C.I. reviews Naomi Klein's DOPPELGANGER: A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD

A repost of C.I.'s review of Naomi Klein's new book.

 

Naomi Klein's DOPPELGANGER

Naomi Klein's a cultural writer and her new book is DOPPELGANGER: A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD. Speaking this week to Amy Goodman (DEMOCRACY NOW!), Naomi offered, "Amy, you listed some of my previous books in that lovely introduction. My books back to NO LOGO, my first book, which I wrote on the cusp of the new millennium almost a quarter of a century ago, have been attempts to map our political moment. They have been attempts to make sense of moments of big shifts in our political world, our cultural world, and in the case of THIS CHANGED EVERYTHING our physical world. I would say that Doppelganger is an attempt to make a usable map of our moment." 

The moment is the continued after-effects of the (ongoing) pandemic.    MCMILLAN PUBLISHERS describes the book as follows:

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self -- a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience -- she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us -- and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now -- and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

That's really not the book she's written and, when she speaks of the book, she also seems to be describing another book.

Make no mistake, DOPPELGANGER is worth reading.  It's well written, it will hold your attention and it will make you think.  

But this isn't a book about 'doppelgangers' or, as we would have earlier called it, 'twinning.'  Naomi's not interested in that actually.  

This is book where she reflects upon herself in an attempt to illuminate what's going on in the world currently.  

Were she actually interested in doppelgangers, doubles, twins, for example, Otto Rank would be more than a passing mention.  Rank broke with Freud over differences of approach and of instigation.  In the most simplistic reading of that, Freud traced things back to childhood trauma while Rank went to birth trauma, Freud practiced psychoanalysis while Rank practiced psychotherapy.

More to the point, if you're writing on twinnings, you really at some point refer to one of Rank's patients -- as well as practitioners -- Anais Nin.  Long before her classic novels such as A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE or her prose poem THE HOUSE OF INCEST or her study of D.H. Lawrence, she had her journals -- published in her lifetime as THE DIARY OF ANAIS NIN with various numbers after that title.  Following her 1977 death, they would be reproduced with different headings which now included the phrase "THE UNEXPURGATED DIARY OF ANAIS NIN" in the title.

The most famous of the rebooted journals -- and the best selling one -- would be 1986's HENRY & JUNE which was also made into a film starring Maria de Medeiros as Anais with Uma Thurman and Fred Ward as June and Henry Miller.

In fact, HENRY & JUNE is probably a good reference point for Naomi's book.  

This journal volume covers Anais' first encounters with June, wife of author Henry Miller.  They exchange secrets, vows of love and a bracelet.  

Some might argue that June was Anais' great love.  However, unless you're a committed narcissist, you can't fall in love with a reflection in the mirror. 

In the end, that's all June was for Anais.  She made a huge impact on Nin, no question.  June would show up in every piece of fictional writing -- most obviously, she's Sabina (as is Anais) in the five novel volume CITIES OF THE INTERIOR.  

The twinning -- physically -- of the two women, their time shared, was brief and limiting.  Long after June left Henry -- which was also leaving Anais -- she continues to weigh on Anais.

For Naomi Klein, at least in DOPPELGANGER, the twin is Naomi Wolf. 

Sadly, Naomi Wolf is no June Miller.

Wolf is a questionable academic who came to prominence with THE BEAUTY MYTH, a book the ripped off the work of Judith N. Shklar -- see FACES OF INJUSTICE -- the book based upon Shklar's Oxford lectures to discover every literary allusion Wolf worked into THE BEAUTY MYTH without giving any credit to Sklar.  When you're stealing basics from others to make yourself sound erudite and well rounded, it's doubtful your career ever gets better.

