The Postironic Times

Lacanian Lipstick on an Unconscious Pig

2010-08-24T12:32:00.001-07:00

Gavin Miller has a written a fascinating article,"The Apathetic Fallacy," in the April 2010 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Following up on the arguments made by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in "Against Theory," Miller argues that the humanities are plagued by a wide-ranging -- and harmful -- taboo against speaking about intentionality and subjective epistemology. Our main mistake, he contends, is that we mistake objective ontology with objective epistemology. Because we aspire to be scientific, we dismiss arguments that rely on introspection and fear the consequences of accepting "first-person warranted claims" (a fear first expressed by advocates of behaviorist psychology). This leads to absurd readings of texts, such as Fredric Jameson's famous Lacan-inspired misreading of Bob Perelman's "China," which allegedly exemplifies the schizophrenic breakdown of signifying chains under conditions of late capitalism.

Let me share my favorite paragraph of Miller's essay, an example meant to illustrate the limitations of Lacanian psychoanalysis:

The ethics of the Lacanian “unconscious” are, I believe, less than benign. The interpretative practice that Fink describes seems indistinguishable from the hermeneutics of abuse directed at Barack Obama for his 2008 campaign comment that “you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” This remark was meant as a metaphor for Republican policy, but was interpreted by the Republicans as a reference to Sarah Palin’s candidature for Vice-President. The “pig” in the metaphor, they insisted, was Palin, who had earlier joked—with implicit reference to herself—that the difference between “a hockey mom and a pit bull [terrier]” was “lipstick.” Had only the Republicans been more Lacanian, they could have added that Obama’s repudiation of this interpretation indicated his pre-analytic investment in a specular image of wholeness and self-identity.

This example neatly expresses the crux of Miller's argument, revealing both its strengths and the questions it begs. Miller is in essence asking, what kind of loon would blame Obama for calling Sarah Palin a lipstick-wearing pig? George Saunders might say this kind:

So, when Barack Obama says he will put some lipstick on my pig, I am, like, Are you calling me a pig? If so, thanks! Pigs are the most non-Élite of all barnyard animals. And also, if you put lipstick on my pig, do you know what the difference will be between that pig and a pit bull? I’ll tell you: a pit bull can easily kill a pig. And, as the pig dies, guess what the Hockey Mom is doing? Going to her car, putting on more lipstick, so that, upon returning, finding that pig dead, she once again looks identical to that pit bull, which, staying on mission, the two of them step over the dead pig, looking exactly like twins, except the pit bull is scratching his lower ass with one frantic leg, whereas the Hockey Mom is carrying an extra hockey stick in case Todd breaks his again. But both are going, like, Ha ha, where’s that dumb pig now? Dead, that’s who, and also: not a smidge of lipstick.

A lose-lose for the pig.

As the political blogger Adam Serwer has recently argued, the American right has increasingly taken up the mantle of identity politics -- "an identity politics which perceives persecution, and possible extinction, for a culturally constructed usually white, conservative, 'real American'" -- embracing the politically correct tendencies formerly associated with liberalism. More and more, I would add, it is the left (more so even than liberalism) that is opposing identity politics, trying to make connections, to disrupt the absurdist malfunction of reasoning that Saunders represents in the form of his narrator's damaged discourse. Which is not to say that Saunders doesn't also reinforce some hoary culture war stereotypes -- his satire was, after all, published in the New Yorker, and seems to complain that supporters of Palin aren't merely wrong, but stupid. My minimal point, though, is that the apathetic fallacy Miller discusses is a bipartisan affair on the American political scene.

But is there no defense we might mount of Saunders's narrator's misinterpretation of Obama or Jameson's misreading of Perelman? I am certainly a fan of referring to intentionality in critical arguments I make. I've spent a considerable about of time in archives this summer and during previous summers looking for evidence to justify my various critical claims, on the assumption that authorial intention matters. But isn't the common confusion of intended-meaning with what we might call significance, well, significant?

And, if we are to speak of the ethical dimensions of how we use language, to what degree should we hold someone responsible for the significance of the words they use? To what degree is it valid to judge the success of art in terms of its effect on its consumer? It seems hard to maintain that intention should always trump significance. Aesthetic responses are, to different degrees, grounded upon our appreciation of the nonsemantic qualities of speech, as Amy Hungerford points out on her recent study, Postmodern Belief. We frequently treat the nonsemantic -- the aesthetic, cultural, social, historical -- as though it were a kind of meaning or had the force of meaning. Whole artistic movements have been built around such conflations. Should we simply banish or ignore these movements? Judge them as failures because they get their theory wrong?

This sort of confusion is at the heart of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, a novel that revolves around the "politically correct" misapprehension of intention. Coleman Silk, a classics professor at Athena College, is punished as racist for using the word "spook" in reference to two absent black students, despite the fact that he meant the expression to have no racist meaning. He was merely referring to the ghost-like absence of his students, he explains. And yet Roth is too cagy to simply come out on the side of intention, against significance, though his sympathies pretty clearly lie with Silk. After all, Roth might have constructed his parable of political correctness run amok without also making Silk someone who is passing for white and as a Jew. This plot development exposes some of the limits of grounding critical analysis in the investigation of intentionality. Can Silk "intend" himself white? Clearly, Silk doesn't think so. He believes that his blackness is a function of who he is, not what he means or what he does. Otherwise, there would be no such practice as "passing." As Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out, without a sense of racial essentialism, a "passing" Coleman Silk would simply be white because he is taken as white.

But if blackness isn't what Silk does, but rather who he is, then he shouldn't be able to submit his blackness as evidence that he is not racist, at least not if he believes that it is only his intentions that ought to count in judging his language. His blackness is, because he understands himself to be passing, definitionally not a function of his intentions and meanings. So, paradoxically, Silk is submitting his blackness (who he is) as evidence that he could not be making a racist statement (what he means), despite the fact that being who he is by definition has no meaning if intention is what really matters. It only has significance. Ergo, Silk must be saying something like, "As a black man, I am alive to the significance of racist words and phrases. It is therefore reasonable for you to assume that I would not use words with a pejorative significance. From this set of facts, you can reverse-engineer my intention and my true meaning."

So even Silk must rest his self-defense on the notion that there ought limits to what one can say -- he implicitly accepts these limits, tacitly claims to be very much aware of them -- regardless of one's true intentions. Though he avoids the apathetic fallacy, his difference from his persecutors is one of degree, not kind. Silk continues to believe, as the administration of Athena College does, that you are obliged to confront common or public interpretations of your words even if those interpretations don't express your real intention. Just as one cannot defend oneself when breaking the law by claiming not to know the law -- "I shouldn't be fined because I didn't know I was supposed to curb my dog!" -- one cannot disown the significance of one's language. This in no way is meant to be a judgment about what specific consequences should follow from violating these socially determined limits, only to say that Silk seems to be on the same page as his enemies.

Bringing this discussion back to "The Apathetic Fallacy," I find myself agreeing with Miller that we should not commit the apathetic fallacy -- we should not discount subjective epistemology or confuse objectivity in epistemology with objectivity in ontology -- but I do feel we should also guard against the false belief that in not committing this fallacy we have excised the responsibility that we have for our words (both their meaning and their significance). Miller doesn't seem to hold to a strong version of this view, but in the Manichean cultures that have defined literary study over the last thirty years, and here Michaels can be deemed as guilty as those who he often rightly disagrees with, swinging too far the other way is a... significant risk.

The New Sociology, or, in Praise of the Middle Zone

2010-06-25T15:13:00.001-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Mark McGurl's The Program Era ends with an insightful reflection on the problem of "scale" in literary study -- our almost automatic assumption that we must always scale up the stakes of literary study in order to argue for our relevance. Bigger, we commonly assume, is better, and will garner for us more funding, more attention, more significance. "[I]t is characteristic of the cognitive expansionism of literary studies... that most of its energy has been invested in extending outward from the nation rather than inward to the regions and localities, not to mention the institutions, that are equally corrective to the thoughtless assumption of disciplinary nationalism." McGurl concludes (rightly, I think) that there is no one right scale of literary study, and that a focus on the subnational -- for example, on the institution -- is as valid an area of critical focus as a focus on the transnational, cosmopolitan, diasporic, and global.

James F. English makes a similar point in his brilliant book on cultural prizes -- both literary and nonliterary --The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value.

On the other hand, we have various attempts to survey and pronounce upon the circumstances and trajectories of cultural life as a whole, based on general theories of cultural production and consumption and broad assessments of national or global trends. What’s left out is the whole middle-zone of cultural space, a space crowded not just with artists and consumers but with bureaucrats, functionaries, patrons, and administrators of culture, vigorously producing and deploying such instruments as the best-of list, the film festival, the artists’ convention, the book club, the piano competition. Scholars have barely begun to study these sorts of instruments in any detail, to construct their histories, gather ethnographic data from their participants, come to an understanding of their specific logics or rules and of the different ways they are being played and played with. In our time, prizes have become by far the most widespread and powerful of all such instruments. But there are many other candidates for the sort of analysis I am undertaking here, especially in the areas of arts sponsorship, journalism, and higher education.

McGurl and English participate in what English has called -- and what I think we should all, in our mania for naming, call -- the "New Sociology of Literature" (on which there will be a forthcoming issue of NLH). Take a look at English's course description of the same name, to get a sense of its contours:

[T]he convergence of sociology and literary studies has never been more widespread or more productive. Some instances include the history of the book, as developed by Chartier, Darnton, Stallybrass, and others; the sociological critique of aesthetics as revolutionized by Bourdieu, Herrnstein Smith, Guillory, and the New Economic critics; analyses of literary intellectuals and the conditions of academic life (Graff, Readings, Watkins, Collini, etc.); the expansion of reception studies (Radway); the impact of systems theory on literary studies and aesthetics (Luhmann); and recent scholarship on culture and governmentality (Hunter, Bennett). Meanwhile, within Sociology departments, the study of literature has acquired new energy and visibility, thanks to the revitalizing impact of Bourdieu, the influence of Konstanz school reception aesthetics (Griswold, Long), the “strong program” in cultural sociology at Yale (Alexander, Smith), and the explosive theoretical interventions of Bruno Latour. Finally, we can point to the recent impact of work by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, suggesting as it does that the expanded optic required by comparative, transnational, or global frameworks of analysis demands a new articulation of literary with sociological method.

I think this middle zone -- whether or not we want to call its study "sociology" -- has much to recommend it as an area of focus. At best, our focus on the "middle" helps us keep in sight both the difficulties that inhere in individual works or groups of works and the broader "field" within which authors reflexively position themselves. For example, does this framework -- English's focus on prizes; and his discussion of the analogy between athletic and humanistic contests -- not illuminate the New Yorker's recent cover, "Literary Field," by Chris Ware, which launches its "20 under 40" fiction issues (more of which are forthcoming)? Is the bitter, eye-rolling, angry conversation the publication of this list has aroused not precisely predicted by English's analysis, not in some sense precisely its point?

What is the significance of issues like this? A similar commotion or uproar arose -- entirely predictably -- after The Millions released its "Best Fiction of the Millennium" list last year. To what degree should we accept such lists and prizes as a natural part of the cultural field, or, if we don't like such lists and prizes, what can we do to dismantle these middle-zone institutions? I ask these questions both because I'd love to read your answers in comments and also to remind skeptics what reflexive sociology should be: not a weary explanation for why we're all fundamentally cynical position-seekers -- though who can deny that we sometimes are? -- but rather a way of understanding our own situation, and the larger dynamics our individual choices participate in creating, that allows us finally to take control over that situation, to change the field or dynamic we are also analyzing and embedded within.

The Origins of Bad Writing

2010-05-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

As Cecile Alduy points out in a recent ARCADE post, bad writing is far too common in literary criticism, which is surprising given the degree to which we are supposed to be attentive students of language and style. Cecile's post has gotten me thinking, Why do we write so badly? This badness originates, I think, from a set of conflicting institutional imperatives, which get turned into habits of mind. Here go a few explanations I've come up with. Please do add more in the comments section.

(i) Despite various disciplinary innovations over the last three decades, we are still asked to become specialists in historically and nationally defined fields, but we are simultaneously told that the essence of literary study is attention to form. Thus, our object of expertise is confused right from the start. Are we formalists or historians? Can we be both?

(ii) Despite the wane of theory, we are still told that literary study must be made "rigorous" through the "application" of various kinds of theory. Unfortunately, each theory or theoretical tradition is taught to us only in partial or fragmentary form, either in "Introduction to Theory" courses or as secondary reading in traditionally (historically, formally) denominated courses. E.g., Let's read a helping of queer theory with our early modern drama! This gives birth to a theoretical "mash-up" culture, in which radically incompatible theories populate our arguments. E.g., I'm a Lacanian postMarxist deeply concerned with a Spinozan debates surrounding postcolonial ethics, especially in relation to the Victorian novel!

(iii) Part of our scholarly training involves reading huge amounts of secondary material larded with jargon. We learn that to be a serious scholar or critic is to speak in a certain idiom. Canny aspiring professionals, we write in the style of what we are asked to read.

(iv) Often, despite our disciplinary self-definition, there is an attendant sense that simply writing about literature or cultural phenomena is not sufficient. If we want the grant or the fellowship that will get us through the next year, we need to concoct elaborate answers to the "so-what" question. We therefore have an incentive to aggrandize the importance of our work: we're being political, challenging norms, overturning conventional modes of thought, etc. Who knew a close reading of a naturalist novel could do so much positive political work!

(v) Finally, after we've written our stylistically mangled dissertations, which try to speak to or satisfy all of the above, we're asked to turn the dissertation into a book that has a "wider audience." Well, we've already written three or four hundred pages in our carefully cultivated "bad" style. We're not likely to make much of a change, and -- I'd suggest -- we've largely internalized the habits of writing that result in the badness of our style. From here on out, this is how we've habituated ourselves to write critical prose. Breaking those habits -- which, if we're lucky, have led to our successful academic careers -- will be very difficult, indeed.

