SARTRE’S FAKE CHILD

“I WAS A FAKE CHILD,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his autobiography, titled The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre. Here is the quote in its entirety:

"I adapted myself to their intentions with a virtuous eagerness that kept me from sharing their purposes,” the elder says of his younger self.

In Sartre’s telling, childhood's "I" figures itself in relationship to knowledge of hypocrisy. The child, here, is helpless; adults rule the world. Comparing this child with my favorite teenage-ing mammals, I am relieved to see this knowledge expressed. What the child knows without saying, the teen articulates as a claim towards their own autonomy. According to the teens, the world is still owned by idiotic adults—and they are absolutely correct. The teens resent this. The teens taste the edge of adulthood on the horizon and they want none of it. Their concept of power is still hitched to exploring the relationship to judgement and guilt. Like Sartre, they exercise their autonomy through the assignation of blame.

As an adult who resents what adulthood has wrought, I’m intrigued by the way in which resentment (my own, the rue I share with the teens) complicates the retrospective gaze. Can we blame our parents for wars, for being veterans, for being survivors of domestic violence, for letting the television run full-time and filling the rooms of our childhood minds whity shitty television sitcoms that socialized us into consumerism?

MONUMENTAL APOLOGIAS

RETURNING TO MY NOTES on Corey Van Landingham's essay, "Apologia," on the apology's elision of sorry-not-sorry. How the 'we' in past tense is always wrong—"And the multiplicity of future I's thus destabilizes every utterance, every word on the page."

Apologia, in Greek, refers to a speech in defense. As a genre, the apologia doesn't admit regret or guilt but "desires, instead, to make one's position clear, to offer an explanation in the face of accusation, to justify one's belief." Van Landingham considers how any public apology in the context of social media becomes an apologia, a mode of constant defense. Thus, monuments are an apologia, or "war's apology" – and I'm fascinated by how monumental apologias maintain a dialogue with the future anterior of the event they make common and perpetuate. Every statue of a man on a horse writes war into the future of human events. 

In Birmingham, three children feed pigeons beneath the boot of a war monument. They are forming an unconscious landscape which kins the monument to the innocence of childhood, restless pigeons, sun-lit sidewalks, the ice cream truck's choired bells. The monuments center meaningfulness as guarantee of timelessness: the single everlasting act of significance is human sacrifice. And publicity forever.

THE TAYLOR SWIFT CASE STUDY

DURING THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN, the two teens who were pre-teens and middle-schoolers at the time loved Taylor Swift.

(Although soft pop annoys me, I supported their emerging love for a particular music that felt inhabitable to them. Even now, we discuss and debate our preferences and tastes often but I don’t condemn their newfound affections at the risk of foreclosing those conversations where I learn more about the teens’ world. Imposing my own monuments, my studied likes and incorrigible appetite for the difficult, on humans who are already buckling beneath the absence of agency that characterizes 21st century late capitalism, seems like an ego-driven use of force. If adults need teens to reify their preferences, the nuclear family is even sicker than I thought.)

A few years ago, the teens removed every trace of Taylor Swift from their rooms, conversations, playlists, and clothing. The Swift imaginary was dead to them. When I queried the end of Swiftmania, one of the teens declared, simply: “She’s a fake.” Thus do I find myself thinking about the politics of betrayal.

We use the word 'betrayal' to refer to a violation of trust. As such, it is a statement about a relationship, a social form articulated on the basis of trust. Whether someone has been betrayed depends on the conditions of that relationship, the soil of that trust, and how loyalty is defined by both the betrayer and the betrayed. One could say, for example, that the President of the United States betrayed the people he was elected to represent if that President committed American citizens to a war after running on a platform that promised not to do so. In this case, he betrayed his constituency, or those who brought him to power. Alternately, one could say the President betrayed his country if he engaged in activity that is prohibited by the Constitution or federal law. The President may betray his wife if they have agreed to a monogamous relationship and he solicits an intern, whom he is also betraying in his function as a public servant. Again, betrayal depends on the particular relationship as well as the conditions that comprise 'trust' in that relationship. 

For betrayal to occur, a relationship must risk having something at stake: it must have something valuable that can be lost. If I am thinking about stakes and betrayal, it is because I am fascinated by the role parasocial relationships play in the political imaginary. Our super-screened world enables us to identify with the people we want to be seen with, and the imaginary unfolds from that space of visibility, of having seen and being seen as or with. Feeling betrayed by the fact that Taylor Swift couldn't care less about the Palestinian children being murdered by US bombs in Gaza is a sentiment based on a willing delusion about the nature of the relationship between fans and their idol. 

Parasocial relationships, more generally, indulge fantasy and delusion to the point of world-making. Because these relationships originate in the fan's imagination rather than the trust of an intersubjective relationship, it strikes me as a sort of masturbatory betrayal that mistakes its object for a subject. It makes sense to be disappointed in the discovery that Swift doesn't use her social power to defend the lives of the most vulnerable.

Enough with the Swiftie lamentations of betrayal! As a writer, the characters I invent cannot properly be said to betray me—even if they disappoint me. 

One might also wonder what sort of fantasy facilitates the belief that Swift would speak for the lives of Arab children. Activism hardly rises to anything like a priority in her career. Her fans may be global but her platform remains pinned to the emotional landscape of American girliness. Like other limousine liberals, Swift waves a flag of affirmation alongside her peers—but only when it suits her, and under very particular conditions that generate publicity for her public persona. 

Taylor Swift is the sort of poet that is more interested in creating ambiance than revealing a difficult truth. Her poetry is indistinguishable from a GAP ad for cute boyfriend pajamas. But the tastes and preferences expressed in these final two sentences are not dicta for utopia. I don’t want my preferences to become rules or laws. My interest is economic: the law I want guts the entire possibility of the American dream that wants to be billionaire. Taxing Taylor down to a few million would be good for almost everyone.