Customer Reviews

My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Sacred Order / Social Order, Vol. 1) (v. 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

America's lowest-profile sociological genius reestablishes himself as the critical critic today against the unraveling of social order. That order, Rieff shows, is coming apart because it is being picked apart hungrily by academic and art elites -- who have turned against not simply "our" culture but against culture itself.

My Life among the Deathworks is striking in its accessibility. This is not "easy" reading -- then again, no one visiting this page is on the hunt for that -- but it is Rieff with pictures. His incursions, made as they are against mounted attacks on culture (the titular "Deathworks"), feature the images of the Deathworks themselves. Rieff is more humane and introspective than ever, in the service of an ontology that takes the lead in Rieff's taking of sides. Gone are the days of Rieff's academic reticence to dirty his hands with the fleeting passions of culture. Those fleeting passions are now the battlefield upon which the fleetingness of culture itself is being determined.

Perhaps the central Deathwork in Rieff's analysis is Marcel Duchamp's "Being Given," which depicts a decayed female body lifting a lighted lamp. Rather than spoiling the depth and power of the analysis, suffice it to say that Rieff declares against the zombification of society: a culture of death as violent as it is erotic. My Life among the Deathworks is the first salvo of a three-volume series. The next takes aim at the knights of the living dead themselves -- those Rieff calls "the officer class" of the anti-culture.

As for the present volume, it is the most important book written by the most important sociologist writing -- because it reaches to the heart of the central cultural issue of our time. Rieff has written for any reader with patience and literacy -- and a deep disquiet over the rot that can often be sensed creeping over the world. Rieff is not anti-art or anti-artist. His is not a reactionary philosophy. He has no use for the old church civilization, which he pronounces exhausted. But by the same token, Rieff declares himself an honorary Christian, and hews as close as one reasonably can today to the 10 Commandments. His work is, in essence, a discursus on Commandment 2.

What Rieff is for is God -- permanent authority that is fixed but not fossilized -- and the social order he terms in his system of lowercase acronyms "via" (vertical in authority). What his enemies are for is an obliteration of that vertical, and its replacement with an amoebic horizontal of social flesh -- rather than God, one could say, "god" (games on demand).

Anyone inclined toward the preservation of wisdom and order across generations and repulsed by the new pop cult of trans-hood ought scroll back up and order this book at once. Anyone uncertain about what is happening to the progress of western civilization should do the same. Rieff's latest is probably the best entry-point into his whole literature, and beyond that is a vital tool for feeling intellects everywhere.

This is one of the best books I've read in over 40 years of being a Common Reader. My enthusiasm for it doubtless colors my review, but even with my cheerleading, there still must be a lot of there, there.

If you have not read widely and thought a lot about that reading, you probably will not enjoy or appreciate this book. And, chances are, that if you are a widely read person, you still probably wouldn't like this book. Philip Rieff draws upon a lifetime of reading and reflection from sources as diverse as the Bible, Freud, Nietzsche, Joyce, postmodernists, and images from art (Michaelangelo to Duchamp) and film (Kind Hearts and Coronets to Zelig) and develops three cultures (fate, faith, and fiction) as means of understanding life and text. As someone who lived through the postmodern temper tantrum at the university, I am amazed at Rieff's accomplishment. His work takes the wild, destructive postmodern methods and puts them in a small bottle for anyone's consideration.

I further suspect that you would like this book the stronger your faith in God. And that is a very weird outcome for a literary approach. Thomas Aquinas would probably like this book. So would Plato. Derrida, Foucault, and the postmoderns would not. Let me put this another way. Rieff's approach allows a well educated reader to also be faithful to God. Postmoderns think that this is impossible.

At the end: God was never dead.

Philip Rieff is amazing and this is a great book.

Although he would never have put it in these terms, I believe Philip Rieff's lifework came to be to show the ways in which works of art and literature can be read to reveal what Catholics call 'heart'. Every work of art is an expression of the acceptance or the rejection of God or, as Rieff would say, has a place in the 'vertical of authority', representing an affirmation of the community of faith's 'commanding truths' or 'interdicts', a transgression against those commanding truths, or a relaxing (remission) of them. Erudite, passionate, and moral, I know of no better place to start than the first volume of Rieff's trilogy for understanding the moral and spiritual dimensions of art and literature.

