Uses of Obviousness in Seven Controlled Vocabularies

The OED provides the pejorative definition of obvious as "lacking in originality; banal, forgettable." As any reader of Tan Lin's work knows, he is a proponent of art that is generic, boring, and forgettable. What seems to have received less attention is his work's engagement with the non-pejorative kind of obviousness: "plain and evident to the mind; such as common sense might suggest."1 Before something can be uninteresting due to its banality, it must first become banal by means of embedding itself deeply and widely into the fabric of shared experience which produces common sense. In this essay, I will argue that Lin investigates how certain forms of experience become capable of supporting a feeling of common sense by experimenting with unorthodox invocations of a figure who I will call the "person of experience."

A person of experience is a figure invoked in order to make a claim by appealing to its obviousness among people with certain experiences. This figure can be found all over Lin's work, but especially in Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (hereafter 7CV). Here are five examples among many:

As anyone who has eaten can tell you, the most beautiful memories are memories that one has forgotten how to have.2

As any child can tell you, you should never have to put down a book to read it.3

As anyone who has been to an airport can tell you: all forms of excitement are moribund forms of pre-excitement. Details become generalities. Everything obtuse is obvious.4

As anyone who has waited for something to arrive can tell you, half an emotion is better than a whole one. The most beautiful emotions are half-hearted. Today I realized that I am [half] in love with my wife.5

As anyone [who has been the subject of intense visual adoration] can tell you, staring at someone is the closest most of us will ever get to being a fly or falling in love.6

Usually, a person of experience construction demonstrates that a specific experience or identity held in common produces a shared sense of a particular situation or stated observation. A more accepted usage would be: "As anyone who has ever been to an airport can tell you, it's best to arrive well before takeoff." Lin's sentences, however, generate maximally generic persons of experience in order to make strange, vague claims that do not bear any clear relation to the invoked experience. What is it about the experience of eating that particularly makes clear that the most beautiful memories are the forgotten ones? The invoked figure appears to make the sentence more obvious by invoking a common basis of shared experience, but its failure to ground that obviousness (as well as the glitchy repetition of the device throughout the book) ends up highlighting the constructedness of the rhetorical gesture. Lin's tweaking of the person of experience construction reveals that its effect at least partially depends upon on a structure of expression, rather than any self-evident logic. Rather than casting doubt on this construction, however, Lin simply draws attention to the belabored attempt to produce a sense of obviousness, thus focusing on the structure of rhetoric undergirding invocations of the person of experience. 

The content of 7CV's claims about reading, memory, and beauty are often counterintuitive or contradictory, but the recurrence of the person of experience construction formally reinforces the overall claim that these ideas are already known to the reader insofar as they have had generic experiences, such as being a child, eating food, waiting. The real subject of interest is thus not the claims themselves, but the question of how invoking generic experiences can convincingly produce common sense or fail to do so. Lin's concern is to experiment with variations in the structure of obviousness to see how much it can bend and stretch in order to encompass vagueness and falsity. 7CV thus offers an important expansion of the notion of obviousness, reframing its status in discourses on ideology, the emotions, and personal experience.

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In the preface to Mythologies, Roland Barthes states his aim: to critique what is "falsely obvious."7 Remarking on the pervasiveness of ideology in Barthes' account, Jan Mieszkowski asks whether we can establish "the difference between the 'false obviousnesses' of myth and 'true' ones."8 It is unclear whether Mieszkowski's quotes around "true" are scare quotes or not, but the claim to a true obviousness (rather than a false obviousness) is indeed an unpopular position within a certain lineage of critical theory. We might find advocates of this notion of true obviousness in Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, who advocate a "weak" reading that only interprets what is obvious in a poem, defining obviousness by its capacity for broad agreement: "if something is obvious, then it must be so not just to me but to others as well," if the others admit "there can be general — not universal — agreement, across ideological divides, on certain features of the text."9 Like Kant's claim that aesthetic judgments involve a formal demand for agreement, this assertion reveals that invocations of obviousness rely on a democratic ideal that seemingly transcends ideology, even as the authors temper their claim with a distinction between the general and the universal.

