Weekly Readings #164 (03/23/25-03/30/25)

I don't believe in facts

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

This week I posted “A Sublime Deformity of Nature” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. This episode is a literally sick treatment of the works of Charles Baudelaire. (A little phlegm in the throat, however, is an invaluable aid to the pronunciation of the French language, I have always found.) I covered some of the standard materials in reference to our poète maudit—the dandy, the flâneur, Decadence, Symbolism—but I hope listeners were as moved as I was by the episode’s climax in the harrowing self-accusation of a “A Voyage to Cythera” and the entranced erotic tribute of “Lesbos.” Thanks to all my paid subscribers! Coming up in the next four weeks we will add Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Ibsen to our ever-expanding archive.

My forthcoming novel Major Arcana arrives in about three weeks. You can pre-order it here in print, ebook, and audio book formats (the audio book will be released on May 20).¹ I emphasize again that there will be a local release event here in Pittsburgh; it will be held at 7PM on April 17 at Riverstone Books in storied Squirrel Hill. While “Steel City” is not quite a global metropolis, I still think everybody within the range of this signal should attend. The event is free: please register here! A New York event will be announced next month, but don’t let this stop you from coming to city I’ve called the nexus of American realities.

For this week—well, see for yourself. Please enjoy!

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Factitious: On Some Motifs of the Now

Walter Benjamin’s grave, adjusted

Two experiences this week with canonical Marxist critics. I tried to reread Benjamin’s “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” for my Invisible College episode. I hadn’t looked at this essay since maybe my second year of graduate school. Jesus, I thought, how did I ever read this stuff? Even a head cold couldn’t help, as it sometimes does when reading abstruosities. (Where did I learn that T. S. Eliot liked to write poetry when he had a cold—that it was like, I quote from an unreliable memory, “the rustle of petticoats” in his head?) Benjamin’s “theoretical apparatus,” as we used to call it, is a Rube Goldberg device: he starts with German vitalist philosophies of authentic experience (lebensphilosophie), which takes him to Bergson vs. Proust on the voluntary or involuntary character of personal anamnesis, which takes him to Freud on the unconscious’s function of sparing the psyche from shock, which takes him to Engels on the shocking character of urban industrial modernity, which takes him, finally, to Baudelaire, though, as he allows, Baudelaire registers this particular shock experience indirectly in his poetry, since none of it is industrial and only some is emphatically (or more than implicitly) urban. Symptomatic reading: absence of evidence as evidence of presence. You want to tell him to skip the theoretical survey—it’s an independent essay; it doesn’t have to be refereed by your committee—and just write about what he wants to write about, but it’s hard to know what he wants to write about. He doesn’t appear to want to write about Baudelaire. Blake Smith says Benjamin is boring because he’s often in pursuit of essences and precise definitions like a high German philosopher, but he reminds me more of a precocious YouTube video essayist. They always start by noticing a cultural phenomenon that invites commentary; and the build-up to the promised explanation often fascinates as our social critics pursue hint, trace, and clue, in the way that the uncanny first half-hour of a good horror movie does; but then, inevitably, out comes the hackneyed monster into the unforgiving light, more bathetic and shopworn than terrifying: late capitalism!²

On the other hand, when I sat in the library the other day and read the Paris Review interview in memoriam of Jameson, the symptomatic reader who gave our vernacular that very (and now very enervating) phrase, I was affected by something that once would have annoyed me, that would have moved me only to satire. To the interviewer’s first question, the inevitable one about his biography and background, Jameson testily insisted on a theoretical reframing, on a brief critique (in the sense of “investigating the conditions of possibility”) of the whole line of inquiry, on a rejection of the banal and benighted idea that there could be such a thing as a fact, especially a fact (he anticipated and parried the accusation lurking behind the question) that would produce a reductive explanation of how a person like himself could hold a political commitment at odds with his subject position:

Well, you want to know facts, and as I don’t believe in facts—that is to say, their constructions—I want to make this first question more theoretical. This will be an illustration of what is, for me, a basic philosophical position on the constructedness of so-called facts, as well as a dramatization of the meaning of the word theory, about which I am so often asked and whose differentiation from philosophy has been so important for me, but which I seem unable to get anyone to understand, unless I have recourse to a word which sounds more familiar and intelligible to them, namely the dialectic.