This is a strange difficult book.I can't say Rieff is a great literary stylist.He is absolutely incomprehensible at times.Still, DEATHWORKS is a powerful, brilliant and surprisingly moving book.If you have a sense that the world is no longer at ease and it isn't just you, Rieff is apt to speak directly to you .He doesn't give you a cure but he does come up with a fairly persuasive diagnosis.The world we live in has been consumed by a kind of cultural anti-matter, who's function is to delegitimize everything that has gone on before it.He believes the transvaluation has taken place and that is the world we live in now, a third world that is post monotheistic.Freedom is formlessness and power is central.The sacred is dead as a doornail.Any reversion to paganism (the first world) is pure contrivance.We are essentially living in the world of the hollow men.
I was struck by how personally Rieff takes what has happened and by his willingness to say , I don't like it. I f that doesn't sound like much , consider the fact that most commentary you read on almost every topic is in some sense a paen to nothingness. Think of how many articles youv'e read explaining to you that the purpose of art , even thought itself is to be transgressive and subversive of the existing society.Which always means , not the existing society but what Rieff calls the second world.I have grown extremely weary of reading that kind of recycled banality posing as thought.What is funny , maybe , scarey is you'll read this kind of warmed over dreck in reviews of TV shows.My point being that this has long since stopped being the province of elite culture.Everyone can now be Foucault. In that context Rieffs rather brilliant yelps of protest are salutory.Also salutory is Rieffs embrace of his own roots as a Jew.In the transition to modernity, Rieff has witnessed in his own life what has gone.What has replaced it? A handful of dust.

I started reading this book but found that I could not easily tolerate
Rieff's opaque and turgid prose. He undoubtedly has interesting thoughts and valuable insights into past and present societies, but he should bear in mind the adage that good prose should be a windowpane (I think this was George Orwell's metaphor). His manner of writing contrasts most unfavourably with the clarity of (for example) Roger Scruton, another contemporary observer of society and culture. On almost every page of Rieff's book you will find examples of what I mean: thus on page 149, discussing Freud's works, he says:

"Freud's ingenious repressions of revelation serve continuously, and in
an intensely stipulative manner, against admitting sacred order back into a modern consciousness pregnant from the father of these repressions. The revelational father unacknowledged, except as "primal repression", modern sensibility has been achieved at the cost of a critical insensibility."
(The expression "primal repression" is actually in italics, but I can't print italics in this review).

Rieff would surely agree with me that the road to profundity should not pass through obscurity. Obscurity is, after all, a good hiding place for vacuity.

This work develops themes Rieff introduced in his justifiably classic book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. According to the book's implicit dramatic structure, there is an on-going war between a third, therapeutic, cultural world and the second cultural world it seeks to replace. The third cultural world is unique in human history because it tries to maintain itself without connection to a sacred and commanding order. Rieff presents example after example of cultural, artistic, and historical "deathworks" that undermine the commanding authority and truths exhibited by second cultural worlds. The contrasts that Rieff establishes between third and second cultural worlds are familiar to similar contrasts that others have drawn between modernity and post-modernity: knowledge, authority and truth are superseded by functionality, choice and supreme fictions

Five comments:

1. Rieff's book does not present an argument in the conventional sense. It does not progress from premise to evidence to conclusion but goes from one example or image to another in a way that is more reminiscent of a novel than a thesis. The book ends rather than concludes. The concrete nature of the illustrative examples in this book makes an abstract summary both difficult and superfluous.

2. Ironically, the structure of the book and its style - filled as it is with indirection, allusions and word play - reflect the third cultural world more than the second cultural world Rieff defends. It's doubtful whether adopting the style of one's opponent is ever a successful strategy.

3. Rieff says that he is going to describe a 3-part typology of social history, prosaically identified as first, second, and third cultural worlds. While the description and contrast between the second and third cultural worlds is thorough to the point of being repetitive, he largely neglects to develop the characteristics and functions of the first cultural world of myth. To me this is a major and telling omission.

4. Rieff's critique of third world culture lacks balance without explaining the positive aspects of third world culture or the short comings of second world culture. If the third world culture is so bad, why did it emerge?

5. Finally, Rieff does not offer a resolution to the war between second and third world cultures. As a result, it is unclear whether Rieff thinks that the war is endless, necessary, inevitable, or a prelude to a fourth cultural world. Is he saying that we should return to the second cultural world he defends? I don't think so, nor do I think that such a return would be either possible or advisable. However entertaining the book may be, it fails in not suggesting an answer to the questions: what next or so what?

For an examination of cultural wars from a more philosophical perspective, see The Search for Meaning: A Short History.

There is nothing new here: The world is going to hell, the sky is falling because of the Godless Liberal Elites, etc. Right-wing OpEd cliches dressed-up in fancy mid-20th century existentialist lingo.

But dayam, if he isn't a hypnotic master of that lingo, spinning webs of webs of webs of secret code. I just wish there were any point to cracking it, when i already know what the take-home message is (see above.) Rieff spends a huge amount of sophisticated learning in the service of an extremely crude point. (He calls this technique the "feeling intellect".) Maybe he was being too sophisticated/decadent for his own good. (He was married to Susan Sontag once - those Baal-worshipping wives can indeed corrupt the King!!)
I would say listen to Laura Ingraham instead, but the heady admixture mixture of preening Jewish narcissism puts it more in the Commentary magazine camp. My point: lower brow sources cut to the chase faster. Otherwise, read Durkheim or take an Art History course and make up your own mind.

(Added a star for including pictures of the works discussed, though I'm not sure I needed to see Mapplethorpe's rectum. I must not have the stomach for Decline, but my godless decadent sophisticate curiosity always made me wonder what that famous photograph really looked like - and Rieff was more than happy to indulge my idle devil. Ah... he truly was corrupted himself! )