out of history as a mistake and translated the 1970s performance of any act of personal or professional stability (holding a job, remaining married, staying out of a mental hospital, or simply not dying) into heroism. First corrupted as a reference to those “survivors” of “the sixties” who were now engaged in “real life,” the word contained an implacable equation: survival was real life.
Soon enough, anyone whose material or physical existence was patently not in jeopardy could claim the title of survivor, and to be named a survivorwas to receive the highest praise. The idea grew arms and legs. Intimations of aggression crept in: ads for a new line of suitcases, “The Survivor,” made it plain that what was at stake was the survival of the fittest—in the jungle of the new economy, nothing else mattered. The idea conquered ontology as it overran ethics. “Garp is a survivor,” wrote a fan of John Irving’s novel
The World According to Garp,
knowing full well that Irving’s hero is shot to death at the age of thirty-three. Here was the ultimate victory of the idea over its word: the dead survivor.
The notion of what in 1976 Bruno Bettelheim called “a completely empty survivorship,” where “survival is all, it does not matter how, why, what for,” invaded every form of discourse. Bettelheim was writing about the new philosophical sanctification of “survival,” as opposed to even a fantasy of resistance, in Nazi extermination camps: according to such arguments as Lina Wertmuller’s film
Seven Beauties
and Terrence Des Pres’s camp-study,
The Survivor,
he said, “the only thing that is really important, is life in its crudest, merely biological form . . . we must ‘live beyond compulsions of culture’ and “by the body’s crude claims.’ ” One had to live, in other words, according to a dictatorship of necessity, not beyond culture but before it, and as Hannah Arendt once wrote, the dictates of the body were inimical to freedom: when survival took precedence, “freedom had to be surrendered to the urgency of the life process itself.” In 1951 in
The Rebel,
Albert Camus retold a different story—
Ernst Dwinger in his
Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music audible to him alone
—a story, Camus said, of an “harmonious insurrection.” But Camus was no longer fashionable; neither were cold and hunger or the “state of constant want and acute misery” Arendt meant by “necessity.” Language turned inside out, so that culture was a compulsion, necessity a luxury, survival an affluent sensibility, and thus the creed of survivalism was embraced most eagerly not by those suffering privation, but by rock stars. You could read the new ideology off the record titles:
Survivor, Rock and Roll Survivor,
“You’re a Survivor,”
I Survive,
“Soul Survivor,”
Street Survivors, Survival,
Surviving,
“I Will Survive,” on and on into endless redundancy—in almost every case signifying the offerings of performers who should have been stunned into an honorable silence years before, but who now found themselves granted the dispensation to purvey their wares forever and, what is more, to celebrate the act as a moral triumph, a triumph that devalued any effort to pursue adventure and risk. The exchange of a guarantee of dying of boredom for a guarantee of not dying of hunger was a good deal—the only game in town.
NOW
Now identified with those who had the money and the corporate affiliations to secure the most sophisticated and arcane tools, rock ’n’ roll became an old story: a parody of the time had a rock star demanding that his label fund the recording of his next album in outer space, but it didn’t come off as a parody. Rock ’n’ roll became
Soon enough, anyone whose material or physical existence was patently not in jeopardy could claim the title of survivor, and to be named a survivorwas to receive the highest praise. The idea grew arms and legs. Intimations of aggression crept in: ads for a new line of suitcases, “The Survivor,” made it plain that what was at stake was the survival of the fittest—in the jungle of the new economy, nothing else mattered. The idea conquered ontology as it overran ethics. “Garp is a survivor,” wrote a fan of John Irving’s novel
The World According to Garp,
knowing full well that Irving’s hero is shot to death at the age of thirty-three. Here was the ultimate victory of the idea over its word: the dead survivor.
The notion of what in 1976 Bruno Bettelheim called “a completely empty survivorship,” where “survival is all, it does not matter how, why, what for,” invaded every form of discourse. Bettelheim was writing about the new philosophical sanctification of “survival,” as opposed to even a fantasy of resistance, in Nazi extermination camps: according to such arguments as Lina Wertmuller’s film
Seven Beauties
and Terrence Des Pres’s camp-study,
The Survivor,
he said, “the only thing that is really important, is life in its crudest, merely biological form . . . we must ‘live beyond compulsions of culture’ and “by the body’s crude claims.’ ” One had to live, in other words, according to a dictatorship of necessity, not beyond culture but before it, and as Hannah Arendt once wrote, the dictates of the body were inimical to freedom: when survival took precedence, “freedom had to be surrendered to the urgency of the life process itself.” In 1951 in
The Rebel,
Albert Camus retold a different story—
Ernst Dwinger in his
Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music audible to him alone
—a story, Camus said, of an “harmonious insurrection.” But Camus was no longer fashionable; neither were cold and hunger or the “state of constant want and acute misery” Arendt meant by “necessity.” Language turned inside out, so that culture was a compulsion, necessity a luxury, survival an affluent sensibility, and thus the creed of survivalism was embraced most eagerly not by those suffering privation, but by rock stars. You could read the new ideology off the record titles:
Survivor, Rock and Roll Survivor,
“You’re a Survivor,”
I Survive,
“Soul Survivor,”
Street Survivors, Survival,
Surviving,
“I Will Survive,” on and on into endless redundancy—in almost every case signifying the offerings of performers who should have been stunned into an honorable silence years before, but who now found themselves granted the dispensation to purvey their wares forever and, what is more, to celebrate the act as a moral triumph, a triumph that devalued any effort to pursue adventure and risk. The exchange of a guarantee of dying of boredom for a guarantee of not dying of hunger was a good deal—the only game in town.
NOW
Now identified with those who had the money and the corporate affiliations to secure the most sophisticated and arcane tools, rock ’n’ roll became an old story: a parody of the time had a rock star demanding that his label fund the recording of his next album in outer space, but it didn’t come off as a parody. Rock ’n’ roll became
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