The dog-eared copies of works that have changed the inner lives of nerdy shy high-schoolers generation after generation have, over the course of the last decades, found new incarnations in the very people that stole them from the school libraries. From Camus to Nietzsche, Emerson to Kerouac, the reckless, the damned, and the radical individualists are now lived-texts in the songs and stylings of folks like Manson, Korn, and Kevin Smith. Sadly, the new voices of existentialism are a constant reminder of the failure of that once life-affirming notion: subjectivity. Lessons from the fringes of art and literature—told with marginalized teenagers' values such as despair, anxiety, and dread—that echo youth's eternal struggle for Liberalism, Idealism, Individualism have become, over the steady course of American pop culture, the fodder for dreadful song lyrics and plots of twenty-something art movies. Yet, cynics who sought out more steadfast over-arching frameworks fare no better with the contemporary sponsors of objectivity. For some of us, Dr. Laura and Pat Buchanan have us digging out our soiled copies of Nausea and Siddhartha like we were sixteen again.
The failure of the new subjectivity lies not merely in its vehicle. Certainly Korn lyrics like "Once I cave in, what can I fight?/ I can never win, my self I don't like,/I don't like, I don't like, I don't like," don't hold anything over Herman Hesse's self conscious prose. But lyrics like Korn's lack an even more important quality. Pop culture, which really includes both Dr. Lauras and Radioheads, appears to offer only two choices for an ethical position. You can have morality without experience or experience without responsibility. The authors of "existentialism," for all their polemics against religion, the masses, conformity and fascism, still held their own subjectivity up to the fine, beveled lens of ethics. Sartre, although serious about Nothingness, still demanded that what we ask for ourselves we must give to others. The absurd and all its consequences impelled even Camus toward political action. The loss of belief in any ethical framework has brought about the false notion that you can't have both dread and responsibility at the same time. And Korn, along with other contemporary artists, seems to have eschewed ethics in favor of commodification.
This might not be that terrible if the product wasn't so artless. The current existents have too much technology and too much money. Staking a claim for individuality today requires promotion spots and backers like MTV. Marilyn Manson and Tom Green probably read the same books in high school; both are nihilists, the former just taking himself much too seriously and the latter not at all. But we all know this is isn't what Nietzsche intended. It appears as if pop culture can't do any better; or maybe it can, but why be being-unto-death broke when you can be an apocalyptic herald and get all the chicks? The death of God, once a profound statement not only about the end of the church-state, but the failure of metaphysics, has been reduced to an upside down cross tattooed on the lead singer's penis.
Outside my house some typically angst ridden club kids chanced upon a newly paved section of the sidewalk. While the concrete was still wet they quoted in flourishing ninth-grade script an Emily Dickinson line: "Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy." What is for the fifteen year old an homage to designer drugs and packed-to-the-ceiling raves was for Emily probably a quiet night at home with the shades drawn, reflecting on the awfulness of God by the light of a single candle. But there is certainly precedent for the kids' reading. The master of existential textual plunderings, David Bowie, was as guilty of mis-readings and exaggerated despondencies far before any ravers got their hands on them:
I'm not a prophet or a stone age man/ Just a mortal with the potential of a superman/ I'm living on/ I'm tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien/ Can't take my eyes from the great salvation/ Of bullshit faith/ If I don't explain what you ought to know/ You can tell me all about it/ On the next Bardo/ I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought/ And I ain't got the power anymore.
A more recent incarnation of Zarathustra, Henry Rollins, finds himself in the same predicament:
No drugs, no pain killers/ Nothing to dull the pain/ I want the Abyss/ Straight no chaser/ I want to see clearly/ For once, for real/ So what if it kills me?/ So what if it tears me to pieces?
No longer alone and stoned in my parent's basement, I find Nietzsche's original not much more inspiring: "He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle's eyes—he who with eagle's talons graspeth the abyss: he hath courage." After this, what is a self-professed subjectivist to do? Go universal? Read Bloom's canon? Argue in favor of the WTO?
The problem seems to lie mainly in that subjectivists grow up to be either objectivists or nihilists, either Charlton Heston or Tom Green, neither of whom is doing art, or politics for that matter, any good at all. Bill Clinton certainly read his Dostoyevsky with relish as a teen, and later carved out his own moral system, like any good existentialist should. But subjectivity just gets you impeached these days. Tit for tat and with a proper polemic the GOP candidates talk about prayer in school and the ten commandments, they use words like freedom and liberty, the cornerstones of the existent's zeitgeist. This kind of conformity disguised as liberty is one of the most dangerous kinds of rhetoric imaginable, where demands for ethical response are really only attempts at hegemony.
