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SubStance 32.1 (2003) 33-35



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What Fascinates Me

Christie McDonald


What many saw in the United States as a radical change in thinking since 9/11 seems rather to me to be an intensification of issues brewing for some time within intellectual debates. We are living through a time of such rapid transformation (not only in the US) that it has often been difficult to understand what is happening. Vaclav Havel put it this way in the first half of the l990s: "It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble." 1

For some time, I have focused on the anxiety surrounding change in American and European thought, discerning from unusual forums and forms ways of expressing change and the ability to analyze it—forms linked to the uncertainty that a lack of evident precedent for thinking creates.

Freud suggested that realistic anxiety deals with a known danger whereas neurotic anxiety copes with what is yet to be discovered ("neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger" 2 ); in this sense, he argued in Civilization and Its Discontents, entire cultures could be said to be neurotic. It is the anxiety of the unknown, as an ethical question about the transformation of personal, cultural and political mores based on choice, that lurks in the reaction to events and problems often unrecognized by official culture. 3

By official culture I mean not only academic debates, although they are included, but also the kind of literary criticism and theory that has not yet fully measured the kinds of implicit analysis within stories that are told and retold in books and the media. Diderot wrote in the mid eighteenth century that it was difficult to discern in discussions of science, culture, and philosophy what was serious and what was trivial in such a time of change. [End Page 33] The same, I believe, could be said today about the relationship of past to present, in between popular and "high" culture, and the media.

We are in any case living in a time when even the meaning of success and failure is uncertain. What seems important about the notion of failure is that it signals, in the broad sense, limits and transformation. On September 11th, something changed abruptly in the lives of Americans, and others; something seemingly without precedent happened, and people begin to revise their thinking about globalism, beyond the stated policies of government.

"A Failure of intelligence" in the year since 9/11 indicated breakdown of knowledge about the heinous acts that beset us in New York and Washington. But Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote: "The World Trade Center is not the place where our intelligence agencies failed. It is the place where our imaginations failed" (New York Times, September 25, 2001). He encouraged people to go on with their lives, and in a later piece, to imagine something constructive: redefining terms like war to "ensure that something lasting comes out of 9/11" (New York Times, May 19, 2002). The binarisms of good and evil cannot account for the complexities of culture, politics, or personal agency, for, as Amartya Sen has argued, refuting the idea of a clash of civilizations, individuals can choose among the identities open to them, however much restrained and context-bound they may be. 4

After World War II, Samuel Beckett wrote of what it is like to be caught in a timeless rip-tide of the mind: "You must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on ....Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" (The Unnamable). The passage captures the struggle of forcing oneself to go on in the face of the unknown and the possibility of failure—the struggle that constitutes life. And while Beckett's writing is about the lessening down of life in language, it also becomes an improbable celebration of that which...

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