Q + A - Chuck Klosterman
The Guardian, June 7 2016
Your new book But What If We’re Wrong? is a series of thought experiments that to try to “think about the present as if we were the past”. The concept really speaks to me, as a fan of science fiction, but also someone fascinated by discredited knowledge: things like the late 18th Century belief that infantile masturbation was a terrible, health-damaging problem that required drastic preventive measures, or the 19th Century pseudo-science of phrenology, using skull measurements to assess the character of people, their criminal tendencies... What led you to this subject - the precariousness of human knowledge, the disquieting thought that most of what we feel certain about today will ultimately be disproved and that the future will scorn and deride all our ideas and beliefs?
It happened sort of gradually and yet suddenly. Over my last few books I’ve been thinking
about the history of thought, but it really came from watching Fox TV’s reboot
of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. I
particularly enjoyed the animated clips about these hinge points in scientific
history, when everybody thought a certain way but then one individual puts
forward this new idea and everything shifted after that. Coincidentally I was reading about how Moby Dick got mixed reviews at the time,
Melville ended up leaving the writing profession, and it wasn’t until after
World War One that the culture shifted, the book was rediscovered, and it
became the Great American Novel. But What If We’re Wrong? really took off from those two things.
Those are two
different kinds of “knowledge”, science and the arts. With science, there are
new discoveries and theories emerge around them, but it’s a much harder kind of knowledge. With changing
ideas about what is valuable in literature or music, about who belongs in the
canon, that’s soft, in the sense that
it’s driven by taste, by fashion, by social shifts. It’s much more up for
debate and revision. Given enough time, nearly everything that’s highly
regarded will drop down in eminence, while once minor things from the past may
get elevated. In one chapter in the book you discuss how it’s impossible to
know who will come to be regarded as the defining writer of our time. And you speculate about “who will be the
future’s Kafka?” – a writer virtually unknown in his own epoch but who later becomes
retrospectively epochal
My thought process with that started with the idea that “whatever
seems like the most obvious answer will probably be wrong”. I build that into
my thinking. The obvious example that many people would give for a contemporary author that will be remembered
as defining our era is a figure like Jonathan Franzen. So I remove that from the equation. So then it
came down to one of two possibilities. Someone who is known and successful but
not that respected - a writer who is
considered a commercial hack. The other
possibility is that it will be somebody who is completely unknown today - like
Kafka. Someone who will be discovered
later on and that discovery process itself will validate that writer. So the
challenge I set myself in that chapter was trying to narrow down the
possibilities of who that currently unknown writer might be - what aspects of
their career, their identity, their writing. An impossible task. But I try,
because that’s what I like to do!
There is an industry
– in publishing, in music reissuing, in the arts generally – of rediscovery,
repackaging, cultural archeology and curation.
There are so many examples of once hopelessly obscure figures who are
now deemed far more central and essential than they once were. Other figures
who were deemed central and essential, by critics and the intelligent reading
(or listening) public drop away – George Bernard Shaw, Graham Parker. And then there are whole areas of the culture
that were once considered beneath consideration, but now get taken seriously.
Your example of that in the book is wrestling.
The pro wrestling thing to me is a weird example of how culture
works. All these wrestlers from the Eighties are dying now, like Dusty Rhodes, and
they are being lionized by people who have this memory from watching them when
they were in high school or junior high. When they write about them now they
tend to inject them with some kind of secondary meaning – almost a
transgressive meaning – and they overlook the fact that at the time, nobody
took wrestling seriously – including themselves. But somehow they create the feeling that there
was always a sense of it being taken seriously. And more generally this seems
to be the way that obscure art becomes venerated – by generating a political
meaning for these long ago things that matches what is happening in the
political present tense. So if you’re
trying - like I am in this book - to find
out what will matter in the future, you have to project a visualization of what
the future will be like, what people will care about.
Although you’re
hyper-conscious about the fragility of cultural convictions, you do still muster
enough certainty to make a few predictions in the book. One is that television,
as an entertainment format, will shortly not exist. Explain the thought process behind that
prophecy.
I started with thinking about the relationship between radio
and television. It feels like there should be a continuum there, that TV simply
adds a visual component. But in fact TV was a huge break – which is why we
don’t aesthetically connect what television drama does and what a radio play
does. I think that’ll happen again – something will come along technologically
that adds another component to the entertainment format that makes it something
completely separate. It could be some kind
of virtual immersion, where you’ll be inside whatever show you’re watching, or
it’ll relate to the mobility of it, which is already happening to some extent
with watching TV on your phone, but it might be even more completely fluid,
such that you can slide in and out of the program you’re experiencing. I don’t
know what it will be exactly but I think when it comes it will be a cut-off
that freezes television as we currently understand it as a period that goes
from its inception in the middle of 20th Century to whenever the new
thing takes over.
So it’s not that
television is going to go extinct exactly – more that it will evolve into
something so drastically different it’ll effectively be something else?
