Weekly Readings #144 (11/04/24-11/10/24)

neon gray zone

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

As my co-ethnic Antonio Gramsci did not quite say, because his praise of Americanism did not quite go so far, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of marketing.”¹ I usually begin these weekly posts by promoting my forthcoming novel and my ongoing podcast for paid subscribers, but this week I will embed the advertisements in the main essay. (I hear the ’80s are back!) You know what that will be about. Please enjoy!²

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Neon Gray Zone: Five Notes Toward the Contemporary

Syd Mead, Blade Runner concept art

§1. I regard the electoral events of the last week in America as (dialectically) inevitable.³ As inevitable, they are not exactly to be resisted but to be worked with—or, as Freud would say, worked through. The occult and spiritual doctrines I researched to write Major Arcana ended up convincing me of a few things. For one, resistance reifies and strengthens the object resisted. It’s unwise to refuse to recognize the other as integral to one’s own self-definition. Integration and synthesis are a better approach to the shadow-self, including the national shadow-self.

§2. If I can get meta-para-social for a moment, I have sought as a writer for an online public to avoid the famous danger of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and audience capture. In line with my Schillerian or Arnoldian theory of art as that which can unite the riven polis above ideological and other social divisions, I therefore enjoy a remarkably heterogenous audience extending from the good middle-aged leftists and liberals of Substack to the “groyper-adjacent” youth (as one of you put it) who come at me on my super-secret Tumblr. Like others with an ideologically diverse audience, such as Jesse Singal or Wesley Yang, I am frequently attacked for being too left and too right. Singal and Yang are rational centrists, though, and I am an irrationalist irresistibly fascinated by extremes. Anti-woke and anti-Trump, Singal and Yang hew to the dream of the Enlightenment, while I like to play in the Romantic space where the Nietzschean left mingles with the Nietzschean right. Accordingly, without making a conscious decision to do so, but so as not to be merely “undecided” or aloof, I produced a body of writing on my super-secret Tumblr and in the “incendiary footnotes” to this year’s Substack posts amounting to the inverse of Singal and Yang’s position, what I have called (in tribute to my imagined enemy Émilie Carrière) “MAGA Woke Brutalism,” whose central tenet I recently summed up as follows: Trump is a queer woman of color—and that’s a good thing. (I won’t rehearse the argument here; you can just go back and read the footnotes, starting around the time of Trump’s mugshot.) I came up with this bit of neo-postmodern meta-contrarianism, I now understand, to try to show liberals (especially artists) what can be worked with on the affective, archetypal, and symbolic levels of the Trump phenomenon, while showing MAGA loyalists (especially artists) a road from the welcomingly ludic qualities of their queen’s persona away from his (or whatever’s) more inhumane impulses. Whether this was worth doing, we are shortly to learn. It’s been a high-risk/high-reward time for cultural politics. You might also say I’m a “weird contrarian freak,” and I certainly am, but that doesn’t in itself mean I’m wrong. As Socrates tells Phaedrus,

The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from ‘oak or rock,’ it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes.

§3. Everybody’s about to try to sell you a book to explain the election. My forthcoming novel, Major Arcana, will also explain the election. Trump’s strongest soldiers proved to be Generations X and Z.⁴ Accordingly, Major Arcana narrates two Gen-X white women’s ideological journey from left-wing youth to right-wing middle age in the tasteful and intelligent editor and teacher Ellen Chandler and the restive and impulsive artist and model Diane del Greco, as well as a portrait of Nietzschean and vaguely neoreactionary Zoomer (semi-)female youth in the occult influencer Ash del Greco. Committed to the novel form as vehicle for the dialogic imagination, I also made sure to offer an affectionate portrayal of a Millennial liberal in the vintage clothier Jess Morrow. Among the (semi-)male characters, the wicked artist Simon Magnus and the martyred saint Jacob Morrow are essentially apolitical. Rounding out my dramatis personae, the tragically humane artist-saint Marco Cohen speaks powerfully for the radical left. I think you will find Major Arcana an illuminating chapter of America’s moral history, as well as a thrilling story told in an inventive style. It’s out from Belt Publishing early next year. You can pre-order it here, get it from NetGalley here, and access the original Substack serial (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here.

