Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film

Rant Against the Regime

Kirk Combe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367654092
• eBook ISBN: 9781000289831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

Chapters 1 and 5 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

1The Rant

The purpose of this chapter is to outline in detail the Rant being proposed. Distinctively, the Rant blends three fictive forms—satire, science fiction, monster tale—in the pursuit of exposing, and perhaps even starting to dismantle, the dominant ideologies of our time. First, I set the specific cultural stage in which the Rant operates. Next, I discuss in turn each component genre of the Rant. Finally, I delineate the kind of social and political critique at the core of such works. As the reader will see, there are a number of moving parts in play when it comes to understanding the Rant.

Modern State, Postmodern Critique

My fundamental premise is that the Rant is a subgenre of modern satire that has come into being in the last four decades or so; moreover, it is always a form of political satire. Although the Rant has certain roots and precursors in literary satiric practices stretching back to early modern Europe as well as to the ancient Romans and Greeks, my primary focus is not in situating the Rant within a broad historical and literary category. Instead, I put forward and investigate the Rant as a satiric creation of our contemporary moment. Such a view and approach to this new form of political commentary, then, necessarily involves the work of Michel Foucault.

Foucault theorizes the modern state to be a system of differentiations wherein a powerful minority, through various instrumental modes, forms of institutions, and degrees of rationalization, is able to act upon the actions of the majority of the population (“Subject” 140–141). Such disciplinary power creates a regimen of “truth”—a dominant and sanctioned worldview—that is a condition for the formation and development of capitalism (“Truth” 316–317). Foucault stresses, however, that although power relations are inevitable to society, those that are established are never everlasting or inescapable. Modern hegemony is particularly subject to alteration and renegotiation. Comments Foucault:

I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the “agonism” between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is an increasingly political task—even, the political task that is inherent in all social existence.

(“Subject” 140)

Since the early modern era, much satire has come to serve, in my view, this function of challenging the “truth” formulated by power.¹ Specifically, modern satire is adept at, as Foucault characterizes the method, “detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (“Truth” 317–318). In the early 21st century, one needs only watch episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or Last Week Tonight, for example, to witness the strategies and techniques of satire applied toward the debunking of powerful political and corporate bunk.

Other key ideas from Foucault’s theories pertain to modern satire as well. For example, from Discipline and Punish: how the main effect of the panopticon on the prisoner is a permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (201–202); how the early modern transition from feudal monarchal spectacle to modern panoptic surveillance featured a new conception of power as a set of actions upon other actions (208–209); and how feudal power sought to form a single great cultural body, but modern power seeks to fabricate particular kinds of individuals that contribute to the productivity of the regulated state (216–217). All of these phenomena become distinct when comparing, say, the feudal and monarchal intimidation taking place in Dryden’s political satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681) as opposed to the carceral control enacted by the modern state in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil (1985). Similarly, Foucault points out in “Truth and Power” that whereas feudal power was a repressive power that said “No,” modern power is a productive power that produces goods, induces pleasure, forms knowledge, and constructs discourse (307, 311). Modern power, then, can seductively mask its control over a population. Oppression is not necessarily overt. In effect, this subtlety makes modern disciplinarity a form of virtually unseen war-like domination by the hegemonic group in a society. As Foucault memorably summarizes the situation, “Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it” (310). As we will see later in this book, a satiric analysis of a film seemingly as whimsical as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) reveals extensive cultural combat at work. Additional concepts instrumental to investigations of modern satire occur in the relationship Foucault theorizes between the individual and the state. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault discusses the ways people resist being made subject to the modern state. These struggles generally are of three kinds: (1) against forms of domination, such as ethnic, social, and religious; (2) against forms of exploitation by the rich, which separate individuals from what they produce; (3) against that which ties the individual to forms of subjectivity and submission to authority (130). When we inspect, in a later chapter, Joon-ho Bong’s film Snowpiercer (2013), all three types of struggle will be very much in evidence. Perhaps most important, as pointed out above, Foucault asserts that while power is an indispensable feature of society, any given manifestation of it should not be taken fatalistically. Modern hegemony is always under challenge and thereby subject to change. For this reason, Foucault advises us not to pursue “universal philosophy,” but to inspect instead the historical here and now—that is, how the current hegemonic discourse came into power and what can be done to thwart its oppressive disciplining (134). Whether defending or attacking the status quo, modern satire is a clear-cut participant in this contemporary cultural battle. For its part, the Rant is a particularly sharp weapon of satiric resistance and attack against the dominant discourse.

