Cultural Autism

The following is an excerpt a 4 September 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. 

Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust

Art:

A lot of stuff coming together in those last few emails. Some paired motifs like pillars and the Tower of Babel. 

I like the head on a stake image. If I can go pagan a little here, the head on the pike also conjures up Pentheus. When you look at the more proximate cause of why Detroit went down, it was people trying impose order--literally in the form of concrete--over the chaotic, creative substratum embodied most fully by Black Bottom. 

Can we put Stan at the center of the collective punishment Detroit and its suburbs suffer? 

Do Arthur and Will have a chance to make it right? Does Arthur, cursed by many things, now have the power to convey divine benefits such that--in an Oedipus at Colonus-like reversal--everyone loves him and wants to claim him? 

Seems like Detroit can also be seen as a particularly Yeatsian apocalypse with its ever "widening gyre" and "the center cannot hold." And what's the eschatological ending there? Well, either heat death, big rip, or big crunch. 

I like all the anti- stuff as well. Seems to suggest that worldly collapse is necessary before spiritual rebirth and growth can occur. That seems to work with Detroit as well. 

I've got to go! You're doing this conversation much more justice!

Will:

We don't need a literal pillar, although I wouldn't rule one out. 

I'm also wondering if we can treat the "ruins" in a way that runs counter to the popular images of ruins. There's plenty of bland, boring stuff in the fallen areas of Detroit. And even though the symbol of vegetation is cliché, it doesn't seem to be that common of a visual trope in ruin porn. It would be strange to see Witkowski and Sons Cement evoking the Shire. 

Along a related thread, I've been thinking about a recent development in postmodern analysis: cultural autism.  Don DeLillo's Point Omega deals with this issue in several ways; it also deals with the issue of the American wasteland--postmodernism becoming a desert and people devolving into stones. People may read Arthur as autistic rather than as a mystic, but there is a bit of cultural autism at work in many of our characters: a type of preoccupation with personal agendas that are out of joint with a healthy social fabric. The notion of cultural autism is that the godly amounts of power technology provides is turning us all into little gods in uninhabited universes. We are desolate because we sculpt worlds for ourselves that aren't inhabited by others. The characters in Point Omega can be near each other and try to simulate vague ancestral memories of familial and romantic relationships, but there is no heart in any of it; things like divorce roll in like the the tide, barely worthy of notice. 

Another thing worthy of notice is another DeLilloish thing: postmodern time. He has been really preoccupied with the shift in our perceptions of time at least since Cosmopolis. Basically, satellite and digital culture have uprooted us from any traditional human sense of time in ways that dwarf the impact of the clock on human existence.

I love looking at the literal construction of Detroit in symbolic ways. My feeling is that Detroit is basically Rome and that its problem is not that other cities learned how to be flexible and Detroit biffed it; it's that Detroit collapsed first, and the seeds of its collapse are germinating in all cities. To also go pagan, maybe the country offers up Detroit to an angry destroyer god to spare New York, Chicago, and LA.