We can retheorize the first question’s empirical formulation by preceding it with a brief discussion of question number two, on the Sartrean view of the family—pioneered, rather, I believe, by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoirs. For both, the family is the crucial mediatory between class society and the individual—the latter learns class through the family and in particular through the parents. But one must add that this is a complex mediation that resembles the double helix of DNA. The infant is, in the parents, confronted with two complete sets of social or class genes. He or she forms a subjectivity out of their combination—that is, the choice between them and the restructuration of a new and novel being.

This may be annoying, but it’s less annoying than (speaking of accusations, I will be accused of making a gendered remark, and so be it) the way all leftist arguments are now, like online recipes, prefaced by overfamiliar personal essays, a veritable saturation (the fluid trope, I will be told, is also gendered) in the supposed facts, when sometimes all one (“what do you mean ‘one,’ white man?”) wants is an argument. As the dialectic rolls on, what once looked like haughty evasiveness now appears as a rare dignity.

I admire Olympian detachment in a critic—an art critic, a literary critic, a social critic, a political critic. I don’t need the commentator to feel every single emotion for me. The impersonal masks the personal, disinterest masks interest, but looking for cracks in the papier-mâché or studying the slivers of flesh visible at the ragged eye-hole gives the reader something to do. Deshabille is sexier than naked; passion burns all the hotter for smoldering underground. (I probably like third-person novels for the same reason.)

I raise the question because it’s surely a bad week to criticize the Marxist critic. 2024’s ironic reversals of 2004 have suddenly, in 2025, snapped back into the linear as the Trump administration completes a bit of unfinished business from the Cold War and its War-on-Terror sequel by finally and forcibly attempting to lustrate the campuses. I was asked, open-endedly, to comment on this, a request behind which I heard several conflicting accusations, my audience being quite ideologically heterogenous, or perhaps several conflicting invitations to let the mask slip, to express either (am I this inscrutable?) unseemly schadenfreude at the subduing of ideological currents I have often criticized or else high dudgeon at direct political interference in academic and cultural freedom. But, aside from the alarm any reasonable person might feel at the alleged lack or abuse of due process and gratuitous use of force in several of the individual immigration-based cases, I don’t feel either extreme emotion upon this sad inevitability. It’s like watching someone die at the age of 103—what did we expect? A publicly funded institution’s autonomy from government (or public) interference can only ever have been a polite fiction, one requiring for its maintenance a studied politeness on the dominated side. (Remember when mom and dad said in our insolent carbuncular teenaged faces, “Once you move out and pay your own bills, you can do whatever you want”?) While there are actually good reasons for a reactionary state to keep revolutionaries (or “revolutionaries,” Jamesonian Casaubons of the revolution) on its payroll—this subtlety has always eluded the more literal-minded on the right, while, in my experience, the irony has long tormented the left—it’s probably not a historical norm. At the same time, the arbitrary exercise of authority over intellectual life by people who can’t be trusted to tell what is living from what is dead in Benjamin or Jameson—and people who can’t, in all honesty, be trusted not to start a satanic lesbian panic over Baudelaire, who somewhat shared a version of their politics—is bound to have the proverbial chilling effect, especially as the old ideological prohibitions of the 1990s-2010s era will likely also remain in force, if off the books for now. Nobody will know what to say or how to say anything at all, and that’s if anybody can read. (Even I forgot how to read Walter Benjamin! I once knew how, I swear…) Honestly, I think it’s curtains. We need cultural elites, but it’s going to be hard to find them there.

Again, however, the grounds to object to any of this were eroded from the inside first. In her stirring Baconian prehistory, Julianne hopes the academic humanities can be saved, but even she lets stand the Frankfurt School culture-and-barbarism charge that hollowed out the project from within and prepared the present collapse. If the train-track runs straight from Homer to Auschwitz, then the study of Homer can only be the reiterated and likely doomed interruption of this journey; such a political project may lend our study a certain alluring urgency at first, but will in the long run tempt us to wonder why Homer should not rather be buried somewhere out of the way as (I vary my metaphor) so much radioactive waste. No, a fully affirmative case for the tradition will have to be rebuilt from the ground up to justify its institutionalization, if we care about this or if it can be done—then again, maybe Adorno is just right, and, as the meme says, whatever can be destroyed by the truth deserves to be destroyed by the truth³—and I doubt it will be done inside the institutions as presently constituted, whether they are patrolled from within by careerists of the left (as they have lately been) or from without by ideologues of the right (as they now threaten to be), or, in the worst case, both and bewilderingly at once.

Unsatisfied by “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” I reread the pages in Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia on Benjamin. The late Australian poet-critic-presenter’s 2007 compendium of 20th-century civilization gets more richly scandalous as the years pass. I wrote in amused rue about my history with it in a 2020 essay—in late January of 2020, it so happens, right on the eve of destruction. On the one hand, it’s a triumphalist document of the neoconservative-neoliberal hegemony, a book dripping with dismissive scorn for leftist professors but respectful of the end-of-history niceties; on the other hand, it’s a book where James at least entertains (though slightly recoils from) the old Cold War thesis that liberal civilization might at times preserve itself by calculatedly using the authoritarian right as a wrecking ball against the totalitarian left, and where he likewise certainly advises the state to take a high hand with illegal immigrants. A very 21st century book about the 20th century, then, in ways only now becoming visible. Anyway, mocking and deriding Benjamin’s abstruse German-philosophy style—the Casaubon analogy is originally his—our showily philo-Semitic Antipodean critic complains that the thinker did not avail himself of his academic exile, the way many excluded Jewish intellectuals of the time did, to learn to write for the public:

Benjamin wanted a place on the faculty more than anything else in life. Other Jews of comparable critical talent, forced into journalism because the universities had shut them out, did what Benjamin could never bring himself to do. They accepted journalism’s requirements of readability, and found ways of giving everything they had to the article rather than the treatise. The books they wrote had the general public in mind. In retrospect, the journalists can be seen to have enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flown thesis. Their written and spoken conversations were informal seminars that turned the cafés into universities, even as the universities were hardening further into hieratic structures where nothing mattered except the prestige of position—a characteristic that made them fatally corruptible by political pressure. The journalists were well out of it, and the cleverest of them realized it: they took the opportunity to create a new language for civilization, a language that drew strength from the demotic in order to cherish the eternal.

Benjamin, on the other hand, even when he wrote for a newspaper, had a way of sounding as if he was still angling for a Ph.D. If he had reached safety he might have been obliged to change his ways, almost certainly for the better. To pine for more of what he had done already, you have to miss the glaring point that he had already done far too much of it.

[…]

None of this is pleasant to say, and is probably not pleasant to hear. There aren’t so many truly comprehensive freelance scholars that we can afford to mock one of them just because he was a victim of his own style, and Benjamin was a lot more than that. Kicking a man when he is down is bad enough, and kicking him when he is unfairly dead looks like blasphemy. Considering the refinement of Benjamin’s mind, his fate was a crucifixion. But we are talking about his reputation, the prestige he still has, and, for the humanities, the baleful encouragement he gives to the damaging notion that there is somehow a progressivist, humanitarian license for talking through a high hat. There is no such license. The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is.⁴

James’s own “demotic,” his “ordinary speech” laden with clichés smugly emparadoxed in the manner of Wilde or Chesterton, a language assuming a commonsensical common ground of public agreement or understanding now become a chasm—this may or may not be (it’s probably not) a model of correct style for the freelance intellectual. As I’ve discussed before, this style of criticism, even when wielded by Marxists, misses the sheer charisma of jargon and abstraction, and the role this charisma plays in the will-to-power of the intelligentsia, and the susceptibility of the laity. But the point about learning to think and to write outside of academic structures and for a public outside of academe is more relevant than when he first wrote these words, even if no “general public” is currently thinkable.

