Abstract
For anyone who has offered a disconsolate thought in the company of others, the weight of the rhetorical situation becomes immediately apparent. Quite simply, there is something abrasive about the articulation of discontent—think what you wish, but out of decency don’t spoil my fun by sharing those gloomy sentiments. Although a rudimentary interpersonal example, this is the everyday communicative framework in which pessimistic rhetoric operates, fated as it is for condemnation in issuing a challenge to an overwhelmingly optimistic status quo. For reasons none too surprising, this rhetorical phenomenon has heretofore garnered relatively little scholarly attention. Yet in an age hyper-aware of bringing marginalized voices to the forefront of our consideration, it seems fitting that an extended meditation on the role of pessimistic rhetoric in our culture has finally come to fruition. Enter Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman’s accessibly comprehensive text, A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture.
Out of the gate, the authors do not shy away from addressing the requisite reflexivity demanded of those who discuss pessimism. We are reminded that the communicative task before such writers is always already undermined by a deeply entrenched anti-pessimistic bias that pervades contemporary Western culture. Providing us a language by which to understand certain strategies of avoiding engaging pessimistic ideas, Packer and Stoneman reference Norwegian thinker Peter Zapffe as a philosopher of interest. Accordingly, they utilize his terminology in an effort to sketch out the psychological tendencies to which many defer in an attempt to seek distraction and isolation from such depressing topics, to anchor the suffering of the world in recognizable schemas of meaning and purpose, and to instinctively sublimate any trepidation about our inexorable return to nonexistence. These framing considerations outlined in their introduction reappear throughout the book, and the authors do an admirable job of showing how different types of popular culture texts can subtly infuse pessimistic ideas into their rhetorical texture as a way to anticipate and disarm a potentially hostile audience reception.
At the core of their argument, Packer and Stoneman suggest that a productive avenue for exploring the rhetoric of philosophical pessimism—that is, life is meaningless suffering and we would be better off never having been born—is to look to more accessible mediated forms that might be able to successfully convey a pessimistic sentiment swathed in an otherwise innocuously familiar guise. As such, the chapters follow up on this idea, taking a case-study approach which draws on genre fiction, crime drama television, animated adult comedy, video games, and the sci-fi leanings of transhumanism. According to the authors, these cultural incarnations of a pessimistic message work insofar as they are “stratagems that are much less reliant on traditional models of rhetoric and argumentation and much more indebted to aesthetic, narrative, and esoteric means of persuasion” (p. 12). As each chapter progresses, there is an overarching concern with how the chosen example speaks back to and often times subverts the anti-pessimistic psychological tendencies set out in the introduction. This return to Zapffe’s ideas lends a great sense of cohesion to the text, grounding each chapter’s analysis in the quest to understand how the chosen case study best evinces a pessimistic ethos without completely alienating an audience.
Overall, the different popular culture texts selected lend themselves well to such a rhetorical analysis. Following the introduction, Chapter 1 examines how weird fiction, in creating a sort of oblique post–Lovecraftian unsettling atmosphere, works to destabilize our taken-for-granted understanding of space, time, knowledge, and human performance. Chapter 2 focuses on the first season of the critically acclaimed crime drama mini-series True Detective as an example of a police procedural that deftly interweaves dark philosophical musings wrapped up in a bleak (albeit “conventional”) murder mystery—and is all the richer for it. In Chapter 3, we branch out to see how adult animated comedy Rick and Morty ratchets up a sense of existential absurdity while couching pessimistic sentiment in overtly wacky, comedic storylines. Chapter 4 takes another right turn as the authors focus on how video games such as Final Fantasy VII present an audience a more kinesthetic experience of preparing for death and recognizing the illusion of agency as they play out various situations as screen avatars. Finally, in Chapter 5, the techno-philosophy of transhumanism is explored as sympathetic to the pessimist’s view that humanity is fundamentally on the decline, while offering its own dubious escape into the future of artificial intelligence as a corrective. Each chapter is relatively concise and does an excellent job of balancing philosophical ideas and description of the text selected for analysis while never losing focus on how said text works to cloak pessimistic ideas in a more accessible popular culture format.
A major strength of the book is how Packer and Stoneman really create an atmosphere that exemplifies exactly the rhetorical tactics it describes. Outside of the understandable boilerplate considerations and structure of an introduction and conclusion, the authors approach each case study with a certain respect for the cultural text described. This is to say, there is less a sense of burying the reader with chunks of philosophy and theory and attaching them to an interpretation as an afterthought. Rather, like the critical approach they advocate, the authors take the time to set up and consider the cultural implications of the text while slowly drawing us into its deeper, perhaps overlooked pessimistic qualities. Sure, names like Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Camus pop up and are expertly integrated into the analysis, but it is always in service of helping the reader gain a greater insight into the topic. For this reason, I will admit that the two chapters I knew least about (not being a video gamer or having too much knowledge about transhumanism) were the ones to which I felt most drawn. In each instance, Packer and Stoneman helped me to clearly understand the topic being presented from various critical perspectives while also bringing to the surface the various ways it presented pessimistic ideas in its own idiosyncratic ways. For this reason, readers unfamiliar with the philosophical tenets of pessimism or any of the individual genres examined should not feel hesitant to delve in and let the authors present their case in what is a very clear and engaging way.
A Feeling of Wrongness is an important book in the communication/cultural studies field. The authors’ take on this overlooked rhetorical phenomenon is detailed, well written, and is structured in such a way so as to connect with readers possessing various philosophical and/or pop-cultural interests and backgrounds. Of specific interest to those working at the intersection of crime and culture, the theorization of a rhetoric of “wrongness” seems apt for scholarly appropriation when focusing on sociological topics such as deviance, transgression and corruption. In light of such an academic focus, I can certainly see the text providing a sort of justification for and sample of how this language of pessimism has a place in the rhetorical fabric of criminological discourse, expanding a disciplinary lexicon aimed at dissecting aberrant behavior and “worst case” scenarios. Although I found myself wishing the authors had taken on additional television and film presentations of pessimistic phenomena, this certainly has less to do with authorial oversight and more with my genuine desire to read more about how Packer and Stoneman would have interpreted other works I could imagine as being congruent with their vision. At around 200 pages, the book is efficient in carrying out its primary scholarly objective and concludes in a place that will certainly contribute to future studies of this rhetorical phenomenon. For these reasons, I highly praise and recommend Packer and Stoneman’s book, and I would look forward to future work on the topic from these two authors.