The First Draft of the Future
Emily Witt’s journeys through the fragments of the end of history.
Emily Witt’s new memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, opens with her lying on the beach in Fire Island, wondering about the future. It is July 2016 and she is single. “Maybe I would be invited to a party. Maybe a relative would die. ... Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come.”
Witt’s first memoir, Future Sex, would appear a few months later. That book, written in first-person but too full of reporting to precisely call a memoir, also begins with Witt alone, wondering about the future. At the time she saw her sexual experience culminating in an ideal future of monogamous love and nuclear family, “like a monorail gliding to a stop at the Epcot Center.” Her friends see love as “an eschatological event, messianic in its totality.” But she has turned 30 and is beginning to doubt: “As I got older, I began to worry that it would not arrive for me.”
And so Witt decamps from Brooklyn to San Francisco in search of a different story about the progression of sex and relationships over the course of a life, one that might better describe her own experience. One can sense a certain reticence to write in first-person; she has said that her editor encouraged her to insert herself into the story. Her reflexivity can be withering: “I would not be the first person to use California as an excuse.” As she embeds herself with porn producers, polyamorists, and evangelists of “orgasmic meditation,” Witt portrays herself as a perpetual outsider peering into the glow of other people’s certainty and happiness, yearning for something like what they have but riddled with anxity and skepticism. Even after of months of participating in orgasmic meditation, whose proponents see it brightly as “the secret to a better life,” Witt confesses that she “felt more comfortable in situations where I had the right to remain maladjusted, to leave some feelings undisclosed, to acknowledge and enjoy the prospect of my own mortality.”
But Witt’s editor was right: her presence as a participant-observer, her blend of openness and reluctance, made Future Sex more than the sum of its parts. Witt combines her training as an investigative reporter with the erudition of a critic in a distinctive method for seeking the historical outlines of the present: submerge herself in subcultures that believe they have found the answer to contemporary life and open herself to the possibility they could be right while also placing them in a wider context. Though driven by the dramas of individual life—what it feels like to live right now—Witt sketches the scaffolding of collective experience: cultural and media narratives, rapidly-evolving technologies, transformations of neighborhoods, who has money and who doesn’t and where the money comes from.
That approach enables her to see through superficial descriptions of the present—for example, that it can be adequately characterized as a porn-saturated era of sexual libertinism. Witt argues that despite the ubiquity of internet pornography, the prevalence of casual “non-relationships” and the apparent explosion of polyamory, the old narrative of a proper and fulfilling life culminating in monogamous marriage has lost little of its cultural dominance. Like the social conservatives they ostensibly opposed, progressive millennials like Witt took it for granted that past experiments with different sexual and relational arrangements had “failed” or “gone too far.” They quietly reverted to pre-1960s ideals without perceiving that they were “ersatz…like the reconstruction of a baroque national monument that had been destroyed by a bomb.”
But though Witt develops genuine appreciation for their appeal, contemporary alternatives to the dominant blueprint of monogamous marriage also feel ersatz—attempts to rediscover roads not taken that are possible only in ephemeral bubbles, especially bubbles created by wealth. She sympathetically observes a trio of young Google employees negotiating their unconventional relationship, taking mushrooms and MDMA to push through difficult conversations and into more rawly honest connections with each other. They go to Burning Man and electronic music festivals and organize sex parties, building a community around themselves defined by experiment and care. “I envied their community of friends, the openness with which they shared their attractions,” Witt writes. But she can’t help but notice its conditions of possibility, the mark it leaves on the city around them. The “hyperbolic optimism” of the polyamorous techies was “totally ungrounded in any wider reality.” It made sense only “in the highly specific time and place of San Francisco, in the first half of the second decade of the new millennium, among a group of young, educated people with high standards of living.”
Future Sex ends on an unsettled note, with Witt wondering if she has witnessed the future but ambivalent about what she has seen. “I had wanted to seek out a higher principle of life than the search for mere contentment, to pursue emotional experiences that could not be immediately transposed to a party of young people in a cell phone ad.” Witt had once hoped for a culturally authorized happy ever after, and then had attempted to follow her body into an alternative story. But “the future was a discomfiting cultural story, and difficult to discern.”
When Future Sex enters the narrative of Health and Safety, Witt has discarded her Wellbutrin and begun to experiment with psychedelics, and also fallen for a younger computer programmer and music producer named Andrew. He watches with pride as she reads from the book at McNally Jackson in New York, but promoting it makes her feel like a “fraud.” After attempting to open herself to a brave new sexual world, she discovers she still wanted most of all to be in love and have a boyfriend. “Now I was settling into convention and finding that it fit like a glove.”