This is, as I say, only a partial list of explanations, and certainly not meant to be a deterministic account of why any one person makes whatever choices he or she makes on the page. It is, at best, a model that offers guidance in formulating a new way forward. If we want to overcome our badness, I am suggesting, we need to become aware of why we've become bad in the first place. That is, we don't write badly because we're bad writers. We write badly because we're canny or good writers, who write to survive in a very confused institutional ecology. As we change our writing -- and we are each responsible for our own writing -- we must also change that ecology. How to do so may become the subject of a future post. Suggestions are welcome.

Interview

2010-05-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

Over at When Falls the Coliseum -- a "journal of American culture [of lack thereof]" -- Alex Kudera interviews your truly. We discussed politics, literature, and doppelgangers, not necessarily in that order. Check it out.

Beard's Women, or, the Problem with Ian McEwan's "Solar" (2010)

2010-05-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) has received mixed reviews, and for good reason. It’s a novel that starts with remarkable strength. Unlike Adam Roberts, over at The Valve, I found the novel's Arctic penis-freezing-and-possible-castration set piece somewhat funny, in a South Parkish sort of way; although I must, only somewhat proudly, admit to the utter baseness of my sense of humor. But after a strong start (which could almost serve as a stand-alone novella), Solar quickly peters out, dissipating much of the momentum it builds in its first part. The remainder of the novel is only intermittently successful as a satire of the global warming debate. Writing for the Telegraph, Tibor Fischer describes the novel ably as "a mash-up of the Hampstead adultery novel and a conflation of the Bradbury/Lodge academic satire, with the merest dash of politics (George W, New Labour spin), and a side order of the trusty McEwan standby of violence." "Merest dash" is absolutely right.

Told in three parts, Solar narrates the story of Michael Beard, a Nobel prize winning physicist whose best days are behind him. Riding off the fumes of his Prize, he floats from one occasional position to another, giving speeches, cashing in his cultural capital. He is also a global warming skeptic who is invited to become part of the National Centre for Renewable Energy, which is dedicated to spearheading technological solutions to climate change. As we might expect of McEwan, various complicated plot developments ensue. By the end of the novel, Beard -- who becomes a believer in the reality of anthropogenic climate change -- has stolen the work of a colleague at the Centre, has created his own solar cell start-up, which will deploy a new generation of solar cells in New Mexico, and stands on the cusp of his greatest triumph, a worthy followup to his brilliant earlier work. Things, as you might expect, don’t work out so well for Beard. The façade of fraud he has built his success upon threatens to crush him under its tremendous weight. And it does, in a kind of creaking or mechanical way.

The main problem with the book is Beard. As many others have noted, Solar is only indirectly about global warming, though McEwan slips in his own relatively uninteresting, New Labourish views of the debate. (Spoiler alert: The market and technology will save the day!). McEwan’s real concern is apparent in his novel’s first line: “He belonged to that class of men -- vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever -- who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so.” Solar is really about Beard’s myriad farcical relationships with beautiful women, all of whom find him unaccountably attractive. Indeed, we never witness Beard being clever. The account of the seduction of his first wife -- his decision to learn about Milton in order to impress her -- comes across as flat and unconvincing. In the immortal terms of creative writing teachers everywhere, one wishes McEwan would do a little more “showing” and a little less “telling” about Beard’s charm, wit, and appeal.

Why does this matter? It matters because Solar's plot depends on whether or not we believe in the truth of the novel’s first line. That is, McEwan’s failure to “show” matters because the crescendo of the novel stages the collision of two of Beard’s women, his only child, and his solar cell project in New Mexico. By the end of the novel, one wonders why anyone would want to have anything to do with Beard. His behavior is so self-destructive, his decisions so ridiculously implausible, his grotesque fatness so disgustingly rendered, that one cannot help but conclude that Beard’s women are (1) unaccountably stupid, or (2) caricatures unworthy of our interest or attention.

This is all a backhanded way of saying I wish Solar had actually been a novel about global warming rather than a novel that uses global warming as a backdrop or fashionable context within which to paint the portrait of a boorish, narcissistic, and unrepentant protagonist. Not that I have any problems with representing “unsympathetic” characters in fiction. The problem is, even accepting McEwan's peripheral interest in global warming, that Beard is not unsympathetic in any interesting ways and that his caddish appeal is unconvincingly rendered. In her sharp blog posting on the novel, Rohan Amanda Maitzen claims that Solar is successful at stimulating the head but not the heart. On the contrary, though I agree that my heart did not much notice Solar, the novel was not particularly successful at stimulating my head, despite its excellent opening section.

The Blank Page with the Blinking Cursor

2010-04-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

What does it mean to own a community?

This is something like the central question motivating a fascinating talk by Richard Nash, former head of Soft Skull Press and founder of Cursor, a reading start-up that promises to "[t]ransform[] the social contract of publishing by restoring the writer-reader relationship to its true equilibrium," whatever that means.

I have a number of complex reactions to Nash's argument. Many might object to the marketing-heavy language ("brand equity," etc.) here, but I have imbibed enough marketing theory to be convinced that Nash is basically right about the need for publishers to reimagine what they're doing. Moreover, he is right to say that Oprah's book club is more about injecting more Oprah into the heads of her viewers -- should they consider wearing tinfoil hats, just to be safe? -- than it is about giving an altruistic helping hand to a struggling publishing industry. As though James Frey needs her pity -- I suspect he has more serious problems.

My main objection is that Nash focuses too much on the management of demand for literature, but says almost nothing about how that demand comes into the world. Who or what produces demand? Demand for what exactly? As I've argued elsewhere on Arcade, it is our educational systems, among other literary institutions, that produce demand. To be as clear as possible, it is not the market operating on its own that produces demand -- including, especially, during the so-called golden age of publishing -- but rather massive quantities of public money, pumped into literary education decade after decade, your tax dollars and mine at work.

Unless we again prime the pump of demand creation -- i.e., fund humanistic education at all levels, provide a decent standard of living to every person -- does publishing not risk riding the demand curve down the long tail of oblivion?

Restoration, Rejoice!

2010-04-16T05:49:00.000-07:00

It has taken a while, largely due to my laziness, but I've finally found a way to restore the blog postings that got lost in the shuffle when my site was hacked back around December. Their formatting's a bit wonky, but the old posts are back. Enjoy.

Neuro Lit and Crit

2010-04-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

At the risk of self-contradiction, I want to draw attention to a recent "Room for Debate" in the New York Times. Gathering together a number of critics, including Stanford's very own Blakey Vermeule, the Times asks:

A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field of literary theory.
“At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is providing a revitalizing lift,” the article said.
Does this research — “neuro lit” is one of its nicknames — energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don’t understand what the scholars are saying?

While I am a fan of the empirical study of literature, and have been more than willing to join the persistent chorus decrying the current state of humanistic study, and would argue that a literate, humanistically inclined public is vital to the flourishing of democracy -- and would argue, as a corollary, that in an era where one in four Americans read zero books per year (of any type), we face a very serious crisis in humanistic education, and by extension democracy -- something about this prompt in the Times strikes me as strange and disingenuous.

The problem: if our problem is budget cuts and a bad job market, shouldn't the solution be more money and better jobs? What does any of this have to do with "neuro lit" or "crit," as worthy an enterprise as that might be? Indeed, if "neuro lit" or "crit" answers questions such as, "Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?" as the Times article on which the "debate" is based claims, some new questions come to mind almost instantly.

Why, if we care so passionately about literature and nonexistent characters, are we unwilling to fund the humanities? If we love stories, why do we read so little? Why does the introduction of scientific terminology into literary scholarship excite enough passion to draw the attention of the New York Times, while run-of-the mill criticism and scholarship elicits almost no commentary at all?

Very Interesting

2010-03-23T03:21:00.000-07:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Is it possible to organize departments of literature, culture, or humanistic study without norms, or around “the general norm that there are no norms,” as Meredith Ramirez Talusan suggests in a provocative Arcade comment? If it were possible, would such an approach be desirable? Should we replace questions of the form "Does this person fit into our preconceived notions of what our department does?" with questions such as "Is this person's work interesting?"

My answers, admittedly thinly defended here, are that we can't dispense with norms; that even if we could, we shouldn't; and that accepting norms doesn't entail abandoning the question of the interesting. On this last point, something like the opposite is true: the question of the "interesting" is directly tied up with the deliberative processes through which we decide what to study and what not to study, through which we determine what we value. After all, who claims to rely on "preconceived" notions in allocating funds? Who advocates that norms should be passively accepted without question? Indeed, by bringing our norms into the light of day, deliberation and conception are exactly what come into play.

I would maintain that were we to eliminate such norms -- that is, were we to eliminate e.g. specified/designated fellowships -- we would simply displace or temporarily delay the ultimate questions of value we’re constantly asking each other.

The problem wouldn't be that “anything goes” in a normless department, but rather that many things would still go and not go; what goes and doesn’t go would become mystified, dependent on an unacknowledged crytonormative foundation. Everyone will jostle to figure out how to gain attention, prestige, and funding, but unknown factors -- such as fashion, personal vendetta, and whim -- could prevail, though they wouldn't necessarily prevail.

As Sianne Ngai writes, in her Critical Inquiry essay on the “Merely Interesting”:

Here interesting comes to the fore as the aesthetic judgment in which this question of justification looms largest of all… the interesting doesn’t seem tethered to any features at all. Though bound up with the perception of novelty (against a backdrop of the expected and familiar), what counts as new is much more radically dependent on context…
Far from being an aesthetic without content, the deepest content of interesting is the process of its own justification.

Ngai's description seems correct to me, and sheds light on the politics of the interesting, which is as she later suggests the politics of deliberation (as opposed to revolution): more Habermas, less Foucault.

The value of named fellowships -- in “feminist studies, sexuality studies, German studies, and Southeast Asian studies” -- is that they wear their values on their sleeves, or try to. Indeed, we create such fellowships, often after a process of political struggle, in order to establish new norms, new areas of inquiry, new approaches to humanistic study. Such norms, institutions, and programs intentionally proceed by shutting down the aesthetic or charismatic dimension of study in favor of the deliberative, the institutional, and the procedural.

So does a Southeast Asian studies fellowship incentivize doing work of a certain type? Yes, that’s precisely why it exists in the first place.

Should it exist? That’s precisely what we need to deliberate on, a deliberation process where new interests, programs, and norms can be proposed, examined, defended, or rejected.

The key for me isn’t to eliminate such established areas of study but to continually open up space for new fellowships, new programs, new kinds of work. But even the “opening up” process requires deliberation within institutions, whose processes and procedures are themselves guided by (often tacit) norms. That’s why I think we’re stuck with norms, all the way down, at least if we want to operate in concert with other people.

But the most important caveat to our stuckness is this: to be stuck with norms isn’t to be trapped in an uninteresting world, but to be within the very domain where we deliberate (endlessly, productively) about what we find interesting, and why.

From "Happy Days" to "Mad Men"

2010-03-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Some recent conversations on Arcade have gotten me thinking about midcentury America, or rather our idea of the midcentury as a privileged moment of literary production, consumption, and promise. In particular, I’ve been turning over Natalia Cecire’s query, “[W]hat is to be gained in mourning the passing of a genre or a medium”? We might also ask, what is to be gained in mourning the passing of an era?

To begin thinking through how we might answer these questions, let’s recall two forms of nostalgia for midcentury America.

The classic form of midcentury nostalgia comes from the cultural (and often the political) right. Celebrating the fertility and energy of midcentury intellectual and popular culture was a solution to the problem posed by the 1960s. The problem was that the 1960s screwed everything up; the solution was to recall those days when things weren’t nearly so screwed up, when there was consensus, order, and good sense all around. Think of American Graffiti (1973), Happy Days (1974-84), the vision of the good life invoked by Reagan’s “Morning in America” (1984).

These fantasies saw the 50s as simpler, square-jawed, short-haired times, before all those crazy America-hating radicals took over the country. By these accounts, even rebellion against the era's norms have nostalgia value. Fredric Jameson ably describes the aesthetics of such rightward-leaning nostalgia in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:

Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the priviledged lost object of desire -- not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana but also the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs.

Lately, though, nostalgia for midcentury has come largely from the left. Left midcentury nostalgia focuses on the era’s broad manufacturing-led economic growth, relatively higher levels of economic equality, relatively more regulated markets, better capital controls, etc., while also admitting that there were endemic -- and highly destructive -- problems within the domains of race, gender, sexuality, foreign policy. One thinks immediately of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal, but even Naomi Klein, in her recent Shock Doctrine, pines for a return to the Keynesian welfare state or the era of “embedded liberalism." Whether one agrees in every particular with the policy preferences of these writers, there is something valuable in remembering that things were once otherwise, that our current economic, social, and intellectual environment once looked quite different. In this sense, nostalgia can be very useful, if only in a qualified form.

More often, however, left nostalgia for the midcentury fetishizes the intellectual culture of the period, longing for an era when Partisan Review–like little magazines were all the rage, when even the CIA felt obliged to pay attention to intellectuals, and when more formal social norms forced people to wear fabulous outfits. The medium-sized cult that has emerged around Mad Men exemplifies the left nostalgia I have in mind -- and I admit to being a card-carrying member of the cult. Through from one perspective we might see the show as arguing for the fundamental necessity of the 1960s -- and, indeed, racism, homophobia, sexual harassment, and corruption run rampant in the halls of Sterling Cooper -- do we not also detect that the creators of the show possess a kind of obsessive love for the era's material culture? Are we not supposed to revel in the idea of reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency (1957) shortly after its publication? Abstracting beyond Mad Men, don't left midcentury nostalgics wish they could non-ironically have the top of their heads (metaphorically) blown off by some symposium in the pages of Partisan Review? Be shocked again by countercultural subversion as if for the first time, all while enjoying some tasty martinis?

