Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove Press, 1999)"Downstairs from New York's offices, there's a surveillance boutique that captures passing pedestrians on video camera. It doesn't bother any of us particularly. But author Mark Dery makes note of such things, and they upset him very much. In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium - a scholarly text that reads less like cultural-crit than like a medieval apocalyptic screed - Dery posits that the "insanitarium" we live in could blow at any moment, and it would be our fault for abiding a culture in which we live to watch others and to make others watch us. But what obsesses Dery most are nightmarish aberrations like the Republic of Cuervo Gold, the town of Celebration, the profession of trend-spotting, and the bestial Jim Carrey, who "returns us to that glorious moment when naked apes emoted with their hindquarters." - Vanessa Grigoriadis
"Like many essays on pop culture of contemporary America, Dery's collection is an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink view of the end of the millenium (including comparisons of the Warren Report to Finnegan's Wake, and the author's fascination with the Edvard Munch painting The Scream). Occasionally, Dery's ruminations on our Nike-obsessed, Jim Carrey-imitating, X-Files-paranoid culture are hilarious; at other times, they definitely are not. But his point is well taken, that as we approach the next century, the U.S. is more of a culturally aware, and thus more culturally consuming, country than ever before. The author's previous take on cyberspace, Escape Velocity, seeps in here as well: the information age pushes the bits and pieces of pop culture further in our faces every day. The title is an old term used to promote New York's Coney Island amusement park, and a more appropriate monicker for 1990s culture can't be found. With no war to distract us as in previous decades, the culture itself has become a focal point for societal anxiety, and Dery's insights into the whys of this upheaval are most illuminating." - Joe Collins
"Centering his critique of the contemporary pop cultural landscape around the title image, borrowed from a sobriquet once applied to Coney Island, Dery sees "a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where cartoon and nightmare melt into one." He can be an astute observer of trends, adept at connecting seemingly disparate phenomena. The best essays here focus on our obsessions with conspiracy and paranoia, the new grotesque aesthetic in the arts and the changing dynamics of technophilia and technophobia in the new computer age. Unfortunately, the book is padded with writing on minor topics. Dery shifts focus rather too quickly‘one has the sense that he is throwing ideas at a wall ostensibly to see what sticks, but really hoping to distract attention from the results through the speed of his performance. And, too often, he filters his subject matter through suppositions plucked from high theory without examining the ideas he's borrowing, perhaps least successfully in his deployment of Georges Bataille to unravel the cultural import of Jim Carrey. Some inconsistencies stick out: at one point, he characterizes deconstruction as a "vogue," barely above the level of a conspiracy theory; at another, he concludes his analysis of freaks as culturally "other" with one of the hoariest of deconstructionist chestnuts, the condemnation of binary oppositions. Such jargon limits his writing, and makes the book feel dated, as his reliance on interpretive strategies left over from the '70s (particularly from French thought: Kristeva's abject, Baudrillard's postmodern, Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic) is stale even by the standards of academe." - Publisher's Weekly
"His usual style is to amass a clever bricolage of facts, figures, and relevant quotes, weave them expertly together, then wrap up with, at best, an original thought or two. Dery is most noticeable in the slightly shopworn theme that draws the essays together: "the pyrotechnic insanitarium of '90s America, a giddy whirl of euphoric horror where cartoon and nightmare melt into one.'' Dery does have an agenda (a rather doctrinaire blend of post-Marxism and post-New-Leftism)'if only he had an angle. He is an intelligent observer and has read and watched widely. His first essay, comparing our millennial situation to the massive social changes inaugurated and furthered by the opening Coney Island (the century's original 'pyrotechnic insanitarium'), is probably his most successful, perhaps because he is able to transcend mere clever collage. As firework shows go... a few sparklers and lots of duds." - Kirkus Reviews
"Flipping through anthologies of what are dubiously labelled The 'Best American Essays' is a bit like drinking luke warm milky tea with too much sugar. Except for the time Susan Sontag edited a volume in this series, they have always struck me as examples of the American essay in its most diluted form. If you want a good strong mug of Joe to hyper-caffeinate the mind, you have to go to American essayists who don't serve up that special blend of mediocrity and manners brewed up by those tepid 'Best American' anthologies.
High on my list of literary heart starters is Mark Dery, well known to Nettime readers from his contributions to 21C, and for his previous book Escape Velocity. In that one, he picked over all varieties of cyberhype, technoboosting and info flim flam. In his new collection, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, the whole of American culture goes into the Dery trash compactor. "All over the world, America stands for fun and death: Disneyland and the death penalty, Big Macs and murder.
Surely its significant that, as of 1992, America's two top export items were military hardware and 'entertainment products', in that order", Dery writes. Not to mention Stealth bombers and sneaking blow jobs in the Oval office.
