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In his recent essay in Tablet, “Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics,” Blake Smith writes about the Bulgarian-French-American critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva, and in particular her fruitful and fascinating analyses of the viciously anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
For Kristeva, Céline is, among many other things, a great example of how anti-Semitism is embedded in western culture in a way that precedes even the very early Christian antipathy to Jews for their role in rejecting Jesus. We are anti-Semitic, in the West, because our very psyches were formed, before Jesus was even a gleam in God’s eye, when the rival but intimately bound figures of the Jewish patriarch and the Jewish prophet set the archetypal boundaries within which we would live and develop.
When we rebel, as we must, it is against one or the other of these figures. Blake writes:
Western fathers, Kristeva insisted, are Jewish. Even Westerners who are neither Jewish nor religious derive from the heritage of the Bible their profoundest and most intimate understanding not only of God—a loving, punishing, powerful, yet often apparently absent or vindictive father—but of everything associated with the “paternal function.” Our sense of political authority, of social norms, of our own fathers and our own fatherhood, is suffused with biblical legacies. A vision of a bearded older man, compounded of God and the patriarchs with whom God spoke, hangs like a superimposed image before every one of our apparently secular leaders, judges, and dads. Whenever we rebel against their authority, and seek to extirpate from ourselves and our culture that authority’s deepest, most hidden foundations, we therefore may easily find ourselves locked no longer in struggle with real, empirical fathers and powers (who may well need to be overcome) but with the abstract, symbolic, Jewish “paternal function” which, never exhaustively embodied by anything, may nevertheless be figured, as a scapegoat, by Jews.
But the Bible contains both Law and Prophets: a power that compels obedience to rules and measures all men’s worth by them, and a power that compels some men to strangely singularize themselves through antinomian acts of outrageous transgression—powers both called God. The prophets marry whores, lay for months unmoving in bizarre positions, eat disgusting bread, report dreams and sightings in which respectable authorities are laid low by vicious pagan foreigners. Here a relation to God seems not to assure the continuity of patriarchal tradition, of sons becoming fathers through adherence to rules and roles, but rather to endanger everything that might make one socially recognizable as a decent person. The prophets, unsurprisingly, are often reluctant, pleading with God that they are not well-suited for such a task, or simply fleeing it.
The traditions of the West, Kristeva posited, since they derive in large measure from the Bible, turn on its central tension between, on the one hand, seeing God as granter of the Law, guarantor of the social order and our place with in it, and, on the other, hearing God’s summons to undo ourself and the world that they might be remade. To hold on rightly both to the “very risky right to be different” as revealed by the Prophets through their bewilderingly personal access to the divine, and “the Law” as given publicly, plainly, to everyone, once and for all, is a difficult venture, and perhaps one bound to teeter endlessly between stifling conformist legalism and reckless individualist fanaticism.
In addition to Blake’s essay on Kristeva on Céline, we also talk about lots of other stuff, including Blake’s efforts to launch a magazine about gay male life and culture, why I (somewhat surprisingly) don’t like Tom Wolfe; and Blake’s very loving parents who didn’t exactly come through when he came out.
What thematically unifies the episode, I think, is the shared concern that Blake and I have with how we can reverse the polarity of our current political and cultural equilibrium, in which culture is boring and limp and predictable and politics are intense and transgressive and surprising. Without quite signing on to Kristeva’s vision of western civilization being premised on the tension between the Jewish father and the Jewish rebel, we find it a useful frame with which to think. Hope you enjoy.
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Back on the ‘pod this week is Naomi Kanakia, author of the just released novel The Default World. We talk about Vekhi, a 1909 collection of essays from ex- and never-Marxist Russian intellectuals; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the dissident Black liberal writer; internecine battles in the trans woman world; why Naomi and I try (and fail) to stay out of bullshit culture war discussions; why we may go too easy on the right because we don’t really expect much from them; why everyone is so angry; and how all we really need is love.
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Two quick opening notes on this episode of the Eminent Americans podcast:
* According to some post by some guy that I read somewhere once, most podcasts don’t make it past 20 episodes. This is episode 21, which I take to mean not only that I’m more stubborn and self-absorbed than all those sub-21-ep scrubs—who have appropriately realized by episode 20 that the world doesn’t need another podcaster in it—but that this is surely one of those tipping point situations where if you make it past 20, then the next few hundred are all but assured. So I’ll be in your life for a while, or at least until you unsubscribe.
