The Books of My Life: The Image

 

In retrospect, Daniel Boorstin's The Image or What Ever Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962) is an odd book given its author, its subject, and the year in which it was published. That one of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, who was not really trained as a historian at all but was trained as a lawyer, and someone who wasn't a fan of Joseph McCarthy--pointing up the differences between American conservative liberals and the radical right--but who named names when called before HUAC, wrote a book in 1962 that prefigures much of the postmodernist theory of the late 1960s and after, seems at least a little bit odd to me.

Boorstin, like many of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, saw America as a new nation. American consensus historians saw the United States as something very different from old Europe with its conservative, conservative liberal, social liberal, and left wing ideologies, and the seemingly endless culture wars these ideologies gave rise to. In the consensus narrative America not only left behind the old ideological culture wars of old Europe but created, in the process, a land of economic opportunity for all. That there were some in this dream America who had no chance of living the American dream seemed to trouble America's consensus historians only a little. Those who really weren't offered the opportunity to do more than dream the American dream were often elided or only briefly mentioned in the dream world of consensus histories of the United States.

By the early 1960s Daniel Boorstin was beginning to wonder whether the world really was getting better thanks, in large part, to America exceptionalism and the American rise to great power status. Boorstin's The Image is, as its original subtitle suggests, all about the demise of the American dream. Before what Boorstin calls the Graphic Revolution, Americans, well mostly male Americans, like Europeans, mostly male Europeans, had images of heroes they could dream about and use as role models for their lives. They had adventures they could take partake in that provided new and very real experiences, an increase in learning, and that allowed one to prove one's mettle in what was kind of an epic journey almost worthy of New World Odysseus. They had art that was representational rather than an art that was imploding in and on itself and whose meaning, as a result, was as mysterious as the mystery cults of the ancient Hellenic and Roman world. After the Graphic Revolution, Boorstin argues, the world of the image with its simulated pseudo-events and pseudo-images that had no referent outside themselves and which many Americans had confused and conflated with real life, emerged. In this world of the pseudo-event photographs of exotic places, for instance, became evidence that one had been there. In comparison to the narcissistic pseudo-image the real thing could no longer compete with the unreal thing. Given all this I am sure Boorstin would not be surprised that Americans elected a capitalist flim flam man and celebrity charlatan as president in 2016.

Boorstin's The Image is a fascinating read from the vantage point of post postmodernism, from the vantage point of an intellectual terrain in which postmodernist theory has become commonplace in Western intellectual culture. Though it comes from a different time and a different theoretical place than late 20th century postmodern theory it is strikingly similar in its analysis and diagnosis of the postmodernist age of simulated fractured identities and images. For these reasons alone, and because I do think it diagnosis the simulated or tautological "spirit" of the postmodernist age pretty accurately, The Image is definitely worth reading.