Dery approaches America's "cultural landfill", from trashy movies to cult comic books, as a "a zero-tolerance critic of the growing encroachment of corporate influence on our everyday lives". There's always something a bit untimely about Dery. In conversation, he is the only man alive to have mastered hypertext in spoken form. And yet his language cojoins 18th century arcana with 21st century sound bites. He describes Insanitarium as "an obsolete hunk of dead-tree hardware that went to sleep and dreamed it was a Web page." The "no fly zone" between high and low culture is where Dery performs his textual aerobatics. He covers a lot of territory, connecting the most unlikely points in an American landscape, the contours of which he hugs instinctively.
What emerges is an America were the Unabomber is the Log Lady's dysfunctional cousin, and a maker of "exploding Joseph Cornell boxes". Where Oklahoma city bomber Timmothy McVeigh's conspiracy theories "read like an X-Files script written by Thomas Pynchon." Where the obsessives who mine the Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination are America's home grown deconstructionists, and where the 26 volume report is "the Finnegan's Wake of paranoid America."
Dery does what 'postmodern' essayists used to do best. He folds irony over on itself. He makes irony ironic. By folding the layers of prejudice and distinction and discrimination that constitute 'taste' against each other, he produces moments of distance and clarity, within which the writer can reveal the connections between his - and our - little corner of the cultural themepark and the rest of the world. Irony might not be much of a tool against the "oozing insinuation of the mass media, blob-like, into every corner of the public arena." But then, who you gonna call? "Irony is a leaky prophylactic against consumerism, conformity and other social diseases" but its all we've got to stop us being "sucked, Poltergeist-like, into the vast wasteland on the other side of the screen."
There's a strong moralist streak to Dery, but it isn't the "pathological puritanism" of the right wing pundits. The repression and denial of the dark and sticky side of life is for Dery part of the problem. "Always, the beast is closer than we know". A classic Dery technique is to start from whatever tepid-tea essayists find distasteful and sink his teeth into it.
He's good on any kind of freak or boundary crosser, like the kind who appear on talk shows, and give talk shows their bad name among the literary jigglers and danglers. "Daytime talkshows are equal parts geek show, peep show and Gong Show, made morally palatable by a gooey icing of psycho-babble. The deeper questions are: What is the chattering class really saying when it reviles these programs as 'freak shows'? Who decides who's a freak? And why are freaks so threatening?"
This is the Achemedian point to which only irony can lever us - the point where there is not just a consideration of what is good taste and what is bad taste, but a questioning of who gets to make the distinction. In the knee-jerking hatred of talkshows among the chattering classes, Dery finds a "paroxysm of class revulsion". Trailer trash, welfare moms, and above all black people are to be discriminated against in the most polite way possible, by discriminating against their cultural tastes.
The trouble with taste is that the distinctions on which the 'cultured' middle classes built their respectable prejudice are coming unglued. Nobody seems to know what's high or low -- everything feels so slippy. It gets harder and hard to strain out the impurities. The result is a constant anxiety about separation. "The Brita filter is our fallout shelter, the existential personal flotation device of the nervous nineties." Everybody knows that the wealth of what's left of the middle class rests on a mountain of industrial waste, and that kitsch is as omnipresent as airborne contaminants, but nobody wants to admit it.
"If there's a message here, it's that we're going to have to make our peace with the repressed, whether its the body and all it implies (defecation, sex, disease, old age, and death) or the solid waste and toxic runoff of consumer culture and industrial production." Or in short, "it's high time we grew up, already."
Growing up, for Dery, is ending middle class denial, accepting the fact of the trash pile on which class privilege rests, studying the landfill for clues as to the process by which the turbulent, chaotic surfaces of consumer culture spew forth from the industrial world. Dery is one of those rare writers with a deep enough insight into the American soul, with an eloquence in all its stuttering dialects, to look America in its dark and gazeless eye, and not blink." - McKenzie Wark
"Like any good cultural critic, Mark Dery knows how to work a metaphor. The title of his newest collection of essays, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, refers to Coney Island at the end of the 19th century and its vertiginous blend of wonder and horror--from the light shows to the freak shows. Coney Island, Dery suggests, was a delirious spectacle that spoke to a nervousness about the 20th-century to come, and the author sees today's fractured electronic media reflecting our own anxieties in the same dizzying way.
Insanitarium traces the vapor trails of a number of cultural phenomena: the media reaction to the cloning of a sheep; the cultish cell of Nike employees who call themselves EKINs; the Disney-planned city of Celebration, Fla. Dery, who explored fringe computer culture in his previous book Escape Velocity, is at his best when he zooms in on the previously unexplored facets of his stories. Discussing how the media treated the Heaven's Gate mass suicide as "an object lesson in the evils of spending too much time on-line," he notes that the cult's cyber-outreach efforts actually stirred up a fierce backlash. A proselytizing mass newsgroup posting gained them a few converts, but the "ridicule, or hostility, or both" that characterized the vast majority of responses was strong enough to convince Heaven's Gate to leave this planet.