* This is the second episode in a row in which I flamboyantly refuse to pay any attention to the text that my guest has selected as our topic of conversation. I should probably reconsider my approach to these State of the Discourse episodes.
* The opening clip is from Beanie Siegel’s “The Truth.”
My guest on this episode of the podcast is James Livingston, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers and the author of, among other books, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century and Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913. He's currently hard at work on a new book on pragmatism, provisionally titled The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008.
The Mark Edmundson essay we discuss is “Truth Takes a Vacation: Trumpism and the American philosophical tradition.” James’s response to it, published on his Substack newsletter Politics, Letters, Persons, is “Pragmatism: An Old Name for a New Kind of Nihilism?”
Here’s how the AI software Claude describes our conversation. It’s basically accurate, but I feel as though it fails to capture the unique essence of our charm and brilliance.
This conversation is between Daniel Oppenheimer, the host of the podcast Eminent Americans, and his guest James Livingston, an intellectual historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University. The main focus of their discussion is pragmatism, the philosophical tradition associated with thinkers like William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Richard Rorty.
Livingston argues that pragmatism is still very relevant to American culture and politics. He sees it as a perspective that dismantles traditional dualisms and binary oppositions in favor of more fluid, constructed notions of truth. A key pragmatist idea they discuss is that truths are made by humans rather than existing independently, and that facts cannot be separated from the values and purposes that shape them.
They then apply this pragmatist lens to the current polarized political climate in the US. Livingston suggests that the contemporary right-wing, characterized by the "MAGA nation," is motivated by a desire to defend traditional hierarchies and values like male supremacy that are threatened by more egalitarian social changes. He and Oppenheimer debate whether directly confronting this regressive impulse is necessary and desirable.
While Oppenheimer is skeptical that heightened politicization and polarization is productive, Livingston argues it is clarifying essential conflicts in American society around issues like racism and sexism. However, they agree that approaching political opponents with empathy and an attempt to understand the experiences and values motivating them is important.
Throughout, they reflect on the role of intellectuals and the nature of progress. The conversation showcases the continued relevance of pragmatist ideas for making sense of truth, politics and social change in the United States today.
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I first encountered Alec Ounsworth back in 2005 or 2006, when I was an arts writer for the Valley Advocate, an alt weekly in western Massachusetts that now, like so many other alt weekles, exists only in zombie form.
The National was playing at the Iron Horse, Northampton’s storied small music venue, and I got tickets to go see them. Opening for them was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the band that Ounsworth had founded and fronted not too long before. I had a vague sense of who they were, and that they were hip, but I didn’t know the degree to which they’d blown up since the tour was booked with them as merely an opening act.
In the interim they’d gotten bigger—more able to attract fans—than The National. The show was packed for their set, and then when they were done most of it emptied out. I’d never seen something like that before in my life, and haven’t since (why if you’ve already paid for a ticket would you leave when you could get more good music!?).
Since then, Ounsworth has made an excellent career for himself (he still tours under the band name, but it’s entirely his operation; band members are hired for shows when needed), which is to say that he’s had his ups and downs. He’s no longer bigger than The National, and hasn’t had a hit on the charts in a while. He continues, however, to be able to book and sell out shows in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He supports himself and his family as a musician. He collaborates with other fancy people in the industry. As I suggest to him in our conversation, he now seems to have “just the right level of fame,” where he can do most of what he wants but can also live a very regular, non-celebrity-esque life.
I connected with Alec in a more individual way a few years ago when I was hawking my book on Dave Hickey and looking for eminent people who were Hickey fans who could maybe be persuaded to blurb or otherwise offer some kind of promotional boost to the book (this is how I ended up with the Steven Soderbergh blurb, along with some inside knowledge about Soderbergh’s taste in gifs). Ounsworth was one such fan. I managed to reach him and send him a copy of my book; in turn, he sent me a lovely vinyl copy of his 2021 album New Fragility.
We talk about the arc of his career, the continuing wisdom of his choice to stay independent of record labels throughout, the art of evolving as a musician without pandering, the challenge of parenting as a touring musician, and various others things. It’s a good conversation.