Such a public remains to be convened by the free writer on the other side of whatever event brings the present fragmentation and polarization to its fiery climax.⁵

1. I hope I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that the producers of the audio book have sent me a 10-page document of uncommon, foreign, and otherwise outré words used in the novel. They want to consult me about their pronunciation. (I don’t know how every one of them is pronounced; I only typed them!) I am tempted to publish the document as my contribution trouvé to the polyglot modernist long poem à la Pound and Eliot. It begins:

susurrus
sigil
tinnitus
Ave atque vale
Morituri te salutant
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani
Quod erat demonstrandum
Magnus
qua
del Greco
geste

Hugh Kenner, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

2. This ubiquitous phrase, which was coined to mean one thing, and was then re-minted to mean the initial thing’s opposite, doesn’t currently mean much of anything, and it would be a net addition to human knowledge if we stopped using it. One wag has even recently suggested, given the seemingly inexorable technological change on the horizon, that we are only just now exiting early capitalism—the capitalism before capital’s full becoming-autonomous as sovereign machine intelligence.

3. Fully affirmative cases for the tradition—the left used to have them, for example:

I grew up with the conviction that what Georg Lukacs calls “the classical heritage of mankind” is a precious legacy. It came out of historical circumstances often appalling, filled with injustice and outrage. It was often, in consequence, alloyed with prejudice and flawed sympathies. Still, it was a heritage that had been salvaged from the nightmares, occasionally the glories, of history, and now we would make it “ours,” we who came from poor and working-class families. This “heritage of mankind” (which also includes, of course, Romantic and modernist culture) had been denied to the masses of ordinary people, trained into the stupefaction of accepting, even celebrating, their cultural deprivations. One task of political consciousness was therefore to enable the masses to share in what had been salvaged from the past—the literature, art, music, thought—and thereby to reach an active relation with these. That is why many people, not just socialists but liberals, democrats, and those without political tags, kept struggling for universal education. It was not a given: it had to be won. Often, winning proved to be very hard.

Many major recent writers are more right-wing than they look at first; Coetzee blurbed Clive James’s book, for example, and see footnote 4 on Morrison. Harold Bloom, however, like his friend Philip Roth, was more left-wing than he looked, and The Western Canon, as I’ve written, was an esoteric-gnostic re-statement of the above quotation rather than the conservative testament of legend and rumor. I mention it only to refute the usual tired polemical misprisions that re-arose this week, in an essay demanding further “accountability,” the Cultural Revolution-ish ring this already creepily cultish word took on in the past decade having failed to dim the famous author’s ardor for further inquisitions. For Roth’s crypto-leftism, please scroll to my capsule review of Operation Shylock here. Then, if you’re tired of everything getting AI-Ghiblified, scroll further at the same link for my Adorno-ish apocalyptic critique of the kawaii way of life—

How Ngai’s redemptive reading of cuteness survives the image of sexually degraded female neoteny Asano presents here and elsewhere, over and over again, I’m not sure. […] Cuteness is what existed before sex, before woman, and so woman, to be reduced back to cuteness, has to be extinguished in and through sex.

—though, while I am literally qualified to write such critiques, my fullest and therefore most ambivalent and multi-faceted treatment of the kawaii is in the cute nihilism exhibited by Ash del Greco in Major Arcana. For a thorough and openly conservative argument that we poets should never have gone down the gnostic-modernist route to begin with and have therefore asked for our tribulation, see Esmé L. K. Partridge’s “Music and the Decline of Civilization.” For a cognate case made on the geopolitical and philosophical level, see Zineb Riboua on “The Decolonial Delusion.”

