Neoliberal Metalinguistic Dysfunction

Popular discourse has praised and cathected onto Cuomo for what it has seen as his blend of technocratic competence and empathy, and one of the most frequently cited examples has been his briefing on 21 March 2020, during which he offered the following musing on the self-reflective possibilities afforded by the pandemic:

Through his use of balanced opposing clauses, Cuomo here approximates a kind of Dickensian sentimentalism—The New York Times, evoking his father Mario, calls it “poetic” (McKinley and Goldmacher)—coterminal with his well-known brusqueness. Yet what many seemed to latch onto was not the universalist gesture itself but the tone of openness made poetically possible by its self-indulgent length. (And this open lengthiness is made all the more obvious by the inadvertently humorous and, perhaps, even more poetic—almost imagist—brevity of Cuomo's signature accompanying PowerPoint slides.) Cuomo's mode of discursivity and intellection is thinking out loud in a manner that appears to betoken a species of humility rare among politicians and to offer the viewing public an opportunity to feel in real time that this scion of a New York political dynasty relates to their own bewilderment and anxiety, that he, too, does not have all the answers in the face of an unprecedented global pandemic.

Yet what is important about Cuomo's briefing style is what is absent: a metalanguage—or, more specifically, the metacommunicative and metadiscursive functions of language. Whether discussing which food items qualify as “substantive” enough to be served with alcohol outdoors (“To be a bar, you had to have food available—soups, sandwiches, etc. More than just hors d'oeuvres, chicken wings. You had to have some substantive food—the lowest level of substantive food were sandwiches” [“Governor Cuomo Announces President Trump”]) or explaining how tropes of epidemiological modeling crash up against the realities of the health-care system (“That is what they are talking about. Flatten the curve. Flatten the curve. Why do you want to flatten the curve? Because the curve is not a curve. The curve is a wave and the wave could break on the hospital system. That is what they are talking about the curve” [“Governor Cuomo Calls on President Trump”]), Cuomo's openness is more readily understood as a grasping after a metalanguage by which to clarify the uncertain code shared by addresser and addressee whose nature nevertheless eludes him. Cuomo's statements implicitly pose the following questions:

• Metalinguistically: What does “substantive” mean? What is an hors d'oeuvre?Footnote ²

• Metadiscursively: What is the lived experience of a graphically abstracted epi curve for those outside the discourse of epidemiology?

• Metacommunicatively: What, as governor, is my relationship to you? To govern by command or by pedagogy? By antagonism or by empathy?

Cuomo's metacommunicative dysfunction along these lines is all the starker in the light of other comments he made on 21 March. In order to anchor his performance of empathy, he resorts to unfortunate hyperbole: apart from 9/11, “we haven't gone through any great social crisis here in New York. … As a society, as a country, we have been blessed in that we have not gone through something as disruptive as this” (“Governor Cuomo Announces Four Sites”). Though still a few months out from the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in New York City and across the country following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the emergence of a vital global abolitionist movement, Cuomo's unwillingness to countenance any “great social crisis” beyond an attack on New York City as the center of global finance is a striking example of what Michelle Chihara has termed “neoliberal gaslighting”—“where talk about race, gender, and class contributes to making realities about race, gender, and class less and less clear.”

While we are in an affective territory well beyond outrage now (I write this paragraph on the night of 6 January 2021), how can one not be flabbergasted at what Cuomo—as the governor of New York—passes blithely over in order to make the current pandemic a teachable moment? The 1975 fiscal crisis and the subsequent closures and ongoing defunding of schools, welfare programs, hospitals, and public transit, along with stop-and-frisk, “broken windows” policing, mass incarceration, and, perhaps most basically, the affordable housing shortage, all contribute to the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on underserved communities. By invoking the reality of social crisis, Cuomo only obscures it and does so in order to impose on his subjects the neoliberal burden of plumbing one's soul for civic mindedness as compensation for the criminal malfeasance of the state.

