On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Tao Lin's Taipei

 

Recently, I was inspired to revisit Tao Lin's hi-def drug-infused yet sobering novel Taipei. I first read this book when it was released to mixed reviews in 2013, for an English course on the contemporary American novel (I think?). While it was insufferable at first, its fragmented style and alienated/alienating protagonist Paul slowly grew on me and I ended up writing an essay inspired by it. 

Here's a version of the 2013 essay I submitted--hopefully this persuades you to read it, rather than the opposite:

Knowing Lots of Nothing: 

On Ignorance, Self-Perception, and the Other in Taipei

It is said that we live in the so-called Information Age, a time in which conceivably, digital technologies have furnished us with the ability to send and receive all sorts of information instantaneously and across borders. This transcendence of data is further sustained by the travel technologies available to help in our physical mobilization and transition from point A to point B. While these technologies seem on the surface to enhance our ability to understand the world around us, they often undermine our ability to understand the complex dynamics involved in our social interactions, our immutable interiority, and our memory as a guide. This theme of conscious ignorance is one which has been visited in Tao Lin’s 2013 novel Taipei. I will suggest that the protagonist Paul’s own ignorance stems precisely from the wide, unlimited, and multifaceted availability of sources of information that is within his reach. I will be exploring how Paul’s overabundant epistemological access has denied him the ability to know how to read emotions of his own and others, thus creating a sense of self-alienation, which is only remedied through a trip to Taipei.

Paul is mainly tuned out, or ignorant, to the emotional status of the individuals he is closely involved with. The reader is bombarded with this incapacity several times within the first encounters: Paul is “unsure what he felt exactly” with Michelle (Lin, 4; 9; 10; etc.). It is only through reading into text messages and checking on updated Facebook and Twitter statuses that Paul comprehends how his friends and loved ones feel towards him. In the midst of an argument with Michelle, “Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn’t seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS” (Lin, 10)— his inability to comprehend parallels his “expert” knowledge of the digital world, as evident in his lexicon. He is only able to know where his friendships with Kyle, Gabby, and the rest stand once they have “unfollowed” or “de-friended” him on the social media platforms (Lin, 30), and can only grasp his own disinterest in pursuing romance with Laura upon scrutinizing their email correspondence (Lin, 50; 53).  But such unconventional methods of reading others also provides much room for misreading. As Andrew Martin writes in The Knowledge of Ignorance, this “allows or demands a response, an interpretation, a judgment. Thus the text is not unassailable, not self-evident or self-sufficient, but just as vulnerable to attack as the author. The reader is always a latent misreader, critic, enemy; his weapons are misattribution, distortion, and misinterpretation.” (Martin, 43).

Such mediation of emotional (un)knowingness can be traced further back in Paul’s life: in 3rd grade he soon realizes that "90-95%" of people he encounters will be/are "separate and unknowable"; in middle-school his inability to interpret or know how to respond to being antagonized is then misinterpreted as feeling "too cool" to react by the other kids; and by freshman year he has resigned to remaining silent, all but losing his ability to know how to react to emotional and social stimuli (Lin, 39-40). As Audrea Lim writes, Taipei “is a depiction of the alienated subject in a personality-driven world where social signals and media messages are so complex…Again and again, Paul is driven to despair by ordinary social reality…” (Lim, 2013).  Ian Samson corroborates, comparing Tao Lin’s novel to the likes of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in its “desperate desire to connect”, that the “novel dwells on the meaning of disassociation and self-exile.” (Samson, 2013).

Confined within this digitized system of self expression through proxy, Paul is prevented from understanding in any clear or cohesive sense his own feelings and emotive responses, and increasingly goes “without knowing why” he feels depressed (Lin, 53). In one culminating instance, Paul experiences a new feeling which he struggles to describe: a “sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans…Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe, after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity.” (Lin, 56). The inability to read the emotional status of others (without literally reading it online) is inextricably linked to Paul’s ignorance about his own state, for “…one cannot know the ‘I’ except through the other, but this kind of knowledge is itself a kind of nescience…the problem  of other minds is not just the problem of other minds, but also the problem of my own mind…my mind is itself other to itself.” (Bennett, 111).

Paul’s knowledge of how to perform his individual “human” and/or social functions is therefore also heavily mediated, through the plethora of drugs that he frequently uses on the one hand, and largely through the digital media which he is perpetually involved in on the other hand. Paul is always in a state of confusion whenever he begins to interrogate his own interiority, and the thoughts he has (which are Lin highlights through the use of quotation marks) reflect this state of inner conflict; he is “completely lost” (Lin, 19), “lost in the world” (Lin, 7), “grateful to exist” (Lin, 248). On the one hand, Paul is almost vaporous: he is all interiority. At one especially alienating point, “Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return…” and “realized he was (and, for an unknown amount of time, had been) rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself…” (Lin, 202-205). This is also marked by the endless flow of inner and outer dialogue he steers. As Samson writes, Paul is “continually aroused but perpetually dulled…(a) style in which fragmented thoughts follow narcissistic flights of fancy, with an underlying tone of desperation and despair. Paul has nothing much to say, but he says it anyway…” (Samson, 2013).