One quick note about an aspect of the conversation that is slightly misleading. The opening premise is that we will discuss Jason Farago’s article on the challenge of AI to music, “A.I. Can Make Art That Feels Human. Whose Fault Is That?” We don’t really do that, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m bored of AI. You probably are too.
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Stella Tsantekidou begins her essay "I too am an unfuckable hate nerd" with the kind of inside-outside two-step that characterizes much of the writing on The Human Carbohydrate, her very compelling Substack newsletter. She's at a party in London talking to another writer. The topic is a recent piece they've both read on the phenomenon of the "unfuckable hate nerd," that very 21st century type who populates the nether regions of the internet, marinating in resentment and fury and impotence, taking out his unquenchable hate on the women of the world, particularly those with the gall to think they have opinions worth considering. Stella writes:
My issue with that article is that it misses how many women feel like unfuckable hate nerds too. [The other writer] looked at me unconvinced, as people often do when I try to explain to them my affinity for incels and other basement dwelling online weirdos. Coming out of my mouth it sounds like I am fishing for compliments, trying to get my audience to state the obvious. How could I be an unfuckable hate nerd?
Then the sexy hammer drops. A photo of Stella:
She's hot, in other words. How could this very attractive, apparently well connected woman feel a connection to these terrible, and terribly unattractive, men? The answer, as in much of Stella's writing, is that she's been on both sides of the glass. Born and raised in a small city in Greece, in unremarkable middle class circumstances, she moved to London for college with no connections and no organic insight into the hierarchies and mores that structured British society. Now she's part of the elite political class in the UK, moving back and forth between jobs in government and the advocacy world, with a regular gig doing TV political commentary on the side.In 2024, she's quite good looking and socially successful. As a kid, though, she was a bona fide reject, greasy and awkward and the victim of rather relentless bullying by her classmates. And not weak-ass American-style bullying, but hardcore second world haven't gotten the memo that we don't do that kind of thing anymore bullying. "When I say I was bullied," she writes, "I mean that for six years, on a daily basis, I was reminded that if my peers could exterminate me like a cockroach cornered with an aerosol, they would. ... The boys would push me down the stairs, throw my rucksack out the window, spit on me, call me names no self-respecting heterosexual teenage girl could ever bear to hear directed at her from the lips of boys without contemplating suicide or at least complete voluntary social isolation. ... the only attention I was receiving from boys was to be reminded of how repulsive they all found me. They regularly wondered out loud why I didn’t kill myself."
Stella knows what it's like, in other words, to stew with hate for both oneself and others, to wish the worst things in the world upon others who seem to have more fortune while also desperately seeking and wanting their approval and affection. She knows what it feels like to feel ugly and powerless. "In my heart," she writes, "there is always an unfuckable hate nerd. This is the part of me that takes intense, nostalgic pleasure every time I sense as much as an atom of bullying energy coming my way. It feeds my inner unfuckable hate nerd who is still struggling to accept her new position on the food chain."The final turn in her essay is back toward the fact of her current life in possession of young female attractiveness and what she can see, in no small part thank to the benefit of her early struggles, are its dangers and the relatively short half life of its power. Stells and I talk about these issues; the broad arc of her academic and professional journey from Greece to the U.K. to the U.S. (where she worked on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign) and back to the U.K.; reactionary feminism; and the complex legacy of her parents, among many other things. It's a great conversation.
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Our text for today’s episode is “John Thompson, b. 1941,” a short eulogy essay by the writer Kiese Laymon in which he reflects on the special affection that not just he but also his “aunts, mother and grandmother” felt for Thompson and his Georgetown basketball team when Laymon was growing up. The coach was more than just a winning coach; he was an avatar of Black America, and a symbol of Black excellence and paternal strength and solidity. Laymon writes:
From a distance, I saw Thompson as representative, our imaginary coach who was once a decorated player, who backed up Bill Russell for the champion Boston Celtics. That decorated player who backed up Bill Russell was once a scared Black child, like every Black child I’d met in the universe, just longing to have a fair shot at gracefully winning and graciously losing.