In most ways, Naomi Wolf' didn't.  FIRE WITH FIRE was the follow up and it was at least alive.  For its many problematic moments and passages, it was alive on the page in a way that THE BEAUTY MYTH wasn't.  It sold well.  But it wasn't stocked well and that mattered in the pre-internet age.  Most people -- even those who bought it -- did not read THE BEAUTY MYTH but it was stocked well.  Even five years after its release, you couldn't escape it in the women's studies section of any bookstore.  Naomi Wolf's writing appeared in an actual bestseller during this time -- she wrote a lengthy passage for the soft cover edition of Gloria Steinem's REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN.  Gloria's book was an actual best seller.  It was not, however, stocked well and after the book fell off the hard cover and then soft cover charts, it was no longer to be found in most bookstores.

After FIRE WITH FIRE, Naomi would never again appear alive on the page.  She would, however, cling to her inaccuracies and out right lies.  

And that's where I have the big problem with Naomi Klein's new book and her promotion of it.

In interview after interview to promote the book, she tries to distance her book from Naomi Wolf.  Which I can understand.   And she tries to defend Naomi Wolf as well.  Which I honestly won't tolerate.  On the former, it's the dance that's always done to avoid a lawsuit.  On the latter, it's Naomi Klein being uninformed.

Naomi argues in the book (and in interviews) that Naomi Wolf went to the dark side because she'd lost favor as a feminist or in the feminist world.  First of all, what profit is there in the feminist world?  I mean, I'm a feminist, it's great to be one.  But where's the big money payday in the world of feminism.  Gloria Steinem was over sixty-years-old before she didn't have to worry about money.  Susan Brownmiller wrote the feminist classic AGAINST OUR WILL but she never ended up with John Updike money -- to note another author and to note one whose work is decidedly anti-woman.  Shulamith Firestone wrote the classic THE DIALETIC OF SEX but died in poverty.  (Her death was a result of capgras delusion -- a condition those who don't enjoy DOPPELGANGER might want to look up and work into their reviews.)

Feminism has never been a money making business -- not for the writers, not for the activists.  It's why Susan Faludi, for example, is rightly concerned the minute a 'Lean In' type emerges because when they're being feted and applauded by the corporate media, they're usually advancing something other than feminism.  

To read DOPPELGANGER is to read Naomi Klein's view that Naomi Wolf wrote THE BEAUTY MYTH and then had a high flying career.  She insists that there are two time periods for Wolf "Before Bannon" and "After Bannon."

And here we need to pause.

Naomi Wolf was a feminist.

Naomi Klein is not a feminist.

And she never has been.  This matters for many reasons. 

First, some are dismissing this book as a "cat fight" between the two Naomis.  Naomi Wolf has, thus far, wisely ignored the book.  If she has any brains left, Naomi Wolf will continue to ignore it until a year and a half from now -- by which point it will have been out in soft cover long enough to have ended any run on the best selling charts.  Any comment she makes prior to that will be promoting this book -- that's how it will be used.

Naomi Wolf grasps that and grasps that a "cat fight" is being set up in the media.  As dumb as she's become, she would never have fallen into the trap of writing a book that could be seen as a "cat fight."  She knows first hand how the media uses sexist narratives.

Naomi Klein doesn't.  We've talked about this many times before but a woman pursuing her dream is not a feminist.  She can be a feminist but that requires support for key principles.  Just being a woman doesn't make you a feminist -- not even just being a woman on the left.  And I'm not slamming Naomi Klein for not being a feminist -- certainly not slamming her at this late date.

Naomi Klein surfed the Iraq War to a higher profile.  Her reporting on it led to THE SHOCK DOCTRINE and then she ran from the ongoing illegal war as fast as she could.  That didn't help end the Iraq War but it probably saved her reputation because she chose to flee just as major news outlets, after years and years of criticism, were sort-of-kind-of finding the women in Iraq -- the women they'd ignored.  Naomi, as people were starting to realize, had also ignored the women of Iraq.  That only became clearer after the publication of Deborah Amos' ECLIPSE OF THE SUNNIS: POWER, EXILE AND UPHEAVEL IN THE MIDDLE EAST (2010).  

NO LOGOS, Klein's first book, had a kind of Gen X esprit that led to the misconception of woman=feminist.  But while Naomi's work may reference a feminist point on the occasional page or two,  her work is never informed by feminism.