This second version of left midcentury nostalgia seems less productive to me. If we want to return to a dynamic, vibrant literary-intellectual culture, we shouldn't attempt to revive the styles of some previous era, even its intellectual styles, however appealing those styles might often be. The real task ahead of us is to build new institutions, to coordinate with educational activists, to build synthetic accounts of the present moment that help us lay the foundation for the flourishing of whatever new intellectual culture will be -- with luck, effort, and invention -- looked back upon nostalgically by future generations.

This should be our mission.

Am I Turning Empirical?

2010-02-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

Continuing my progressive descent into vulgar materialism (I use the words "progressive" and "vulgar" in positive senses!), I’d like to continue the line of thinking of my previous post, "Reading under Neoliberalism." I will use the questions Joel Burges asks in a comment to guide my reflections here. His questions are too good to cosign to the comments section of my previous post. I will begin with a caveat: everything below is, as with my previous post, provisional and only vaguely sketched. Critical comments will do much to help me sharpen my primitive ideas.

Joel asks whether my approach to literary study, at least the approach I take when I discuss historical changes in reading practice, is marked by an "empirical turn," an "operative assumption that we will know more if we get more empirical -- not just materialist in the sense of assuming that economic conditions lead to cultural elaborations, but in which we turn ourselves into something like sociologists." The short version of my answer is simply yes. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the academic study of literature more generally is swinging away from the era of theory toward an empirical orientation, if recent studies are any indication. We might recall new work in cognitive science and literature; the rise of evolutionary literary studies; "distant reading" research programs, spearheaded at Stanford by Franco Moretti, and other database-driven forms literary study; Bourdieu-inspired literary sociologies (McGurl, Casanova, Jim English come immediately to mind); the "postpositivist realist" epistemology of Satya Mohanty and, here at Arcade, of Paula Moya; the myriad anti-theoretical children of Walter Benn Michaels (one need merely look at the 20/21 series for excellent criticism in this vein); and so on.

The longer form of my answer comes with numerous necessary caveats and complications.

"Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from theory, from, say, bridging textual analysis and conceptual thinking?"

This question assumes a stronger distinction between the empirical and theoretical that I am comfortable with. After all, isn’t the work of Bourdieu both thoroughly empirical and theoretical? Doesn’t Foucault make all sorts of empirical claims (ranging from claims about prison systems to claims about the history of science to claims about how discourse functions to reproduce power relations)? Isn’t Lacan interested in correcting Freud’s fallacies, relocating psychic processes not in the minds of individuals but in relation to intersubjective processes of recognition and "within" structures of language? Do not Jameson, Žižek, Hardt, Negri, Laclau, Mouffe, and a range of theoretically sophisticated Marxists and post-Marxists all base their arguments, at least in part, of empirical claims about capitalist economies?

Likewise, all empirical studies are, I would argue, necessarily suffused with theoretical abstractions. You correctly identify many of the abstractions I rely on to make my case: "literary market," "reading public," "sophistication," "literary culture," "postwar." There’s no way to study the world apart from our abstractions, theories, and interpretations, even if those interpretations are the translation of photons hitting our optic nerve into terms discernible by our cultivated mental capacities. The question is, What are our best theories? What theories should we reject?

The theory I reject is the notion that we should see in literary form an elaboration of material contexts on the model of homology. The theory I accept is that texts and contexts are dynamically linked together in a greater whole or totality, whose determinants do not necessarily operate according to a logic of homology. Causes do not necessarily look "like" effects. To the degree that “theory” in the academic humanities tends to refer to the former of these two intellectual frameworks, then I do reject theory, though in a partial and highly qualified way. I am more interested in "mechanical causality" than "expressive causality," to use Jameson’s terminology in The Political Unconscious.

"Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from hermeneutics, from, say, textual analysis -- and what would we gain from that?"

I don’t see how we can avoid hermeneutic activities in the classroom as long as we ask our students to read individual texts -- I tend to teach individual texts in much the same way that they were taught to me -- nor do I think that there is some simple empirical practice apart from interpretive, cultural, and historically situated frameworks. That said, I think a lot of self-avowedly materialist criticism and theory today makes large empirical claims without doing the legwork to back up those claims. That’s what I take to be the source of Moretti’s frustration with literary study.

In our monographs and articles we have a habit of sliding between perfectly valid hermeneutic claims and large historical claims, often based on three or four close readings, often without explanation or with vague gestures toward some notion of discourse. This is the academic version of what the journalist Daniel Radosh calls “trend journalism” -- three examples of anything can be selected to argue for a historical trend. If we supplement textual analysis with an empirical orientation, we will possibly learn more about the material determinants of literary history and we will also learn what claims we should not be comfortable making with great confidence. Like Socrates, we will at least know what we don't know.

"Literature departments are... notoriously bad at making the normative and conventional ways in which their members read and write clear to students… So… shouldn't we also examine what knowledge we already transmit, and how we might do it better?"

Yes, I enthusiastically agree that we should study the normative and conventional ways we read and teach. We should understand how and to what effect we transmit knowledge to our students.

Indeed, my interest in empirically analyzing postwar literary culture is motivated by explicitly normative concerns. I begin from the premise that certain practices of reading are good and desirable. Reading long, complex novels is salubrious for human wellbeing. Cultivating the attention required to understand and appreciate poetry improves us. Literary reading gives scope and depth to life. These claims are normative -- and not strictly instrumental -- to the degree that they have no foundation. No empirical study will be able to prove to a persistent skeptic that literature matters. No data beyond self-reporting will explicate words like "wellbeing," "improvement," and "scope and depth."

My second assumption -- really, in a longer work, which I fantasize about someday writing, it would be my argument -- is that literary culture is unnatural, in the sense that it isn’t a spontaneous or inevitable development in human affairs and existence. We don't just decide to care about literature; and we don't automatically move from such caring to a society that enriches and supports what we care about. Our reading culture is, instead, the product of considerable investment, education, and political work. Humans may at all times have generated one sort of narrative art or another, but a society where all persons have the opportunity and capacity to appreciate literature requires hard work and years of institution-building.

If our empirical and critical work is grounded in the norm of producing such a "reading public," then we cannot help but self-reflectively understand our own teaching in relation to the broader project of the production of such a public. This doesn't meant that every critic would take or teach sociology and economics classes, but that every critic would understand that when they teach a course on Shakespeare, they are always whether they intend to or not linked to a larger public-producing machine, the University, which itself interlocks with other social spaces -- the book club, the marketplace, little magazines, and institutions of primary education.

Reading under Neoliberalism

2010-02-23T18:56:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy's fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players." I was originally going to post this as a comment, but the response grew too long and unwieldy, so here it is as a stand-alone blog post. Suffice it to say, you should read Josh's provocative posting, and the comments thread before proceeding.

In his original post, Josh proposes that "[i]f we abandon our efforts to train minds" in the project of reading and appreciating poetry "certain kinds of human pleasure [i.e., poetry reading --LK] will eventually fall forever out of reach," and poetry will come to resemble CDs in a world without CD players. In my original comment, I agreed with this sentiment, and suggested that the source of poetry's public decline can be traced to changes in our educational institutions and reading priorities, which have also eroded the public position of literary fiction. Andrew asks, in response to my comment, about Mark McGurl's claim, in The Program Era, that university creative writing programs have radically enlarged the sphere of "good" writing.

I largely agree with Mark's claim that more good fiction is being produced now than has ever been produced before, though The Program Era reads texts (and careers) in relation to the institutional context of their production, and (understandably) doesn't do the empirical legwork of quantifying this big, provocative claim -- if such quantification is even possible. Still, I am enough of a vulgar materialist to believe that when the R&D-oriented university pours cash into the project of developing good fiction writers, it will yield fruit. It indisputably has.

The question Josh's post got me thinking about is the demand side of the equation, whether this flood of good fiction is connecting with readers, and -- if so -- how. Readers read, as they always have, even in an increasingly complex media environment, but what do they read? How do they read? In what direction is our reading culture heading?

I began thinking about these questions at last year's ACLA, where I was part of a panel called "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture"; the panel organizer, Patrick Gallagher, gave a fascinating paper on the rise of conglomerate-owned publishers and the effect of media conglomeration on literary production. The short version is that midlist authors got killed. In the era of what we could call "neoliberal publishing," every book was now supposed to turn a profit; bestsellers no longer subsidized what editors deemed to be high-quality products. Editors became warier of taking risks "developing" young writers. The results are obvious for all to see. We now live in the era of gigantic-advance-getting celebrity authors. Even literary authors operate on the model of celebrity. These developments occurred alongside other developments, including the rise of creative writing, but I think they had a serious effect.

Literary scholars need to investigate this transformation in literary culture. My unsubstantiated hunch is that the reading public has begun a long-term process of parting ways with literary writers. I think, beyond the rise of the university creative writing program and the conglomeration of publishing, transformations in the broader US economy have had a serious effect on our public literary culture. My very sketchy thesis would go like so: When the American economy experienced its postwar boom -- across-the-board manufacturing-led growth -- readers sought to "sophisticate" themselves. Suburbs expanded, cars were purchased; the population was upwardly mobile on a number of fronts, including in the domain of literary consumption. Sometime around the early seventies, things began to change. Stagflation hit the economy; manufacturing fractured, and the service economy absorbed formerly high-wage upwardly mobile unionized workers; inequality began to increase, leading to social and educational stratification; an increasingly competitive media environment put downward pressure on the low-profit literary marketplace. For the "ambitious" literary writer, the University became appealing because it provided a shelter from the broader economy.

Thus: Time once put Updike on its covers; today, it features Dan Brown. Readers of the New Yorker needn't worry, though; they still enjoy interesting reviews of high literature (whether or not you like James Wood). Mysteriously, though, the copies of the New Yorker sitting open beside me as I type this post have advertisements for BMW, Louis Vuitton, and iPhones.

Whether the parting ways of reader and writer is good or bad remains unclear. If literature has a public mission -- if reading a well-crafted novel (or poetry) affords unique, serious, and vital pleasures for all people -- then we are moving in a bad direction, despite the profusion of good writing in creative writing programs. If long-form prose fiction gives us nothing that an engaging television show doesn't already give us -- and I in no way mean to disparage television; I've watched more than my fair share -- then there's no reason to worry; we can just renew our subscriptions to Netflix.

The truth may live somewhere between those two poles, but I must admit, I am a partisan to the idea that every person ought to have the capacity -- and the desire -- to occasionally sit down and read a long, difficult, rewarding novel. Many, many people still do. But we should not assume that they always will, even if great fiction continues to be produced in great quantities.

Norms, Norms, Norms

2010-02-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

I've been rereading Amanda Anderson's fascinating and cogent collection of essays, The Way We Argue Now. Reading through her opening account of the debate between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler, a version of the Habermas-Foucault debate in the domain of feminist theory, we find this cogent summary by Anderson of the differences between each thinker's definition of the term "norm":

Paralleling these divergent understandings of autonomy are fundamentally different conceptions of “norms.” For Benhabib, a norm is a rule or principle that provides criteria for evaluating the rightness or wrongness of an action or practice. One might specify such norms as evaluative norms. While Benhabib believes the norms of reciprocity and respect are embedded in communicative practices and reproduced through socialization, she follows Habermas in calling for our selfreflexive justification and extension of such norms. For Butler, by contrast, norms are mechanisms of social reproduction and identity formation internal to hegemonic social structures. One might specify these norms as functional or normalizing norms. Whereas Benhabib would certainly distinguish between these two senses of norm and fully admit the existence of the latter, it is not at all clear that Butler admits a distinction in kind between them. Indeed it would seem for her that all normativity ultimately reduces to normalization. Even more: Butler feels that evaluative norms are insidious precisely insofar as they attempt to mask their normalizing power. (30)

I find this to be a very succinct description of the two senses in which humanities scholars use the term "norm." We either celebrate the aspiration toward a universal system of ethical principles, on the theory that such a system promises human liberation, or we decry the secretly normalizing impact of allegedly universal claims, focusing on who gets necessarily excluded by the project of articulating universalist ethical principles.

I am interested in what seems to me to be a signifiant omission here: a sense of norm I would term "functional norms," a sense quite important to parliamentary procedures, traffic management, etiquette, and narratology. When we drive down a road and keep (in the U.S.) to the right side of the road -- to give the most banal but clearest example -- are we not performing and possibly internalizing norms just as much as when we (as Benhabib would emphasize) condemn a neoNazi from a universalist stance or when we (as Butler would emphasize) accept a pernicious heteronormativity?

Is not most or all literature built around the arguably "functional" norms of typography, bibliographic convention, and tacit understandings of intelligibility (I specifically omit linguistic and syntactic regularities and patterns, because I believe these are less norms in my sense than cognitive capacities)? Does literary theory have adequate terms, tools, and categories to deal with functional norms? Is the idea of a functional norm itself a sort of pernicious obfuscation? Or, as someone like Richard Rorty might argue, are evaluative and normalizing norms really all secretly reducible to functional norms, that is norms are just conventions we let each other get away with?

Life, Art, Life

2010-02-14T20:15:00.001-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was released in 1972. The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos.

Today, I found another example of film invading life. Palestinian protesters are reportedly dressing up as Na'vi from James Cameron's 2009 film, Avatar. The AP notes that these activists have compared "their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film," and are opposing the separation barrier Israel has constructed in the West Bank.