Witt views her increasingly abject love for Andrew as something of a regression in her newfound values even though they agree to a loosely defined open relationship and she resists daydreaming about the future. When she refers throughout the book to “losing herself,” it is not to drugs or to partying but to her boyfriend. She flies to Berlin alone, parties at Berghain, and sleeps with other men to regain her “solitude,” but returns with a “sense of surrender”; she has “no choice but to lose myself to the person I loved.” She adopts Andrew’s world and friends as her own, distancing herself from the “gloominess” of her literary social circle, where she senses judgmental skepticism toward what her friends see as a different kind of “regression”: an adult having too much fun for her age.
As she did with cultural narratives about sexuality, Witt notices a structural American hypocrisy that tolerates drugs to fuel breakneck productivity or to take the edge off suburban malaise, but not to expand one’s mind or to generate social interconnectedness. (In 2002, Joe Biden introduced the RAVE Act, a carceral attack on MDMA that helped kill the underground rave scene; at the same time, the American state was opening the floodgates to the deadly and highly profitable mass abuse of opioids.) Witt approaches drugs in a characteristic way: bookish and intellectual, but also with a desire to “be around people who were world-building,” who were “in confrontation with the forces of contemporary triteness.”
Witt is elated to find in psychedelics and the Brooklyn rave scene a world she had always been looking for, one not as obviously compromised by New Age woo-woo or Silicon Valley wealth. The party scenes in Health and Safety are lyrical but not indulgent, painting the specificity of the experience in appealing hues: the sense of liberation from the dreary strictures of the mind, of a total freedom of the body unavailable almost anywhere else in contemporary society. The sense of melding with other humans and the hazy, multicolored blurring of social determination; the intimation that after a grim life of seeing only in parts, you now have access to glimpses of the whole. In substances like LSD and the sound of techno, Witt finds a respite from the ambient cultural demand to surrender oneself to narratives:
The music did not say what to feel or when to feel it. Instead it followed a process of defamiliarization and destabilization. … What techno offered was not meaning but space, and the possibility of evoking the complexity of the world through discontinuities and breaks, interruptions and hybridizations.
Next to her on the dancefloor, Witt finds people who resist commercialism and costumes, who scoff at social media and take social communion seriously. Much has been made of the link between rave culture and deindustrialization. In the minds of some left-wing thinkers, the two can be grimly collapsed in a move of guilt by association, with images of frivolous hedonists dancing on the ruins of the working class. Some of the Brooklyn parties Witt attends, like the queer rave UNTER, were packaged in a semi-ironic radical politics. Witt sees the overlapping geographies of raving and gentrification, but rejects cynical conflation:
What we did in these spaces was closer to a kind of scavenging, landing on a carcass to pick at the bones until the apex predators swatted us away. We accompanied the property developers, flapping around them. We hung out in the same places they did their killing but we could not claim to be their prey. Yet the hedonism was a resistance to something. … We might not have believed in the higher authority of religion, but neither were we frolicking around in a decadent cult of the self—if in the world we were atomized, at the rave, for a few hours, we could model a collective ideal with its own manners and ethics.
Even so, Witt had landed in one of the ephemeral bubbles of social innovation she chronicled in Future Sex: spaces that bear the promise of a world remade even as they are sharply constrained by the real one outside. As the first Trump administration dawns, she begins to see rave culture in something like these terms: a space that, though politically powerless in itself, preserves something being systematically repressed. American society’s manipulative character is just as visible in the “belabored attempts to generate enthusiasm about Hillary Clinton’s ‘poise’ and ‘intellect’” as they are in a president-elect whose “entire identity was branding and advertising.” Raving, Witt writes, “did not constitute a politics of resistance, but it moved our entire frame of reference in its direction. I could hold those rooms in my mind and measure them against the counterfeit promises of meaning and belonging offered everywhere for sale.”
That claim appears at the halfway mark of Health and Safety, and is soon challenged by actual politics. As a trial assignment before she is hired by The New Yorker, Witt is sent to cover the aftermath of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida in 2019. She observes with disgust as the teen survivors are chewed up by media spectacle. She knows she has to strike “the right rhetorical tone, between resolve and hope” to be hired and to represent The New Yorker, even though the requisite note of hope rings false. Witt’s partying drops off as she crisscrosses the country, covering anti-gun protests, right-wing militia rallies, and anti-police riots.