She wouldn't have to do her current dance if she were a feminist because she wouldn't have painted herself into the corner that now requires her to give interviews insisting she hopes the best for Naomi Wolf.  These are statements to avoid the "cat fight" angle the corporate media wants to sell the book on --  the angle the media always wants to sell.

I'm not Naomi Klein.  I have no sympathy for Naomi Wolf and no feminist should.  But again, Naomi Klein is not a feminist.

As we were saying Klein's divides Naomi Wolf's life into two periods -- BB (Before Steve Bannon) and AB (After Steve Bannon).  It's her opening sentence, in fact, to chapter five.  That's not feminism.

Naomi Wolf has many problems but she's not beholden to any man.  I no longer consider her a feminist -- for obvious reasons -- but she's not been shaped or molded by a man.  It's insulting for Naomi Klein to suggest that and it's less than honest for Naomi Klein to suggest that and then give interviews where she pretends she's being kind to Naomi Wolf.  It is never kind to a woman who writes to pretend that her scope is dictated by a man.  Naomi Klein is robbing Naomi Wolf of her agency -- and that's not feminism.

It's also incorrect.  Not just for the reasons outlined above but because Naomi Klein oversimplifies, ignores and just flat out doesn't know Naomi Wolf's history.

We've had to call out Naomi Wolf a lot lately.  She's in bed with Moms for Bigotry, she's pimping Donald Trump (who she's flirting with voting for -- and absolutely will if he picks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as running mate), she's reTweeting men who call for the end of women's studies programs on campus, there's just so much horrible that surrounds her these days.

However, we've been charting the decline of Naomi Wolf since 2008.  One example you can refer to is, "Naomi Wolf: The Feminist Myth (Ava and C.I.)" which Ava and I wrote in January of 2009.  

So Naomi Klein's work on Naomi Wolf's history or 'history' doesn't work for me or for anyone else whose informed.

Naomi Klein's argument is that Naomi Wolf fell out of favor because she was no longer the fresh face and that Wolf's need to remain pertinent drove her to the right.

Interesting.

But not true.  

Naomi Wolf did want to remain pertinent and that's how a centrist Democrat ended up restyling herself as a radical.  2007's END OF AMERICA was the most obvious attempt there.  It was a provocative book an one worth reading.  It was clear she was struggling with concepts and that led to the Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner asking me, "Is she for real?"  To which I replied, "She's for real in whatever moment she's living in at that second.  Don't get vested and don't trust her."  He would later repeat my remarks back to me when he learned the reality of Naomi the hard way.

Naomi Klein wants to -- but is stopped either by legal reasons or a refusal to clarify -- call Naomi Wolf an outright fraud.  

It's not a controversial call.  Naomi Wolf is a grifter seeking attention and every phase of her public life has been about how to garner attention.  

That's why she's been all around the globe politically speaking.  A centrist Democrat is how she started out and that's who Al Gore hired.  Outside the scarlet fever brains of FOX "NEWS," Al Gore would never hire a radical.  With the ascension of Bully Boy Bush, Naomi loses her prominence and celebrity.

Why?

In part it's due to the sexist take down the media carried out.  Naomi was part of the Gore campaign, they lie, to advise him on fashion.  I honestly get tired of being the one who has to stop and point out history and make the connections.  It would be much quicker if we could just ignore reality the way the bulk of book reviewers do.  Instead, we're like a segment of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.

Justine Bateman hosted SNL -- not if you go to her credits on CRAPAPEDIA -- again, that's an anti-woman site.  You won't know she hosted.  I thought it was 1988 but had to go to IMDB to confirm that (yes, I fact check my pieces), season 13, episode 11 and I'm now streaming it on PEACOCK to make sure my memory is correct (I only saw it when it first aired).  In that episode, as I remember it, there's a parody of FAMILY TIES which is also a parody of sitcoms.  Sitcoms reach a certain number (say the 100th episode) and they do a clip show.  Characters sit around a kitchen table or they're trapped in some locked room and they say, "Hey, remember when . . ."  In the skit with Justine, they sat around the kitchen table recalling one past episode after another including the time they watched THE JEFFERSONS and George and Louise were tied to chairs in the living room remembering when Florence . . . 