Ignoring the fact that Avatar depicts an interplanetary -- not intergalactic -- struggle, we should ask, What does this mode of activism say about how narrative templates and popular culture shape everyday life and real-world political struggle? Obviously, unlike the case of The Godfather, Palestinians don't think they literally are the Na'vi, but to what degree can digital blue aliens serve as the locus of identity-formation, ethical self-definition, and new conceptualizations of human rights (ironically, or perhaps necessarily, triangulated off of the digital non-human)?

Is this an example of activists cleverly appropriating popular culture, or an example of popular culture even more cleverly appropriating the imagination of activists? Or is this perhaps an example of the desperate lengths to which an activist must go to get our attention -- by flattering our pop cultural vanity? Would I have written a post about Israel and Palestine if these activists had not dressed up like fictional blue aliens in a blockbuster film? The answer is probably no. Is that a problem?

Life, Art, Life

2010-02-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

The Threshold of Politics

2010-01-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

(Crossposted at my new blog at Arcade.)

Amir Eshel has been composing a series of fascinating posts on his Arcade blog, which I presume are related to his current book project, on life after the End of History, the return of liberalism as an object of scholarly interest, and recent trends in contemporary literature. I recommend that you read all three posts (here, here, and here) to get context for what follows. In sum, Eshel proposes that the end of the cold war saw the renewed focus on a kind of political agency that had previously been absent from film and literature.

In my response to these inquiries, I questioned Eshel's use of the term "agency." Wasn't the end of history supposed to be precisely the time when politics went away for good, leaving only the refinement of technical systems, the solving of local problems, and a relaxation in ideological conflict? Walter Benn Michaels reminds us of this common interpretation of the End of History in the inaugural issue of the second volume of The Baffler.

When Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history back in 1989, he did so with mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was the ideological triumph of free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them. Even communists were talking about the importance of being competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was that without “the worldwide ideological struggle” between capitalism and socialism to inspire us, we were in for “a very sad time.” “In the post-historical period,” he wrote, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” The end of history would be good for markets, bad for art.

I should start by saying that I agree with using 1989 as a periodizing marker; what my comment was asking was whether the transition from pre- to post-89 might have had more to do with a stripping away of political agency, more a sclerosis of the political imagination than its renewal. My own research on what I call postirony underscores the plausibility of this interpretation for me, because everywhere I look on the literary scene I see authors who wonder whether they have any agency in an era of the world market, of the total system, of -- in a word -- postmodernity triumphant.

In his thoughtful response to my questions, Eshel invokes J.M. Coetzee's novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Coetzee's novel is a complex, highly ironized artifact, which stages multiple voices in conversation, voices which literally map onto the space of the page. One of our characters is the politically frustrated C., an aging South African writer, living in Australia, and author of Waiting for the Barbarians, a clear a stand-in for Coetzee. His short political screeds, "Strong Opinions," occupy the top stack or "story" of the three-story page. The middle story of the page features a diary C. is keeping, the eponymous diary of what is a bad year indeed for C. On the lowest story of the page we meet Anya, a sexy Filipina -- arguably a cliched and unconvincing character -- who is employed as a typist by C., and who comments on the inanity of C.'s political fulminations.

The crux of Eshel's response seems to be encapsulated in a complex affirmation of Anya’s claim that “Politics is all around us, it’s like the air, it’s like pollution. You can’t fight pollution. Best to ignore it, or just get used to it, adapt.” In a supportive gloss of this sentiment, Eshel writes, “politics today might simply mean making sure that as many people as possible have clean water, minimal healthcare, functioning sewage systems and opportunities to advance. Adapting might mean seeing how this kind of politics is, indeed, ‘all around us,’ and accepting that challenge.” This is ethics (we might also say politics) without ontology.

At one level, I agree completely with Eshel's argument. What Eshel calls "politics today" very clearly describes the dominant, pragmatic relationship citizens have to politics today, a good description of how our world actually works, day after day. On another level, what Anya is arguing for might be understood as just another way of saying what I have suggested above. The problems of the world, problems of human making, are something that are “best to ignore” or “adapt” to. In light of the political impact C. wants to have, the impact he wishes intellectuals could have, this is the end of a certain kind of agency. But what about clean water and healthcare? Are these the intellectually nonsexy issues that C. should be focusing on if he wants to be a political “agent” post-89? What is missing from Eshel's account, it seems to me, is a justification for what it is legitimate to disagree about, or criteria for determining what belongs in the category of small-p politics and what belongs to large-P Politics. What is up for grabs, and what is off limits?

If only the projects of the world’s Stalins, Maos, Hitlers, and Pol Pots count as capital-P politics, then C. should be celebrating the end of politics. But what about the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, and the United Nations? What about labor unions, anti-war activists, and the ACLU? Preventing Anya's boyfriend Alan from swindling an elderly intellectual: this is the crux of Anya's "political" intervention in the novel, Eshel suggests. But is this politics or an episode of Law and Order? (And don't get me wrong: I like Law and Order!) To bring this question back to the text of Diary of a Bad Year, let’s examine one of the most intense and uncomfortable essays that C. writes, “On national shame.”

C. informs us that

An article in a recent New Yorker makes it as plain as day that the US administration… not only sanctions the torture of prisoners taken in the so-called war on terror but is active in every way to subvert laws and conventions proscribing torture… The shamlessness is quite extraordinary ... Suicide would save one’s honor, and perhaps there have already been honour suicides among Americans that one does not hear of. But what of political action? Will political action -- not armed resistance but action within the ground rules of the democratic system (circulating petitions, organizing meetings, writing letters) -- suffice?... In the present climate of whipped-up fear, and in the absence of any groundswell of popular revulsion against torture, political actions by individual citizens seem unlikely to have any practical effect. Yet perhaps, pursued doggedly and in a spirit of outrage, such actions will at least allow people to hold their heads up. Mere symbolic actions, on the other hand--burning the flag, pronouncing aloud the words “I abhor the leaders of my country and dissociate myself from them” -- will certainly not be enough.

There is an obvious irony here. C.’s name-checking the New Yorker should inspire a bit of eye-rolling -- despite Jane Mayer’s very important reporting on the U.S. torture regime, which is what C. must be reading. We might also sigh at the bombast of C.’s suggesting that the route to alleviating the shame produced by U.S. torture policies is suicide -- as if this were a serious solution to serious political problems. And yet the question remains. Torture was happening. It was approved of at the highest levels, and openly applauded in the mainstream media and by esteemed public intellectuals after 9/11.

What if you, like C., don’t approve?

“Best to ignore it, or just get used to it, adapt”?

Coetzee is here engaging in a form of postirony. C. and Anya ironize each other through mutual commentary, destabilizing C.’s skewed sense of what impact an isolated intellectual can have on mainstream political life. But the bottom line is that Coetzee, like C., cares about ending torture. Through all the novel’s layers of structural irony, his fear that he has no agency, his words have the force of conviction. I would argue that Diary of a Bad Year dramatizes the difference between Politics and politics as the difference between caring about Guantanamo Bay and caring about getting through the day. If the question is “what of political action?” and the answer is “Best to ignore it,” then perhaps C. has a reason to mourn the rise of the regime of small-p politics.

The question of whether to provide water or health care through the private market or public systems (municipal water, the Veteran's Administration) is also a question for politics, of course, even if this is not the politics of a Lenin or Mao. And yet the nature of this political decision may turn out to be huge: transforming a private medical system to a public system, turning a public Social Security system into a big hedge fund. What seemed to have “ended” at the End of History was the viability of debate on matters that many -- on the left at least -- felt were not settled questions. Do markets lead to optimal outcomes? Is individual liberty really identical, or even plausibly correlated with, to the freedom to buy and sell on a market without interference?” Those who mourn the passing of capital-P Politics, more often than not, are mourning the narrowness of debate on a host of questions of enormous human significance.

Is C. not right to mourn?

DFW@MLA III

2010-01-12T14:45:00.001-08:00

I haven't had a chance to write up the MLA panel I helped organize, "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace." It was very well attended -- especially for an 8:30 a.m. panel on the last day of the convention -- and the talks were all terrific. Fortunately for me, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written up the special session, offering much more detail than my swiss cheese memory would have been able to provide.

Here are some key tidbits (from Michael Pietsch's talk) about Wallace's forthcoming unfinished novel, The Pale King:

Pietsch says Wallace had been working on since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including “Glitterer,” “SJF” (which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and “What is Peoria For?” As we’ve heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, and so forth. What I hadn’t heard before today was that various pieces we’ve seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapters of the novel, including “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” and “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity. The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we’ve heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn’t there to argue with.

There is something deeply appropriate about Wallace's decision to confront the question of boredom, given how much Infinite Jest is concerned with rapturous entertainment. It's almost as if Wallace saw in the boring, the banal, and the cliché the best candidates for what used to be called grace or spiritual enlightenment.

DFW@MLA III

2010-01-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

Here are some key tidbits (from Michael Pietsch's talk) about Wallace's forthcoming unfinished novel, The Pale King:

Pietsch says Wallace had been working on since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including “Glitterer,” “SJF” (which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and “What is Peoria For?” As we’ve heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, and so forth. What I hadn’t heard before today was that various pieces we’ve seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapters of the novel, including “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” and “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity. The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we’ve heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn’t there to argue with.

My New Year's Paradox

2010-01-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

My 2010 resolutions: (i) to separate myself from this diabolical device known as the Internet, which sucks up my time, distracts me from what I would at some second-order level of intelligence prefer to be doing, and doesn't really lead to lasting learning and/or self-improvement; (ii) to turn this Web site into a real blog, to actually, like, post semi-regularly about my life, books, ideas, and other stuff. Is this a paradoxical resolution or merely a hypocritical one? I.e., am I not going to be able to keep this promise to myself in full, because to do so is impossible, or am I going to be able to do what I want only by posting things to an Internet that I want to have nothing to do with (but that I demand that you want to have something to do with)? I suspect the latter.

eBook Revolution?

2009-12-26T20:42:00.001-08:00

Amazon is reporting that on Christmas it sold more Kindle books than physicals books. At the moment, because it insists on charging no more than $9.99 for books, even for best-sellers, and despite publisher protests, Amazon loses money on each Kindle book it sells.

Now, we may find this impressive or not in and of itself -- and, speaking in my capacity as an author, I'm perfectly happy to sell e-books to those who prefer to read in that format; and I see the value in selling a high volume of individually cheaper books -- but I'm skeptical about this statistic and its importance. To understand why, look at the list of Kindle bestsellers.

At the time of this posting, 7 out of 10 of the bestselling books for the Kindle cost $0.00. That's right, lots of authors are giving Kindle books away, and consumers predictably prefer free books to books that cost them money. I mean, really, is it any surprise that people are willing to download lots and lots of free books?

eBook Revolution?

2009-12-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

Mind Reading, Writing

2009-12-25T18:59:00.001-08:00

The Singularity-loving transhumanist guys over at h+ magazine have an interesting article on technologies that allow people to interface with machines via thought.

A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can “type” (input data into a computer) using just their minds.... The patients were asked to say or imagine words flashed on a screen while their brain activity was recorded. Schalk’s team then used specially designed decoder algorithms to predict the vowels and consonants of the word, using only the pattern of brain activity. They found that both speaking and imagining the word gave roughly the same level of accuracy.

The article emphasizes the active aspects of this technology, what it allows users to do with/to their computers, e.g. writing, tweeting, moving a cursor across the screen. What Surfdaddy Orca -- the author of this article; I'm not joking... -- doesn't talk about are the obvious ethical/philosophical/political counterparts to all the active things this technology lets us do or will let us do someday.

I.e., helping quadriplegics communicate is vitally important and wonderful, but to work in the first place, this set of technologies needs first to be able to read minds accurately and reliably. If we can do that (read minds), can we also read them from a distance? If we can read minds from a distance, should I be ordering myself up a tinfoil hat?

That thin and flimsy fiberboard wall separating our outside from our inside may just have gotten a little thinner.

Mind Reading, Writing

2009-12-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

The Singularity-loving transhumanist guys over at h+ magazine have an interesting article on technologies that allow people to interface with machines via thought.

A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can “type” (input data into a computer) using just their minds.... The patients were asked to say or imagine words flashed on a screen while their brain activity was recorded. Schalk’s team then used specially designed decoder algorithms to predict the vowels and consonants of the word, using only the pattern of brain activity. They found that both speaking and imagining the word gave roughly the same level of accuracy.

That thin and flimsy fiberboard wall separating our outside from our inside may just have gotten a little thinner.

DFW @ MLA II

2009-12-23T13:47:00.001-08:00

I'm still working on trying to figure out how to restore my older blog postings. I think my XML export file might've been corrupted during export. In the worst case scenario, I'll manually restore my old posts, though that'll screw up the dates and mean all comments on these posts will be forever lost.

On an unrelated note, I want to put in a plug for the special session I helped organize at the upcoming MLA Convention in Philadelphia. If you're around, please stop by "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace," which is at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 30th, in Independence Salon I at the Philadelphia Marriott.

We have a distinguished group of panelists including Stephen J. Burn (North Michigan U.), Marshall Boswell (Rhodes C.), Sam Cohen (U. of Missouri, Columbia), John Conley (UMN, Twin Cities), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona), Mary Holland (SUNY New Paltz), and -- very fortunately -- Wallace's Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch.

I'll be talking about how Wallace's interpretation of the role of the avant-garde shaped his literary projects.

From Google Goggles to Omni Science

2009-12-23T13:27:00.001-08:00

Google has created an interesting new product for Android-based mobile devices called Google Goggles, which allows you to do visual searches based on images your phone's camera captures. Needless to say, this is just one more step on the long road to the visual search revolution, as described in Pop Apocalypse. It's all happening right on schedule, and each incremental step will seem -- as this does! -- real neat when it happens.

DFW @ MLA II

2009-12-23T08:46:00.000-08:00

I'll be talking about how Wallace's interpretation of the role of the avant-garde shaped his literary projects.

