, after all, life is not a work of fiction—the requirements are different.

One must retain contemporary society’s formal coherence, its mode of delivery, hewing close to the knowledge that the medium is the message, that the form is the content, while investigating its outermost extremities, straightfaced at all times.

This formal requirement for contemporary satire—that it must appear to be what it denounces—entails also that the content of satire today be 100% real. As real as the mass-murdering children who were once self-fulfillingly prophesied by rightwing Moral Majority types. Where will the tension be found in which the critical utopian content may develop? In this case, satire would, of course, take up the voice of the Silent Majority, and then juxtapose that voice’s very real awareness of the danger lurking in the culture with that voice’s utter ignorance of itself as a necessary cause. A satire of blatant omission. Which absence turns the missing content into a form rigorous enough to write in via the old logical temptation to attempt to disprove a negative. The tension is here, in this bad logical conundrum the reader will confront: the reader will know (hopefully) exactly what is missing, but will be thoroughly unable to find confirmation of this knowledge in the text precisely because it is missing—there will be no facile identification with the author of the satire, no being in on the joke. The punchline remains unspoken, but, and this is the responsibility of the author, clearly nagging in its absence.

More generally speaking, satire today can only explore real horror with go-go advertising or journalistic style, which are the same thing. Satire will never again, this side of the end of prehistory, be found in the content.

Before you protest that this is not funny: satire was never funny. Who was it who showed that satire, called cynicism there, has to date been strongest in service of the status quo? which is made to poke hilarious fun at the laughable proffered alternative? Sloterdijk? His Lucian? The point is that the point from which satire carries a new proposal or new development of the yet-eversame to its preposterous limits, the point of view of satire, is the present. Which is why we today so easily misunderstand Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal—which was originally developed as a polemic against the practice of political economy, which would have to wait until Smith to be theorized, and which satire was actually outdone in the practice of full-fledged industry, which actually did eat children alive—as a political polemic against economists—theorists of political economy—, “economics” meanwhile preferring to root itself almost exclusively in Malthus’s theory of overpopulation—thus its self-understanding as “the science of the allocation of scarce resources”—, with borrowed illustrations from Dickens’s and Hugo’s tales of street urchins, workers, and criminals in Manchester and Paris, and Marx’s polemics—some of which, taken in isolation, are quite capable of powering Keynesian-type social democracy—, without, of course, acknowledging the critical insights of those authors. And the judgmental tone, the moralism of those authors, which was secondary, has since been adapted as a token of sincerity/integrity to all economic pronouncement from every bar of the ideological spectrum. An economist may worship either the totem of the bear or the bull, but is required at either sooth to say.

“I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation.”

But the field of satirical vision expands as the society regresses from confrontation with any particular proposal; now, since the end (at least in principle) of history, the space within which satire would push the proposal to its extremes is not to be found between the lines of the text: we have moved too far backward for that. (Need I say that we hope to satirize the new proposals for the maintenance of the old order?) The texts are lined up for our perusal like so many items on a supermarket shelf—how long has it been since Marx himself was commodified?—it strains our vision to read the ingredients. No, the extreme is now in our form of perception: extreme distance, distended vision, gravity-distorted by the market mass and its apologists, all of which are also responsible for the all-too-inevitable refraction of what has only come to light in the present into the past, our difficulty in traversing that distance to understand a text like Swift’s in the heyday of its genre. Too far removed to retain any of the pathos of any particular proposal, let alone a critical or radical one, even in satirical form; most efforts today can do no more than catalogue them coolly, quotation marks encompassing the object of our ridicule, the better to mark it off from our text, the better to tell them apart, which is a real problem, because the necessity of formal identity between the satire and its object is inexorable, and comes back to bite any satirist who refuses to acknowledge it.

Our disgust with what we would satirize, the distant real, is as real as our distance, but that distance removes the possibility of satire—it’s just another text—, and we are left in a situation of real, lived irony. Kierkegaard, in connection to Socrates’ method of questioning, called this presatirical void emptiness. And sooner or later, the barrier in the text collapses under the pressure of this vacuum—one can only insert so many quotation marks before the point of the illegibility even of our type of text is reached, too-taxing—, and we finally accept that our real lives have become ridiculous. And not in that spoiled-brat manner, either. I mean the fact that at the beginning of the third millennium, 270 years after Swift’s truly modest proposal for an increase in the number of loaves available, the vast majority of human beings is still malnourished.

April 9, 1998 - November 10, 1999

Supplementary Draft on Satire.