And that's what we end up having to do here because of people like Naomi Klein.  And it pisses me off.

They do not provide context, they do not provide history.  Naomi Klein wrongly gets the criticism about Naomi Wolf re: The Gore campaign wrong but, even more importantly, she provides no context for it.  Such as?  During the 1972 George McGovern campaign, when Gloria Steinem was an advisor, the press insisted (wrongly) that she advised him on what ties to wear.  As much nonsense as saying that Naomi Wolf advised Al Gore on earth tones.

A feminist -- again, Naomi Klein is not a feminist -- would have called out the trashing -- the sexist trashing -- of Naomi Wolf.  An informed feminist would have tied it into the same thing being done in 1972 to Gloria Steinem. 

The sexist treatment of Naomi Wolf at the start of this century was part of removing her from the talking heads on TV.  Also helping to remove her from the media was 9/11.  9/11, day of, was so interesting in terms of the media.  The rewrites that immediately started were so true to form.  On 9/11, we heard about brave women and men . . . but as the press stopped having to respond live and could instead take a moment to shape the narratives, it became brave men.  Apparently, on 9/10/2001 all female police officers, firefighters, doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc were let go in a mass firing.  Or that's how the media decided to portray the events.  It was manly, manly, manly 24-7 and it was toss out anything that questioned that narrative of who and what a man was.  That's why Mark Bingham went from 9/11 hero to who? in about 24 hours.   As the media discovered that Mark Bingham was a gay man -- openly gay -- he was no longer one of the heroes of Flight 93 who died.  

The 9/11 coverage post-9/11 was instructive on how things would now be portrayed and, in this new media world, there was no place for a Naomi Wolf.

After this became obvious, Naomi Wolf went left-er.  The US was moving towards authoritarianism was her first step in that direction -- see her 2007 book THE END OF AMERICA.  By August 17, 2009, she was on Michael Ratner's LAW AND DISORDER RADIO discussing Guantanamo Bay (see her "What happened to Moahmed al-Hansahi?").

This is where it all goes off the rails so Naomi Klein ignores this period at the risk of her own book.  

Naomi Wolf now has serious topics.  She does not, however, have serious arguments.  And her arguments and claims now fly higher and higher above the ground as she continues down this path.  She goes from questionable statements to outright lies in this period.  But on the left, the mood is: Don't criticize her, she's talking about our issues.  (Ava and I criticized her prior to this time and continued to criticize her throughout this time.) 

It falls apart for Wolf with her attacks on rape survivors as she rushed to throw down a line wherein if women were raped it didn't matter, she must protect Julian Assange at all costs. 

That was a key event in her public life and Naomi Klein's not even aware of it.

 

She then loses a significant portion of the left and it shuts her newfound alternative media stardom down.   I've avoided bringing it up in criticizing her of late and, as recently as a week ago, I noted I'm biting my tongue.  It doesn't help Julian Assange for this to be raised so I've left it alone.  Julian needs to be freed immediately.  The persecution of Julian Assange must stop.

But you can't talk about Naomi Wolf and her political square dancing without noting that moment.

That's when feminists had the real break with her.  And for good reason.

This is when she begins her 'groundbreaking' work on 'chemtrails' and the danger of 5G and this is where Naomi Klein traces centrist Democrat Wolf moving over to the dark side.

She had milked centrist Democrat for all she could and, to regain attention, she'd moved to radical Wolf.  And then when that started falling apart, she got deeper into conspiracy theories and finds an audience online in the pre-Q-Anon days -- because conspiracy hypotheses can find a lot of platforms on YOUTUBE.  And she eases ever closer to the nutjob world of Ron Paul.  

So her eventual wedlock to the right wing isn't a surprise and she has been grifting her way along the political ideology interstate for some time now.