At points in the book, Dery lays the primary blame for our angst on what he dubs "the Gilded Age, version 2.0" -a second era when the delusions and delights of the moneyed few drown out the voices of the impoverished. In doing so, he places himself in the company of other old-school dissenters such as Noam Chomsky and Lewis Lapham, and the perennially angry political journal The Baffler, who focus on material matters of oppression while avoiding the Balkanization of modern multicultural scholarship. Unfortunately, Dery seems ill-prepared to contribute to these dialogues: His essays linger too long on points, such as America's precipitous income disparity, or the retreat of the global elite from civic engagement, that have already been treated at length in the lefty media.
What's more of a disappointment is Dery's dispassionate take on his subject matter. He roots his analysis in the more tragic consequences of the wrecking ball of global capitalism--dropping wages, vanishing job security, and mass firings--but loses that sense of humanity once he enters the rarefied strata of lit crit and media deconstruction. His distanced essays compare poorly to, say, those of The Baffler: At least that journal's best arguments build upon a core of steely outrage; they're less like ambling discourses and more like battle cries. (Tellingly, one of the most common criticisms of The Baffler, and other brash leftist polemicists like Michael Moore, is that they lack authority to speak compassionately for the swelling ranks of the working poor--as if that were the jurisdiction of who, exactly? CNN? Forbes Magazine?)
To be fair, Dery has succeeded in writing a suitable primer for reading the media at the fin de millennium, a respectable goal in itself. But that doesn't change the fact that we need less writing that showcases erudition while masking more immediate, ground-level concerns. What we need is for capable and perceptive writers like Mark Dery to put their hearts into their work: to write as if it actually mattered, and not just to turn the last tooth in the gears of a grad-school education." - Francis Hwang
"One of the main characters in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Idoru displays `a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him... an extremely good researcher'. This also serves as a pretty fair description of Mark Dery's career, as one of our pre-eminent info-node sifters - rhizomatic, haphazard and intuitive.
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is Dery's latest stage-dive into what he once termed `the intellectual moshpit'. With his last two books, the edited collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture and the indispensable Escape Velocity, Dery planted his flag on this field as one of its most passionate commentators and eagle-eyed critics. Not one to turn the other cheek, Dery's over-heated word-processor has ensured that most on-the-pulse magazines and journals around the world have at least one of his spirited defences or surgical strikes within its pages. This latest book is a collection of essays which previously appeared in embryonic form in such periodicals as Suck, 21.C, World Art, New York Times Magazine and Village Voice, threaded together via the metaphorical title--a turn-of-the-century description of Coney Island.
Considering the diversity of his subject matter - corporate logo-centrism, the Disneyfication of community, the Unabomber, Jerry Springer, Moby Dick, Heaven's Gate, bio-technology, formaldehyde photography, eugenics, etc. - Dery does an impressive job in sculpting a coherent vision of millennial America as an `infernal carnival' perched on a `fault zone'. In many ways a darker sequel to Escape Velocity, which has become the definitive guide to the wired world, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is itself a rollercoaster ride through a lurid landscape fairly pulsing with schizodistractions and apocalyptic contraptions.
Indeed Dery seems to relish his self-cast role as Calibanish carnival barker, hailing us to observe the freakshow that is the millennial USA and shudder at its gallery of grotesques. Of course Dery is too self-reflexive to labour the metaphor, and his focus on titillating topics often pulls back in order to expose the complex economic, historical and cultural forces which frame the important questions he is posing the reader. `Either/or questions for a both/and world,' as he puts it. Something like a hipper version of our own Stuart Littlemore, Dery is another persistent watchdog snapping at the heels of the Four Postmen of the Apocalypse: the military-industrial complex, the media, market fundamentalism and plain old ignorance. Like Mr Littlemore's, Dery's opinionated wit can be interpreted as an infuriating smugness by his detractors, or a spirited `touche' by his supporters.
After a preface on the grey zone between conspiracy theories and corporate practice, the book kicks off with an amusing, meditation on the ubiquity of Munch's The Scream as a meme infecting everything from key-rings to blow-up dolls. This is then followed by a long overdue essay on the significance of Clownaphobia, the creeping social suspicion that all clowns are psychopaths. The most compelling chapter, however, exposes the subterranean discursive affinities between the Unabomber's Wild Nature, and the digerati's Wired Nature. The individualistic intersection between this neo-Luddite's nostalgia and the futurist utopia valorised by Wired magazine is offered as the uncanny hinge on which a creaky country depends.
