HOW WE GOT HERE, David Shields

Full title: How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon. I admire the typography-only cover. This book is paired with a film that I haven’t seen yet – it’s on Amazon and Tubi, apparently.

David Shields did REALITY HUNGER, the book that was ground zero for the autofiction / autotheory boom, a large collection of quotations interspersed with the work of the author himself, all attributions scrubbed off so you could never be sure who was who. HOW WE GOT HERE utilises a similar style, but with all the sources named.

His point here is very simple:

…politics as nothing more or less than performance art: After forty years of warning us about the dangers of postmodernism, the right now sounds like Jacques Derrida, and in the wake of Trump’s kidnapping of Perspectivism, the left now sounds like (conservative philosopher) Allan Bloom.

And he assembles his argument like a more spiteful James Burke in CONNECTIONS, hooking together moments in several thousand years’ worth of philosophy as a journey towards professional untruth.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. —Andre Breton

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters. —Donald Trump

It’s an entertaining piece of assemblage, eccentric, often funny, generally intriguing. Shields is a skilled collagist, and it’s a bit like reading an Adam Curtis documentary with a sense of humour and more of a handle on human nature.

HOW WE GOT HERE, David Shields (UK) (US+)