One wonders, too, whether the recent “daddy” phenomenon that Cuomo has come to exemplify (see the regrettable “Cuomosexual” craze) is a shorthand for the erotics not simply of authority but of being gaslit.Footnote ³ As a generic inflection of what we might recognize as dorkiness, the dad joke, for example, names a mode of humorous intellection and discourse whereby an uncool speaker, lacking a metalanguage by which to establish to his kids his coolness, resorts to reproducing and recombining the conventions of language most ready to hand (“Dad, I'm hungry.” “Hi, Hungry. I'm Dad”). The “daddy” and the wider aesthetic of dadness index an attempt by an obsolescent white masculinity to recuperate its metalinguistic dysfunction as itself a form of literary or verbal performance that simply by virtue of its recombinant character can approximate the sensuous appeal of poetic language—a dysfunction materially caused by none other than the “dads” themselves in their decades-long war of attrition against equitable public education and the bogeyman of the left, especially in the humanities.Footnote ⁴

Cuomo shows his hand when in the briefing on 21 March he chastises “younger people” for not taking COVID-19 protocols seriously enough, yelling in all caps on his slide, “YOU ARE WRONG”—as if one of the primary organs for acquiring the metalinguistic and metadiscursive literacy necessary to navigate the epistemological straits of the pandemic were not the very institutions of higher education whose viability and accessibility he has been instrumental in undermining (“Governor Cuomo Delivers Update” 00:21:09).Footnote ⁵

Double Bind Theory

The affective and cognitive frustration with which one might react to such gaslighting—especially because it is often warmly received—is perhaps the result of what Gregory Bateson theorized as the double bind.

A central component of his larger interdisciplinary and holistic inquiry into the “ecology of the mind,” the double bind is Bateson's name for the experiential form of the “paradoxes of abstraction” that inhere in all complex communication and between all levels of biological development (193). By attending to these paradoxes, Bateson wagered, one could theorize the etiology of a whole range of “behavioral patterns” or “syndromes” from the animal world to the human, both pathological and creative—whether broad, seemingly universal phenomena such as humor or art itself, or more specific phenomena like addiction or schizophrenic psychosis (272). For Bateson, these are all, at different scales, examples of evolutionary adaptation to environmental constraint, but much of his research focused on the pathological nature of the last two, which provides a starting point for understanding the conditions of metalinguistic dysfunction.

Building on Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types, Bateson's double bind theory observes that denotative communication is possible only with a complex—though often nonverbalized—set of metalinguistic rules that govern the relationship between linguistic units and objects or events. This is because communicative messages do not, from a cybernetic-ecological perspective, describe or “express” preexisting relationships such as “love” or “hostility” or even “dependency”: “This is epistemology backwards: in truth, the messages constitute the relationship, and words like ‘dependency’ are verbally coded descriptions of patterns immanent in the combination of exchanged messages” (Bateson 275). Through a set of metacommunicative conventions or signals comprising and depending on everything from tone and rhetorical register to format or venue and the economy of space therein, a communicatively successful message denotes its own pragmatic function (or what J. L. Austin would call its illocutionary force) by containing it within itself.

And in cases where the message requires a metacommunicative clarification of contradictory pragmatic contexts—say, an insult meant in an affectionate manner—such containment becomes a matter of self-referential negation: “a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement. Expanded, the statement ‘This is play’ looks something like this: ‘These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote’” (Bateson 180). In other words, a logical “paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type,” in which a statement, operating across two successive orders of abstraction, negates the very class into which it has abstracted itself (180). Yet the fact that such messages obviously do function successfully in both human and animal communication (in the behaviors of many animals the signal for “this is play and not combat” is functionally the same as the signal for “this is combat”) suggests not only that language is incommensurable with ideals of logical consistency but also that such formally objective paradoxes—in line with the hypothesis on which mid-century cybernetics staked its entire existence as a field, that binarily quantitative differentiation can by itself produce qualitative phenomena—are generative of, even necessary for, an entire range of subjective experience and development.