While it might seem intuitive that general agreement serves as solid grounds for identifying true obviousness, Louis Althusser argues precisely the opposite, claiming that the most agreed-upon and seemingly universal categories are the most ideological and false. He writes,

[T]he category of the subject is a primary "obviousness" (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc). . . . [Ideology] imposes (without appearing to do so since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the "still, small voice of conscience"): "That's obvious! That's right! That's true!"10

This argument reframes the basic categories of subjectivity and freedom as effects of ideology, which are secured by the involuntary reaction of agreement. Where Attridge and Staten see general agreement as true obviousness (evidence of a harmonious democratic community), Althusser sees it as false (a coerced, imposed effect of ideological conditioning). Althusser critically highlights the importance of the subjective reaction of agreement, a moment of interpellation which exists alongside the essay's more famous example of being hailed by a policeman.

Keeping Lin's person of experience construction in mind, we can read the opening of Althusser's essay in a different light. It reads: "As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not produce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year."11 Just like the interpellated subject who cannot help but agree with ideology's proclamations, Althusser seems forced to invoke the figure of the child (via Marx) to assert the obviousness of reproduction's importance, despite his own critique of obviousness.12 In fact, while it may be obvious that a system of production needs to reproduce the conditions of production, it hardly seems obvious that a child would know this. Althusser's construction, like Lin's, distracts us from the claim itself and directs our curiosity toward the generic figure who is summoned to ground its troublesome obviousness.

Let's restate Lin's line about the child: "As any child can tell you, you should never have to put down a book to read it."13 The seeming irrelevance of the non-sequitur claim to the experience of childhood stages a failure of obviousness' rhetorical deployment, bringing our attention back to the dependent clause, the now-in-question ground of shared generic experience. Mieszkowski writes: "the obvious is never obvious enough, always requiring a supplemental gesture of confirmation."14 It is precisely this supplemental gesture, rather than the supposedly independent or actual obviousness of a given idea, that is Lin's focus. What can we learn by focusing on this gesture or construction, rather than the idea it frames?

First, the gesture suggests that obviousness exists not in the realm of the universal, but in the moment of extrapolation (related to Althusser's moment of interpellation) from particular experience to general truth. By calling attention to the person of experience rather than the thing they are saying, Lin's line asks the reader not to assess whether the child's experience particularly proves the claim, but whether the child is a suitable figure from which to extrapolate. If obviousness requires a rhetorical gesture of confirmation, then an obvious claim must invoke — implicitly or explicitly — some figure of general experience to confirm its obviousness. The generic figure can only appear credible by reference to a particular experience, ideally one that is as familiar and relatable as possible, in which case it may be implicit. In Lin's constructions, the figure is explicitly and maximally generic (and thus often eerily unfamiliar or unrelatable) but is invoked to support claims that fail to register as obvious, prompting the reader to return to the person of experience, in an attempt to render them more particular and thus more familiar and relatable.

Thus, Lin's constructions prompt the reader to investigate the conditions under which a person of experience successfully serves to establish a feeling of obviousness or common sense. Because I struggle to understand what the child says, I wonder: is childhood in fact a generic, familiar, or relatable experience? As soon as I read Lin's line with this question in mind, I think of the historical construction of childhood, particularly of a childhood in which one learns to read (perhaps even reads about the conditions of production). The effect of obviousness produced by a person of experience construction thus depends upon a particular understanding of the generic figure, and the particularity is here supplied by the reader. The claim that a book should not have to be put down in order to be read is indeed obvious, but that obviousness depends on the common but not universal childhood experience of learning to read. And, as ideology critique demonstrates, the claim can be both obvious and false; indeed, 7CV challenges this obvious claim by promoting various forms of "non-reading" or "reading without reading," perhaps most memorably when Lin writes, "One should never know one is reading a book when one is reading it,"15 or "It should never be necessary to turn a page when reading."16

Following these contradictions leads us to the second insight gleaned from Lin's focus on the supplemental gesture: obviousness often serves as a fuzzy structure for emotional identification, rather than a shared agreement about the truth of clear ideas. Lin does not endow his generic persons of experience with emotional states; rather, each of them merely offers support to a factual assertion stated in a neutral tone. But 7CV does have a generic, impersonal theory of the emotions. Lin writes, "All of our emotions are obvious and the same as everybody else's," and also, "The most general feelings are the most beautiful feelings because they are the only ones we know how to have. People who think they have their own emotions are incapable of empathy or cooking."17 For Lin, emotions are not expressions of a unique interiority, but represent (like obviousness itself) the generic medium of experience that is required for individuals to recognize and nourish each other. Notably, this last sentence inverts the logic of the person of experience construction; here, a person with a certain belief (the privacy of emotions) is incapable of having a certain experience (empathy or cooking).