…Thompson’s national championship and his subsequent loss in 1985 made real for me the representative possibilities and consequences of publicly winning and losing in America while Black. Though Thompson was our imaginary coach, in this eerie way we were his real team. If Thompson lost, and Georgetown lost, it felt as if my race lost. Even at 9 I knew there should have been more Black coaches in all the sports I watched since nearly all the best players were Black. I knew that there was nothing as joyful as publicly beating white Americans in anything simply because white Americans were allowed to play, cheat, coach, referee, own and win whether they actually showed up or not.
My guests on the show today are Laymon himself, professor of English and creative writing at Rice University and author of, among other books, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, the novel Long Division, and the memoir Heavy; and Jason Sokol, professor at history the university of New Hampshire and author of, among other books, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights and The Heavens Might Crack The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Two personal notes about this episode: Jason is my oldest friend on the planet. We went to pre-school together and have been close friends since. And Jason and Kiese were friends at Oberlin College, where they played basketball together and talked ideas, history, race, and the rest. As you’ll hear on the episode, they haven’t spoken since they graduated, so this is a bit of a reunion.
The audio clip at the beginning is from the song “Georgetown Press,” by Wale.
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Reading List
* The Lure of Divorce, by Emily Gould
* Goulded Cages, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy
* The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad, by Elizabeth Weil
* Can polyamory save this marriage? by Phoebe Maltz Bovy
My guest on today’s episode, which is part of my ongoing double secret probationary special series on the state of the discourse late winter/early spring 2024, is New York born, Toronto-based writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy.
I reached out to Phoebe after reading her short post on Substack about the recent big, long, splashy essay by Emily Gould about Gould’s descent into bipolar-induced mania, her separation from her husband (writer Keith Gessen), their eventual hard-won reconciliation, and the complex ways in which her feminist analyses of the problems in their marriage were much less useful and clarifying than they initially seemed.
Phoebe writes:
Gould … steeps herself in the men-are-bastards literature of the past years/decades, and concludes, “This was not quite the way I felt.”
I cannot emphasize enough, having read many such items for researching-straight-women purposes, what a tremendous break this is from business as usual. Because if you’re a 40ish straight or straightish woman, you’re meant to feel one thing.
Gould tries to funnel her angst-and-then-some into the expected feminist narrative, but is stymied by her realizations that she’s done a lot of bad things, and that her husband, too, is a person. She looks at the facts on the ground and isn’t able to blame the patriarchy for her own messy blend of mental illness and bad choices.
Phoebe and I talk about Gould and Gessen, the unglamorous realities of the writing life, how much cultural capital is worth compared to actual capital, and Phoebe’s review of the recent polyamory memoir by Molly Roden Winter.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the author of The Perils of “Privilege” (2017). She is a senior editor at the Canadian Jewish News, a co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, author of the Substack newsletter Close-reading the Reruns, columnist for the Globe and Mail, and writer for various other publications of note.
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Reading List:
* “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin), 2 (Lionel Trilling), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr), by Damon Linker.
* “Philosophy and the Far Right”—Part 1 and Part 2
* “Conservatism and Skepticism”—Part 1 and Part 2
My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias occasionally punch it out for the title in an underground fight club built in the tunnels under the charred timbers of the former headquarters of the New Republic).
Damon is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Notes from the Middle Ground newsletters on Substack, is a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and is the author of two books, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders.
I asked Damon on the show to discuss his recent series of essays on three of the seminal thinkers of post-war liberalism, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. We also got into his conflicted feelings about the philosopher Leo Strauss and the movement—Straussianism—that he birthed.
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Reading list:
* Windex Ain’t Scared: Here’s Our Statement on Israel/Palestine, by Jeff Maurer
* Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell, by The Onion
* Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake, by The Onion
* American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie, by The Onion
My guests on the podcast today are Jeff Maurer, author of “Windex Ain’t Scared,” and my brother Mark Oppenheimer, who selected the text to be the subject of this installment of my special series on the state of the discourse.
Jeff Maurer served honorably in the federal government for eight years until his standup comedy career led him to being hired as a writer on John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, where Jeff worked for six years, and he is now the author of the Substack newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, which is hilarious and smart.
Mark is a writer and podcaster based in New Haven, Connecticut, author of many books, most recently Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and The Soul of a Neighborhood, also brilliant and hilarious. He's hard at work on a biography of Judy Blume; is the host of The Syllabus, a podcast about campus politics; and Substacks at Oppenheimer.