What is more, in its critique of the modern state, the Rant employs postmodern analytical techniques. Along with this Foucauldian reading of modern satire, I’ve argued elsewhere that the form itself activates undecidability.² For this assertion, I draw on Derrida’s concept of différance and Colbert’s term “truthiness” to make a case for the postmodernity of satire. Whether advocating for conservative or radical positions, satire deals in the truthy, that is, in social constructions. As a cultural creation, satire undermines, as Derrida states it, the “coherence in contradiction” that characterizes any social desire for a Transcendental Signified (495). Like the thinking of the Sophists, satire runs as a counter-discourse to Platonic thought in western culture. Any “truth” structured by a satirist comes with the knowledge that she is decentering someone else’s “truth,” and that her center, in turn, likely will be decentered. Thus, in my view, satire partakes of and contributes to Derrida’s “joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world … without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation.” This “Nietzschean affirmation” of “the non-center” indicates, for Derrida, the activity of interpretation as a game played “without security” (509), where language criticizes itself and structure is ever provisional. That is to say, as meaning-making beings, we inevitably create a center, but another center is sure to come along to destroy that old machinery (500). Satire, then, embodies that “terrifying form of monstrosity” that is Derrida’s concept of deconstruction (510).³ What I mean by satire, then, and in particular the Rant as it carries out a postmodern critique of the modern state, is this combined Foucauldian–Derridean tenor of agonistic monstrosity. Turning now to a description of the tripartite Rant, I begin with a more detailed account of satire.

Satire

Attempting to define this genre is notoriously tricky. It’s a bit like trying to put toothpaste back in its tube. You’ll meet with some success, but the mess makes you wonder if the effort was really worth it. While some essential ingredients of the form can be identified, too many other aspects of it inevitably escape delineation. In the English tradition, John Dryden’s “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1692) marks the first comprehensive effort to explain the genre. Even at that point, more than three centuries ago, Dryden tries to summarize and concretize a satiric tradition stretching back at least to Archilochus, a Greek satirist of the 7th century bce, and wending its way through classical Rome and then medieval and renaissance Europe. Dryden’s pedantic decrees about satire (e.g., a work of satire ought mainly to condemn a single vice and recommend its opposite virtue) carried considerable critical weight well into the 20th century. Formalist critics, when bothering at all with this shambolic brand of writing, pursued a rhetorical theory of satire up into the 1950s. When postmodern critical practices emerged in the 1960s, satire was recontextualized into its various cultural settings. Although working without definitional absolutes, scholars at that point nonetheless felt the need to establish satiric common ground. In 1968, Leonard Feinberg writes: “we have no right to demand complete conformity to a particular variety of satire, and we should be willing to accept numerous deviations from customary procedure” (31). Nonetheless, as reasonable generic similarities, Feinberg declares of satire that “it always criticizes, it always distorts, it always entertains” (36). Two decades later, Don Nilsen outlines a more elaborate rubric for recognizing satire, postulating four necessary conditions—grounding in reality, distortion, negative tone, posture of attack—and three strongly correlative ones—irony, social bonding, humor (8). Many such helpful formulations for the cardinal traits of satire have been offered. Among them, a statement by Edward Rosenheim stands out for its acumen and efficiency; satire, he maintains, is an “attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historical particulars” (31). Applying these simple guidelines for analysis allows a critic to explore, in nearly endless detail and combination, the disposition of the attack, the complexion of the fiction that is its vehicle, plus just how patent that work of imagination is. In the same vein, the critic must ask which historical particulars, precisely, are being brought into play, and exactly how visible are those local concerns. Intention, reception, rhetoric, cultural context, and the rich heritage of the genre are all subjects for scrutiny.⁴

Such operational guidelines make good sense. As discussed above, in the modern era satire has become as well an hegemonic device of discipline and subject formation within the struggle of modern power relations. By way of summarizing the key features of satire, I offer the following digest.