In the introduction, Dery urges us to consider his new offering as a `Gutenbergian artifact that rewards nonlinear reading and welcomes readers at ease with mental hyperlinks--far-flung associative leaps of logic... The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is an obsolete hunk of dead-tree hardware that went to sleep and dreamed it was a Web page'. The author's commentary reads like a slick guided tour through an encyclopedia of postmodern references. One unfortunate side-effect of this quality is that it invites the reader to fill in the gaps, based around the formula, `how can you talk about x without mentioning y?' Editorial constraints aside, Dery occasionally makes some frustrating omissions which I would attribute to judicious restraint if it weren't for more obvious name-checks elsewhere. For instance, how could he resist the sanity-warping image of a line of ping-pong-ball sucking clowns in a chapter on this very phenomenon? Especially when such creepy head-shots morph into Munch's scream in the collective imagination (or at least mine). And how can he neglect to mention Mr Methane as a modern-day incarnation of my near-namesake, Le Petomane, who enthralled the crown-heads of Europe with his anal antics? Other figures haunt the margins of the text: the death-row prisoner who ended up as scanned slices of meat on the Internet, Jocelyn Wildenstein, the plastic surgery addict, Kinko the Klown, Westworld's malfunctioning androids, and the horse-penis-transplant in Sex and Zen all cry out to be acknowledged and catalogued.
Another criticism concerns the carnivalesque strain of his study, which in some ways makes the book read like a prequel to Escape Velocity. (`Serial killers?!' sneered one friend. `Soooooooooo early 90s.') The reason that such a cutting-edge critic would risk his reputation by re-treading the cattle-trail left by a herd of stampeding Damien Hirstophiles analysts, or mentioning the meta-arcane practice of body-piercing, is two-fold. First, Dery can never resist having the last word, and secondly, this accelerated hyperculture of ours is far more sluggish than we like to believe. Just when you think Goths have crawled away to die in a corner, or trade their lace for `distressed nylon', along comes Marilyn Manson. Consider the retro-lounge craze which, while waning, seems to have lasted longer than the decade it was imitating. Similarly, that pesky capitalist exploitation never seems to go out of fashion.
Leaping between so-called `high' and `low' culture like Frogger on fast mode, Dery wears his pinko-liberal stripes proudly on his sleeve, pulling out Hobsbawm, Marx and Chomsky, amongst others, to bolster his argument against the statistical horrors of the New World Disorder. He depicts the postnational global economy as the tightening vice of a self-described technological elite on the hearts, minds and stomachs of the downsized and disenfranchised. While this may be an interrogation of antidemocratic forces, one can't help feeling that Dery's `indignant-cop/cheeky-cop' routine lets the suspect walk free. Finding hope in `cathartically deconstructive' insights and practices of certain social counter-currents is--as Dery practically admits - almost a default optimism (although I acknowledge it seems a tad harsh to blame someone for not being able to pin the crime on a system which has walked free till now). Dismissing post-modem irony as `passive resistance' also seems like a light sentence considering it is so often complicit with the consumerist mentalities he is attacking.
After ooohing and aaahing at Dery's linguistic pyrotechnics, one craves a closer reading (preferably containing at least one sentence without an adjective). It takes more than thumbnail sketches to roast the ideological beasts that he has so expertly skinned. Having said that, however, much of the pleasure of this book is provided by the throwaway one-liners: `The Brita [water] filter is our fallout shelter, the existential personal flotation device of the nervous nineties.' `Hitler might have had a hard time on Usenet.' And my favourite, `Jim Carrey is Georges Bataille's Solar Anus, with a change of underwear'.
Two more minor quibbles, since we're discussing Bataille, one of them personal and the other less so. Dery twice uses the phrase `excremental philosopher', and also `excremental fantasy' - a bit rich from someone who recently took me to task for using the term, `excremental nihilism' because it `didn't really mean anything'. In a different chapter, while discussing the gross-out strategies of cadaver-art, he also makes the claim that `French philosophy... tilts toward the formal, the theoretical, the cerebral; it has no idea what to do with a pig sawed in two'. This after an extended section on Bataille as an authority on abject, animalistic excess; someone who was, after all, a French philosopher. When Dery occasionally makes these binary statements, however, they appear more the products of convenience than conviction.
Indeed it was Bataille who once said something like, `I am only interested in books to which the author has been driven'. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium certainly satisfies on this account, and is a passionate wrap-up of a decade still shaky with Pre-Millennial Tension. While an index would not go astray, and the statistics are occasionally inconsistent (is it 8.4 million or 3 million Americans who live in gated communities?) the strengths of this book are self-evident to those familiar with his talent for exposing the ideological irritant within the rhetorical engines of the rich and powerful. The horrific shapes which contort wildly in Dery's funhouse of mirrors are a fascinating backdrop to his `perilous tapdance in the minefield between pop intellectualism and academic criticism'. Dery combines the esoteric and the ethical, the entertaining and the emphatic, in a valuable catalogue which we can only hope will continue to guide us through the circus of everyday life." - Dominic Pettman