Television is already the most dynamic technological
experience when it comes to entertainment. The experience of watching television
now is drastically different from what it was 20 years ago. Whereas with music
or reading, certain elements and aspects change but the experience of hearing a
song is - from a physiological standpoint - the same as it was 200 years ago. Reading is
a static thing fundamentally. But TV is
taken so seriously now, it has really changed the experience completely. Joyce Carol Oates wrote an essay for TV Guide about Hill Street Blues in about 1980 and it starts with her saying how
embarrassed and ashamed she is to admit that she and her smart friends find themselves
often talking about this TV show. But now it’s like, Emily Nussbaum just won a
Pulitzer Prize for her New Yorker TV
criticism. When something becames that meaningful, it changes the experience of
watching it. TV used to be relaxing. Now
you have to concentrate.
Yes, watching the box
used to be almost like an opiate or a tranquilizer – idle skimming through the
channels. You’d have the desire, or need, to watch television in the abstract,
and then look for the least tedious specific thing that was on. Now you make
appointments. You manage your viewing and stockpile it. You binge an entire
series. And you have to pay close attention, for fear of missing a key bit of
dialogue or a narrative twist.
With TV in the past, there was no expectation you were going
to have to concentrate. And if you
missed an episode of a TV show, you just missed it – no big deal. Nowadays just about the only thing people
watch to unwind still is sports.
Another section of
the book that struck a chord with me was when you write about dreams – the way
they’ve been demoted in the culture. For
most of human history, dreams were considered highly significant – they had
oracular meaning, they warranted being interpreted. In the early twentieth century you had Freud
and Jung analyzing the symbolic language
of dreams, and an artistic movement, surrealism, that drew inspiration from
dreams. But even as recently as the 1970s, books about the meaning of dreams
were popular. As a teenager, I kept a detailed dream diary. Maybe it’s just our family, but it doesn’t
seem like my kids ever talk about their dreams. It’s just not something people
pay much attention to anymore. Why is that?
Freud and Jung were the apex of looking at dreams seriously.
But more recently you have scientists who map the brain, like these two guys at
Harvard who came to the conclusion that dreams are just left-over thoughts from
the day. There isn’t a narrative there, it’s an avalanche of emotions that we
reconstruct as a story – because we can only understand things through
story-telling. The conclusion of all this neurological research was that the
content of dreams is worthless. It’s just an oddity of the mind and how it
works when we are sleeping. Those ideas have filtered out to the secular,
intelligent public and the general view now is that dreams are a waste of time
to think about. The idea that they’re significant is a really fringe, borderline
New Age thought at this point.
In the book, though, I wonder if this is something that we
could be wrong about. It’s a third of our life almost where we’re having these
metaphysical experiences. Sometimes
they’re lucid and we know we’re in a false reality. Sometimes we can’t tell
we’re in a different reality. Part of
the problem is that we are so limited in how we can study them, there’s no way
to see or hear or feel someone else’s dream.
So maybe we are just going to keep on going down this path of thinking
it’s just electrical impulses in the brain, just biomechanic . But I wonder if
that’s a huge misstep. I understand the
rational argument against dreams, but something feels important to me about
them.
One thing I wondered
was if the downgrading of dreams as a cultural interest had some relation to
digital technology: video games, the internet, computers generally. Has the virtual displaced the oneiric? It’s
hard to imagine an art movement like surrealism emerging that was invested in
dreams and the unconscious as a source of inspiration. Contemporary artists are
more stimulated by digital technology and internet culture. Do we no longer pay
attention to dreams because we are so involved with digitally-enabled zones of
make-believe and magic? And does that
also affect a different kind of dreaming that we do in our waking hours –
daydreaming? Overall, it feels like these interior and reflective mental activities
have declined in the scheme of things - and that this must have something to do
with the rise of the internet and social media.
The amount of time we’re looking at an unreal image on
electronic screens is so much greater now. Just waiting in line for the bank, nowadays I
would always look at my phone. My mind
is attached most of the time to something specific. But once, waiting in line,
I would have daydreamed - my mind was elsewhere. Perhaps those five or ten minutes of daydreaming
had value.
One thing interesting
about your writing style, which is unusual in arts and culture writing –
perhaps more common in popular science writing – is the way you reason out an
argument. You set out a proposition and then logically follow it through,
methodically raising the counter-arguments, the evidence that contradicts it. Mostly
in cultural criticism, the writer does that in private and then presents the
results to the reader – often bombastically. But you lay out that process in
real-time, almost, and bring the reader along with you.
What I I hope is that when someone reads what I’m writing, that
they feel like they’re writing the piece with their own mind. The sequencing of
the thoughts, the obstacles you encounter intellectually along the way – I want
it to be like a real-time transfer of my mind. I want it to look like it’s
easy, so that the person reading it almost feels like they could have written
that. Which is kind of a trick, because that’s not what is going on! The
hardest thing about doing this kind of writing is creating the illusion that
anyone can do this.
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