From Google Goggles to Omni Science

2009-12-23T08:27:00.000-08:00

Repairs Forthcoming

2009-12-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

I've managed to import my old blogger postings to WordPress, but I still can't quite import my XML export file containing everything I've written since I switched to this site. I hope to resolve this problem shortly, and restore all the shiny design elements while I'm at it.

Site problems

2009-12-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

Please excuse the blankness of this page as I fix some errors with my site. We'll be live again, ASAP.

From Google Goggles to Omni Science

2009-12-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

From Google Goggles to Omni Science

2009-12-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

io9 on PA

2009-10-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Lauren Davis over at io9 has written one of the most perceptive reviews of Pop Apocalypse I've seen yet out there in the mediasphere. Davis concludes:

Pop Apocalypse is a genuinely frightening book, not for its apocalyptic prophesies, but for its peek five minutes into the future. It's suggestion that photo-tagging software could someday turn all of existence into the ultimate reality television show isn't far-fetched in the least. One character comments that when you see how sausage gets made, you'll want to become a vegetarian. And in Pop Apocalypse, we're the sausage, and the whole world sees how we're being made all the time.

She's quite right about the apocalyptic framework of the book: it's more of a way of thinking about the social, political, and economic problems of the present (and maybe the very near future) than it is a genuine Cassandraish forecast of planetary doom. I'm saving genuine planetary doom for future projects, in fact.

Also, I'm pleased she caught the sausage line. Check it out.

io9 on PA

2009-10-21T06:17:00.000-07:00

Lauren Davis over at io9 has written one of the most perceptive reviews of Pop Apocalypse I've seen yet out there in the mediasphere. Davis concludes:

Pop Apocalypse is a genuinely frightening book, not for its apocalyptic prophesies, but for its peek five minutes into the future. It's suggestion that photo-tagging software could someday turn all of existence into the ultimate reality television show isn't far-fetched in the least. One character comments that when you see how sausage gets made, you'll want to become a vegetarian. And in Pop Apocalypse, we're the sausage, and the whole world sees how we're being made all the time.

Also, I'm pleased she caught the sausage line. Check it out.

Listmania vs. Lake Woebegone

2009-10-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

X-posted at Plasma Pool.

There is an interesting emerging conversation about The Millions' recently published "Best [Books] of the Millennium" list on a number of blogs I follow. First, Edmond Caldwell over at Contra James Wood questions the whole premise of list-making, associating such lists with the predominantly corporate character of the imprints represented on the list: "the listing and ranking game goes on--and on and on--as if all sectors of society were afflicted with a kind of mass obsessive-compulsive disorder or species of autism. "If ordered lists like this must exist," stipulates Andrew Seal – but why must they? Why should we submit to such fatalism? Where do these lists come from, whom do they benefit, and what ultimate ideological function do they serve?"

Andrew Seal, responding to Caldwell on his blog, (fatalistically?) argues that "I don't really see how I'm going to stop them [literary lists]. They have a manifest utility for a number of different types of readers: they make well-read people feel good, both by allowing them to sneer at them and by allowing them to note what a great percentage of the list they've read; they allow younger (or less well-read) readers to get a feel for which books to allocate their temporal resources toward; they allow readers with well-defined tastes to pick attention-grabbing fights; they allow readers with no well-defined tastes an opportunity to pick up one. These lists don't function as tools for generating a consensus which a critique can overturn or disrupt; they exist to attract a broad range of interests, many of which contradict one another."

An interesting debate. My eyes sort of glazed over when I read The Millions list.

I bear none of these authors any animosity as individuals -- though I am frankly not always fans of their books (except for those books I am a fan of!) -- but The Millions list seems to me tediously predictable on a number of levels and in ways that I find it hard to articulate. I am left with a number of questions: What's the matter with lists? If lists can be used as a bludgeon in a game of status-conscious warfare, aren't lists also a convenient time-saving device, a way of getting started exploring some intellectual or cultural domain for non-initiates? If I wanted to learn more (to pick in an innocent example) about the history of Marxism, wouldn't a list of the "best" books on the history of Marxism -- organized by a trusted expert on the subject -- be an excellent and useful thing? Indeed, isn't a good list a way of getting started in a cultural domain, not the final word on that domain? Is there no practice of list-making which is ideologically neutral? John Guillory has a lot to say about the ideological function of the list in the canon debate in Cultural Capital, but Helen DeWitt gives what seems to me the most lucid answer I've found to some of my questions; explaining why she refused to submit her judgments to the listmakers, she writes that "[t]he only writers who stand any chance of making it into the top 20 are going to be writers a significant number of other contributors have also noticed - which means they are wildly unlikely to come from the undeservedly neglected. They will come from the pool of writers who got promoted, who won acclaim, in other words from the much smaller pool of writers many of us have happened to hear of."

Aggregation around socially interesting "nodes" is perhaps an inevitable part of social life, but -- as I've discussed elsewhere -- such nodes are also deeply self-reinforcing. In artificial music markets where "consumers" can see the preferences of other "consumers," initial consumer clustering (almost at random) around certain "seeds" has a powerful effect on subsequent consumer choice. That is, if you happen by chance to take an early lead in a competitive race in an open market, social clustering around apparent "winners" will create feedback loops. The popular become more popular, and the unpopular become less popular. (Moreover, this difference in popularity isn't just a cynical consumerist copying of the tastes of the Joneses -- it's not all about status anxiety -- but is arguably experienced sincerely as pleasure or disgust, though this is a secondary point.) In this context, if the form of the list has an ideological function, it is to reduce thought to a sort of cant, to give an illusion of superiority of one item in a field of more or less equally good (middling) products. Genuine superiority or inferiority is exceedingly rare. Experiments that construct artificial music markets in which consumer choices are genuinely independent -- where you make your own choice and issue a rating independently of others -- demonstrate in general that consumers have no particular preference for one artist or another, except at the tail ends of the distribution. If you stink, you won't get very far; if you're great, you'll always do modestly better in your ratings. If you're in the middle of the stack, your fate is a crap shoot.

If we accept this admittedly speculative analysis, and are willing to apply it to our conversation about books, what do these results portend for literary lists? It seems to me that all we can say about lists is that their popularity and consistency is a symptom of a highly stratified, hierarchical culture in which truly independent thought is incredibly hard to find. Eliminating lists will not eliminate this stratification or the social forces that drive us toward some canonized set of authors. To make an unjustly bold claim, given the sketchiness of my evidence: a just distribution of attention -- attention allocated in a society where highly educated individuals made genuinely autonomous value assessments, independent of marketing and spin, under conditions free of coercion -- would reveal the (arguably) fundamental sameness of most literary and artistic products or at least make constructing literary lists impossible, since the autonomous judgments of a hundred judges like DeWitt would not cluster around any nodes whatsoever. These lists would look like statistical noise to us. Some small set of artists might garner slightly more attention under such conditions, others a bit less, but most would -- like the children of Lake Woebegone -- be equally regarded as (slightly) above average, and we would be forced at last to love all our above-average children equally.

Listmania vs. Lake Woebegone

2009-10-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

X-posted at Plasma Pool.

An interesting debate. My eyes sort of glazed over when I read The Millions list.

Inherent Vice

2009-08-28T11:32:00.000-07:00

Check out my microreview of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice over at Plasma Pool. And while you're there, check out the rest of the site. They're doing some interesting stuff.

Inherent Vice

2009-08-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

Check out my microreview of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice over at Plasma Pool. And while you're there, check out the rest of the site. They're doing some interesting stuff.

Dissertation abstract

2009-08-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

I've been frantically copyediting my dissertation in anticipation of filing this coming Wednesday. One thing I've finally settled is the wording of my abstract, which took way longer than it should have. For those who're interested, here's the final text I've come reluctantly to accept:

“Wipe That Smirk off Your Face” examines a contemporary ethos of literary production I call “postirony” and relates this new artistic sensibility to longstanding critical debates about the value of irony. Starting in the late 1980s, postironic authors began critiquing the postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theory they were exposed to in the academy while remaining committed to extending these traditions. Positioning themselves as a new type of counterculture or avant-garde, postironists claimed that the dominant culture had co-opted irony, thus robbing it of its critical power. My dissertation investigates the theoretical presuppositions underlying this claim and argues that both postmodern ironists and postironists rely on the same tacit theory of cultural politics, the notion that symbolic action can undermine the foundationally linguistic or symbolic apparatus through which the mainstream culture maintains its power. The authors I study all present literary models of ironic and postironic character as a means of resisting the hegemonic culture. My chapters therefore tell the story of irony’s decline through the analysis of three major countercultural figures who have noteworthy relationships to irony: the hipster, the believer, and the trendspotter.

My first chapter analyzes the ironic figure of the “hipster” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and documents how cold war intellectuals celebrated the hipster for his powers of self-creation and ironic knowingness. In Invisible Man, Ellison joins this cold war consensus by positioning a hipster character (B.P. Rinehart) as the catalyst that awakens his protagonist to the ideological limitations of the Brotherhood, a thinly veiled version of the Communist Party USA. In contrast to social realist and protest fiction, postwar modernism was viewed as a potent anticommunist weapon, simultaneously an emblem of the freedom of the West and a bulwark against middlebrow American culture. A decade later, Pynchon invokes a post-Beat version of the hipster in V. as a means of finding a middle ground between postwar modernism and the emerging counterculture. Pynchon’s desire to court both sources of cultural legitimacy inflects the form of V., which is divided equally between a Beat narrative and a modernist narrative, each of which ironizes the other. Pynchon seeks to construct a higher-order critical irony above both modernism and hipness, and attempts to render this superior stance in the character of the African-American jazz saxophonist, McClintic Sphere.

In my second chapter, I turn to the “believer” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Wallace and Eggers regard the higher-order irony Pynchon helped invent as hopelessly corrupted and alienating, and seek to use postmodernist techniques toward sincere ends. Their postironic metafiction constructs a picture of the believer as a secular figure designed to resist the disenchantment many felt at the end of the cold war, when the market came to seem triumphant and invincible. Wallace uses metafictional form to cultivate reader belief and to short-circuit what he sees as the irony characteristic of American consumer culture. For Eggers, the believer finds re-enchantment in an aesthetic practice of “quirky” juxtaposition, the aggregation of unusual consumer products and offbeat experiences, the transformation of lifestyle into a work of art that inextricably links ethics and aesthetics. I conclude that the ethos of the postironic believer fails to neutralize irony and cynicism because these authors propose to solve institutional problems through individual activity. Even Eggers, who has built popular literary and philanthropic organizations that have adopted postirony as something like their house style, links re-enchantment to the atomizing logic of the competitive marketplace.

My third chapter studies the trendspotter, a female figure that combines functions associated with economic production and consumption, in Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl (2001) and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). I relate these two novels, examples of a literary genre that Fredric Jameson has called “socioeconomic science fiction,” to an influential body of branding theory that tries to understand and manipulate the symbolic logic underlying consumer motivation. The Savage Girl imagines a satirical version of the present in which all values, including countercultural values, have been commodified. Shakar’s hip trendspotter characters forecast the rise of what they term “postirony,” a collective cultural backlash against postmodern irony, along the lines outlined in my second chapter. Shakar’s characters compete to define the word “postirony,” reproducing at the level of content the formal problems we face as readers of The Savage Girl. In Pattern Recognition, Gibson presents his protagonist, the trendspotter Cayce Pollard, as a model of how one might endure the marketing-saturated world of globalization. Gibson uses a brand-name-laden style as a means of creating for his reader “cognitive maps” of economic globalization. These maps, associated by Gibson with the figure of the trendspotter, are features of a postironic disposition inclined to link the intimidating complexity of real global supply chains to the glossy surface of the brand.

My conclusion analyzes aspects of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which skillfully presented the candidate as a human symbol able to neutralize voter apathy and cynicism and reinvigorate engagement with public life. I link the sophisticated marketing techniques of the campaign to Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995), which I describe as a postironic Bildungsroman, suggesting that his presidential campaign should be understood as an extended paratext of his memoir. A postironic figure, “Brand Obama” was able to speak to different groups in different linguistic registers while maintaining a highly regimented, technologically savvy, and unified identity. His success may foretell the growing relevance of the postironic project to cultural life.

Well, I've settled on this version until I inevitably change my mind about this or that word or phrase five seconds before I submit. Who knew writing the abstract would be so hard? (I'll semi-surreptitiously change the text of this abstract if and as I make any future changes, just so you're warned. Down the memory hole!)

Dissertation abstract

2009-08-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

“Wipe That Smirk off Your Face” examines a contemporary ethos of literary production I call “postirony” and relates this new artistic sensibility to longstanding critical debates about the value of irony. Starting in the late 1980s, postironic authors began critiquing the postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theory they were exposed to in the academy while remaining committed to extending these traditions. Positioning themselves as a new type of counterculture or avant-garde, postironists claimed that the dominant culture had co-opted irony, thus robbing it of its critical power. My dissertation investigates the theoretical presuppositions underlying this claim and argues that both postmodern ironists and postironists rely on the same tacit theory of cultural politics, the notion that symbolic action can undermine the foundationally linguistic or symbolic apparatus through which the mainstream culture maintains its power. The authors I study all present literary models of ironic and postironic character as a means of resisting the hegemonic culture. My chapters therefore tell the story of irony’s decline through the analysis of three major countercultural figures who have noteworthy relationships to irony: the hipster, the believer, and the trendspotter.

