III.
Really we ought to be careful when speaking of "self-consciousness". All too often, nowadays, we speak of it in a way only all too informed by an idea of being special, and in a way, consequently, which comes to orient itself way too much towards mere appearance - a typical instance of the typically modern epidemic of putting shame over guilt. Which of course is also to say that, in truth, self-consciousness as a kind of thinking activity is likely not far from essentially serving as the very foundation of the aforementioned phenomena. No one is merely passively aware of how they are perceived by others ; the problem lies in the lack of recognition that preoccupation with shame is itself something you sincerely ought to feel guilty over. You have things to do, and instead you're thinking about how you'll look when you do them. As much as you may care what others think, you hardly seem to care if you're doing the right thing - you only care how it looks to them. But again, take the hint: Whatever it is you ought to do, thinking even more about yourself is hardly the answer.
There's a certain point in ZDF's interview with David Foster Wallace, roughly 34-35 minutes in, where he briefly comments on the intimate connection between self-hatred and narcissism. I think he's right. Hate is a word so intense that, honestly, I think we say it too much. And the intensity of the utterance, really, matches hate itself too. Hate is not just intense but totalitarian. There's a reason one can speak of being consumed by hate - matter of fact is if anything, I think hate must be the affective state which most precisely resonates with the ancient Greek idea of 'pathos', the affect to which we are subjected as if it were some external thing that, well, consumed us. In genuine hatred, there is nothing unaffected. And so self-hatred, obviously, correlates only all too well with narcissism . For if I say that I hate myself, and if what I say is true, what I am saying is that my relation to myself has been so thoroughly tainted by me that really, I cannot do anything without that too being done through the static noise of an underlying self-hatred. Which of course only serves to further ground the self-hatred itself, because if I didn't have enough to hate before, now I can also hate myself for ruining what I tried to do because I was too preoccupied with my self-hatred to do it 'right'. Self-hatred is a vicious and narcissistic cycle, a justiciary chasing a villain whose lives largely in the past, outside the reach of the law.
IV.
One minute into Runaway, Kanye finally speaks - or sings, rather. The call of conscience is a call to introspection, which, for those self-obsessives who tend to spend all too much time on just that activity, carries no normative standard for completion on its own. The cycle can, essentially, continue until it is forcibly terminated - never from within, always from without. Following the grandiose setting of a melancholy stage, Kanye submits to just this call.
And I always find, yeah, I always find something wrong
You been putting up with my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at finding what I don't like the most
So I think it's time for us to have a toast
A "pre-chorus", we might call it. Which of course is a horribly violent way to understand such a part of the song. For the rest of the song, it will repeat itself a few times, always along the chorus, and the chorus never without it. Yet we call them by different names, but while the chorus appears in some sense free to stand on its own, the pre-chorus remains always determined by the chorus itself; without it, it has no intelligible being. Which, in this case, actually seems surprisingly apt, as the chorus itself takes the form of a response to the last line of the pre-chorus, namely the toast itself.
Let's have a toast for the douchebags
Let's have a toast for the assholes
Let's have a toast for the scumbags
Every one of them that I know
Let's have a toast for the jerk-offs
That'll never take work off
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can
Much as the chorus appears a response to the pre-chorus, in turning to the pre-chorus we find exactly that same dialogical structure we'd expected: Kanye's conscience has spoken, and he has answered with self-consciousness.
Something is wrong with Kanye - that much we know, he knows it from without, and he knows it totally. A totalitarian demand was made, but how does one respond? Clearly, by taking the blame upon oneself, in recognition of the fact of conscience. But, of course, his response is insufficient. Simply put: If it were sufficient, there'd hardly be grounds the remaining six minutes of the song.
And so it's perhaps not random that the first "flaw" identified by Kanye is something akin to a perfectionism - he finds things that are wrong, finds things he doesn't like. But how does that amount to perfectionism anyway? See, in some ordinary sense, I should like to think that when we speak of perfectionists, we speak of people who are somehow incapable of finishing what they are doing, believing that things are missing. That, first and foremost, is the core of perfectionism in its own practical externality. That process, essentially, is one which must be accepted on the grounds of our work being nothing more than an infinite approximation of perfection, something to which we can get closer and closer yet will never reach. Which of course is hardly what Kanye is speaking of, for which reason the immediate conclusion that what Kanye is speaking of is a general condition applying to everything in his life is plainly false, simply for that it cannot be true. What Kanye does is he finds what is wrong, and he finds what he doesn't like.
Perfectionism in the sense Kanye speaks of here is a perfectionism not with reference to how things might be in some future if only he could do things better, but a perfectionism with regards to a preexisting source of normativity. For us to find what is wrong, we must have a sense of what is right in the first place - and in his introspective mood, that source of normativity appears to be nothing less than what Kanye likes. But even more fundamentally, we have to consider who even finds these things. Obviously: the one who searches. And so it's not random that Kanye always finds something wrong. In a question of the chicken and the egg, we have to wonder whether what was wrong was there to begin with, or whether in reality, what happens is that what is wrong manifests itself exactly in the fact that Kanye searches. "Seek and you shall find".
