The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting “spread” in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

as he enumerated in accelerating succession the various unpredictable ways implementation of his opponents’ plan would lead to nuclear holocaust (almost every plan, no matter how minor, would lead to nuclear holocaust),

what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

“The opposite of a truth,” Klaus quoted, “is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—“may be another profound truth.”

we also felt like—we also were—two feminists forming a therapeutic alliance in a context where those slippages were typically used to reinforce patriarchal relations.

Once at a staff meeting I brought up the issue of salary differentials between men and women and later that day, when I was on Caplan’s couch, he encouraged me to think about how my concerns about being paid less than men might relate to penis envy.

Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.

There was this incredible sense of relief when I let go: this language has ended in pure sound. This language has reached its limit, and a new one will be built,

couldn’t really take them seriously, or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity. (Of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.)

When one of the Men called, and I said hello, and he dropped into his whisper to call me a cunt of whatever variety, I would pretend that I couldn’t hear: “I’m sorry, can you speak up?” Typically what would happen is that the guy would repeat, confused, whatever he’d said a little more loudly, and while I could hear him fine, I would say, equally politely, betraying no knowledge of the nature of the call, “I’m sorry, it’s not a great connection, can you be a little louder?” And I’d just keep doing this, keep politely asking the loser to speak up. He’d maybe repeat his message once or twice, but he would always eventually get too embarrassed by the sound of his own voice—or maybe he was worried about being overheard;

He must, to fit the type, be not only male, but also white and able-bodied: the perverted form of the empire’s privileged subject. If he were a woman or a racialized or otherwise othered body, he would be in immediate mortal danger from sexual predators and police. It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation:

Of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state; you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy, develop the right desires from within the wrong life; the travesty of inclusion they were playing out with Darren—their intern—was also a citation and critique of the Foundation’s methods; if they were at once caring for and castigating Darren, they were also modeling and mocking their own parents.

competitors wandering around mumbling to themselves like Foundation lunatics or Bluetooth users of the future as they tried to commit outlines to memory.)

The parallel with the larger culture was imperfect, but undeniable: the supposedly disinterested policy wonks debate the intricacies of health care or financial regulation in a jargon designed to be inaccessible to the uninitiated while the more presidential speakers test out plainspoken value claims on civilians, a division underwritten by petrodollars.

we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them. More often we fed them.

the young Evanson embodied what disturbed us—the choreographed spontaneity, all in the service of manipulation, of winning.

the Brain had offered him to the Men, thinking he would somehow know better. And now he was a graduate of the Topeka School.

instead of just defending a welfare state, he was going all-out in heavily iambic prose (see him nod) against the maximization of profit as the organizing principle of a society. It was ludicrous and I loved it, my man-child quoting Rosa Luxemburg to a bunch of future corporate lawyers or their lobbyists in the shadow of the world’s largest mall.

But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.

what mattered was that language, the fundamental medium of sociality, was being displayed in its abstract capacity, and that he would catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of grammar as pure possibility.