My first chapter analyzes the ironic figure of the “hipster” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and documents how cold war intellectuals celebrated the hipster for his powers of self-creation and ironic knowingness. In Invisible Man, Ellison joins this cold war consensus by positioning a hipster character (B.P. Rinehart) as the catalyst that awakens his protagonist to the ideological limitations of the Brotherhood, a thinly veiled version of the Communist Party USA. In contrast to social realist and protest fiction, postwar modernism was viewed as a potent anticommunist weapon, simultaneously an emblem of the freedom of the West and a bulwark against middlebrow American culture. A decade later, Pynchon invokes a post-Beat version of the hipster in V. as a means of finding a middle ground between postwar modernism and the emerging counterculture. Pynchon’s desire to court both sources of cultural legitimacy inflects the form of V., which is divided equally between a Beat narrative and a modernist narrative, each of which ironizes the other. Pynchon seeks to construct a higher-order critical irony above both modernism and hipness, and attempts to render this superior stance in the character of the African-American jazz saxophonist, McClintic Sphere.

In my second chapter, I turn to the “believer” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Wallace and Eggers regard the higher-order irony Pynchon helped invent as hopelessly corrupted and alienating, and seek to use postmodernist techniques toward sincere ends. Their postironic metafiction constructs a picture of the believer as a secular figure designed to resist the disenchantment many felt at the end of the cold war, when the market came to seem triumphant and invincible. Wallace uses metafictional form to cultivate reader belief and to short-circuit what he sees as the irony characteristic of American consumer culture. For Eggers, the believer finds re-enchantment in an aesthetic practice of “quirky” juxtaposition, the aggregation of unusual consumer products and offbeat experiences, the transformation of lifestyle into a work of art that inextricably links ethics and aesthetics. I conclude that the ethos of the postironic believer fails to neutralize irony and cynicism because these authors propose to solve institutional problems through individual activity. Even Eggers, who has built popular literary and philanthropic organizations that have adopted postirony as something like their house style, links re-enchantment to the atomizing logic of the competitive marketplace.

My third chapter studies the trendspotter, a female figure that combines functions associated with economic production and consumption, in Alex Shakar’s The Savage Girl (2001) and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). I relate these two novels, examples of a literary genre that Fredric Jameson has called “socioeconomic science fiction,” to an influential body of branding theory that tries to understand and manipulate the symbolic logic underlying consumer motivation. The Savage Girl imagines a satirical version of the present in which all values, including countercultural values, have been commodified. Shakar’s hip trendspotter characters forecast the rise of what they term “postirony,” a collective cultural backlash against postmodern irony, along the lines outlined in my second chapter. Shakar’s characters compete to define the word “postirony,” reproducing at the level of content the formal problems we face as readers of The Savage Girl. In Pattern Recognition, Gibson presents his protagonist, the trendspotter Cayce Pollard, as a model of how one might endure the marketing-saturated world of globalization. Gibson uses a brand-name-laden style as a means of creating for his reader “cognitive maps” of economic globalization. These maps, associated by Gibson with the figure of the trendspotter, are features of a postironic disposition inclined to link the intimidating complexity of real global supply chains to the glossy surface of the brand.

My conclusion analyzes aspects of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which skillfully presented the candidate as a human symbol able to neutralize voter apathy and cynicism and reinvigorate engagement with public life. I link the sophisticated marketing techniques of the campaign to Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995), which I describe as a postironic Bildungsroman, suggesting that his presidential campaign should be understood as an extended paratext of his memoir. A postironic figure, “Brand Obama” was able to speak to different groups in different linguistic registers while maintaining a highly regimented, technologically savvy, and unified identity. His success may foretell the growing relevance of the postironic project to cultural life.

Return to Life

2009-07-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

I've been woefully negligent as a blogger (and, I should say, as a fiction writer), too busy putting the finishing touches on my dissertation to do much else. My primary chapters are all done, and my introduction and conclusion are mostly written. Two-three more days -- finishing the intro and conclusion and doing a global revision of the whole diss. -- and it'll be complete.

After three years of (more or less) continuous work, I am going to print the sucker off next week and give it to my committee for review, and then gleefully commit myself to the tedious but intellectually relaxing work of checking all my citations and the formatting of my Works Cited page. It's a little bit hard for me to believe that I'm so close to the end, and in a sense I've only just begun the process of turning the dissertation into a book, but it's finally happening.

But between frantic bouts of chapter writing and revision in the coming days, I will also be doing a reading from Pop Apocalypse at a fantastic science fiction/fantasy/horror speciality store on Valencia Street in San Francisco called Borderlands Books.

If you can, stop by tomorrow (Saturday, July 25, at 2 p.m.). It'll be fun, though you may notice dark circles under my eyes.

Return to Life

2009-07-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

More on Cultural Finance

2009-06-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

I received an interesting response to my posting on SellaBand from someone who works for a related service, Slicethepie. Turns out Slicethepie has implemented some of the ideas I mentioned in my previous post.

Slicethepie "is a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established Artists to raise money directly from Music Fans and Investors." Shares in a band purchased through Slicethepie are transferrable -- via their "Music Trading Exchange" -- which makes this system functionally equivalent to a stock market, as far as I can tell, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, SellaBand and Slicethepie are not the only places where what we could call Aspiring Celebrity Finance is happening. Way back in Jan. 2008, Josh Levin reported in Slate that Randy Newsom was holding a "self-IPO," in which he sold shares of his future earnings to interested investors. Newsom explained that he would use his capitalization to improve himself as an athlete, but he could also have used it to position himself in the media and grow his reputation. And Newsom was, of course, only the first athlete in the U.S. to self-IPO. As Levin explains:

Football Players Funds Management, a Portugal-based hedge fund, helps pro soccer teams buy the contracts of promising youngsters in exchange for a percentage of the players' future transfer fees. Top poker pros are often staked for tournaments by investors, and a golfer might get his start on tour with backing from a consortium of investors. There's already a popular fantasy site, ProTrade, where fans can buy and sell virtual shares in their favorite players. And last May, Michael Lewis wrote a convincing piece for Portfolio arguing that it won't be long before Americans will be able to invest in their favorite athletes.

Newsom's experiment ended in failure, as Levin reported in an update:

Update, Feb. 2, 2008: I no longer own a professional baseball player. In an interview in Friday's New York Times, Randy Newsom said he'll return the $36,000 he earned from selling 1,800 shares—six to a Slate investment group—in his future major-league earnings. Newsom and his company, Real Sports Investments, neither registered their offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission nor sought approval from Major League Baseball before issuing the first-ever baseball player IPO. "We want to pause to hear everyone's concerns," Newsom told the Times. "This idea is not going away. This is assured by the amount of fan support, and the amount of players we talked to, that the support is there. The spirit of this idea will go on."

The spirit of this idea will go on, I suspect. I've been meaning to read the science fiction novel, The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin, which projects a future in which everyone owns shares in everyone else, and the greatest freedom one can aspire to is a controlling stake in one's own stock issue, the ultimate logical extension of the spirit of this idea. Pop Apocalypse stands somewhere on the middle ground, and posits a world where only reputations are associated with finance, and only celebrity or wannabe celebrity reputations at that.

The key difference between current real-world cultural financing schemes and the New York Reputations Exchange in Pop Apocalypse is that celebrities and wannabe celebrities who list their names in my novel are not linked to a particular industry or to a particular set of talents and abilities. This describes Eliot's situation quite well: he has no particular talents, no special virtues. He is a celebrity who is famous for being famous in a world that is experiencing what could be described as an asset bubble in celebrity reputations.

In our world, I suspect that investors in a band or an athlete still have a mental attachment to the performance of persons or groups w/r/t their stated domains of expertise (music, athletics, etc.). But in fact, there's no particular reason Paris Hilton couldn't float an IPO on her name. What's she talented at other than at being famous? Whatever innate talent you have, you can always also be turned into a brand. After all, you may be talented, but you won't ever find people to recognize your talent if you can't draw people to you in the first place.

Moreover, there is evidence that "objective" talent is sort of overrated when it comes to predicting the popularity of artists (though not so much in the case of athletes); seeing aggregate consumer behavior apparently substantially shapes how "good" people perceive a particular aesthetic experience to be (as does price). That is, people don't just mindlessly agree with what the masses say but rather are more careful in giving attention to art that is prejudged to be good, and genuinely perceive this positively prejudged art to be better. Which means that in the competitive race to the top of the billboard charts, your media game can be as important as whatever you put on the page or on your CD.

Perversely, then, celebrity reputations markets will only achieve their full maturity when they detach themselves from this or that industry, this or that output, and find a way of allowing anyone who thinks they have the potential to hit it big in the mediasphere to connect with investors.

More on Cultural Finance

2009-06-23T03:35:00.000-07:00

Football Players Funds Management, a Portugal-based hedge fund, helps pro soccer teams buy the contracts of promising youngsters in exchange for a percentage of the players' future transfer fees. Top poker pros are often staked for tournaments by investors, and a golfer might get his start on tour with backing from a consortium of investors. There's already a popular fantasy site, ProTrade, where fans can buy and sell virtual shares in their favorite players. And last May, Michael Lewis wrote a convincing piece for Portfolio arguing that it won't be long before Americans will be able to invest in their favorite athletes.

Newsom's experiment ended in failure, as Levin reported in an update:

Update, Feb. 2, 2008: I no longer own a professional baseball player. In an interview in Friday's New York Times, Randy Newsom said he'll return the $36,000 he earned from selling 1,800 shares—six to a Slate investment group—in his future major-league earnings. Newsom and his company, Real Sports Investments, neither registered their offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission nor sought approval from Major League Baseball before issuing the first-ever baseball player IPO. "We want to pause to hear everyone's concerns," Newsom told the Times. "This idea is not going away. This is assured by the amount of fan support, and the amount of players we talked to, that the support is there. The spirit of this idea will go on."

9 99 Boycott

2009-06-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise when I visited Amazon's page for the Kindle edition of Pop Apocalypse and saw that it had been marked with a tag called "9 99 boycott." I initially thought that an uprising of angry readers had for reasons inscrutable to me decided to boycott my book -- what a great and unexpected pleasure that would be!

But no. A bit of quick Web research (the only kind I seem to do anymore) turned up an explanation:

A loosely organized group of 250 customers has been labeling books in the Kindle Store with the tag "9 99 Boycott" due to its belief that the e-books should cost no more than $10. It's a reasonable argument when you consider that most paperback books cost about $10 and are much more versatile than their e-book counterparts.

I am a high-volume consumer of books, so I obviously support cheaper electronic books. Indeed, if Kindle ebooks were cheaper the economics of my decision whether or not to buy a Kindle would change: that is, I'd buy one now rather than do what I've been doing, waiting till a cheaper better version arrives or some competitor creates an even better ebook reader.

But you've got to wonder why someone who doesn't want to pay $9.99 per Kindle book would bother buying a Kindle in the first place. The clear alternative to Kindle texts is... book-based texts.

Why isn't there a movement to tag physical books as overpriced? I suspect it has something to do with our strange intuitions about electronic content. If we pay $20 for a book, we are impressed by the presence of the book. We think the cost must be justified, because it took some effort on our part to procure the book. When we acquire an electronic text instantly we're lulled into believing that the costs can't possibly be justified. Getting this "nonmaterial" artifact was easy as pie¹, so the associated costs must be trivial, ergo consumer boycott.

------

1. Though, really, how easy is pie?

9 99 Boycott

2009-06-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

But no. A bit of quick Web research (the only kind I seem to do anymore) turned up an explanation:

A loosely organized group of 250 customers has been labeling books in the Kindle Store with the tag "9 99 Boycott" due to its belief that the e-books should cost no more than $10. It's a reasonable argument when you consider that most paperback books cost about $10 and are much more versatile than their e-book counterparts.

But you've got to wonder why someone who doesn't want to pay $9.99 per Kindle book would bother buying a Kindle in the first place. The clear alternative to Kindle texts is... book-based texts.

------

1. Though, really, how easy is pie?

Infinite Summer

2009-06-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

For those who haven't already heard, allow me to direct your attention to the launching post of Infinite Summer, an organized effort to read through Infinite Jest this summer, endnotes and all.

The irony for me is that I'm too bogged down finishing a dissertation chapter about Wallace (and Dave Eggers) to participate. Maybe after I get my dissertation in the can I can try to play catch-up.

SellaBand and the Reputations Exchange

2009-06-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

Richard Florida blogs about a new Dutch music startup called SellaBand, a service that aims "[t]o unite Artists and Fans in an independent movement that aims to level the playing field in the global music industry."

SellaBand tries to connect what they call "Believers" with aspiring musicians. As a Believer, you can invest money toward the costs of producing the first record of an aspiring band (either $50,000 or $100,000, depending on which tier the band is in). In return for this investment, Believers split the earnings of the albums they help finance 50/50 with the bands they help launch.

This service presents itself as a way of connecting fans to musicians without the mediation of big record labels, and to a degree it is just that. But with a few modifications it could become something very much like the model of the Reputations Exchange I describe in Pop Apocalypse.

After all, what you are doing here isn't so much believing in your band as investing in them -- though all finance is ultimately based on belief, that some version of the system will exist in the future, that some individual firm will pay dividends, whatever. Why not issue a share of band stock to every Believer? Why not allow that stock to be transferable or to become the core or basis for secondary markets? Why not turn SellaBand into something like an electronic band stock-market exchange?

Obviously, I present such schemes in a satirical light in my book -- making fun of what I regard as the undeserved glamour of high finance, the absurdities inherent in its real-world shape -- but the more I've gone around to book readings and had conversations with readers about these ideas, the more I am convinced that something like a stock market for reputations is inevitable, even in this era of burst bubbles and Wall Street (supposedly) in retreat.

Infinite Summer

2009-06-22T02:06:00.000-07:00

For those who haven't already heard, allow me to direct your attention to the launching post of Infinite Summer, an organized effort to read through Infinite Jest this summer, endnotes and all.

The irony for me is that I'm too bogged down finishing a dissertation chapter about Wallace (and Dave Eggers) to participate. Maybe after I get my dissertation in the can I can try to play catch-up.