Skipping all of that, Naomi Klein pretends centrist Naomi Wolf ended up where she is today by chance and leaves out her flirtation with the activist left, the radical left and then the utlra-left which, as Cynthia McKinney's own adventures confirm, will land you in the lap of the right-wing.

DOPPELGANGER finds Naomi Klein building on the work of Susan Faludi's TERROR DREAMS -- though Naomi gives no indication that she's read the book.  The difference between Faludi's strong book and Klein's new book is that Klein focuses on herself throughout, such as here:

  

All of this attention to packaging and style was, I told myself, a wink -- better yet, a hack of the world of corporate branding. It also worked: No Logo sold over a million copies, beyond anything I could have imagined. And as I toured continuously for two years, I kept playing with the idea of being an anti-brand brand. I had a look that was simple but consistent: black trousers, T-shirt, denim jacket --mainly to make packing easier. I ginned up a No Logo logo and taped it to my water bottle. During speeches I would swig from it and joke dryly, "I just don't understand why all these journalists keep saying I'm a brand."
There was a disingenuousness to this theater; I see that clearly now. I wanted it both ways: to be the No Logo girl (the face of an emerging anti-capitalist movement) and to deny that I cared a bit about building a brand. To be the only clean one in a dirty business. And isn't that what so many of us want as we try to win the game of personal branding -- or at least not to get slain by it? We carefully cultivate online personas -- doubles of our "real" selves -- that have just the right balance of sincerity and world-weariness. We hone ironic, detached voices that aren't too promotional but do the work of promoting nonetheless. We go on social media to juice our numbers, while complaining about how much we hate the "hell sites."

And another section from the book:

"Really?" Avi asks. 

It's eleven o’clock on a warm night in early June, and he has walked in on me doing yoga before bed, a nightly practice to help with back pain. When he arrives, I am in Pigeon Pose, breathing into a deep and challenging hip release. And, yes, okay, I am also listening to Steve Bannon's War Room. Life has been hectic lately, with the end of the school year and Avi's campaign for federal office heating up, so when else am I supposed to catch up on Other Naomi's flurry of appearances? 

My obsession has become a growing gulf between Avi and me. And not just between us -- it is intensifying my already deep isolation, cutting me off further from other friends and family. No one I know listens to War Room, and I feel increasingly that it is impossible to understand the new shape of politics without listening to it. Still, it has gone pretty far: for days, I have been unable to get the show's rabidly anti-communist theme song out of my head ("Spread the word all through Hong Kong / We will fight till they're all gone / We rejoice when there's no more / Let's take down the CCP"). I pledge then and there to give it a rest, to put this least charming of pandemic hobbies aside. It seems like the right time to reassess anyway. Twitter has just suspended Wolf's account, seemingly permanently. I'm not comfortable with this heavy-handed corporate censorship, but I tell myself that Wolf losing her main public communication tool surely means that she won't be able to get herself (and me) into nearly so much trouble. 

"I'll block Twitter," I tell Avi. I promise to spend the summer not only helping more with the campaign but also focusing on our son (still deep in his shark phase) and the rest of our woefully neglected family.

  

And that self-focus is why it matters that Naomi Klein doesn't get Naomi Wolf right.  

She's using Naomi Wolf to understand herself.  But she doesn't understand Naomi Wolf and doesn't even get Wolf's journey correct.  So, in the end, Naomi Klein can't understand her own self.

From 1931 (when she met June Miller), until her own death in 1977,  Anais Nin focused on June.  And she was aware that she didn't know June.  She knew that her impressions of June were influenced by the way Henry Miller saw her.  She knew that her impressions were influenced by what June told her which might have been true and might have been false.  She did not have the internet to track June or June's beliefs and actions.  Naomi Klein had all this and more but somehow comes across believing that she knows Naomi Wolf and Naomi Wolf's political lives.  She wants you to know that she's been seriously grappling since 2020 -- three years ago.  Anais grappled with who June was for over thirty years and she never came away with the self-assured, self-satisfied knowing that Naomi Klein wrongly projects in DOPPELGANGER: A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD.