Weekly Readings #81 (08/21/23-08/27/23)

lose yourself

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

This week I appeared on Manifesto! A Podcast to discuss Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” with Jacob Siegel. (It’s a Patreon-only episode, but come on, they only charge two bucks.) As far as steps in my inexorable rise to fame go, this is an especially satisfying one, since I’ve long listened to the pod.

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I also published “Übermeat,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. I don’t know what to tell you. Part Two is drawing ever closer to its heart of darkness—and the novel drawing ever closer to the gnostic gospel of contemporary adolescence that is Part Three—so if you’re not subscribed already, you really should be.

Thank you for your support. Now let’s, please, double these numbers!

Today, I’m writing about (what else?) Merve Emre, academia, the sociology of art, whether or not fascism politicizes aesthetics, modernism from Joyce to Sontag, the gender of professionalism, Trump’s mugshot, and all the rest of it. Please enjoy!

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All She Wants to Do Is Dance: Public Criticism and the Sociology of Art After Academe

I could say I’m above gossip. It wouldn’t be true, but I could say it. While Merve Emre’s immigrant father is a transplant surgeon, my immigrant mother is a hairdresser—her business card reads “aesthetician,” which I’ve always envied—and I was raised in a beauty shop.¹ Argal, I live for gossip. But there are intellectual concerns we must address here as well.

The purpose of Anna Silman’s masterfully constructed and much-discussed Emre profile in Business Insider is to defuse these concerns through four primary tactics. First is to disarm readers by granting their objections to Emre in advance, the old “self-deprecation as self-defense.” Second is to present Emre as a victim of racism and sexism. If the piece had been published in 2020, this argument would be its mainspring, but such accusations are, whether we like it or not, a bit shopworn at the moment, so Silman evokes the idea without dwelling on it; she even intimates that Emre, as a child of economic and professional privilege, is not really the poster-child of the oppressed. Third and related is to present Emre as a renegade from academe and to associate any critics she might have with resentful academic dullards like the ones quoted anonymously in the piece. Fourth and most effective—if I were another kind of critic, I might describe this tactic as “toxic femininity”—is to dismiss anyone skeptical of Emre’s eminence as envious because she is, after all, smarter, hotter, and richer than most of us will ever be: You’re just, like, jealous.

I’m actually sympathetic to most of the above. Emre does work hard and has read widely; critics should address the public; academe is spiritually dead. But on my Eminent Americans pod appearance last month, I did describe Emre’s position at the New Yorker as an instance of academe colonizing public criticism, and Emre herself has characterized her public criticism—on her now-deleted Twitter—as pedagogy.²

For all her understandable fallings-out with the complacent professoriate, Emre seems in her intellectual orientation like a typical product of the 21st-century elite English department. Silman writes of Emre’s “sociological approach to criticism.” In this period, theory became unfashionable and was succeeded by a variety of approaches to literature derived from history and the social sciences. In tandem with the changed methodology came a shift in the self-conception of the tenurati from insurgents in league with the oppressed to the oppressed’s expert managers and defenders against the depredations of backward capital and the lower middle class. (I describe these developments in more detail here.)

A certain highly enervating small-c conservatism, reducing art and thought to the jostle for advantage, has accompanied this transition, as Silman perhaps inadvertently dramatizes:

“But the other thing is like, I don’t actually think that the work relies on the evacuation of subjectivity,” she continued. “It is impossible. So then I think the question becomes, what does it mean to make style charismatic through an act of withholding access to the personal in one genre, and then giving or creating the appearance of giving people access to the personal in another kind of genre?”

“So are you saying this is all a calculated dance?” I asked.

“Everything’s a calculated dance,” she shot back. “It would be foolish for anyone to think that what happens in a form of writing, whether it’s a long-form magazine piece or 140 characters, isn’t in some way calculated. I wonder what pure authenticity would even be.”

“Authenticity” in this case is a straw man, as if anyone were asking her to publish her diaries, though I doubt even Emre would be so quick to knock the concept down if, for example, the authenticity of gender identity or racial experience were at issue.

The real question is in what way writing, or indeed dance, is “calculated.” A “sociological approach,” which stages writers as agents jockeying for power in the social landscape, also understands literary works as weapons in a struggle for status, shaped deliberately to have maximal effect on the writer’s standing. There is little room in such a worldview for inspiration, for obsession, for the unconscious, for the muses, for divine frenzy—for art as compulsory witness to experience, for art as tribute to the creation, for art as address to the ineffable. Art is artifice by definition: the process therefore necessarily involves calculation. But it doesn’t, unless we’re dealing with sheer hackwork or propaganda, involve calculation of the artist’s clout. If I’m being honest, I will concede that this lower calculus does come later—but not in the heat of composition.

Ironically, Emre knows all of the above. I find her criticism unobjectionable, if—echoing the ever-mysterious Alice from Queens—a bit unmemorable. I can’t imagine why anyone would “revile” her, a word used in the Business Insider headline. Aside from the Boston Review piece decrying the personal essay’s decay into “a shallow sort of mimesis” that brought her to public notice, she’s less thesis-driven, less polemical, than peers like Parul Sehgal or Andrea Long Chu. I don’t share her affinity for minor and forgotten modernists; I believe it’s “lonely at the top” and that “everything good is on the highway,” so the thought of minor and forgotten writers, to say nothing of “writers’ writers,” tends to demoralize me. Such writers usually seem to me to have been justly neglected: too narrow in their vision, off on some private quest, or too fastidious to reach the universal.³

When Emre loves a book or an author, however, she doesn’t write like a sociologist. I’ve already quoted on here the assertion on her now-deleted Twitter that Jon Fosse’s Septology made her feel the presence of God; meanwhile, her centenary encomium to Ulysses was so extravagant that even a canon-man like myself had to wax skeptical.⁴ Emre’s journey from Bain & Company—much as the ethos of that organization may have inspired her “everything is calculation” stance—to avowed socialism and feminism, has its modernist pedigree, and Emre’s feminism, like that of another of her subjects, Susan Sontag, flourishes insofar as it keeps faith with modernism’s lack of sentiment and didacticism.⁵

And even if we decide—as some other renegade academics have decided—that socialist modernism is an oxymoron fabricated alongside other mind-control programs in Langley, let us nevertheless not mince words about what gives the sociology of art its moral prestige: Walter Benjamin’s celebrated dictum that fascism aestheticizes politics, and that in rejoinder communism must politicize art. I personally think this is incoherent; my first viral review, almost 10 years ago, explicated Kazuo Ishiguro’s essential rejection of this premise in An Artist of the Floating World—his implicit judgment that aestheticizing politics and politicizing art are the same gesture, that totalitarianism matters more to the artist as an analytic category than fascism and communism, and that the artist should pursue inward freedom.⁶

As a practical matter, however, if your enemy has successfully aestheticized politics—I actually doubt there’s anything that’s not always already aestheticized, the same way that the human body, in defiance of second-wave feminism’s ethic of the gaze, comes pre-objectified—then you should aestheticize politics right back rather than resting your weary case on reason or ethics, sociology or law.

Emre’s much-resented charismatic manipulation of her own image suggests that she well understands this, too. She doesn’t miss much. Ever the pedagogue, she can perhaps teach it to her political confreres in the wake of their most recent and perhaps most hilarious aesthetic miscalculation: turning the charismatic countenance of their enemy into a sublime battle standard.⁷

1. I was going to say, re: my and Merve’s divergent immigrant backgrounds in addition to our divergent races and genders, that “it’s not a competition.” But it is a competition; the only question is to what extent, as the balance of this post will show.

2. This de haut en bas treatment of the common reader as a recalcitrant student rather than a fellow citizen typifies an era when intellectual elites are panicked by populism and anxious that the populace might get the wrong idea from the humanist tradition (cf. Emily Wilson’s patronizing commendation of the “empathy” in the Iliad, an epic that derives its power from its “objective and disinterested…vision of nature as an impersonal order,” to quote Northrop Frye). Why this development has coincided with the increasing hegemony of women over the liberal arts is surely a difficult topic, but, if I may, let me pluck my own sociological explanation from my review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Art, and please note my analysis’s congruence with Emre’s explanation for why Sontag, with her rejection of moralism and critique of normativity, anticipated queer theory more than she affiliated with second-wave feminism:

In her devotion to what Moser calls the idea of her own “exceptionality,” Sontag was faithful to modernism. The first artistic explosion against the Victorian bourgeoisie, the naturalism and neo-romanticism of the fin de siècle, was a male-oriented revolt against domestic woman and her literary corollary in the sentimental realist novel—against what George Moore pointedly called “literature at nurse.” But women could be said to have piloted the revolution’s second generation—Wilde and Conrad gave way to Woolf and Stein—and modernism’s female artists exemplify the genius resisting the tyrannical moralism of an overly regulated and schematized society. Sontag was heir to this tradition of the exceptional woman, was in this modern sense a feminist.

But feminism, as the legitimating ideology of momentous economic and social changes, went, in Sontag’s lifetime and still more in our own, a different way. This may be (now I am speculating and historicizing) among the reasons why Sontag never quite reliably affiliated with the movement, and distanced herself especially from the irrationalist variant associated with the likes of Adrienne Rich, whom Sontag all but directly called a fascist. As Sontag saw it, Rich’s supposed radicalism was just an updated variant of an old, bad form of emotional coercion that would not prove emancipatory to women, barred as they had already been by the grandees of the canon from their share in reason. (Moser, despite his otherwise thoroughgoing anti-radical liberalism, takes Rich’s side in their dispute on identity politics grounds and resorts to psychological and even verbal cliché to do so: “Sontag’s furious response suggested that Rich had touched a nerve.”)

After the anarcho-modernist interregnums, the artistic eruptions, of the 1920s and 1960s, after the ages of Woolf and Sontag, middle-class women were put back into their old Victorian role as guardians of virtue and rectitude, concepts updated (i.e., superficially de-Christianized) as “appropriate conduct” for the state/corporate neoliberal bureaucracy typified by the postmodern university. The angel in the house became the angel in HR. Women were not, as the feminism of Woolf’s time promised they would be, freed from the moral strictures and emotional limits of the domestic sphere with their entrance into culture and the professions; rather, culture and the professions became the new domestic sphere with female “emancipation.” Adrienne Rich’s “disloyalty to civilization,” because of its hierarchal coldness, was translated into universal over-socialization, a kind of communism on capitalism’s behalf, or capitalism with a human (i.e., female) face.

3. See friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith’s controversial essay on the NYRB Classics mentality. To defuse the potential gender or leftist politics of this issue, I should say I didn’t enormously admire On the Marble Cliffs—see here—representing the NYRB’s revival of a perhaps neglected modernist who is not only dead, not only white, and not only male, but even also ultra-right-wing (I am attracted to Jünger’s ideas, however, particularly his ideal of the outwardly obeisant and inwardly liberated “Anarch”). On the other hand, what about my perennial insistence on the importance of Nightwood or the fact that my novel-in-progress bears an epigraph from Mina Loy? Is this not hypocrisy? Well, no. Writers I like are not minor, or else I wouldn’t like them!

4. Emre calls Molly Bloom “the best—the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful—representation of a woman anyone has written in English.” I love Molly, but shouldn’t the greatest female character in Anglophone literature get out of bed at some point? My advisor in graduate school thought so, as she wrote in her own treatise on modernism and gender:

This voluptuous Molly is reduced to the bedroom for all intents and purposes, where sensuality becomes her unconditional ontology. She occupies no other room, not parlor, not kitchen, with the result that woman and bed are conjoined as the sum and substance of Joyce’s bourgeoisified carnality. There Molly is virtually immobilized by desire.

With his unsurpassed verbal genius, Joyce captures Molly’s voice to the letter, but there are heights and depths to human character out of his essentially comic conceptual range. Even limiting myself to women created by male modernists in English, I might produce Isabel Archer, Ursula Brangwen, and Addie Bundren as rivals to Molly’s preeminence.