Satire is a polemic: a passionate argument against something and, thus, in favor of something else; key aspects of satiric discourse include:

•a combination of laus et vituperatio (praise and blame)

•the negative behaviors being condemned are highlighted and predominant

•the positive behaviors being recommended sometimes are clear, but sometimes are implied or even indistinct

•an exploration of important cultural issues of the day

•social (e.g., religion, class, gender, race, literary matters, tastes, and fashions, etc.)

•philosophical (e.g., ethical conduct, nature of The Good, human perception, etc.)

•political (e.g., the best form of government, factional wrangling, Truth and Power, etc.)

•often these types of issues are in combination

•a frequent and effective rhetorical tool of satire is distortion and exaggeration

Satiric persona is a key element: what kind of narrator is the satirist presenting to us—and why? That is, what rhetorical and polemical functions does that narrator serve? For example:

•the Horatian vir bonus (the good, honest man)

•the Juvenalian vir iratus (the irate, indignant man)

•the parodic narrator (pretending to be someone or something else)

•the self-damning narrator (a trap for the reader)

•the unreliable narrator (sometimes reasonable, sometimes ludicrous)

•any combination of the above; other types?

Satiric form needs to be evaluated: what structure or manner of communicating does the satirist construct—and why? For example:

•the thesis-exempla satire: basically, an essay with a main point followed by supporting argumentation and a loose series of examples

•the situational satire: basically, a semi-dramatic storyline presented through various scenes, characters, and voices (such as an adversarius)

•a mixture of both thesis-exempla and situational elements

•a fully realized longer work of fiction, whether in prose (such as a novel), in verse (such as a mock-epic poem), for the stage (such as a social comedy), or in audiovisual format (such as a feature film or a broadcast/cable/new media series)

•a thoroughgoing invasion of another genre or form—personal letter, philosophical dialog, newspaper editorial, travel narrative, scientific article, film documentary, musical, television news program, etc.

Important to keep in mind as well is that satire generates a particularly concerted transactive reader response dynamic. That is, if text + reader = meaning, then satirists are especially attuned to precipitating an exact kind of partnership with their contemporary readership. As much critical attention needs to be paid to the satiric narratee, then, as to the satiric narrator. Questions to be deliberated include: precisely who is the contemporary audience for a given satire? Exactly how is that current-day reader being manipulated into becoming the ideal reader of a piece—that is, to fall into complete agreement with the satirist? Is the reader being bullied, cajoled, having heartstrings tugged on, collective fears tapped into, empathy created, outrage fomented, shame provoked, or pride stimulated? Is the satirist preaching to a choir or making a broader appeal to the society? Has the satirist ventured into the lion’s den of the oppositional camp? Who is listening has everything to do with how a satirist embeds a text with things for that reader to do. Obviously, with these readerly issues comes the all-important historical contextualization of each piece of satire we consider.

Another vital component to consider when recognizing and analyzing satiric works is that satire itself has origins as a genre of power. In the western tradition, satire very much tends to be works created by educated urban men of means—that is, the dominant social group. Thus, satire can be seen as a patriarchal genre, one produced by those participating in the hegemonic masculinity of the day. Is satire, then, merely infighting among the elite? Satire also tends to be located in the major city of its day: Athens, Rome, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles. While such major urban centers obviously blend together a diverse population, they are nonetheless the focal points of political, economic, and cultural power. Given this privileged backdrop for satire, some interesting questions emerge regarding the form. Where do women fit in the satiric game—aside from being its constant targets? Where do non-white, non-European peoples fit in? What about lower-class voices? Can satire be an instrument of social justice? Or is satire an instrument of social disciplining and control? Clearly, when raising these issues and asking these questions, we enter the ambit of cultural power and the theories of Foucault.

In short, satire operates within a cultural context to enact a polemic mission. To accomplish its persuasive task of blame and praise, satire invades other gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Briefest of Introductions: What, Why, How
• 1 The Rant
• 2 The Regime
• 3 Ranting Against the Regime
• 4 Living Under a Lousy Orthodoxy
• 5 Special Topic Rants
• 6 Neoliberal A.I.
• The Briefest of Conclusions: So What? Why Bother? How Does This Matter?
• Bibliography
• Index