Earlier in Health and Safety, Witt observes that she liked reporting because, “like drugs, it caused a temporary defamiliarization that could reveal my own insularity and myopia.” But as the Trump presidency unfolds, she begins to wonder whether it is possibly any longer to grasp political reality at all—whether American politics is a fantasy-producing machine the humble fact-finding creed of journalism is unsuited to challenge. “It was very difficult to determine what people believed versus their performance. To describe it, which was my job, only seemed to perpetuate it.” There is little solace to be found in the upheavals that convulse her own side of the political spectrum. The decay of American politics into frenzied paralysis was not a right-wing plot, but the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s failures and a cultural left that “floundered in relativism” and superficial obsessions with language. In this bleak landscape, Witt finds it difficult to imagine any form of authentic, effective resistance. “I think all the moral posturing online during those years had something to do with this sense of utter helplessness.”
Witt’s personal reality begins to collapse at the same time she struggles to identify a discernable political reality around her. For his centrality to the plot, Andrew remains for most of the book a spectral presence whose appeal never quite becomes concrete. They have sex on the first date, and after the second, Witt writes that she “started to cry, because I knew I could not live without him.” They move in together and she begins to daydream about having a child together. But after Andrew is beaten and arrested at a protest, he becomes a visceral character. He suddenly turns angry and cruel, verbally harassing Witt while they are trapped together in isolation from COVID. He weaponizes radical politics against her, demeaning her use of her press pass to stay safe at violent protests and her pretense of “journalistic objectivity.” He tells their friends she is beating him and accuses her of “gaslighting” for suggesting he might be unwell. When she finally accepts that he is having a mental breakdown and flees the apartment, he stalks her online and slanders her on social media.
The third and final act of Health and Safety spirals forward with escalating desperation. Witt’s even critical voice gives way to tones of brokenness and survival. She has lost everything: her faith in her work, her hope for political change, her community of living experimentally. She finally abandons the hope of marriage and family, the countercurrent that had coursed in the opposite direction of her search for the future, but was part all along of her hope for a meaningful life. She stares again into the abyss of the future and finds it still featureless: “My life took on its own character once again. The rest of it now stretched before me. It was an empty plain.”
Health and Safety surpasses its predecessor in both ambition and grace. It is a study of contradictions, of “interruptions and hybridizations.” It is, above all, a book about historical overdetermination: a view from inside a time that refuses all hope of firm ground, that withholds authorization for the conviction that one has discovered the right way to live.
Everyone who pontificates on the future these days inevitably does so through retrospection, whether the longing look backward is toward a simpler time of duty and family or of the sturdy political supports of the union and the party. Witt’s journeys through the beautiful and berserk fragments of the end of history might be said to be guided by another light from the past: the romantic politics of the 1960s, which were, in a longer historical view, a costumed revival even when they appeared.1 As a San Francisco psychiatrist told Joan Didion of the Haight Street flower children in 1967, it is a kind of politics “that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification.”2
The San Francisco psychiatrist suggests that all of our contemporary historical restagings are tinged with the romanticism of nostalgia regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum. Witt is an observer, not a theorist, but her struggle to see through the haze of the present makes her more aware of the pitfalls of her enterprise than most. She moves against a current of priggish analysis on both right and left that attempts to damn the romantic social innovations of the 1960s and 1970s by reducing them to a hedonistic “cult of the self” or to an incipient “neoliberalism.” Instead, she follows the thread backward through its twists and deformations, seeking what was purest in the promise of opened minds, liberated bodies, and authentic community.3 She finds it still persisting in fragments of the present, but sees too much to declare it the future.
In her final pages, Witt returns to Detroit, where American techno was born as a once-proud city became an industrial wasteland. “On that warehouse floor,” she writes, “I came to terms with my denatured self and the despoiled world, for this was music that also came from the wreckage.” She believes, in the end, the entities that appeared to her during her trips, telling her she would be “rewarded for breaking down formalities with richer and truer friendships relationships,” and that her mission in life was to “observe and report.” She does not believe that raves or journalism are revolutionary praxis, or will reveal the meaning of history, but finds them meaningful just the same. “The point, for me,” she said in a recent interview, “has been just putting it down on paper and hoping somebody can figure out what was actually going on later.”
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The original Romantics were “painfully aware of the alienation of human relationships, the destruction of the old organic and communitarian forms of social life, the isolation of individuals in their egoistic selves, which taken together constitute an important dimension of capitalist civilization.” Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001), 42.
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), 120.
Writing specifically of the French context, Löwy and Sayre see 1960s romanticism “manifested in the feeling of a rediscovered human community, in the experience of the revolution as a festival, in the ironic and poetic slogans written on walls, in the appeal to collective imagination and creativity as a political imperative, and finally in the utopian notion of a society free of all alienation and reification,” 220.
What a thoughtful review. Excited to dig into Witt's work after reading this.