Marxisant

The French have a great adjec­tive: marx­isant. If you look it up in Larousse you are told that it means “that which tends toward Marx­ism,” but so bald a def­i­n­i­tion doesn’t cap­ture the con­no­ta­tive fla­vor of the word. To be marx­isant is to be vaguely but osten­ta­tiously left­ist, as a form of class dis­play. It means to affect a faux-radical style, and to spout a half-baked Gram­s­cian jar­gon that iden­ti­fies you as polit­i­cally cool and adver­sar­ial. It’s a way to be hip and trendy while hang­ing out at the Sorbonne.

In France if you are marx­isant you wear a black turtle­neck, you shave only every few days, you dis­cuss Sartre at great length in bistros, and you kiss the feet of every decrepit soixante-huitard whom you encounter. As for Marx and Lenin, well—you haven’t actu­ally read them, but you know they are pro­foundly impor­tant, and you’ll quote them on occa­sion. Being marx­isant isn’t an intel­lec­tual posi­tion. It’s a social pos­ture, designed to indi­cate that you are a mem­ber of an upscale elite.

We have plenty of marx­isant types in Amer­ica, suit­ably Yankee-Doodleized. Go to any fac­ulty meet­ing, where they swarm like locusts, buzzing end­lessly about race, class, and gen­der. Or hang out in a wine bar where grad­u­ate stu­dents gather. Or visit Ann Arbor, or Prince­ton, or Cam­bridge Mass­a­chu­setts. There they have formed lit­tle colonies of the like-minded who teach in Eng­lish, Women’s Stud­ies, or Polit­i­cal Sci­ence. Or else they might work in the social ser­vices, or with an envi­ron­men­tal group, or for Legal Aid, or in a veg­e­tar­ian food-cooperative. These are the peo­ple who get right­eously indig­nant over global warm­ing, George Bush, racism, and what­ever else is on National Pub­lic Radio’s cur­rent hate list. They have emo­tional seizures when they watch Thelma and Louise, or Broke­back Moun­tain.

But just as in France, it’s all pri­mar­ily a pose. Marx­ism for such peo­ple isn’t a polit­i­cal com­mit­ment but a lifestyle choice, with no more sig­nif­i­cance than a bumper sticker on a Volvo. Indeed, marx­isant types are in the same cat­e­gory as those bat­tle­field “re-enactors,” who dress up in Civil War uni­forms and shoot off vol­leys of blanks from replica mus­kets on week­ends, pre­tend­ing that they are at Get­tys­burg or Anti­etam. Every­thing in Amer­ica today approaches the con­di­tion of a Dis­ney theme park, includ­ing our polit­i­cal loy­al­ties. The fak­ery and the phoni­ness are palpable.

What’s nice about poetry is that it is tra­di­tion­ally the one area of human life where cre­at­ing your own spe­cial theme park is con­sid­ered accept­able and non-frivolous. As I have writ­ten else­where, poetry is “a licensed zone of unre­al­ity.” You can con­jure up what­ever worlds you please out of your imag­i­na­tion or your desires. And you can do it on paper, with­out invest­ing in mus­kets and cav­alry sabers, or a Che Gue­vara T-shirt.

Well then, with all this free­dom why is poetry in such sad shape? Why is so much of it as unread­able as an alumni newslet­ter, or a New York Times edi­to­r­ial? In many cases the prob­lem has its roots in a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion. Free­dom with­out imag­i­na­tion is the free­dom to veg­e­tate intellectually.

This is not, I has­ten to add, a prob­lem just for poets and other lit­ter­a­teurs, but for the entire mod­ern world in which we now find our­selves stranded. The very struc­ture of con­tem­po­rary life in what we sim­per­ingly call “the devel­oped world” is hos­tile to imag­i­na­tion, except when it takes the form of the out­ra­geously bizarre, the mind­lessly vio­lent, or the explic­itly sex­ual. We have reduced imag­i­na­tion to the trashy com­mon denom­i­na­tor of Juras­sic Park, Pulp Fic­tion, and Sex and the City.

One rea­son for this sit­u­a­tion is that the mega-business types who con­trol the mod­ern world don’t want imag­i­na­tion, except in their accoun­tants and ad-men. Real imag­i­na­tion is unpre­dictable, and not as easy to turn to profit, the way one can with the merely spec­tac­u­lar or the bla­tantly out­ra­geous. A pop­u­la­tion with liv­ing imag­i­na­tions isn’t depend­ably pre­dictable in its reac­tions. It can actu­ally think for itself, which is pro­foundly ter­ri­fy­ing to bureau­crats, politi­cians, and the busi­ness com­mu­nity. For all their stu­pid blather about entre­pre­neur­ial ini­tia­tive and inno­va­tion, busi­ness­men are the least imag­i­na­tive peo­ple on earth. They want every­thing to be as pre­dictable as the chim­ing of a clock, or the col­lec­tion of accounts payable. In order to guar­an­tee it they have encour­aged a smoth­er­ing con­formism and stan­dard­iza­tion and reg­u­la­tory miasma over what­ever they can con­trol. And their toad­ies in the uni­ver­si­ties have fol­lowed suit, duti­fully mak­ing sure that all under­grad­u­ates get the proper mes­sage. Don’t think… just fol­low pol­icy guide­lines and get paid.