            At the same time, this acute and intensely self-conscious interiority sits alongside Paul’s inability to comprehend a concrete reality and is exhausted by the digital technologies visited earlier, as well as his self-narcotization.  Referencing Michel Foucaut’s theory of “technologies of the self”, Lim writes: “Drugs can help us to adapt, to be more productive, and even to excel within our circumstances, to make our lives more bearable, and in some cases, to radically reconfigure our subjectivity, if not the world. In Taipei, drug use is less about changing the world than it is about adjusting to it.” (Lim, 2013). Paul’s most basic function of locating his spatial and temporal existence in a concrete reality is greatly hindered throughout the text, perhaps as a byproduct of his frequent trysts with opioids, stimulants, and every drug in between: “his affectless tone is especially unsettling when applied to drug experiences.” (Lim, 2013). The ‘drug fight’ episode in which he and Erin have a logic-based argument on the effects of cocaine and Paul cites literature as proof demonstrates this disaffected attitude as well as a sense of conscious, or intentional ignorance (Lin, 157-8; 219). When asked by Erin how he knows, he responds “based on what I know, from things I’ve read and experienced, about tolerance…” and when Erin suggests that past experience doesn’t necessarily correlate to future outcome, Paul says conclusively: “’I’m not trying to argue with you, based on what I know’…aware it was funny to qualify ‘I’m not trying to argue with you’ with ‘based on what I know’, but not feeling humoured.” (Lin, 219).

Paul and the others traverse all across America and beyond, and much like the Vernian technique Martin writes of, “the ubiquitous images of multiplication and division (geo)graphically narrate the fragmentation of the matter and media of science…(they) signify the fragmentation of the classical configuration of the rational, Newtonian universe, encompassed by a unifying framework of knowledge…” (Martin, 176). Though perpetually in transit, Taipei takes on an important dynamic as the realm in which the typically unknown can be made knowable to Paul, where he can locate markers that orient him towards the directions of understanding. On his final visit, Paul believes that “if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur…it would be here.” (Lin, 164). While there Paul reflects on a neon sign that “conveys “too much information”,  leading him to muse on how technology has lost its enchantment for him,  that “technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness…Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task… by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement…in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves…” (Lin, 166-7). This feeling of accessing this latent, hidden transcendental wisdom is sharpened by the fact that even Las Vegas, famed for its bright lights, neon signs and related symbols failed to speak to Paul; Taipei  is the locale in which Paul undergoes his epistemological transformation, thus leading up to that last moment of nirvana.

Post-Taipei, Paul and Erin “start to love each other more…They find themselves doing things, rather than merely watching things…life is changing from the aesthetic to the ethical.” (Martin, 2013), or even from the digital to the actual. It is when he has returned from Taipei and is with Erin that Paul experiences his moment of heightened awareness versus hyper-awareness, enhanced on the one hand by the corporeality of laying with the character he has come closest to genuineness with and on the other a sense of metaphysical communion with beings in general. For Paul, caressing Erin’s back “gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world… Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibrium…he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information…that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn’t, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant.” (Lin, 243-4)

Memory, and more specifically the failure of memory to produce or enhance “usable” knowledge is one which figures heavily in Taipei. Memory at its most basic function is as a record of experience, a holder of the places, times, and moments one has undergone, and presumably learned from. But what happens when such memory is fragmented, lacking, or even inaccessible? Both texts confront such questions openly. In Taipei, Paul’s memory at times seeps into his perception of present reality, but for the most part, eludes him whenever he attempts to revisit it, like an unfamiliar book he is reading for the first timr (Lin, 18; 201; 228; 246-7; etc) .

Thus, as we have seen throughout Taipei, the realm of knowledge is an abstract one difficult to locate and even more difficult to adequately exist in, for it is formless and ever-evolving. The realm of ignorance, then is just as difficult to locate or perceive if one exists in it. It is a paradox of sorts, for if one knows that they do not know, is this not actually closer to knowing? Lin confronts these ideas head on by positioning Paul in between both realms, where Taipei provides the time and space for a more “enlightened” perception of Self and Other.

Consulted Works

Bennett, Andrew. Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2009. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. Print.

Lim, Audrea. "The Drugs Don’t Work: Tao Lin’s “Taipei” and the Literature of Pharmacology." LARB. Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

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Lin, Tao. Taipei: A Novel. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2013. Print.

Martin, Andrew. The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.

Martin, Clancy. "The Agony of Ecstasy: ‘Taipei,’ a Novel by Tao Lin." The New York Times Online. The New York Times, 28 June 2013. Web. Nov. 2013.

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Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche, Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold. Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage, 1968. Print.

Sansom, Ian. "Taipei by Tao Lin – Review." The Guardian UK Online. The Guardian, 4 July 2013. Web. Nov. 2013. .

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