But what awaits us on the other side of the objectivists line? Manson lyrics like: "And hell was so cold/ All the vases are so broken/ And the roses tear our hands all open." The commodification of angst goes well with the designer drugs meant to turn this once authentic feeling of alienation into the need for all the right clothes—a trend that seemed to peak over all the excitement that the world might end at the turn of the year 2000. Music is most susceptible to this kind of hype. As history has shown, it is one of the best ways to measure the hopes and dreams of the youth culture. Techno and tribal rhythms set to houselights and ecstasy are the new rituals designed to help bring in the apocalypse. It's like a rain dance. But instead of simply watering the dry crops, the music of the new millenium is seeking to blow everything apart. Stores like Urban Outfitters won't have you forget, just because the world is about to end doesn't mean you still can't shop. These stores market directly to the spirit of the music. Never mind building new more noble structures from the ashes of the old, they say, there is nothing left for you to do than trip and spend money.
The new existentialism seems bereft of any hope at all. Perhaps that is the elephant in the room. It might not be possible to have responsibility and ethics without hope. A passage from one of the most angsty philo-rebel texts, Sartre's Nausea is infused with it: "Maybe they thought they were lost irrevocably, drowned in existence. Yet no one could think of me as I think of them, with such gentleness... They are a little like dead people for me, a little like the heroes of a novel; they have washed themselves of the sin of existing."
Folks like Marilyn Manson—although filled with the proper despair and alienation—don't even come close to Sartre's fusion of art, dread, and yes, hope: As Manson so succinctly puts it, "But I'll just suffer in a hope to die someday/ While you are numb all of the way."
Ethics, then and now, is paved over the debris of religion. Any dark-eyed depressed high-school sophomore will tell you, religion is part of the problem. But for Nietzsche and Satre religion was merely a symptom of something larger gone wrong, of grand mythic systems turned into legal and hierarchical structures that did nothing more that homogenize the culture. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard thought so too, and he was a man of deep, almost unfathomable faith. Some years before his death, the Danish government decreed that everyone in the country was automatically Christian simply by virtue of being born there. Kierkegaard railed against this until he died, writing op-ed after op-ed decrying that lived experience would help authenticate someone's religious leanings. The new detractors of inauthentic religious life are a bit less inventive in their polemicising. With an Amazon.com sales rank of 324, the band Pantera chimes in with:
My soul for a goat. Yet I'll outlive the old./ Embrace some religion. To get close to some/ Undivine ejaculation point./ Simply to thy ghost I cling./ Simply to thy ghost I reject./ Simply to thy ghost I give spit.
The great Dane Kierkegaard gets a sales rank of 220,625 for his Attack Upon "Christendom":
"Every hour this lasts the crime is continued; every Sunday that divine worship is conducted in this manner Christianity is played as a game and God is taken for a fool; everyone who participates is participating in playing Christianity and taking God for a fool, and is thus implicated in the Christian criminal case."
The lighthearted band Godsmack, with a sales rank of 101 offers this charming tautology:
Lie down in all this piss, you drink it from me every night./ I live in a world of shit, been left here to die./ Sometimes I realize my mind is meant to go away./ Never have I seen your God, so why should I believe in faith?
Certainly one could find themselves worried about this subculture (although with bands like Pantera only no. 44 on the Billboard chart, the subculture has, it seems, come up for air) seemingly bereft of not only good taste and artistic flair, but of hope as well. Even though Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are getting sales ranks below their current derivative incarnations, they far outrank contemporary artists as the spokesmen for authentic despair. And for all the good a decent piece of prose on despair can do for the cultural landscape, a little bit of hope can actually propel music and literature, even the most despondent anti-traditionalist, into something lasting. The image of Camus' Sisyphus was once somehow inspiring, somehow filled with an awful sense of having to persevere despite the redundant mediocre structures around us. Folks like Manson and Korn are wimps. Today's form of dread, with its wallowing in black sheets and nipple piercings is homogenity by another name. They would have us believe it is better to give up hope than form a new constructive ethic from the hollowed out pit of conformist culture. If the once loved subjectivity is to ever resonate again, it must remind that liberty means the freedom to choose the nature of your ethical dilemmas, and that dread of the infinity of possibility propels us towards ethics.
