Cary Tennis is a smart guy. Responding to a woman who wants to marry her boyfriend, but is troubled by persistent thoughts of an intense affair she had in college, he has this to say:
One of the things addicts do -- and believe me, this is my nature I'm talking about -- is we have a peak experience and we try to stay up there. Instead of letting it pass and contemplating it with awe from a distance, instead of feeling the bittersweetness of the world's fleeting joys, we want to keep eating the candy.
So far so good. I have a bit of a problem with the essentialism of "the things addicts do" -- as if you could draw a sharp line between the addicted and the nonaddicted -- and I'd rather substitute "humans" for "addicts" here. But Tennis's own argument, as he continues it, makes that case for me, albeit implicitly:
But you can't bottle what happened to you. You will have other intense, enlightening, mind-bending experiences, but each one will be singular and unforeseen. It's only the addict who thinks you can keep getting that same high. (I suppose therein lies the link between addiction and mass production.)
The equivalence between mass production and addiction undermines his claim that it's only the addict who thinks this way. The structure of addiction -- of wanting to "bottle" and repeat the peak experiences -- is part and parcel of mass culture; it's built into the nature of capitalism, if not the whole logic of being.
But it really gets good in the wrapup:
But keep in mind that whatever you make routine will no longer be spectacular: No sooner do you try to build in such peak experiences then their peaks become rounded.
From the revelations of your first acid trip to the pathetic banality of your hundredth; from the fresh excitement of Mondrian's paintings to the static, trapped design dullness of a coffee mug with the same design; from the odd uniqueness of Warhol's soup cans to the dreary art school rehashing ("look, it's different, because it's a tuna can"); from the raging eccentricity of the Stooges to the domesticated rebellion of the Strokes. Consumer culture requires the peak experiences, but can only imitate and level them into mediocrity.
The peaks become rounded: the inexorable law of cultural, and psychic, erosion.
Posted by Chris at March 25, 2004 10:04 AM