It is in the event that a metacommunicative grammar is not available to a speaker or addressee that a double bind occurs and a pathological behavioral syndrome develops. Schizophrenia, for example, according to Bateson's research, is a result of family interactions in which a child repeatedly and simultaneously receives a contradictory set of imperatives—say, “Be obedient to me,” and “Be independent and don't rely on me.” While it is entirely natural and, perhaps, necessary for child-rearing to involve both obedience and independence, a metalanguage or metacommunicative grammar is required for a child to distinguish between “obedience” and “slavish adherence to the parent's literal word.” Otherwise, the implicit containment of the first imperative within the second and vice versa—“Don't rely on me” can be articulated as “Don't adhere fully to every command I give, including my first command to be obedient but therefore also this command”—creates an epistemological confusion sufficient to produce rage or panic, especially when the double bind is accompanied by some sort of threat to survival: “Obey me, or else.” This, for Bateson, is the etiology of schizophrenics’ classically symptomatic hallucinatory, contradictory voices, along with their difficulty in distinguishing between figurative and literal language.

Similarly, the cybernetic etiology of alcoholism lies neither in the chemical properties of alcohol alone nor in the neurochemical predispositions of the alcoholic but in alcoholics’ characteristic “pride.” The actual addictive behavior of alcoholics consists of their arrogant insistence on proving their control over their own alcoholism. (Bateson based his hypothesis largely on the literature and practices of Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as on his intensive work with alcoholic patients.) That insistence is, however, disingenuous, because there is always the “ulterior but unstateable purpose of proving that ‘self-control’ is ineffectual and absurd” (Bateson 327). Alcoholics thus continuously escalate the degree of risk over which they can assert control while, of course, making it materially more and more impossible for such control to succeed.

For Bateson, this might be thought of as another epistemological imprecision. Alcoholics say, “I can drink without losing control,” but because of “the Anglo-Saxon epistemological tendency to reify or attribute to the body all mental phenomena which are peripheral to consciousness,” they identify the “I” or “mind” that asserts control tendentiously only with the uppermost surfaces of consciousness and not the entire ecological system upon which their agency actually depends—their affective mechanisms and visceral sensations, their physical environment, society (320). Hence even as alcoholics try monstrously to assert control over their own escalating drinking and thus expand the remit of their “self,” “alcoholic ‘pride’ progressively narrows the concept of ‘self,’ placing what happens outside its scope” (322). The fact that alcoholics can simultaneously and paradoxically claim that “I am in control” and that “self-control is impossible” creates a double bind (“My self, which I have separated from the possibility of control, is in control, even of the utterance of this proposition”), and it is often only in recovery, maybe, that the alcoholic acquires the metalinguistic tools by which to resolve this conflict.

Metamodernism and Fascism

Methodologically, double bind theory offers one possible way to apprehend the phenomenological experience of the pandemic—not in the sense that such a generalized condition would be wholly equivalent to mental illness or addiction but rather in the sense that double bind theory offers a linguistically anchored formalism for the pathological life of late capitalism and the way it is inscribed, as a kind of Derridean supplement, already within the ideologemes of mental health and civic mindedness that would expel it.

Familiar by now, for example, is the temporality of lockdown, where time is felt to pass so much more quickly and more slowly all at once, and such an experience of opposing extremities recalls the familiar aesthetic antinomies of modernism—of the ephemeral moment or atomistically dense fragment on the one hand and the empty futility of history as a bad infinity on the other. For as Elizabeth Outka has demonstrated in her recent, uncannily timed monograph Viral Modernism, modernist aesthetics needs to be read in the light of the striking absence of direct depictions of the 1918 pandemic in the interwar literature that followed it—an absence brought on by what Outka calls a “cultural amnesia” and what we might see as a sign of metalinguistic dysfunction caused by the difficulties of comprehending such a mass event (29). “Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness,” Virginia Woolf writes in her essay “On Being Ill,” “more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow” (202), and it is this incomprehensibility that gives the attentive modernist access to new registers of language and experience, both minimal and maximal. For instance, Woolf writes that it is in the “indifference” of flowers, “the stillest, the most self-sufficient of all things that human beings have made companions,” “that they are comforting” (199). She also zooms out to consider the invalid who is able, “perhaps for the first time for years” (198), to look up at the sky and see it as “divinely beautiful” and yet “divinely heartless,” in which “immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit” (199).

