the New Pantagruel

Lifewords: A Review of Philip Rieff’s My Life among the Deathworks

by Jess Castle

Reviewed in this essay: Philip Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.

ulture is the form of fighting before the firing actually begins.” So reads the first of countless bold pronouncements about culture, authority, and identity to be found in Philip Rieff’s first full-length book since 1973’s Fellow Teachers. The return of this once-prominent social theorist was worth the wait. Even those readers familiar with his previous writings are likely to be overwhelmed by the scope and range of My Life among the Deathworks. It is Rieff’s most ambitious work to date, and although that ambition turns out to be problematic, it is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain new perspectives on our ongoing culture war.

The essential starting point is the useful model of comparative cultural analysis that Rieff lays out in the first chapter and uses throughout the rest of the book. First world culture, which is “pagan and in the majority everywhere,” has as its defining characteristic a “primacy of possibility,” or pop—a broadly inclusive concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal dreamtime to Plato’s Forms. These governing primacies of possibility, being metadivine in their primacy, also contain the hidden limits of possibility: the Greek gods and goddesses, Rieff points out, were themselves subject to fate, which is the defining motif of the first world culture. Second world culture is grounded in “the traditions out of Jerusalem” in which the principle of the world’s creation is not a mythic, metadivine reality, but a divine revelation that commands obedience and places clear and absolute limits on possibility. Second world culture’s defining motif is faith. The third world culture of late modernity and postmodernity recognizes no governing divine or metadivine presence, and is characterized by recyclings of the mythic motifs of first world culture in sinister, fictive primordialities like race, class, and sexuality (though these primordialities are ontologically unmoored, unlike the pops of pagan culture), and by its relentless assaults on the divine revelations at the heart of second world culture. The motif of this third world culture is fiction.

For Rieff, the unprecedented aspect of this third culture is that it makes no effort to translate sacred order into social order, which is for him the true task of culture. Rather, it is devoted to the destruction of previous cultures’ sense of sacred order, especially the sacred order of second culture, inseparable as it is from divine commandment. As he puts it, “I intend to describe that unprecedented condition of fighting against the cultural predicate that organized all human societies until almost our own time. That predicate I call sacred order.”

It is important to note that these cultures, though they correspond to periods of actual cultural production, are also used by Rieff to describe inward dispositions that exist synchronously and compete for dominance in our selves—though the third culture is now dominant. The third culture disposition has been introduced by cultural elites, mostly artists and writers. Accordingly, much of the book is devoted to deconstructions of their “deathworks.” Deathwork is Rieff’s term for “the resolution, in life and/or art, of a particular world creation.” More plainly put, deathworks are cultural creations that function as hidden assaults on true culture. In his analyses of third culture deathworks, Rieff seeks to expose the de-creation—the undoing of sacred order—that constitutes the central task of late modern literature and art. Rieff gives brief, dense readings of Duchamp, Picasso, Joyce, Kafka—and the list goes on. He writes, “I hope to take the reader behind and beyond contemporary reality by juxtaposing events and works that do not appear, on first reading, to be related. Call it deconstructing radical contemporaneity.” These readings are intended to allow the reader to see clearly through late modernity and enter sacred order, to which we have been blinded by so many images destructive of it. Rieff’s breakdowns of deathworks are deeply compelling, and their logic hard to dispute.

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