4. Magic is real, though, but intermittent in its effects. Benjamin at least grasped this. James’s racist language of voodoo and witch-doctors reminds me that friend-of-the-blog Gnocchic Apocryphon surmises a kindred conflict on this point between Frederick Douglass, a man of Enlightenment, a champion of reasoned discourse and literacy, and Toni Morrison, a belated modernist fascist (my deliberately inflammatory label, not GA’s) using language not as communication but as incantation to raise the old gods and the blood consciousness, like Yeats and Lawrence before her, to see the plumed serpent ride again on the charred air. (Though each can be read otherwise, as great writers always can; it is this which tempts us to drag them into the seminar room in the first place, or what tempts us to drag ourselves there. Morrison champions open endings and polysemous symbols. As for Douglass, why does he even tell us about the root he carried into his triumphant battle with Covey if he thought it only backward superstition?) Honor Levy, about whom I’ve written at length here, also reappears to confess her oracular powers have run dry. I feel the same. I walked by an anti-Trump/Musk protest yesterday. It was well-attended, but I thought my eyes were deceiving me: the protest was held essentially on a teeming and diverse university campus, but the protestors were almost all of retirement age. They were all white, and so was their hair; the Boomers will evidently go out fighting. The Zoomers, out enjoying the nice spring weather, milled around their elders’ agitation with bemusement. The mundane astrologers, meanwhile, are pulling the fire alarm as we are scheduled to move from an era when we idealized the weeping victim to one when we will idealize the flaming warrior-leader. See here and here—I deliberately link to a white male MAHA type and a black female DSA type to prove they’re in prophetic alignment despite any personal biases. The dangerous polarization my commenters urged me to observe in the lead-up to the election, which I said I didn’t feel at that time, has now emerged into our eerily calm normalcy. Will a revolution materialize? A post I accidentally saw on Substack Notes before I hurried from the repulsive “home” tab back to the comfortable “following” tab said that the government will soon be black-bagging citizens. Maybe, but we are one terrorist or even “terrorist” attack away not only from that happening, but from that happening with the warm approval of (for example) Jeffrey Goldberg, whose recent psyop—well, I’ve already said too much. As Chappell Roan sagely advises, we cannot be political experts. Put not your faith in clearly marked labels or “sides.” Just some observations. I make no other prediction, no other recommendation. Honor Levy, in passing, mocks the cultural critic for cowardly non-involvement in the production of culture. The critic is always right, of course, in the same way that, as Conrad wrote somewhere, only those who do nothing make no mistakes. (This is why I want all my readers to become writers—so they’re too busy writing to—correctly!—criticize me.)

5. I recently wrote a long introduction to the oeuvre of novelist Bruce Wagner for The Metropolitan Review. I framed my essay with Wagner’s announcement that he would retire from writing, but I am happy to have been proved premature in my proto-obituary yesterday with Wagner’s re-emergence: an excerpt from his forthcoming novel about the L.A. fires in that very journal. (Has any serious novelist novelized a disaster so soon after its unfolding? Since, I mean, I published my pandemic novella in May of 2020?) The opening movements of Wagner’s polyphony exhibit his unique, ineffable merit, as we are lured into thinking we are about to read a satire—

A week before, in her home in the Highlands, she hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates at a fundraiser for Gaza children. (She spoke with him about a film project too.) Among the guests—likeminded friends she called the Pacific Palestiners—were Hunter Schafer, Angelina Jolie, Quannah Chasinghorse, Kehlani, and her pretend-bestie, Debra Winger. The bakery she owned—with its tiresomely nonbinary celeb-whoring Esthergen waitstaff—catered the event, but the hubby wasn’t there because a few weeks ago, she accused Rocky of having an affair and kicked him to the curb.

—before finding ourselves immersed in tides of emotion (can I weep for Stephen Colbert?) we’d never have predicted from the scenario alone. (Sam Kriss—whose elegy for his mother I trust you’ve all read—confessed in his alt-lit survey that at the advanced age of 33 he understood every reference in the aforementioned Honor Levy’s “Love Story.” I am 10 years older than Kriss, but, alas, I did too. I have never understood every reference in a Bruce Wagner novel, however, though Wagner is some 27 or 28 years older than I am. How does he know these things? This is not impressive in itself—Philip Traylen is right to reprove me explicitly that the novel is properly transhistorical and implicitly that most novels are not worth reading at all—but to lift itself above or through history the novel-worth-reading requires fuel, and the immediately contemporary, Cervantes’s Arabic manuscript found in the street, or Dostoevsky’s raucous and timely ideological quarrels, or Wagner’s name-dropping celebrity soirées, are that fuel.) I look forward, as it were, to Amputation.