The matter becomes clearer when remembering that we're still working within the confines of the response to conscience. If the introduction of the song called for introspection, to find out what was wrong, the response given might seem unsatisfactory, unless of course we consider whether the answer may already be given. And so what it wrong is that Kanye searches for wrongs in the first place - something that can only be wrong if what he searched for was not genuinely wrong. And in that same vein, it is all too worthwhile to note, too, that when Kanye looks for a wrong, it's not a matter of looking for something which he doesn't like, and it's not even a matter of looking things he dislikes either - he simply looks for something he doesn't like the most; in other words, in the mind of Kanye, there has to be something wrong, even if everything seems right - a possibility only present in the purview of self-hatred. In this way, the nature of self-consciousness and the narcissism of self-hatred are fully present in the pre-chorus of Runaway (set within the context of the foregoing introduction), not by means of an analysis of the phenomenon, but by way of sheer and pure display. Self-consciousness and guilt-ridden introspection are shown plainly for what they are. Kanye always finds what is wrong, and he does that because he searches for something wrong, and what is wrong is what he doesn't like. The question, then, of whether what Kanye finds can ever actually be the source of his dislike - well, I don't think there can be much doubt there either,
But here's the killer: Kanye's not speaking of just anything, he's speaking of other people. In another cycle of self-reference and laying layers upon layers, it seems that not only is Kanye responding to the fact of conscience from the introduction of the song, but, I should like to claim, also to another search of that very same kind - namely a search for what is wrong in a particular relationship. And so the "you" of the second line has, just as Kanye is doing to himself, been subjected to the scrutiny of looking for something wrong, to which the answer turned out to be Kanye. The totalitarian nature of self-hating introspection thus also comes into the light on full display: What is wrong with the you, the her (as evidenced in the first verse, which is yet to come), is that she "puts up with his shit", or, to put it in less self-hating words, that she accepts him. Where everything else is perfect, self-hatred demands that something be wrong, and failing all else, the answer can only be yourself. Self-hatred is all-consuming.
V.
There's something mildly enigmatic about the transition from the pre-chorus to the chorus itself. The last line of the pre-chorus seems odd in the context of the former three - if, as I thing the song wants us to do, based on the change in instrumentation between the pre-chorus and the chorus - we are to really understand the pre-chorus as a coherent entity, then the fourth line, I think, must find its explanation in the foregoing three. And indeed, I think this is what the fourth line tells us to do, too - that's the meaning of the So. The song bluntly communicates its own causal structure.
If, as I have claimed, the pre-chorus has a two-layered structure, being both a response to the fact of conscience and a case of self-application as Kanye finds what's wrong with his her, the So must fit into this. In other words: following a first instance of both narcissistic self-hatred, the first movement, and of an examination of her, the second movement which leads back to the original self-hating movement, the So, I think, may be a genuine attempt to break the cycle of self-reflection. There's a reason Kanye doesn't simply say that it's time to have a toast - rather, it is us who must make it. And so I don't think it's unreasonable, either, to wonder which "us" he speaks of. It'd be easy to simply conclude that Kanye is speaking to her, but I think we'd be wrong to do so. Well, she might be part of it, but on the other hand, as pointed out in Part 1, the introduction fundamentally has fundamentally already broken the fourth wall, and Kanye, as he speaks, speaks for all of us, not for himself, answering the fact from conscience on our behalf, whether we like it or not. And so I think that the us truly is us. That doesn't mean that the she has to be excluded from that us, indeed, we might like to think that no one is excluded from the vague us that is implied. Certainly, it seems pretty much anyone could hear the song, joining us in our toast with a timely delay. And, truth be told, that would likely be in keeping with self-conscious self-hatred, which thus provides the connection to the previous three lines.
Kanye attempts to break the cycle self-reflection, is my first claim. He does so by, in a literal sense, ending the pre-chorus by ending its self-reflective structure. And so that's the point of the toast itself too - what Kanye calls for is the termination of his looking for flaws. The So, I think, is not just some appearance of causality, but is an expression of the reality of Kanye's search. The first three lines do not leave any opportunity for doubt, and no trace of skepticism is present. Where she might've come to say something, in line two, Kanye has spoken for her, and so the dialogue of the first four lines terminate themselves in Kanye, having now self-examined where he ought to have consulted social reality, calling for recognition of a succesful etiology. Whatever was wrong, Kanye was the cause of himself - he was the wrong.
The toast, of course, cannot properly be understood in any joyful manner. It must, I think, be understood in the tragic spirit of self-hating narcissism, having taken an ironic turn in its confrontation with itself. The toast is not, by any means, a celebration, but is a case recognition - and in this case, as we follow Kanye's thoughts in the response to conscience, it is a toast in which we, as listeners, take part in recognizing ourselves in the picture painted by Kanye. And I think we can very well make sense of this sort of toast. Recalling the downward-headed spiral of the piano, we can think to those toasts had with friends not when we've come out to celebrate, but rather to drown our sorrows, and to - importantly - forget ourselves. That's the kind of toast we're having, I think, except we're past forgetting, as conscience has already spoken and spoken finally. Indeed when Kanye speaks of all the ones he knows, we have to ask who he might ever speak of. Because what we saw before was that, in attempting to break with himself in line 2, that attempt reflected back on himself - the flaw in her was that she accepted accepted. And so the nature of narcissistic self-hatred demands that that particular structure be present. In other words, I don't think Kanye truly manages to see past himself - what is wrong is him, and he himself is all the jerkoffs, all the assholes and all the douchebags that he knows. It's no coincidence that the types for whom we toast are all so similar. And we, we're much the same. Which means that the attempt at breaking the cycle has failed. As much as Kanye might have tried to get outside of himself, he never truly left, and neither did we.
Except the cycle does break, and Kanye does manage to leave himself, this time not just concerned with the us, but actually extending to her, to the you, in a movement which externalizes the conclusion we've already arrived at, now in turn realizing it in social reality. "Run away fast as you can". And I think this reflects an image of genuine love for her, genuine concern, but also of the perfectionism depicted. What was wrong with her was him ; what is missing, for her perfection, is his absence. When Kanye tells us he has a plan, what he consequently proposes was the only possible solution. Disease and symptom are one and the same; there are no other options when all that is wrong is You.