Who we really are — random thoughts about Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger
An editor might make me write a more coherent review, but Ben Burgis already did that
At Damage and he did it very well, so here is a list of angry and sad thoughts I had while reading this book.
Naomi Klein as Ben Burgis argues is an identitarian Leftist, and therefore a liberal who is pretending to be a Leftist. In suppressing class critique in all her engagements with the shitty state of Left politics under capitalism, she never questions why liberal brands of environmentalism do not catch on with the majority of people in North America, working class people who might actually view her and her exhortations with suspicion.
Naomi Klein uses anecdote as evidence, just like Naomi Wolf. Her evidence might be more high/middlebrow. Literary/theoretical examples of doubling, oppression, racism, political tragedy that she draws on, from Sigmund Freud to Philip Roth to James Baldwin to Ta Nehisi Coates to bell hooks provide a certain kind of open repository of empirical evidence for her arguments that do the work of making us think that Klein is a serious thinker. Never mind that Freud’s universalism, Roth’s increasing cultural conservatism based on a sense of betrayed Enlightenment universalism would put these thinkers at odds with the pantheon of social movement critics upon whom Klein relies for her identitarian bona fides.
Naomi Klein has never read Adorno and Horkheimer, who basically argued in 1947 that the culture industry’s ideological logic was the mirror image of Fascism. I’m being crude here, but their ingratitude about being taken in by American academia and Hollywood was deeply informed by their exile in the hidden abode of production or the virtual factories of the culture industry. And she unfortunately misses out completely on Freud’s and the Frankfurt School’s ideas theories of anti-Semitism that relate to a popular, half formed hatred of reason, represented by Jewish monotheism, because anti-Semitic irrationality identifies reason with modernity and standardization. The petit bourgeois anti-Semite feels itself humiliated by a higher form of spiritual and ethical renunciation represented by the Jews. The psychology of scapegoating under the twin regimes of Enlightenment reason and capitalist rationalization has been explored more deeply and more politically than Klein does.
The relationship between Klein’s milquetoast liberalism as an oppressive form of contemporary authoritarianism and Wolf’s social media addled, anti-authoritarian irrationality can be mapped out according to the struggle for authentic critique in a time of debased reason and occult, conspiratorial forms of thought encouraged by the platforms against the institutions.
Wolf is an opportunist, but let’s face it, she is also much more marginal to the liberal culture industry than Klein. Klein is a darling of the liberal media and she is upset that a tarnished nutty vessel of conspiracy theory thinking haunts her brand. Klein praises Wolf’s feminism and wonders why she veered from her liberally correct positions in The Beauty Myth to nutty, clout seeking conspiracy thinking. I will venture that any critique of myth without an account of political economy is conspiracy theory thinking. Sorry.
At Yale, I was the editor of a now defunct feminist newspaper called Aurora. It came out on newsprint and our offices were in the wall to wall carpeted, smelly Women’s Center on the edge of Freshman Yard. I rejected Wolf’s Beauty Myth pitch because I told her that Beauty is not the only form of life that is subject to the logic of commodification and that her definition of it was too narrow and idealistic. She wrote a bestseller with the idea and advised Al Gore, while I hid in libraries and then was being abused by senior professors who thought I was an impostor all for a starting salary of 35K a year. So go figure, Wolf was an opportunistic feminist, and I was an idiot with ideals, but we both went to Yale and had the cultural confidence and grift (like JD Vance) conferred on us by that deeply corrupt anti-Communist, Cold Warrior institution (thanks Timothy Snyder for carrying on the tradition). I was unable and unwilling to leverage my story to sell it through the culture industry as identity melodrama, while Vance and Wolf were able to swan their way to fame, glory and iniquity with some Yale infused ideas about America and our problems.
Some day I’ll write more about Naomi Klein’s liberal use of the term “trauma” and it how it exactly mirrors Wolf’s use of the same term but I will leave that for the end of Traumatized.
Thanks for this, and the Burgis link. Another issue w the book is that Klein doesn’t really engage w the Jungian idea of the shadow. Freud’s uncanny is very compelling but Freud is mostly interested in repression. Like most shadow stories, she seems to destroy or discredit her shadow, assuming there can only be one. A Jungian reading would mean she’d have to learn to love her shadow and integrate with it. And to Burgis’ point it would mean a real engagement with her contradictions. But that would be radical and it’s easier to destroy the thing you cannot face.
I think the best part of her book is her reading of the changeling myth. It’s Marie-Louis von Franz good. But it’s a rabbit hole in relation to the rest of the book.