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Reading List:
* The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms, by Ross Barkan
* Notes Toward a New Romanticism, by Ted Gioia
* The Invisible College: Modern British Literature, by John Pistelli
* The Three Segments of American Culture, by Ross Barkan
* Major Arcana: Preface, by John Pistelli
My guests on the show today are writers Ross Barkan and John Pistelli, and they’re here to help me launch something new on the podcast, which is a series of shorter episodes that are dedicated to taking stock of the state of the intellectual discourse.
I don’t have a grand schema for what means. I’ve just been reaching out to a bunch of interesting people, some of them prior guests on the podcast, and asking them to “pick one idea, writer, cultural encounter, or text that you think has been significant in the past year or so.”
My only other criterion is that I’ve asked folks to try to avoid going too directly at the culture wars topics that suck up so much energy in the discourse right now. Those topics are important, of course, and no doubt we’ll touch on many of them in the course of things, including in today’s episode, but I didn’t want to start there.
John proposed today’s texts, which are two connected essays that suggest that we may be entering, if not necessarily a new romantic age, then at least a period in which certain romantic tendencies swirl more forcefully than they have in a long time. One is Ross’s December 2023 essay in the Guardian, “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange romantic backlash to the tech era looms.” The other is “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” a Substack essay by cultural critic Ted Gioia.
I’d add to this mix some of the writing that John has been doing on his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss; some of Ross’s work on his Substack, Political Currents; and maybe also some of the modern British literature lectures that John has been beaming out via his substack to his paid subscribers, of whom I’m one.
Ross Barkan is the author of three books, including the novel The Night Burns Bright. He's a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and his reporting and essays have appeared in a wide array of publications, including New York Magazine, The Nation, and the Guardian. He teaches journalism and writing at NYU.
John Pistelli has written four novels, as well as short fiction, poetry and criticism for venues as diverse as Rain Taxi, The Millions, Tablet, and The Spectator. At his Substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, he publishes a weekly newsletter on literature and culture, serializes his latest novel, and offers independent literature courses, including on the writers of the Romantic era.
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Reading List:
* Oh, Mr Hitchens! by Laura Kipnis
* The Journalist and the Editor, by Laura Kipnis
* Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe, Laura Kipnis
* My Title IX Inquisition, by Laura Kipnis
* Christopher Hitchens' last years: Islam, the Iraq war and how a man of the left found his moment by breaking with the left, by Daniel Oppenheimer
My guest on the show today is Laura Kipnis. Laura is a cultural critic and essayist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of, among other books, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation; How to Become A Scandal; Against Love: A Polemic; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability; and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America–have been translated into fifteen languages. Her latest book, just out this past year, is Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis.
I’ve admired Laura’s writing for many years, but the specific reason I was prompted to invite her on the show today were two essays of very recent vintage. One was a review, for Bookforum, of the last book by Janet Malcolm, which was published after her death. And a short essay for Critical Quarterly on Christopher Hitchens that had the lovely title, “Oh, Mr. Hitchens!”
These essays resonated with me both on their own terms and because Janet Malcolm and Christopher Hitchens were—are—profoundly important to me. In very different ways I think they provided templates of what kind of things I might want to do as a writer. I also just loved reading them, and think my understanding of the world has been shaped by them. And Laura kind of got them.
The Hitchens piece, in particular, captured something about the man that I’ve seen captured by no one else. Take this passage, for instance, in which Laura is recounting an evening when she was drinking with Hitchens, before he was scheduled to give a talk at Northwestern. They get on the subject of Bill Clinton:
Something about Bill Clinton's sex life seemed to derange him. He was off the rails on the subject, literally sputtering. I tried to put it to him that he seemed, well, overinvested. It seemed way too personal, somehow off. What was it about Bill Clinton that had this unhinging effect on him? (I was kind of drunk at that point myself.) I suppose I expected him to at least pretend to ponder the question, devote maybe a few seconds to a show of self-examination. Anyone would. Not him. He was barricaded against anything I could say, also against the ‘what is this “about” for you’ sort of conversation that drunk people are known to have, which is one of the fun things about drinking, Something obdurate and hardened switched on instead. Thinking was not what was taking place, just pre-rehearsed lines and a lot of outrage.