But the obviousness of emotions does not clarify them; instead, it raises the question of how the category of the obvious can encompass the vagueness, ambivalence, and contradictoriness of something as complex as the emotions. The relationship between emotions and contradictions is established throughout 7CV, with lines like "our feelings are mainly repudiations of our feelings"18 and "non-emotions [are] emotions we haven't had yet or emotions we've already had."19 The relationship between the supposed clarity of truth and the muddiness of feeling is again invoked when Lin compares a baseball stadium to "the idea of truth and the feelings we confuse with it."20 An idea cannot be proved to be obvious because the grounds of shared experience are constantly shifting, but an idea can feel obvious when a specific experience seems to convene a stadium-like totality of experience. Consider that Lin never says that his person of experience knows the thing they are saying, he only ever uses the expression "can tell you." For instance, the person who waits for something to arrive does not know that half an emotion is better than a whole one, but they can tell you that. This again suggests that the claims made by the persons of experience are not meant to be taken as truthful assertions, but instead are designed to characterize an emotional atmosphere in which feelings of obviousness can circulate.

Anger at having been duped by something that should have been obvious, horror that someone does not see a moral imperative where it seems one would be obvious, amusement while waiting for someone to piece together something that will soon become obvious — these are among the feelings that often frame obviousness in real life. But because Lin focuses on isolated generic experiences rather than particular relational interactions, these feelings are not found in 7CV. Instead, the book offers two primary moods: a transpersonal feeling of bliss upon having an experience or thought which seems available to all (the celebration of "our most beautiful emotions"), and a sort of boredom or indifference in response to incoherence (the deflated "half an emotion is better than a whole one"). These moods hew closer to aesthetic experience than interpersonal experience, revealing the emotional valence of obviousness as a wider cultural or aesthetic category. By drawing our attention to a stubborn desire for obviousness that manages to encompass nonsense and vagueness, Lin helps us to consider why we might feel ourselves wanting to believe the generic person of experience even when their observations make no sense or reflect only the alienation of consumer society. Perhaps there is more to desiring obviousness than merely being duped by false consciousness.

I have thus far refrained from mentioning a feature of Lin's work that has great relevance for its relationship to ideology critique: his seeming praise of consumerism and mass production. This is because I want to consider it in light of the framework I have outlined above — viewing Lin's constructions as attempts to complicate our emotional expectations of obviousness. This seeming praise is all over 7CV, but one example will suffice: "Our most beautiful emotions like a movie theatre or the pages of a Chinese cookbook or the price of 16 ounces of Pepsi are routine and anodyne."21 I want to claim that such a line represents neither merely an ironic rebuke nor a genuine acquiescence to consumer life. Instead, Lin is testing the limits of the assumptions of the true and universal which frame the experience of obviousness, by claiming that commodified cultural forms (movies, cookbooks, Pepsi) offer an equivalent to more traditionally-recognized forms of universal and true experience (beauty, emotions), thus risking a structure of feeling in which the former is as obvious as the latter.

Comparing Pepsi to a beautiful emotion sounds like advertising, ideology pure and simple. It may feel true to the consumer, but any ideology critic can tell you that such feelings are produced by false consciousness. However, Lin's reframing of the role that emotions play in the structure of obviousness cautions against such a quick dismissal of something merely feeling true. In fact, it may be necessary to identify with the emotional need for obviousness, however ambivalently, in order to avoid the risk of constructing the subject of ideology as a strawperson, one whose emotional life is so paltry that we cannot see from their perspective at all, despite its undeniable overlap with our own. This does not necessarily require that our emotional lives or relations be formed around false consciousness, but it does suggest that we reconsider the kneejerk impulse of criticism to further flatten the generic subject of ideology and reexamine the supplemental gestures performed by these figures that make possible the emotional identification which secures the grounds of obviousness in even the most suspicious of discourses. By drawing our attention to the person of experience, Lin prompts us to ask what we know about the "anyone" who knows all the commonplace truths of our social world, how the hypothetical experiences of this rhetorical figure produce a certain notion of obviousness. 7CV does not rigorously excise obviousness from its discourse; instead, it stretches the tone of obviousness to its limits, utilizing its convening function while heightening its vagueness and ambivalence in order to show all of the mixed feelings involved in the supposedly mindless acquiescence to ideology.

