Although it didn’t have an appreciable effect on my own personal workload, it’s been spring break hereabouts, which means that temperatures are slowly rising and my inbox is nearing a manageable level. Both are welcome developments, which I celebrated last Sunday by spending most of my time and attention reading.
This week, I finished up Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein. In addition to being one of my favorite words, Doppelganger came out last fall and promptly showed up on a number of 10-best lists for 2023, so I don’t feel like I’m giving away any great secret when I describe it as a book worth reading. The Guardian’s list provides a pretty solid thumbnail:
Viciousness towards famous women is also part of the story in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (Allen Lane), in which she becomes obsessed with her half-namesake Naomi Wolf, and the latter’s curious transformation from hip feminist to Covid conspiracy theorist and truther on the topic of contrails. It doesn’t help that Klein (author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine) is so often confused with her subject “in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media”. But as she continues “cringe-following” Wolf her themes widen and darken, taking in a cultural history of doubles and evil twins, conspiracy theories more generally, the rise of the populist right in the person of Steve Bannon, and a close reading of Philip Roth, whose Operation Shylock she reads persuasively as the key to many such mythologies.
Compared to the last few books I’ve been reading, Doppelganger is both lengthier and more inductive. I’m tempted to characterize it as bloggier as a result, but I don’t mean that as any sort of insult. Rather, it’s a book whose style I recognize (and tend to inhabit myself), in that it takes kind of a quirky observation (the fact that lots of people tend to mistake one Naomi for the other), and spins it into a much more substantive and broadly relevant set of issues. Klein dates herself in some ways throughout the book, particularly in what I’d argue are sort of take-it-or-leave-it attitudes towards social media, but I’m the same age. So while I felt the generational difference in a book like Filterworld, I felt a generational similarity with Doppelganger that was palpable.
There’s also something resolutely academic about her response to the Wolf confusion as well. Klein’s reaction to being “doubled” in this way is to seek out as many literary accounts of doppelgangers as she can find, and the list (which I won’t try to assemble here) is impressive.
[One place where Klein and I diverge, I suppose, is that I thought instantly of mass culture (tv, comics). Early on, my mind went to Community’s “darkest timeline,” as well as all of the multiversal stuff from comic books, not to mention “evil twin” sort of stuff. It’s not a big deal, but it does pitch her discussion in a certain way. I may write about this later.]
Rather than try to fit all of my thoughts into a single post, I’ll most likely break it into two or three, so I’ll be a bit more descriptive here. On one level, Doppelganger is a book about Naomi Wolf, and her “transformation,” which has an inadvertent impact on Klein. Klein herself has built a reputation for her critiques of capitalism and globalization, advocacy for climate justice, etc. In some ways, she returns to the subject of No Logo and her pedagogical work to think through the late capitalist, social-media-powered system that encourages us to generate our own doubles (personal brands, digital avatars, et al.). One of the things that’s interesting about this move is that Klein isn’t writing a biography of Wolf so much as a brandography; as we learn late in the book, the two of them have only ever interacted directly once, very early in Wolf’s career (and prior to Klein’s, basically). If we double ourselves to perform on social media (and to write books), then Doppelganger is already ensnared in doubles of doubles. Part of its length, I suspect, is due to the care that Klein takes to tease out these implications.1
There’s a version of this book that could have focused mostly on the curious overlap-then-polarization of (good) Klein vs (bad) Wolf, and for a while, that’s kind of what I expected. Maybe that’s because I wrote recently about two wolves, and the early part of this book narrates the contrast between how each of them got “fed” over the years. Klein spends the first part of the book exploring her own “failed brand” and the ups-and-downs (and re-ups) in the career of the “Other Naomi.” She follows Wolf’s career through a broad range of what at one point Klein calls “exaggerations, speculations, and baseless claims,” before Wolf locates a new role for herself as an (ex?)liberal commentator on Fox and in particular recurring guest appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
The second part of Klein’s book hunkers down for a long visit to this “Mirror World,” where the welcome and encouragement that Wolf receives from the Right “represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring—a mimicking2 of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.” In Wolf’s case, what’s going on is something that Klein describes as “diagonalism,” where populations that might otherwise be substantially distant from each other on the left-right spectrum gather, strange bedfellows style, around a single issue (in this case, vaccine denialism). These aren’t simple disputes taking place in a shared reality, but fundamental disparities in worldview. “The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality—we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.” The refusal to acknowledge any common ground, while drawing on the terminology and ideas of the other side, eats away at the relationship between our discourse and the world it describes. “How comforting it would be,” Klein writes, “if Wolf were a fake we could unmask—and not a symptom of a mass unraveling of meaning afflicting, well, everything.”
In some ways, Klein’s book could also have stopped with its exploration into the Mirror World of Bannon and folks like him, but that last idea, that all of our mirror worlds are symptomatic of a deeper malaise, is ultimately the place where Doppelganger arrives at, which she terms the Shadow Lands, “the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy.” Conspiracism, for many of its flaws, remains a way to make sense of our problematic world—“conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right,” but fail to target the broader social structures that underlie things. The third part of the book is where Klein really draws a bright line from her earlier work to the present day: “The story we are trapped in is not about a people, or two people, or twins. It’s a story about a logic, the logic that has been ravaging our world for so very long,” a logic that includes capitalism, the rampant deregulation that’s been our lot since Reagan, and the hyper-individualist neoliberalism that we see on display in social media (including, specifically, sectors of the influence economy).
By the time I reached the final chapters of Klein’s book, I felt a number of parallels between her account and Young’s in Wrong. I didn’t do a search on Klein’s book, but there were a number of spots where she talks about distillation in a way that felt resonant with Young’s discussion. While we might not consider them symmetric, the fact that I think both Young and Klein raise is that distillation happens on all sides of the divide. And we’re incentivized to pursue it in ways that distract us from the larger problems we’re facing. Klein writes that “we must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world that does not require Shadow Lands, that is not predicated on sacrificial people and sacrificial ecologies and sacrificial continents. More than imagine it, we must begin, at once, to build it.”
Easier said than done, I know, but personally, I still believe (and I think Klein would agree) that we need to be able to say (and think) this first, and there are too few of us doing so. In the second part of her book, Klein critiques anti-vax momfluencers: “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.” This was one of the best encapsulations of the real conflict at play in Doppelganger, and it’s ultimately the argument that her book makes.
I could keep going and.or flesh out these descriptions more, but I think I’m going to leave it there, and pick up some smaller pieces for my next couple of posts.
I should note that implication is an especially useful word here; etymologically, it comes to us from the Latin verb plicare, “to fold.” Folding is a form of doubling, too. I know that this is me being overly clever, which is why this is a footnote.
Klein: “For instance, when Bannon states that his armed and authoritarian posse is being “othered” by leftists and liberals, he is appropriating an important term that analysts of authoritarianism have used to describe how fascists cast their targets as less than human, making them easier to discard and even exterminate.”