SellaBand and the Reputations Exchange

2009-06-22T01:51:00.000-07:00

Starting Summer

2009-06-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

I'm back from a trip to Seattle and Portland where I did readings at Elliott Bay and Powell's (on Hawthorne). These were great fun, the bookstores both awesome, and they drew my biggest crowds yet -- not huge, but respectable, in the (very) low double digits. It's kind of neat that people who've presumably never heard of you -- or read your book -- are willing to come out and on the basis of a short reading and some discussion take the risk of buying your book to read. Thanks so much to everyone who came out. I appreciate it.

While up north, I also managed to find some decent WiFi cafes where I finished the last of my PWR grading, so my summer has pretty much officially begun. I've got a full agenda for the next three months. Before I start my new postdoc in September, I have to complete my dissertation on postirony, teach a six week Continuing Studies novel-writing class, do research at the British Library, and attend two weddings.

I also want to finish the first draft of Hamsterstan, which I think is doable, so long as I finish my dissertation in a timely manner. If I'm genuinely hyperproductive, I'd like to finish revising an article on hipsters and Thomas Pynchon for resubmission to a literary journal and also submit a few article pitches -- one on the literary origins of and culture surrounding the concept of technological Singularity and another on the ways in which Obama might be understood to be a postironic figure. And while I'm at it, I'd love to get back to blogging in a semiregular way.

Wish me luck.

Starting Summer

2009-06-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Wish me luck.

Postirony, again. And DFW.

2009-05-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

One negative consequence of publishing Pop Apocalypse is that I've been blogging very little about my dissertation. For four years, I pretty regularly updated my other blog, The Postironic Times, but in 2008 I closed up shop there, transferred all my postings to this site, but lost a bit of momentum in the switch.

Well, of course, I never stopped writing my dissertation (it sometimes seem as if I'll never stop!) or conducting research on postirony or going to conferences or doing any of that tasty academic stuff.

Today, I received some good news: an MLA special session I proposed on the legacy of David Foster Wallace's writing has been accepted. The roundtable panel will feature a distinguished group of academic folk who have done great work on Wallace. We are also very fortunate to have Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown, participating in our discussion.

Here go a few key paragraphs from our proposal, which'll give you a sense of what we have planned:

The September 2008 suicide of David Foster Wallace sent shock waves through the literary world. Equally admired for his fiction and nonfiction, Wallace was considered one of the best writers of his generation, “a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” according to Jonathan Franzen. As early as 1993, academic critics recognized the importance of Wallace’s prolific body of experimental writing, which as of now comprises two critically acclaimed novels--including the thousand-page “Infinite Jest”--three short story collections, two collections of eclectic essays, a book-length mathematical history of infinity, a co-authored book on rap culture, a short book on John McCain’s failed 2000 primary campaign, and others. Wallace’s writing style seemed utterly original but hard to categorize, weaving together a number of characteristic features: hypotactic, sometimes pages-long sentences that fuse highly technical vocabularies with colloquial diction; extensive digressions, footnotes, and endnotes, also sometimes many pages in length; a mixture of silly, elaborate jokes with a deep sense of moral seriousness; and a love of philosophical paradoxes and puzzles.

And:

To focus our inquiry into the nature and scope of Wallace’s achievement, our discussion will largely concentrate on what is indisputably Wallace’s magnum opus, “Infinite Jest.” “Infinite Jest” is a novel that draws on a staggeringly diverse range of discourses--neuroscience, advertising, game theory, philosophy of mind, self-help and recovery theory, marginal economics, television history, among others--in order to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an era of mass hypermediation and widespread cynicism. We will take this novel as the most accomplished articulation of Wallace’s aesthetic and philosophical aims, his attempt, as he put it in a commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College, “to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of [his] natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.” Though we will all make reference to “Infinite Jest,” we will not limit ourselves only to discussing this encyclopedic work; our talks will use “Infinite Jest” as a platform or hub from which to stage a searching analysis of the broader set of issues that animate Wallace’s fiction, criticism, and journalism.

I'll post more as the convention approaches in December. We hope to see you there.

Postirony, again. And DFW.

2009-05-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

Here go a few key paragraphs from our proposal, which'll give you a sense of what we have planned:

The September 2008 suicide of David Foster Wallace sent shock waves through the literary world. Equally admired for his fiction and nonfiction, Wallace was considered one of the best writers of his generation, “a huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer,” according to Jonathan Franzen. As early as 1993, academic critics recognized the importance of Wallace’s prolific body of experimental writing, which as of now comprises two critically acclaimed novels--including the thousand-page “Infinite Jest”--three short story collections, two collections of eclectic essays, a book-length mathematical history of infinity, a co-authored book on rap culture, a short book on John McCain’s failed 2000 primary campaign, and others. Wallace’s writing style seemed utterly original but hard to categorize, weaving together a number of characteristic features: hypotactic, sometimes pages-long sentences that fuse highly technical vocabularies with colloquial diction; extensive digressions, footnotes, and endnotes, also sometimes many pages in length; a mixture of silly, elaborate jokes with a deep sense of moral seriousness; and a love of philosophical paradoxes and puzzles.

And:

To focus our inquiry into the nature and scope of Wallace’s achievement, our discussion will largely concentrate on what is indisputably Wallace’s magnum opus, “Infinite Jest.” “Infinite Jest” is a novel that draws on a staggeringly diverse range of discourses--neuroscience, advertising, game theory, philosophy of mind, self-help and recovery theory, marginal economics, television history, among others--in order to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an era of mass hypermediation and widespread cynicism. We will take this novel as the most accomplished articulation of Wallace’s aesthetic and philosophical aims, his attempt, as he put it in a commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College, “to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of [his] natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.” Though we will all make reference to “Infinite Jest,” we will not limit ourselves only to discussing this encyclopedic work; our talks will use “Infinite Jest” as a platform or hub from which to stage a searching analysis of the broader set of issues that animate Wallace’s fiction, criticism, and journalism.

I'll post more as the convention approaches in December. We hope to see you there.

Palo Alto Weekly Article

2009-05-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

My fellow Pop Apocalyptarians: Check out this article, published in the latest issue of Palo Alto Weekly, featuring yours truly. It's quite nice, and it gives a good sense of what the book is about and what I was aiming for when I was writing it. Their photographer took a pretty cool/menacing-looking picture of me, too.

Palo Alto Weekly Article

2009-05-09T06:30:00.000-07:00

Browse Inside Pop Apocalypse

2009-05-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

Coffee and Laptops

2009-05-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

If you find yourself floating around a bookstore anytime soon, pick up a copy of the May issue of Zink magazine and check out the last page. There you'll find an op-ed I wrote for the "Fresh Ink" section of the magazine. Read it to find out what I've been up to over the last three-four years of my productive life. (Hint: it involves coffee and laptops.)

Browse Inside Pop Apocalypse

2009-05-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Coffee and Laptops

2009-05-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

Book Club Offer (10x10)

2009-05-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

In the interest of getting word about Pop Apocalypse out to the general public, and of meeting people with excellent taste in literature, I've decided to make a special offer to my readers.

Here's the deal. If you are part of a book club and are interested in reading Pop Apocalypse, I would love to do a video conference with your group via Skype or iChat. I'm willing to do whatever your group wants (within reasonable limits): answer questions, give a talk of some sort, do a reading, dance like a chicken, whatever.

I would love to talk to every group that asks, but unfortunately my time is fairly limited this summer -- I have a dissertation to finish, another novel to write, and a Stanford Continuing Studies novel-writing course to teach -- so what I would propose is that the first ten book groups that can organize ten readers each to buy and read Pop Apocalypse will definitely get (at least) two hours of my time via Skype or iChat. Beyond that, I can't make any commitments.

If you're part of a Bay Area-based reading group, I would even forgo Internet-mediated communication and show up to your group meeting in person, as long as you live within a reasonable driving distance from San Francisco.

There are a limited number of weekends available this summer, and I'll fill them up on a first come first serve basis, so let me know if you and your group are interested, ASAP.

Book Club Offer (10x10)

2009-05-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

In the interest of getting word about Pop Apocalypse out to the general public, and of meeting people with excellent taste in literature, I've decided to make a special offer to my readers.

There are a limited number of weekends available this summer, and I'll fill them up on a first come first serve basis, so let me know if you and your group are interested, ASAP.

Get with the program, people

2009-05-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

An interview I conducted with UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl has just been released in this month's Believer magazine. The original interview was fairly far-reaching and lively, but has here been shortened to a still-lively-even-if-slightly-less-far-reaching "micro-interview," spread through the May issue.

When you're done reading the interview, do also check out Mark's excellent new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which is sure to rearrange the mental furniture of scholars and critics of postwar American fiction, perhaps even installing a new sofa couch or two.

But don't be put off by all that. The book is also quite readable and engaging in a public intellectual sort of way. The book actually partly helped dampen some of my prejudices and stereotyped impressions about MFA programs, which I avoided, assuming falsely that they were all homogeneously dedicated to the reproduction of minimalist realism.

Not that I don't love minimialist realism, but it's just not what I wanted to do as a writer. Little did I know!

Get with the program, people

2009-05-01T02:50:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

Not that I don't love minimialist realism, but it's just not what I wanted to do as a writer. Little did I know!

The End of the Beginning

2009-04-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

I feel the urge to comment here today, the release-date of Pop Apocalypse, but I don't have anything particularly original to say about the release of the novel.

Obviously enough, I'm super-excited that the book is getting out there into the world, but I also feel pretty powerless to do anything to shape its reception. People will read the book or they won't read the book, and they'll like it or not, they'll laugh or they won't even know they're supposed to. I've done my part. Time to let the little-bird-analog fly away from the nest-analog under its own wing-power-analog, whatever any of those analogs might be in this case.

I went rooting around the Palo Alto Borders this morning to see if I could find a copy of the book. No luck. I am informed by my editor that Barnes and Noble is going to be displaying Pop Apocalypse on its New Releases shelf, which is super-cool. After I'm done working for the day, I'll drive to Redwood City and see if I can find it somewhere.

What I am coming to realize is that the book world operates at slightly slower than a snail's pace. The day when I received the initial offer on the book, way back in September 2007, was in some ways much more meaningful and more of a drug-like head-rush than today. Whatever comes of Pop Apocalypse will come in a kind of dribble and sputter of non-events, a review here, a review there, a spike in my Amazon ranking followed by a long lull. If I'm lucky, word of mouth will lead to a strong first showing, which will pave the way for Hamsterstan (which is still in progress and going well).

All of this is not quite anticlimactic--there's still lots of exciting stuff to come, reviews, readings, other book-related events--but today's turning into a quiet kind of introspective day.

The End of the Beginning

2009-04-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

I feel the urge to comment here today, the release-date of Pop Apocalypse, but I don't have anything particularly original to say about the release of the novel.

All of this is not quite anticlimactic--there's still lots of exciting stuff to come, reviews, readings, other book-related events--but today's turning into a quiet kind of introspective day.

Post-Pre-Swinocalypse

2009-04-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

I had a great weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

As promised, and thanks in large part to the expert moderation skills of Jim Ruland, my panel, "The Post-Modern World," had almost nothing to do with postmodernism and everything to do with the End of the World. Which, I should mention, is nigh. What seemed to me to be about two-hundred people showed up.

I have to say--with all our talk of death, Armageddon, nihilism, Camus, and the utter meaninglessness of our mindless voyage through the yawning dead expanse of deep space--it was all pretty grim and morbid and ominous.

And so much fun!

Our audience was laughing with us as Todd Hasak-Lowy, Fiona Maazel, Jerry Stahl, and I mused on the question of whether there was any reason whatsoever to have hope for the future of human life and civilization. The word "swine flu" came up more times than I could count, which almost unavoidably led to a question from one member of the audience inquiring: If only Jews and Muslims survive the pending Swinocalypse (my word, not the audience member's) what might that mean about the future of humanity?

Jerry Stahl, deadpan, suggested that some kosher variation of the swine flu would strike down whoever thought they had escaped the first round of destruction. That struck me as exactly right.

The Pop Apocalypse is very nigh, folks. Buy your copy today, before it's too late!

Post-Pre-Swinocalypse

2009-04-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

I had a great weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

And so much fun!

Jerry Stahl, deadpan, suggested that some kosher variation of the swine flu would strike down whoever thought they had escaped the first round of destruction. That struck me as exactly right.

The Pop Apocalypse is very nigh, folks. Buy your copy today, before it's too late!

Pop Apocalypse @ the LATfob

2009-04-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

Those of you who live in LA, take note: I'll be in town for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, participating in a panel called "Fiction: The Post-Modern World" on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. in Franz Hall on the UCLA campus. With me on the panel: Todd Hasak-Lowy, Fiona Maazel, and Jerry Stahl, with Jim Ruland as moderator.

One thing I can promise is that the word "postmodern" is unlikely to come up. The writers involved (myself included) all seem to be more interested in creating fiction about near-future (or present day) gonzo apocalypses than in waxing philosophical about some sort of postmodern condition or any such thing. Which isn't to say that gonzo apocalypses have nothing to do with what is called postmodernism--as any Pynchonite will quickly inform you--but don't be put off by that.

The panel'll be fun, apocalypses and all. Really. I'll be signing copies of Pop Apocalypse afterward.

Reserve your free tickets today.

Pop Apocalypse @ the LATfob

2009-04-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

The panel'll be fun, apocalypses and all. Really. I'll be signing copies of Pop Apocalypse afterward.

Reserve your free tickets today.

T-Minus One Week

2009-04-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

With a little more than a week to go before POP APOCALYPSE is released into the world, I was pleased to read this thoughtful review of the novel by British science fiction writer Adam Roberts. Adam writes:There’s a good deal of rattle and a certain amount of hum in this novel; rattle in the hailstorm of cool ideas, plot twists and one liners, and also (after a slightly sticky first hundred ...