This is why the marx­isant types in our uni­ver­si­ties are such utter frauds. They talk about their “com­mit­ment to the strug­gle” and their “sol­i­dar­ity with the oppressed,” while in fact they are com­plicit with an edu­ca­tional sys­tem that func­tions to pro­duce obe­di­ent man­age­r­ial staff and docile con­sumers. They raise clenched fists and shout “La lucha con­tinua!” while cor­po­rate donors build their libraries and endow their pro­fes­so­r­ial chairs. Such “Marx­ism” is just frip­pery and cha­rade, like the gar­ish cos­tumes at a Mardi Gras cel­e­bra­tion. It’s some­thing to don for cock­tail par­ties and aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ences, and which doesn’t inter­fere with one’s stock portfolio.

So we have to dis­tin­guish between two very dif­fer­ent types of fal­sity, and their moti­va­tions. There is the fak­ery of the marx­isant types, which is directed solely to the base ends of status-display, in-group sol­i­dar­ity, and social climb­ing. And there’s the imag­i­na­tive cre­ativ­ity that expresses itself in fic­tive mime­sis. The mod­ern world has no trou­ble what­so­ever with the first kind of falsity—in fact, it encour­ages it via the retail­ing of all sorts of “lifestyle choices” and “options.” But the mod­ern world is indif­fer­ent and in many instances hos­tile to the sec­ond kind of fal­sity, which is rooted in the free play of imag­i­na­tion in an individual.

Let’s give an illus­tra­tive exam­ple. If you want to kill mil­lions of vir­tual peo­ple in a grotesquely vio­lent video game, the mod­ern world will afford you ample oppor­tu­nity to do so, pro­vid­ing you with san­guinary sce­nar­ios in all vari­eties, shapes, and sizes. But if you write a seri­ous poem or novel about mass mur­der, all sorts of buzzing dis­ap­proval will be heard, and your motives and san­ity will be ques­tioned. A stu­dent who dared to write on such a theme in his high school Eng­lish class would be imme­di­ately sent to a guid­ance coun­selor or the school psy­chol­o­gist. Slaugh­ter myr­i­ads of peo­ple on a com­puter screen? Sure, of course. Write about the iden­ti­cal sub­ject in a poem or story? Omigod the kid’s psy­cho­pathic!

The same thing with sex. Want wild, crazy, out­ra­geous sex of the most degrad­ing kind? Turn on your com­puter and surf the great porn wave. See things done that would have made Krafft-Ebing faint in dis­be­lief. But dare to write an explic­itly sex­ual poem, seri­ously dis­cussing a sex­ual activ­ity or issue, and watch the prissy rejec­tion slips from tigh­tassed poetry edi­tors pile up on your desk.

What’s going on here? Well, think about it a lit­tle. Vio­lent video games and com­puter porn sites are actu­ally safe—they are con­trolled by profit-and-loss-conscious peo­ple who won’t do a thing that isn’t attuned to their niche mar­ket. As I said above, busi­ness­men like what’s pre­dictable. But a good poem or a novel or a story isn’t safely pre­dictable. It can upset your expec­ta­tions and assump­tions. It can ques­tion your prej­u­dices. It can remind you of for­got­ten his­to­ries. It can raise polit­i­cal issues. It can actu­ally start you think­ing about philo­soph­i­cal or reli­gious mat­ters. It can make you begin to won­der if the world that cor­po­rate busi­ness types have cre­ated for us is really the only pos­si­ble one. And once some­thing like that hap­pens on a large scale, busi­ness­men start to sweat. If things get out of hand, they’ll phone their lob­by­ists and their bought congressmen.

So rather than being a fac­ti­tious rev­o­lu­tion­ary, like the marx­isant types in our uni­ver­si­ties with tenure-track posi­tions and high five-figure salaries, why not read—or bet­ter still, write—a truly sub­ver­sive poem? Why not imag­ine some­thing that will really upset and shock con­ven­tional read­ers, and send them scream­ing to their sup­port groups?

Well, maybe you’re not up to it. Per­haps you’re still wor­ried about what the neigh­bors will think, or whether your appli­ca­tion to the coun­try club will be com­pro­mised. In that case stick with your lit­tle Kaf­feeklatsch of work­shop bud­dies, and write heart­felt poems about your rela­tion­ships. After all, it’s just pos­si­ble that toad­y­ing and net­work­ing will make up for your timid­ity. What does Mirabell say in the Con­greve play? ‘Tis the way of the world.