Notes from the Revolution

Maura O'Connor's
introduction to Thomas de Zengotita,
Voices from the Edge, EnlightenNext World Center

I want to start by saying that it's really a great pleasure to be able to introduce our speaker tonight. Unfortunately, the first thing that concerned me when I asked if I could do this introduction was not what I was going to say but rather, what was I going to wear? (laughter) And the second thing that concerned me was the joke that I was going to make about thinking about what I was going to wear at the beginning of my introduction. Luckily enough, both of these things just so happen to illustrate the very subject matter that we're going to be learning about tonight, which is mediation and the increasing self-reflexivity that we're all experiencing as a result of it.

One of the things that I can virtually guarantee you right now is that once you hear about these ideas, you'll never be able to forget them. I think you'll find, like I have, that they'll haunt your thought processes, they'll make you question your own sense of self, and they'll also make you look at the world around you completely anew. I haven't been able to shake the work of tonight's guest since 1999 when I read an essay in Harper's Magazine called “The Gunfire Dialogues,” in which he wrote that young people today are going “ironic” rather than psychotic, and this made perfect sense to me at the time. But it was also in this essay that he began to lay out the core ideas of what would follow in his later work, including his new book Mediated, which came out this past March. De Zengotita wrote in “The Gunfire Dialogues” that “as a gigantic matter of historic fact, our world is becoming so intensely reflexive that distinctions between action and performance and reality and representation are eroding at every level of our lives.”

Now, when I read this essay I wouldn't have been able to know that four years later I would be interning at a magazine called What Is Enlightenment? and that I would have the opportunity to interview him. When I emailed him asking as much, I received a response that basically said, “Okay. Sure. Here's my phone number.” There were no Dear Maura's; there were no Sincerely Tom's. It was what you might call a brisk correspondence. (laughter) Nevertheless, I was besides myself and for good reason. Because I called him up a couple of days after that and proceeded to have one of the most enlivening conversations that I've ever had. It was during that conversation that I asked him what he felt the significance of young people growing up in the shadow of the 1960s was. He encouraged me to think about what it must have felt to grow up in the 1830s. They, of course, grew up in the shadow of the French Revolution. I'm quite sure, he told me, that they were thinking, “Now that was a revolution. Anything that we could possibly do is just going to be an imitation.” It was also in that conversation that he managed to describe the guise of postmodernism—or what he called “the mood” in the high Hegelian sense. In surfer speak, he said, “Hey, wait a minute. Chill, man.” And that is the exact quote. (laughter)

And since that initial conversation my own understanding of why it is so desperately important for each of us to begin to grasp and understand his work has only grown and increased. It's my opinion that his distinct skill and his passion are roaming the landscapes of our American culture with an unparalleled power of observation and depth of understanding. Of course, this wouldn't matter if he wasn't able to come back from these jaunts and communicate what he saw to us. And luckily for us, he's also a master of the pen and he's a wonderful, wonderful teacher. So ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Thomas de Zengotita.

Visit WIE Unbound to listen to the full audio of Thomas de Zengotita's talk.

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