T-Minus One Week

2009-04-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly on POP APOCALYPSE

2009-04-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

This week's Publishers Weekly mentions POP APOCALYPSE in an article on pending Apocalypse-theme books coming this summer. Check it out.

Publishers Weekly on POP APOCALYPSE

2009-04-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

This week's Publishers Weekly mentions POP APOCALYPSE in an article on pending Apocalypse-theme books coming this summer. Check it out.

First Review of Pop Apocalypse

2009-03-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

I received a note from my editor today informing me that Publishers Weekly has released its review of Pop Apocalypse. The verdict? Quite nice: This playful and witty novel takes our celebrity-obsessed and media-hijacked culture, mixes in geopolitics and a dash of cyberpunk dystopia to create an intelligent and blistering what-if.Intelligent and blistering were definitely in the neighborhood ...

First Review of Pop Apocalypse

2009-03-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

Cover

2009-02-26T18:07:00.000-08:00

Cover

2009-02-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

Cover is Up

2009-02-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

The cover of Pop Apocalypse is now up on the Amazon Web site, so I thought this would be a good time to add a copy of the image here. I'm pretty excited with how it turned out.

Cover is Up

2009-02-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

The cover of Pop Apocalypse is now up on the Amazon Web site, so I thought this would be a good time to add a copy of the image here. I'm pretty excited with how it turned out.

Still Here

2009-02-22T19:46:00.000-08:00

I have not forgotten you, my loyal readers.

I shall return.

Still Here

2009-02-22T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have not forgotten you, my loyal readers.

I shall return.

Self-Conscious Self-Promotion

2009-02-10T15:31:00.000-08:00

I hesitate to direct attention to these two videos, given how horribly self-conscious seeing footage of myself makes me, but in the interest of blatant self-promotion I have heroically managed to overcome my hesitation.A note: the videos say Pop Apocalypse is available now, but it's not of course. It's coming out in late April/early May.

Self-Conscious Self-Promotion

2009-02-10T10:31:00.000-08:00

Olive NY Questions

2009-01-03T17:26:00.000-08:00

The Olive, the Harper Perennial blog, has published a list of New Year's resolution-type answers by Harper authors. You can read my profound views on 2008 -- and predictions for what is to

Olive NY Questions

2009-01-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

The Olive, the Harper Perennial blog, has published a list of New Year's resolution-type answers by Harper authors. You can read my profound views on 2008 -- and predictions for what is to

These Weird Guys

2008-12-27T13:48:00.000-08:00

One of my PWR students wrote his final paper on the McDonald's Video Game, a satirical simulation that lets you try your hand at running everyone's favorite multinational corporate fast food giant. I decided to check it out, and was reading through the game's tutorial. The game lets you operate four sectors/views of McDonald's food system -- "the farmland, the slaughterhouse, the restaurant, and the corporate HQ." The most humorous imagine in the tutorial is the view of the corporate office. Here's a relevant screen cap.

I love these little marketing guys. Weird, indeed.

A New Car!

2008-12-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

if:book, a blog associated with The Institute for the Future of the Book, has published a lengthy and fascinating interview with Helen DeWitt.

I found this suggestion by DeWitt somewhat amusing:

I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.

If after reading Pop Apocalypse you are so moved by my dystopian near-future satire that you feel inclined to give me a free car or six months rent-free stay in your second or third home, I will be more than happy to accept your generous offer. In thanks, I could even add you as a character in my next book!

Anyway, the rest of the interview covers a wide range of topics, from working with editors (DeWitt seems to have had some bad experiences) to how the Internet might change the eating/surviving situation of novelists to the perils of copy-editing.

The interview has gotten me thinking about possible second or third critical/scholarly books -- or maybe just articles -- that would be fun to do post-postirony. Like, something about novelists who blog. Or something on reading off screens. Or novels that attempt to incorporate/cannibalize Web-based literary forms. The possibilities abound.

These Weird Guys

2008-12-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

I love these little marketing guys. Weird, indeed.

A New Car!

2008-12-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

if:book, a blog associated with The Institute for the Future of the Book, has published a lengthy and fascinating interview with Helen DeWitt.

I found this suggestion by DeWitt somewhat amusing:

I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.

Classic Literature/Video Games

2008-12-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

Alerting us to a major victory for the world of letters, Mobylives reports that a deal has been reached to make works of literature available on hand-held video game devices:

Japanese video game maker Nintendo has announced a deal with HarperCollins to make classics of world literature available to read on its games playing devices. As a Telegraph report by Murray Wardrop notes, “The unlikely partnership means that the names of computer game characters such as Donkey Kong and Mario will sit alongside the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters on the hand-held gadgets.” Dubbed the 100 Classic Book Collection, the package will cost about £20 (about $30) and will be available initially only in the UK. A Nintendo spokesman said, “We hope to encourage people to try books that they wouldn’t go out and purchase themselves.”

While I appreciate any move that will stave off the long-coming and inevitable destruction of literature and literary culture, this deal reveals a singular lack of imagination on the part of Nintendo and HarperCollins. The possibilities for cross-fertilization between literature and video games -- for synergistic magic! -- are far more varied and exciting than this.

How much more interesting would it have been to translate classic works of literature, by Austen or the Brontë sisters, into video games? Very. Imagine: Navigate Elizabeth through Pemberley, first-person shooter style, while fighting off Darcy's zombified (or at least influenza-stricken) servants. In a multiplayer twist, take control of either Stephen or Bloom and, Final Fight-style wallop your way out of Night Town; when Stephen and Bloom team up, the Citizen won't stand a chance.

Or, better still, what if we transformed all our most beloved video game characters -- Mario, Link, Sonic -- into new literary classics. Yes, okay, I'll admit, Bob Hoskins didn't turn in a very good performance in the Super Mario Bros. movie -- not nearly as good as Captain Lou Albano in the Super Mario Brothers Super Show -- but is Super Mario Brothers not, at heart, a story of personal development, a sort of interactive Bildungsroman made for the age of psychedelic growth-accelerating mushrooms?

Yes, yes it is. I think I needn't say any more.

(x-posted at Plasma Pool)

Classic Literature/Video Games

2008-12-13T02:08:00.000-08:00

Alerting us to a major victory for the world of letters, Mobylives reports that a deal has been reached to make works of literature available on hand-held video game devices:

Japanese video game maker Nintendo has announced a deal with HarperCollins to make classics of world literature available to read on its games playing devices. As a Telegraph report by Murray Wardrop notes, “The unlikely partnership means that the names of computer game characters such as Donkey Kong and Mario will sit alongside the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters on the hand-held gadgets.” Dubbed the 100 Classic Book Collection, the package will cost about £20 (about $30) and will be available initially only in the UK. A Nintendo spokesman said, “We hope to encourage people to try books that they wouldn’t go out and purchase themselves.”

Yes, yes it is. I think I needn't say any more.

(x-posted at Plasma Pool)

post-Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T19:12:00.000-08:00

There's not much news to report on Pop Apocalypse, but I thought I'd write a brief post here reflecting on my Thanksgiving.

post-Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

There's not much news to report on Pop Apocalypse, but I thought I'd write a brief post here reflecting on my Thanksgiving.

DeLillotastic News

2008-11-23T15:49:00.000-08:00

As if I didn't have enough to do, between job applications, teaching, various forms of blogging, and occasionally dissertation-writing (let's not even discuss new-novel writing), I decided to shoot off an abstract applying to participate in the American Comparative Literature Association's 2009 annual meeting. Specifically to a fascinating-sounding seminar called "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture."

I submitted an abstract for a paper called "The Cosmopolitanism of High Finance in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis." And who woulda thunk: the abstract was accepted into the seminar. So now I must add one more thing to do on my to-do list, right after Check To-Do List Regularly. This commitment will force me to do some much-needed thinking and writing on DeLillo, who is hovering all over my dissertation but whom I don't directly address. Wallace and Franzen were hugely influenced by DeLillo -- reading their letters to him at the Ransom Center is utterly fascinating -- and I think the general critical classification of DeLillo as a postmodernist gets him wrong in important ways.

Naturally enough, I try to position DeLillo as an author who shares many of the concerns and aesthetic commitments of the folks I call postironists, though his concerns clearly predate whole postironic careers. There is a risk when you write a dissertation -- or anything -- of discovering your interests everywhere you look, but I think I can defend my claim that the dominant reflexive readings of DeLillo's career tend to rely too much on White Noise as their model of DeLillodom (or maybe DeLillohood). No, I say. Not so!

The more I read by DeLillo, the more I am convinced that White Noise is actually quite anomalous in his career. He's not so ironic, once you get to know his writing. Rather, I see him as someone who wishes he could avoid irony -- which is for him defined by the detachment of words from their referents -- but who holds out little hope that it's possible to do so anymore.

DeLillotastic News

2008-11-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

Zadie Smith on Joseph O'Neill

2008-11-15T23:23:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted at Plasma Pool.)

After reading Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland, I took a look at Zadie Smith’s fascinating take-down — “Two Paths for the Novel” in the NYRB — of O’Neill as a representative of what she calls “lyrical Realism,” a review which might be characterized as an indirect attack on the brand of Realism most commonly associated with James Wood — lyrical, (apparently) apolitical, overly committed to models of deep subjectivity as the marker of the Real. The problem with O’Neill, for Smith, is perhaps that he writes too well; he is a too-perfect embodiment of what we want from what we sometimes take to calling Realism. Every time a political question comes up, he artfully diverts his narrator’s attention to the beauty of cantilevered clouds or some such aesthetic thing.

I am of two minds regarding this review. One mind is satisfied that Smith conducts a relatively sharp reading of the many ways O’Neill defers his novel’s — potentially hackneyed — theme and materials through various forms of mediating irony and self-aware qualification. Rather than have Hans, his narrator, come out and say that he wants to use cricket as an allegory of assimilation into the U.S. (we all learn the rules of the game! rah rah democracy!), he places such choice declarations into the mouth of the character of the self-consciously “post-colonial” (to use James Wood’s term, though he is perhaps better described as merely cheerfully colonial) Chuck Ramkissoon. Smith is, additionally, very smart when describing the ways political material gets startlingly excised from the realm of the Real. Hans wonders: “Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn’t really care.” Worried about the Iraq war? Well, let’s take a moment to reflect on the beauty of clouds… Was there something about a war you were discussing? Though Smith doesn’t say so, the novel also fails — more grievously in my view — to build a compelling narrative justification for Hans’ interest in Chuck by its end, and so — I think — fails even on its own highly aestheticized terms. There are plenty of pretty sentences, though. Hundreds of pages’ worth. Overall, I actually really liked the novel, though my opinion of the book is not my subject here.

Says my other mind, Smith’s attack on this mythical beast, capital-R Realism — and her celebration of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as one of its most promising anti-types — remains underdeveloped (though I do come away from her article very eager to read McCarthy’s novel). What, in Smith’s view, prevents a thriving Realism from coexisting happily with forms of anti-Realism? The answer is, as Smith has to acknowledge, nothing: “In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.” What’s the real problem with Realism, then? I’d argue that Smith is not really attacking “lyrical Realism” as a theoretical approach to getting at what’s real — deep subjectivities or infinitely nuanced personalities or whatever the real happens to be constituted by this week — but rather is expressing her frustration with a set of established literary-critical institutions — publishers, reviewers, readers, (some) scholars — that lavish too much prestige upon it (Realism) at the expense of more experimental modes, institutions that moreover assign authenticity to certain identities at the expense of others. The literary pie is small, she seems to be saying, and we’re all scrounging around for whatever crumbs we can find.

But, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the term Realism uncomfortably conflates an epistemology with a genre. Genres have histories — they rise, they fall, sometimes they rise again — but epistemologies, though historically constrained, must by necessity claim to have an objective, if still contingent, character. Smith’s claim against lyrical Realism is based on an assessment of the failure of the literary marketplace to sustain multiple roads, but the particulars of her attack grow out of an assessment of the particular epistemic failures of focusing on deep subjectivity and hypercomplex personalities as the expense of the political, the existential, and other dimensions of the Real.

And yet by admitting that in fatter times we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, Smith admits in essence that there is no theoretical reason why O’Neill can’t write a Realist novel today, lyrical or otherwise. Indeed, individuals are free to write pretty much anything they want whenever they want, from whatever epistemic vantage point they prefer. There are only institutional barriers to his doing so, and a system of publishing — and power — that values what he does a certain way. Ditto for McCarthy’s anti-Realism. Smith’s failure to distinguish clearly — or rather her rapid oscillation — between epistemic and literary-institutional definitions of Realism and her assertion (without evidence) that literary publishing is in straights very dire indeed seem to me to be the biggest weaknesses in an otherwise good overview of some pressing representational choices facing writer folk today.

I’m not quite sure what we’re left with once we’ve made that distinction. A call to reform the publishing industry? A reeducation of the reader? An expansion of minds of critics? All of these would be worthy goals, but would have little to do with Realism as such and everything to do with the structures (political, economic, social, etc.) that value it. And: What reforms? What reeducation? What precise sort of mind-expansion?

Zadie Smith on Joseph O'Neill

2008-11-15T18:23:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted at Plasma Pool.)

Big box of galleys

2008-11-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

I received 25 galleys of Pop Apocalypse today at my department mailbox. The packaging of the books looks fantastic--great cover art, nice design, and so on. Now, I have to find 25 people

Big box of galleys

2008-11-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

I received 25 galleys of Pop Apocalypse today at my department mailbox. The packaging of the books looks fantastic--great cover art, nice design, and so on. Now, I have to find 25 people

On Amazon

2008-10-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

One of the coolest moments of freshman authorhood is when you first see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pop-Apocalypse-Possible-Satire-P-S/dp/0061715379/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=122375866