5. Economics is out of my league. I could never work at Bain; I go back and forth over whether or not this is anything to be proud of. Still, to suggest how modernism, socialism, and feminism may form a unity despite the individualism of the first term and the collectivism of the latter two, I will quote from a essay I’m sure Emre, given her academic generation, keeps in her own back pocket, Jennifer Wicke’s “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets.” Wicke explains how and why it matters that Woolf and Keynes emerged from the same milieu:

Bloomsbury updates Wildean socialist individualism in that it proffers a mode of living that people can, and do, emulate, creating what is essentially a coterie canon of consumption. Oscar writes as an Individual concerned for the social: “The Ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social” (51). By the time Bloomsbury arrives as an inchoate social group, a public secret society, the oxymoron serves to underscore the strength of the Bloomsbury idea—Wildeanism lived in a coterie fashion, Oscar as a group.

[…]

Recall that it was Ronald Reagan who, in a burst of anti-Keynesianism with long-lasting effects on most of the Western industrial economies, triumphally declared a return to “the magic of markets.” This particular magic harkened back to the neo-classical economic faith in the regulatory order of the market system, where “things” would get sorted out as if by magic. Keynsian and Woolfian modernist magic is the antithesis of Reaganite or Friedmanite (as in Milton) or Marshallian (as in Alfred) monetarist magic. As such, it is an understanding of the market as magical in a complex, fluid, unpredictable, social, emotional, and sacrally consuming fashion—everything that the hierarchized wizardry of classical market magic would repudiate. This is a “soft,” a fluid magic, feminized, anarchic, yet interconnected, playful at its best.

In other words, social democracy—government subsidy for and of the market economy—is a feminine and queer carnival through which consciousness may freely stream. I used to find this more persuasive. The last few years, however, have hinted to me that Shaw’s Fabian totalitarianism, rather than Wilde’s aesthetic anarchism, may lurk behind this utopian ideal. Even leaving aside the pandemic, consider only the culling of the poor, ill, and old in Trudeau’s Canada. Like the proverbial broken clock, the old Stalinists might have been onto something when they said there was no difference between fascism and social democracy.

6. I understand Ishiguro in all his novels to be recommending something close to the aforementioned Jünger’s concept of the Anarch. Re: fascism and communism, artists and writers have more in common with one another than they have with the masses as a whole or any wing of the masses. Artistic collaboration with fascism and communism arises when artists and writers stop trying to settle their quarrels with each other in the realm of art and writing and strive instead to hurl rival wings of the masses at one another in the street. It’s disgusting and idiotic behavior. None of the “oppressed” people the communist and fascist artists claim to champion want anything to do with them because, as writers or artists, and from the point of view of any normative politics, they are degenerates ipso facto. So create something beautiful and shut the fuck up.

7. Someone recently asked me if I admired any other writer’s sentences. I high-handedly denied it. Then Trump’s fundraising email describing conditions in the Fulton County jail went viral. He wrote:

Inmates have dug their fingers into the crumbling walls and ripped out chunks to fashion over 1,000 shanks.

I will confess to envying this writer’s sentence—literarily, not juridically, I hasten to add in the circumstance. There’s almost a Bolaño quality to it, an unpredictable unspooling with an undertone of grotesque sexual dread; I'm reminded of the prison in Santa Teresa where Klaus Haas is held in 2666. But Bolaño comes through the screen of translation (at least for me), while this sentence offers the specific pleasures of English: the masterful assonance (“dug,” “crumbling,” “chunks”), the slant rhyme (“chunks,” “shanks”), the wonderfully off-balance diction of the three verbs to create an image of violently languid or languidly violent artist-criminals (the brutal Saxon “dug” and “ripped,” with their subliminal intimation of “fuck” and “raped,” against the cultivated, leisurely Latin of “fashion”), and the almost medieval paradoxically hyperbolic precision—the author’s signature—of the comic horror with which the sentence culminates in “over 1,000 shanks.” The middlebrow literary intellectual Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize much less than Trump, the first aesthete-American president and now potentially the first outlaw-American president, deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature. Was it Richard Howard who remarked of Sontag that she’d have been nicer if she’d won the Nobel? Probably true of this diva, too. Anyway, Trump’s aestheticism is not a problem for his enemies; it’s the problem. It’s why he de facto leads the American counterculture while they—including conventional Republicans with their tiresome Bible-thumping and promises to cut Social Security—flounder even in power. I recommended long ago that they borrow his magic to commandeer him in all his political hollowness; instead, they empower him with their unattractive opposition.