This is exceptional writing. It’s also very perceptive about Hitchens in a way that sidesteps so many of the posthumous takes on Hitchens, which tend to divide far too cleanly between those who like or dislike his late politics. The problem with late Hitchens wasn’t that his politics changed, but that his thinking got more rigid and therefore writing got worse.
Laura and I talk about Hitch, Malcolm, her own backstory as a writer, and more.
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In this episode of the podcast, I talk to Blake Smith and Gary Kornblau about the 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s seminal 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.
Blake is currently a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as the author a great (which is to say, very flattering) review of my 2021 book on Hickey, and he was a stalwart participant in the Substack “book club” I organized on the new edition of Dragon. Gary is faculty at the ArtCenter College of Design. More pertinently, he was Dave’s great editor, having plucked him out of obscurity to write for art Issues, the small LA-based journal that Gary founded and edited. He was the one who gave Dave just the right amount of rein to do his best work, and also the one who conceptualized and edited both Invisible Dragon and Dave’s subsequent book Air Guitar.
The episode covers a lot of ground, including the impact of the original version of the book, the reasons why Gary decided to put out a 30th anniversary edition, and Gary’s decision to use the opportunity to try to “queer” Dave. It’s a blast. I hope you listen.
I also wanted to take the opportunity to run the below excerpt from my book on Dave. It covers the background to the writing and reception of Invisible Dragon, and is, IMO, a mighty fine piece of writing in its own right. Hope you enjoy.
On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that it was cancelling Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, its scheduled exhibition of photographs by the celebrated American photographer, who had died of AIDS in March. The Corcoran’s primary motive in cancelling was fear.
Only a few months before, a long-simmering debate about the role of the federal government in funding the arts had boiled over in response to Piss Christ, a photograph of a small icon of Jesus on the cross floating in a vitrine of urine. Its creator, Andres Serrano, had received a small chunk of a larger grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the offending photograph had been included in a touring exhibition that was also funded by federal money. During that tour, the photograph caught the eye of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian advocacy group dedicated to fighting what it saw as anti-Christian values in entertainment and the arts. They rang the alarm.
Soon after, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato called out Piss Christ from the floor of the Senate. He tore up a reproduction of the photo and denounced it as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who would soon lead the charge against Mapplethorpe, added: “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. . . . Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord.” Patrick Trueman, president of the American Family Association, testified to Congress that governmental support of work like Piss Christ would make it less likely that prosecutors would pursue or win cases against child pornographers.
The ensuing congressional battle, over funding for the NEA, became the first in a series of broader cultural and political battles that would come to be known, in retrospect, as the “culture wars” of the 1990s. These battles would range not just over sex and politics in the arts, but also over issues like gays in the military, federal funding for abortion, and control over history and social studies curricula in the public schools. It was “a war for the soul of America,” as Pat Buchanan framed it at the 1992 Republican Party convention, a contest over whether the nation would continue to secularize and liberalize or would return to a more conservative social equilibrium.
The full contours of the conflict weren’t immediately evident in the aftermath of the Serrano affair, but it was very clear, right away, that the Mapplethorpe exhibit was another grenade ready to go off. Its organizers at the University of Pennsylvania had received NEA money, and the Corcoran Gallery, walking distance from the White House, was too visible an institution to slide by the notice of people like Helms and D’Amato. So the Corcoran begged off, hoping to shield themselves from the shrapnel and avoid giving conservatives another opportunity to question the value of federal funding for the arts.
Instead, they got fragged by all sides. By fellow curators and museum administrators, who believed the Corcoran’s appeasement would only encourage more aggression from haters of contemporary art. By civil libertarians, who saw the Corcoran’s actions as an example of how expressive speech was being chilled by the culture war rhetoric of the right. By a major donor, a friend of Mapplethorpe, who angrily withdrew a promised bequest to the museum of millions of dollars. And, of course, by the conservatives they had been hoping to appease, who accurately recognized the blasphemy in Mapplethorpe’s federally funded portraits of sodomites doing naughty things to each other and themselves.
