Overfed, starving
on The Topeka School by Ben Lerner and Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space by Keller Easterling
“I didn’t mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, its mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound. How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.”
The Topeka School follows Adam Gordon – interscholastic debater, prolific orator, and tempestuous product of upper-middle class suburban upbringing – as he looks to win the 1997 National Speech and Debate Tournament while grappling with (white, male) teenage angst and psychoanalysing parents. Adam the debater wields language as a tool: of perceived intellect, of popularity; challenging his opponents on form and topicality, delivering rapid-fire speech of arguments, elaboration and citation woven together in an unintelligible spread. Adam the teenager wields language as a weapon, manipulating his parents through rage and rare bouts of benevolence. The audience – in both the theatre and at home – is bewitched by Adam’s cerebral disposition and surrenders to his authority.
In between Adam’s narrative, Ben Lerner interposes the story of Darren Eberheart, the town’s loner. Darren, the story implies, has a learning disability; often choosing quiet than to risk inarticulacy and regress further into his status as Topeka High’s punching bag, sob story, village idiot. He is the town’s token of inclusion, invited to parties and basketball games out of pity, or formality. The crux of Lerner’s story is Darren’s involvement in a senior party gone wrong: The fraternity of Topeka High, under the influence of alcohol and toxic showmanship, lured Darren with the possibility of friendship then roused him into violence – a kind of hazing ceremony. “Hadn’t they always been told to include him?” Adam said, trying to defend his involvement, then slowly descending into the realisation that their supposed kindness, as with any kindness that feeds only the giver’s ego, is cruel:
“The opposite might also be true: that they were viciously punishing Darren for what he represented, the bad surplus. The man-child [...] It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation: the man-child was almost fit for school or work or service,...the real men – who are themselves perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end – had to differentiate themselves with violence.”
A mindset that breeds the culture of toxic masculinity. Patronising, castigating exploits veiled as protection; a barrage of propaganda and reassurance sans correlating actions. A failure of systems, a crisis of communication.
This language, of deceiving intent and damaging impact, is one used by global performers – politicians, self-help gurus, and on a less impressive level of influence, finance bros – to create alluring personas and stories. In her book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, architect and urbanist Keller Easterling argues that these stories may both propel and conceal disposition, described by sociologist Erving Goffman as “all the gestures, postures, facial expressions, and myriad subtexts deployed in an individual’s almost theatrical presentation of ‘self’”. When extended into systems and infrastructural elements, stories has the potential to transform cultures and spaces, as seen in the rapid expansion of suburban housing:
“The developer William Levitt associated his suburban housing with familial and patriotic narratives that were particularly infectious in the post-war period, and such stories accelerated the spatial effects of the house as multiplier. The house, its repetitive organisation, and the story attached to it all constitute information that contributes to disposition.”
At its worst, stories such as these are designed to deceive, to distract viewers from dangerous dispositions just beneath the surface. This tendency is perhaps best exemplified by the girlboss – the independent hustler, the unstoppable dreamer, desirable and accomplished. She is the obedient child of choice feminism that believes, truly, that her achievements and independence alone is a beacon for all women, that her immaculate image is purely the fruits of her diligence and productivity. “She looks like an instagram,” Jia Tolentino writes in her essay Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman, “which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace.” Just as she deceives her audience, she herself is deceived: the aesthetic of the ideal woman, Tolentino writes, will grow to recognise her new lifestyle, finding fresh insecurities to prey upon.
These narratives veer comfortably between fact and fiction. They are stories repeated one too many times with such cogency that it’s near impossible to discredit, even with trained skepticism. Or, perhaps, we have become so embedded in the story that we can’t quite manage a way out of it, knowing that it will grow around us like vines, parasites. Our doubts grow to become a formality, or as Lerner dubs it, “repetitions just beneath the threshold of [his] consciousness”. I often find myself bombarded with stories: a cocktail of left-wing activism and Fox News, a roulette of truths and falsehoods that are increasingly grey and blurry, a kind of homophone. They turn and turn in my head, a glossolalia I’m unable to exorcise, one of Adam’s unintelligible spread – a swirling black hole, a void. Why is it that we remain hopeful? Why have we not surrendered to fatalism? Lerner writes of Topeka’s young men (no, I can’t believe I find this relatable, either):
“[...] they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, ...they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving.”
Tonight, developing stories on Afghanistan: Angelina Jolie joins instagram, Biden reminds the international community that the US mission was never supposed to have been nation building. This day on Feminism: Roxane Gay on the New York Times, men more horrified of false accusations than they are of violence against women, Kendall Jenner claiming the Kardashian name held her career back. Then, Lerner again: “How much easier would it be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages?” How much easier would it be if the villain comes with devil horns, never changing their costume, never faking their accent? Instead they are disguised, changing partners and gaining new enemies every other day to mask their dangerous dispositions. I wonder, I wander. I am overfed, I am starving.
Darren, in a way, is Lerner’s chip of sympathy and hope. In an insert of Darren’s point of view, Lerner recounts Adam and Darren’s days at Bright Circle Montessori: Adam making up a ritual, giving Darren the power to make a wish for something to happen. Darren was obsessed with tornadoes, Lerner writes, and he said he’d use his power to make one happen. Later, at nap time, a storm comes. He must have let out a prophecy, Darren thought:
“He hurries back to his cot and pulls the Peanuts sheets up over his head and tries to call off the storm he’s summoned. To his rabbit whose name is lost he says again and again that he is sorry. And then we hear the sirens starting up.”
Both Adam and Darren recognise the power of language to affect, to inflict. Adam rejoices in his power, wearing it on his sleeves, even boasting a National championship trophy for it. Darren cowers behind his, believing it to be cruel; Darren is an outlier, a source of tenderness in an ocean of Adams. Lerner admits this, too: "Darren performed a critical social function: he naturalized their own appropriated talk and ritual; Darren helped them keep it real."
Darren is the audience, all of us, fed choreographed lines day in and day out. They taunt us, the Adams of the world, and then we rage at emptiness because we can’t really prove the lyrics satanic. Shameless, those Adams, ivy-league educated, well-travelled, hedge-fund managing, philanthropic Adams. “Of course they knew better,” Lerner writes, “but knowing is a weak state.”
