Acts of destruction.

My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, by Philip Rieff, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. 234 pp.

CAVEAT LECTOR: the latest work by the late Philip Rieff is impenetrably, almost excruciatingly hard to read. The editor's warning that "the book is difficult, intentionally so," as the author employs a "strategy of concealment," should be taken seriously. The book is a collection of vignettes, strung together by a sometimes barely discernible common theme and cemented by a curiously obscure private language. The narrative is intensely personal, with moving accounts of the author's and his relatives' life-experiences. These stories, while not distracting from the book's message, add little to its structural consistency. Many readers will find the book's style excessively heavy, its logic obscure, its structure haphazard. This, however, is a warning, not a discouragement. Those determined enough to read the book from cover to cover will be rewarded. Obscured by the all too successful "strategy of concealment" are fragments of an immensely erudite and penetratingly insightful theory of culture, authority, and social change.

The book's idiosyncratic vocabulary belies its traditional foundations. Indeed, even the vocabulary itself is in line with a well-established sociological practice. From Auguste Comte to Talcott Parsons, sociologists have invented new words when their inquiry extended beyond the limits of existing languages. While often irritating, this habit is as old as sociology itself. Rieff's treatment of social change as an identifiable sequence of stages is also a very traditional tool of sociological inquiry. In general, affinities with Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and, less obviously, Parsons, are traceable throughout the book.

The book presents a view of history as a sequence of three "worlds," each with its own cultural imperative. To Rieff, culture is enormously important; indeed, it is world-creating. More than just a system of rules and values, culture is a set of truths, acknowledged and indisputable, which occupy the space between the sacred and the social.

The First World was built around the pagan cultural imperative which holds fate--inscrutable, unfathomable, erratic, devoid of moral substance--to be the main force governing the affairs of men and gods alike. Rieff calls this force the "primacy of possibility," or pop for short. It is unclear why one would use a counterintuitive term to designate a well-known phenomenon which already has an accepted name. It might be that the choice was intended to designate something even more intractable, abstract, and impersonal than fate.

Primacy of possibility serves as a bridge between two worlds: the first, mystical and pagan, and the third, disenchanted and post-modern. Rieff calls the third culture "paganism parodied." It is paganism because its imperatives are just as unfathomable and morally void as those of the culture of the pagan first world. It is a parody because cultural imperatives of the third world are based not on fate but on fiction. The latter is not primordiality inherited from the past but is a set of rules created by the new cultural elites and based on class, race, or gender. The elites that fabricate those postmodern primordialities are well organized. The author refers to them as "officers of the third culture" who create and enforce the rules that serve as surrogates for commanding truths. While the reader is given a glimpse of the organizational side of the new cultural elites, their relations to power, authority, and, above all, the state remain insufficiently explored.

The second world is radically different from both the first and the third worlds. Its culture serves to connect social order to the sacred order. The latter is not a projection of society but instead the only context in which society, together with its culture, can be maintained. Faith, not fate or fiction, is the source of commanding truth in the second world. Unlike the fatalism of the first world and the enforced conformity of the third one, faith is not a passive acceptance of primordialities, whether inherited or constructed. It requires acknowledgment of the universal truth contained in sacred order. In the first world, this truth is unknown, in the third, it is denied.

Rieff, albeit rather dimly, hints at a connection between faith and knowledge. Indeed, as Pope Benedict XVI reiterated in his now famous lecture at the University of Regensburg, faith is not contrary to reason as both are needed to comprehend divine truth. Rieff reflects on the weakening of both faith and reason in modern society. The second world, built on precepts of Judaism and Christianity, its culture informed by the commanding truths of the sacred order, is now disappearing. It does not pass away on its own accord, but retreats before the pressure of the new elites that incessantly assault the very idea of ultimate truth. In this process, works of art created by the new cultural elite of the third world become what Rieff calls "deathworks"--artistic or scholarly efforts self-consciously undertaken to undermine the foundations of the second world.

Often sexually explicit, sometimes scatological, always deliberately offensive and grotesquely self-aggrandizing, the deathworks discussed in the book comprise a long and lamentable catalogue of human folly. Strangely, the author seems to take them not just as subversive reflections of their creators' oversized egos, but as artistic endeavors worthy of consideration in their own right. While recognizing the deathworks for what they are--coordinated acts of destruction of transcendent truth in public discourse--Rieff devotes inordinate effort to analyzing the multiple meanings supposedly conveyed through the media of Duchamp's urinal, Manzoni's canned excrement, Serrano's container of urine, and Mapplethorpe's homosexual pornography. Of course, in a book about the social implications of modern art, a certain amount of attention to the artists and their works is unavoidable. Still, the author's extensive analysis of the psychological and artistic aspects of notable deathworks is almost painful to contemplate.

While the book's subtitle is "Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority," the psychology of the former receives a markedly more thorough treatment than any sociology of the latter. Power and authority are frequently mentioned, but discussed sketchily or not at all. The author recognizes the modern culture wars as an enduring conflict, waged by the forces of the third world against the social order of the second world. Rieff's pessimistic tone leaves no doubt that the third world is winning in this conflict. Why is this so? The book leaves the reader in search for answers. Unlike the first world, where fate is unquestioningly accepted as the guiding cultural principle, in the third world, the primacy of possibility based on fiction cannot be introduced by appeals to traditional authority. The creators of fiction, "officers of the third world culture" in Rieff's words, must instead persuade people of the commanding primordiality of their creations. Failing that, they need to tap a source of power sufficient to force their views on the general public. In modern society, the ultimate power rests with the state.

The absence of the state in Rieff's discussion is therefore a glaring and surprising omission. Indeed, the third world elites would not have been able to introduce "paganism parodied" as the guiding cultural principle of contemporary society without the infiltration of state and state-like bureaucratic structures, from courts to colleges, from museums to charitable foundations, from government departments to large corporations. The "long march through institutions," now successfully accomplished, surreptitiously harnessed the power of large organizations, and uncontrolled by political constituencies, unobserved by civil society, enabled the "officers of third world culture" not only to make their death-works the centerpieces of the modern cultural firmament but also to coerce or coax the general public into the acceptance of fictional primordialities of class, race, and gender as substitutes for the faith-based moral imperatives of the second world. Rieff's book does not ignore the coercive role of the state in the shaping of public discourse and the progressive reduction of civil society. Still, the institutions that provide the new subversive cultural elites with access to the power of the state and quasi-state bureaucracies do not receive the attention they deserve.

While the state is discussed only briefly, the university receives a considerably more detailed treatment. The book provides plenty of insights into the education of third world elites. Unlike their second and even first world predecessors, these new elites have to learn how to be illiterate. It is not a paradox, if one considers the destructive role chosen by the officers of third world culture. Of course, it is not simple inability to read and write that is needed, but the ability to destroy the literate cultures of the second and first world. This ability is acquired in "institutions of higher illiteracy," modern colleges and universities that produce "armies of principled illiterates." Perhaps military metaphors are not incidental as the author tries to convey the organized and coercive nature of the modern cultural revolution.

Rieff demonstrates, forcefully and in frightening detail, the immense destructive potential of modern art. Unexpectedly, he ends his largely pessimistic book with a suggestion that might be interpreted as a call to arms: the "deathworks" should be resisted by those intellectual and artistic elites that do not share the subversive goals of third world activists. How many intellectuals will hear this call to arms, remains to be seen.

ANDREW SAVCHENKO teaches sociology at the University of Rhode Island.