§4. Does The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, help to explain anything about our current state and society? The most recent episode on Robert Frost explored the non-consecutive presidential terms of Grover Cleveland alongside the evolution of the Democratic Party from a more populist to a more technocratic organization. That seems relevant! To encourage you to offer a paid subscription, I will also let friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre testify from an excellent outside perspective on the election:

I’m indebted to John Pistelli’s Invisible College course on American literature for a deeper understanding of the American psyche. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of listening to John rhapsodise over Whitman getting jerked off by the Hand of God, go on, treat yourself!

§5. I haven’t lied before, and I won’t lie now: divided as I am between classes and therefore between “cultures,” I have also found my political loyalties divided. My sympathies have been with such other divided members of the literati as Matthew Gasda and Walter Kirn. I weathered this contradiction earlier in life because the two political parties were composed differently. In youth I belonged without reserve to what we might now call the Tulsi Gabbard (then Dennis Kucinich) wing of the Democratic Party: hippie-ish and libertarian, pro-speech, anti-war, skeptical (sometimes to a dubious extent) of any authority that presented itself as machinic authority. This faction no longer exists in the Democratic Party and is attempting to recompose itself in a Republican Party that itself seems increasingly pledged to an alternate vision of machinic authority in the form of the Silicon Valley right. Contradictions abound; no ground is safe. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” Nevertheless, the expert class, of which I am an accredited but not a native member, has bungled many of its political interventions in this century and has operated for most of this decade as a terroristic force in American life. One learned to vomit at the phrase “according to experts.” This class’s party frankly deserved to receive an electoral blow to teach them not to do it again. The pandemic response is avenged—and, as its architects have commandeered the Democratic Party, the War on Terror is avenged once more. The expert class’s cosmopolitan vision, however, remains (to me) an attractive and correct one, just not one that can be achieved through force, whether through force of imperial arms or force of social policing. The very moral high ground they (we) sometimes rightly claim can only be held if this vision wins because it is the more appealing one, not the more powerful. We of all people cannot legitimately resort to “might makes right,” even though it often does. Note: I do not say persuasive; I say appealing. I believe in aesthetics more than I believe in arguments. And I will continue to strive to develop the aesthetics of a better world.

1. Gramsci is better known for his theory of the organic intellectual, which is to say the intellectual as born spokesperson for a particular class, as opposed to the intellectual as disinterested or deracinated intelligence. I have always hewn to the latter ideal; I have also long been aware of my petit-bourgeois consciousness. Aided by major writers who share my class origin like Keats, Dickens, and Joyce, I have attempted to square this circle by reconceptualizing the petite bourgeoisie as a genuine point of departure not for proto-fascism but for utopian sentimental aestheticism. How well I succeed in this endeavor, fulfilled if anywhere more in my novels than in my criticism, the reader will have to decide. The rest of this post, the rest of my work, should be read in the light of this footnote.

2. I admittedly also believed this before, though. When the #resistance first launched eight years ago, I was skeptical. I wrote a blog post I almost immediately deleted for fear of blowback. Self-quotation is inglorious, but almost nobody ever read it, so I give you a paragraph below to show you what I was thinking in late November 2016:

Recently, whenever ISIS has carried out another terrorist attack, the public has been exhorted by counterterrorism experts not to respond with over-generalization or vituperation toward Islam in general because the intention of the terrorists is precisely to destroy the “gray zone” between moderate and radical Islam and more generally between east and west—the discursive space of moderation wherein negotiation and dialogue (sans violence) can occur. On this theory, moral, religious, and metaphysical appeals must be suspended to allow all interlocutors sufficient dignity and security to feel they can compromise without being destroyed. Even if we know we are on the side of the angels, it is in our own interests to refuse the satisfactions of the generalizing demonization; even if we feel unsafe, it is to secure our safety that we must avoid outright civilizational or cultural war. And even if we wish to alter destructive elements in the culture of another, the best way to go about that is to amplify that culture’s creative and productive elements rather than dwelling endlessly on the negatives or suggesting that their entire enterprise is corrupt from top to bottom. Total war would be a price too high to pay for total victory, so we seek in its place a modus vivendi. Peace, this argument implies, is the precondition of justice and not the other way around.

In the event, the #resistance was a cultural disaster, laying waste the arts in an explosion of repulsive sanctimony, puritanism, and condescension that led only to a predictable backlash, whose excesses I myself have tried to stem. I hope this absurd strategy is not attempted again. The aftermath of the 2004 election, as I recall, saw a temporary retreat of liberalism to quiescence—there was a mini-Henry James boom in the republic of letters, in fact—so maybe this will be one more echo of that time. No shame in retreating to regroup.

3. “If it was so inevitable, you dipshit, then why didn’t you predict it last week?” My rude reader, we are sometimes cowed by what we pretend to be above. I rail against polling, but I was rattled last week by the Selzer poll. I allowed a poll to make me question the evidence of my own eyes; I believed a poll when I should have believed the college students in MAGA hats, not exclusively male, I saw walking around the city, an unthinkable sight in 2016 or 2020. (Or, my favorite anecdote, the three 20-something women I overheard agree not to tell one another who they were voting for!) I should have been firmer in my conviction that this was a reversed replay of the 2004 election: Selzer, now widely mocked as having canvassed the line at Starbucks rather than the broader electorate, also botched her vaunted poll in delusive favor of the Democrats in 2004—one more synchronicity across 20 years.

But there is a broader philosophical point to make here. Inevitability is always decided backwards. Here at Grand Hotel Abyss, the only science we trust is literary science; the central axiom of literary science is retrocausation, the simultaneous fulfillment and defeat of time. The period casts a spell of coherent significance back across the sentence, which begins for every writer and every reader in contingency and incertitude. Every sentence is written and read twice or not written and read at all. There is no reading but only rereading. And, said Barthes, “those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.”

4. Incorrigibly nostalgic Gen Xers—and elderly Millennials like Anna K. and myself—have their very own Reagan revolution, their neon-lit neo-1980s. This shouldn’t exactly be a surprise. For those old enough to remember, an entire popular sitcom of that aforementioned decade was developed around the idea of reactionary Gen-X youth—though IRL Mallory turns out to be a lot more “based” than IRL Alex, if her X account this week is anything to go by. As for the Zoomers, those now wondering who Mallory and Alex are (don’t worry about it, élèves; your elders watched too much television as you watch too much TikTok), I will allow myself one pettiness, one “I told you so” when it comes to the rightward shift of both youth and metropolitans. I know some people thought it was frivolous or beneath me somehow to focus, starting on my super-secret Tumblr’s now five-year-old “new conservatism” tag, on the strange things that young people were writing in this decade. But I’d say my interest, largely the academic interest of someone with an eye out for neo-modernisms, has now been vindicated. Please give Honor Levy another try rather than a brisk dismissal, or at least my essay on Honor Levy, if you want to understand the word on the street right now, the “Trumpian affect,” to quote someone I rarely quote, Masha Gessen, in our own time and not in the 1980s. I have avoided gender-war discourse in this post, but I also note that Levy is a female author able to write not uncritically but also not unsympathetically about (and from the perspective of) reactionary male youth. After that observation, I go back to avoiding gender-war discourse. I hope we can avoid the war, too. Quoting Tori Amos quoting Joe Jackson, “If there’s war between the sexes, then there’ll be no people left.”