Yet more than just in terms of aesthetics, the phenomenology of the pandemic and of the political landscape of 2020 more broadly has had a modernist discursive and intellectual dimension, the effects of which are detectable in the widespread sense that there does not seem to be a way to think our way out of this mess, despite having known full well that it was coming. As if in one of the many time-travel films of recent popularity—Palm Springs, Tenet, Avengers: Endgame—we are in a moment of narrative stuckness that is circumscribed not only by the unendingness of the pandemic but also by the increasingly claustrophobic era of neoliberal capital (of which the pandemic is a synecdoche). And it is possibly for this reason that in our attempts to understand our contemporary moment—say, since Donald Trump first emerged as a viable contender for the Republican presidential nomination—we repeatedly, almost compulsively, look to the modernist period in order to find a model by which to understand our own, whether by whimsically finding in Trump's idiosyncratic speech patterns an echo of Ezra Pound's prosaic ones or by allegorizing each recent fascist event in terms of Nazi history, as if such easy analogies for stuckness would not only ever reproduce stuckness.

The contemporary cultural transcription of modernist aesthetics that David James and Urmila Seshagiri in 2014 termed “metamodernism” might be seen as an instance of historical recursiveness operating within the epistemology of genre that Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” What is crueler, after all, than seeing in the gaslighting double bind of Cuomo's metacommunicative dysfunction—“Trust me, an empath” (“This is serious”) and “There's been no great social crisis until now” (“I don't take this seriously”)—an echo not only of the familiar double bind of modernist ideology that discursively posits the failure of discursivity in the face of modernity but also of the existential double bind of the humanities in particular, where a commitment to practices of noninstrumentalization grinds administratively against the demand that our profession be made useful to capital?

Perhaps cruelest is recognizing that the same double bind structures fascism as well. For not only does Cuomo's thinking out loud resemble Trump's own freewheeling metalinguistic dysfunction, but so too do both neoliberal and fascist double binds dynamically reproduce themselves in the discourses of their addressees in a kind of anticommunicative chain reaction. The humanist's double bind under neoliberalism finds a perverse reflection in popular discourse's conception of the protocols of the cultural left, where the politics of difference and relativism (“Nothing matters”) are perceived to slide antinomically into the politics of “wokeness” (“Everything is problematic”) and thus together provide the dysfunctional conditions for the recent emergence of seemingly liberal ideologues critical of so-called cancel culture. Similarly, fascism's double bind—grounded in its anti-intellectual refusal to communicate, let alone grasp, the sedulous work of governing—functions by exempting its adherents from the conventions of the cultural discourses and democratic processes in which they nevertheless demand a right to participate. Hence the events of 6 January 2021 at the Capitol, in which Trump supporters, armed with their own religiously held double bind (“The government is risible, yet everything they do is the sign of a nefarious purpose”), attempted to violently overthrow the very electoral process from which they sought and will continue to seek validation.

The fascists did not emerge out of nowhere, just as, say, J. K. Rowling did not wake up one morning to find herself transformed into the world's leading transphobe. The mechanism by which neoliberal capital extracts surplus value from labor also structures the libidinal economy of fascism—namely, the idea of self-management. The neoliberal commandment “Love what you do, do what you love”—a metacommunicative obfuscation that displaces the dignity of the worker from the productive and livable labor in which it is rightly found onto the material and experiential cost of having surplus value extracted (and that gaslights all the more effectively as it is gamified)—comes to its ultimate fruition in the ideological capture of fascists, for whom dignity involves the exercise of a kind of absolutely abstracted freedom and violent power as a response to the perceived overdeterminations of technocratic politics, even to the point of surrendering their own self-determination.Footnote ⁶ Hence, for example, the many tropes of addiction, “weaponized autism,” and first-person shooter gaming in alt-right dank meme culture, in which the immiseration of meme making itself is freeing and freedom itself is immiserating. On this kind of fertile troll loam so much of fascist discourse has been nurtured.Footnote ⁷ Not only Cuomo's “beauty” and “vulnerability,” in other words, but also Trump's “We love you, you're very special.”