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I would like to suggest, briefly, that a focus on obviousness shows how Lin's use of the person of experience prompts a reconsideration of the processes which construct racial identity as a form of personal experience producing general structures of knowledge. The persons of experience in 7CV are properly generic, never marked by race, gender, sexuality, or other such categories. But his formulations uncannily echo popular expressions originating in standpoint epistemology: sentences beginning with phrases like "as a trans person" or "as a person of color" and which suggest the obviousness of a certain idea to certain identity groups as well as its non-obviousness to outsiders. Of course, this use of the person of experience seems opposed to Lin's: whereas his approach questions the relationship between experience and knowledge based on a troubling of the generic or universal, the popular expression serves to assert a definite relation between knowledge and experience based on the particularity of identity.

The unstated assumption grounding this opposition is that experiences pertaining to race, gender, and other identity categories are decisively particular and distinct from universal or generic experiences. But, if Lin is correct that false obviousness can feel (and be) as universal as true obviousness, we may infer that an experience of racialization may be as generic as one of childhood. In that case, Lin's focus on a maximally generic, nearly universal person of experience might prompt a consideration of how and why the generic-but-particular "person of color" is being invoked to offer an imagined experience that serves to imply the obviousness of various claims. If we consider recent thinking in Asian American studies about the figuring of Asian persons, things, and ideas as "generic" or "counterfeit,"22 it may be possible to consider 7CV as a text which re-examines the generic person of experience as a way to re-examine race or perhaps Asian racialization in particular. Importantly, Lin reveals the processes by which the individual figure of the generic person produces a notion of experience and emotional identification which allows for general extrapolation, and I contend that his poetics of generic emotion can offer new ways to think about more personal forms of writing, including his own.

Lin's attention to the relationship between the generic, the universal, and the obvious (as well as their various counterfeit uses) is essential for understanding how he writes race in his recent works of fiction and memoir. Works like Insomnia and the Aunt, The Fern Rose Bibliography, and the forthcoming Our Feelings Were Made by Hand narrate family relationships defined by immigration and racial difference, rather than Lin's early focus on abstract experiences of consumer life in media environments, seemingly signaling a turn toward more personal and intimate writing. By drawing attention to how 7CV uses an impersonal theory of emotions' obviousness to thicken our conception of the generic person of experience, however, I am suggesting that Lin's earlier work provides an essential lens for reading his more recent work. After all, Lin himself has said that 7CV is "really just one long preface to a novel; it's the cataloging or indexical system to a novel I 'just finished' and is 'now' called Our Feelings Were Made By Hand."23 Perhaps Lin wants the reader to approach his life writing of the Asian American family having already worked through his writing on generic emotions precisely so that the seeming obviousness of a more personal and intimate text can be experienced in the more expansive and complex sense of obviousness outlined in 7CV.

Following Irene Kim's claim that Insomnia and the Aunt achieves a kind of "sincerity without honesty,"24 I want to suggest that both Lin's fiction and 7CV achieve (in different ways) a kind of intimacy without being personal, precisely by mapping an emotional structure in which the personal is dependent upon the generic. For Lin, emotions and perhaps personal identities must be obvious (which is to say: diffuse, shared, and difficult to recognize as distinctly one's own) before they can be personal and particular — if they ever can. To state it a bit strongly: we are able to identify with emotions in Lin's writing precisely because they are not anybody's particular emotions; even when they seem to be derived from Lin's experience, these feelings are "obvious and the same as everybody else's." Lin's writing does not bind emotions to personal experience (whether that experience is of reading a website or of racial difference), but instead investigates and experiments with the structure of the obvious processes by which our "ideas of truth and the feelings we confuse with them" become transmissible, inheritable, general, beautiful, and thus real.

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Violet Spurlock is the author of In Lieu of Solutions (Futurepoem, 2023), which was the recipient of the Other Futures Award. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English at UC Berkeley, where she is researching the significance of obviousness in the history of literary criticism and patent law. 

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