Being negative it can benefit from the logical conundrum it creates and now must create: in those cases where the satirist is satirizing only an aspect of the order, its critical scope can be broader than this, than even the author might prefer. The satirist searches this partial object for lines of horrible flight, and that train of thought, being logical, will textualize the dynamic of the totality anyway, which is of course already alive in the partial aspect. From the situation of colonially-imposed poverty—simple peasant poverty and simple urban-un-or-em-ployment poverty—Swift himself was led to the implicit understanding that at least 1.5 million human lives were being commodified, just like loaves of bread, but obviously cheaper. Of course, this insight was his jumping-off point. From out of this simple insight, Swift hits upon the plan to simply replace the dearer food source with a cheaper commodity. But (1) Catholics breed more during certain times of the year; their infants, through the magic of the invisible hand, will hit the market just when the Protestant infants are scarcer. But then perhaps Catholics will “set up shop,” breed for profit, which has the beneficial result of “greatly lessen[ing] the number of Papists, with whom we are yearly over-run”! This apparently unrelated thread of the satire—a criticism of religious intolerance, a plea for religious tolerance, a protoatheistic plaint against religious dogma, the dogma of religion itself—grows out of the critique of the commodification of human life in one small island on the North Sea 270 years ago. More on the cash-money nexus: (2) If Catholics would breed for profit, why not Protestants? In fact, among both groups, it would increase the rate of marriage, and men would treat their wives better: “Men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf or sow when they are ready to farrow; nor [would men] offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.” About the only positivity one can draw out of this is that women are treated like horses, cows, and pigs. The satirical method opens this can of worms and refuses to close it. The can is actually exploded with one critique of this sort, and nothing positive, especially no halfhearted plea for moderation with your women, no rule of thumb, can be salvaged from this particular text. Such a devastating passage—an indisputably radical-feminist passage—but it grows out of Swift’s nationalistic and arguably moralistic intention only by virtue of the totally negative satirical form. The irrelation of these two small aspects of Swift’s critique to his explicit intention is an illusion of reified thought categories, which are embodied in academic departments and labor specializations of all sorts, most of which Swift manages to transcend within the space of a mere seven pages.


















1. Although it can effectively function as such in the spectacle, in the situation in which the real has been progressively displaced by the artificial—which, paradoxically, is manufactured in such a way as to be easily intelligible, i.e., made according to precisely those formal characteristics of fiction and ideology that failed to accord with reality—effectively erasing all trace of the real that has been lost.

2. E.g., the market-determined nominalism/positivism of journalism, the all-too-easy excitability of advertising, the amnesia of both, the chameleonesque shifts in affect, the schmaltzy time change - directed heart-tugs of theme muzak, etc.

3. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public (1729).

4. Adam Smith (1723 - 1790), An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

5. This effect, the restriction of the critique to the pretend voice which delivers it—in Swift’s case, that of either a British tension-strategy journalist masquerading as a pamphleteer, an MP with an efficient solution, or simply a brainwashed concerned citizen—, is a terrible tragedy. The voice of the satire overwhelms its full meaning with the evolution of the conditions against which it is levied; in this case, Swift’s satire tempts one reading it today to identify the narrator of the Proposal as one of our dismal scientists, endlessly calculating, “maturely weigh[ing] the several schemes of our [competitors],” and arriving just by virtue of the math at inhumanity (not to say that the presence of such a calculating reason, which was not yet fully developed, can be denied). Calculation like that of now - US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in his memo recommending increased pollution of the Third World to colleagues at the World Bank. The extent to which reality has superseded satire’s old form is clearly revealed in Summers’ nonapology: He was just being satirical. In any case, reification is discernible in both the shift in the reader’s perception—what was actually critique of then-untheorized praxis now appears to have been critique of theory—and the shift in reality, because praxis has hired some apologists in the meantime.

6. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 2, MIT, 1995, pp. 467 - 469 (1959): “Malthus [1766 - 1834] decided in his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population [As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society]’, 1798, that the reason for misery lies in the ‘natural contradiction between man’s boundless striving for propagation and the limited increase in means of nourishment.” Malthus’s contention was that population progresses geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 . . .), while the capacity of the means of production can only progress arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10 . . .). “Malthus promises: mass misery will only exist until a nation sensibly recognizes this connection and restricts reproduction to such a degree which corresponds to the degree of loaves of bread available. Thus it is proletarian lechery, not capital, which produces social misery; and the so-called law of diminishing crop yield plainly passes sentence on the proletarian scapegoat.”

7. And the heyday of the genre of a text like Swift’s, which was so ahead of its time, can only be said to be that time for which that text was too early. Or at least that is what I think after having witnessed the near-immediate cuperation of creativity by ravenous mechanisms which have only recently fully come to light. But perhaps this is a case of refraction as well.

8. Presatirical in our case because satire is prevented by the real; for Kierkegaard, this emptiness meant something different. He meant the void—the negativity—that gives birth to reason. After a Socratic dialogue, a successful one anyway—and not many of them were—the emptiness left in the mind of his partner in dialogue was “meant” to cause reflection; a function analogous to that I prescribe for the well-placed absence in the contemporary satirical text. Socrates was presatirical because his power of negation, his ability extemporaneously to negate the false positions of his interlocutors, was no joke. Satire, even of the powerful Swiftian variety, is already a failure when contrasted to this presatirical praxis of negation; Socrates confronted his opponents—pretenders to truth, justice, and wisdom, all—face to face, hardly via reified and rigidified “channels of communication” like the pamphlet, which may inspire warm feelings but which is already the beginning of the spectacular unanswerable lie, the forebear of the contemptible newspaper—as it is today, even a march of millions upon Washington is worthless.






















satire jonathan.swift irony writing lit.crit