Method and Recovery

Cruelty does not have to be the end, however, even if, at this time and in this space, there is not necessarily a clear path forward for our profession (besides agitating for more tenure-track lines). Bateson was, in the end, wary of any practical application of his theories, but where he did find his work to have therapeutic traction was in the careful reproduction of double binds to the point where their contradictory commands are disaggregated. It is when, for example, alcoholics “hit bottom” that they are able to grasp that what they actually wanted all along—to relinquish the exacting work of being in control—is not what they thought they wanted. It is only then—even though alcoholics “will often see it as an act of spite” (329)—that they are able to begin making the metalinguistic distinction between being released from control and losing control, which, for the alcoholic and troll alike, is often only an excuse for compulsive, rageful self-assertion.

Likewise, in the midst of the current so-called method wars, we might reflect more fundamentally on the affordances of our discipline, which at its core does the work of metadiscursive and metacommunicative differentiation between literal and figurative language on one level and between work and play on another. In what ways might critique and postcritique alike provide the tools by which we might midwife the recovery, as it were, of those who are or would, at a neoliberal breaking point, be fascists, especially in this historical moment where, for lack of a better term, Trumpian fascism and therefore also neoliberalism have just hit bottom? For if trolls rage precisely because they perceive themselves to be beset on all sides and always in advance by the dogmatics of cultural politics—and if some of these trolls are even our students—then how much do critique (especially when restricted to the level of representation) and postcritique (seen as so much self-important decadence) only exacerbate that double bind?

Like alcoholics, though, trolls do not necessarily want what they think they want. Thus, we might see the wisdom in a metadiscursive mode that works toward both a critique of attachment and a postcritique of representation. The point of this mode is not just to, say, critique our problematic objects or, even, eschew them entirely, but to provide the tools by which the fascists might learn to radically desublimate, avow, and, ideally, rechannel the desires that motivate and are often unwittingly activated by the ugliest feelings—moving from the false conflation of pleasure and surplus labor that passes as freedom back to the libidinally rightsized dignity of their primary processes. At some level, this mode would then embark on the risky (but, I hope, not wholly ill-advised) project of recuperating nothing less than white masculinity—but how else, when fascism and neoliberalism alike have disastrously aestheticized politics, to politicize aesthetics?

Generically cognate with the time travel film is the heist film, the erotics of which is premised on the expertise and professionalism of its characters. The pleasure of the heist derives from the élan with which our thieves do what they are good at. Thus, it is no surprise that the heist film has found a renewed escapist popularity as the crisis of neoliberalism has become more evident—despite, or precisely because of, how dangerously it, as a genre exceptionally defined by how deliberately intricate and easily digestible each film is at the same time, flirts with the structure of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as “the gimmick”: Is the heist film simply an elaborate confidence trick, an overworked illusion under which there is nothing of value? At the same time, the heist film finds its realist reflection in the modern crime picaresque—say, Uncut Gems (2019)—in which none of the characters ever know what they're doing. Stripped by capital of a metalanguage, the players’ logic is that of a gambling addict's double bind, in which the thrill of being alive derives simultaneously from everything being at stake all the time and from having, inescapably, nothing to lose.Footnote ⁸ And at their midpoint, perhaps, is Steven Soderbergh's 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion, which couldn't help, only four years after the conclusion of Soderbergh's Ocean's franchise, structuring itself as a kind of epidemiological heist film—precisely up to the point where epidemiology runs up against the metalinguistic gap between its protocols and capital—and yet which, in 2020, found itself in the ironic position of providing to a panic-stricken public a stopgap metadiscourse where none other seemed available.