Piss Christ had been useful to the conservative cultural cause as an example of how homosexual artists were taking taxpayer money to spit on the values that decent Americans held dear, but it wasn’t ideal. How blasphemed could a good Christian really feel, after all, by an image of Jesus as reverential as what Serrano had in fact made? His Christ was bathed in glowing red-orange-yellow light, the image scored by dots and lines of tiny bubbles that come off almost like traces of exhumation, as if the whole thing has been recently, lovingly removed from the reliquary in which it’s been preserved for thousands of years.
“I think if the Vatican is smart,” Serrano later said, “someday they’ll collect my work. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.”
Mapplethorpe’s pictures, though, were something else entirely, a real cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity. Where Serrano was mostly using new means to say some very old things about the mystery of the incarnation and the corporeality of Christ, Mapplethorpe was using orthodox pictorial techniques to bring to light a world of pleasure, pain, male-male sex, bondage, power, trust, desire, control, violation, submission, love, and self-love that had been banished to the dark alleyways, boudoirs, bathhouses, and rest stops of the West since the decline of Athens. And he was doing so masterfully, in the language of fine art, in the high houses of American culture.
There was Lou, for instance, which could have been a photograph of a detail from an ancient bronze of Poseidon except that the detail in question is of Poseidon’s muscled arm holding his cock firmly in one hand while the pinky finger of his other hand probes its hole. In Helmut and Brooks, a fist disappearing up an anus plays like an academic exercise in shape and shadow. And in the now iconic Self-Portrait, Mapplethorpe has the handle of a bullwhip up his own rectum, his balls dangling in shadow beneath, his legs sheathed in leather chaps, his eyes staring back over his shoulder at the camera with a gaze so full of intelligence and vitality that it almost steals the show from the bullwhip.
In response to these kinds of beautiful provocations, the outrage, which had been largely performative vis-à-vis Serrano, became rather genuine, and the whole thing escalated. By July, a month after the exhibition at the Corcoran had been cancelled, Congress was debating whether to eliminate entirely the $171 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. By October, a compromise was reached. The NEA and its sister fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, would get their usual rounds of funding, minus a symbolic $45,000 for the cost of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe grants. They would be prohibited, however, from using the monies to support work that was too gay, too creepy in depicting children, or just too kinky. Exceptions were made for art that violated these taboos but had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” But the point had been made, and the enforcement mechanism, in any case, wasn’t really the articulated rules. It was the threat of more hay-making from the right and, ultimately, the implied promise that if NEA-supported institutions kept sticking their noses (or fists) where they didn’t belong then it wouldn’t be too long before there wouldn’t be any NEA left.
A few months later, in April 1990, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, took up the Mapplethorpe baton by opening their own exhibition of The Perfect Moment. Hoping to head off trouble, they segregated the most scandalous of the photos in a side room, with appropriate signage to warn off the young and the delicate. They also filed a motion in county court asking that the photographs be preemptively designated as not obscene. But the motion was denied, and the separate room proved insufficient buffer. When the exhibit opened to the public, on April 7, its attendees included members of a grand jury that had been impaneled by Hamilton County prosecutors to indict the museum and its director for violating Ohio obscenity law. Of the more than 150 images in the exhibit, seven were selected out by the grand jury for being obscene. Five depicted men engaged in homoerotic and/ or sado-masochistic acts, and two were of naked children.
The trial that followed was symbolically thick. Motions were filed that forced the judge to rule on fundamental questions about the meaning and political status of art. Art critics and curators were called in to witness, before the largely working-class members of the jury, to the artistic merit of Mapplethorpe’s photography. The indictment read like an update of the Scopes trial, captioned by Larry Flynt, in which “the peace and dignity of the State of Ohio” was being ravaged by bands of cavorting homosexuals.
The jury issued its verdict in October 1990, acquitting the museum and its director. It was a victory for the forces of high art and free expression, but a complicated one. The exhibition could go on. And Mapplethorpe’s photographs—indeed, the most outrageous of them—had been designated as art by the State of Ohio and by a group of decent, law-abiding, presumably-not-gay-sex-having American citizens. But the cost had been high. Museums and galleries everywhere had been warned, and not all of them would be as willing as the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati to risk indictment and the threat of defunding for the sake of showing dangerous art.
Perhaps most significantly, the National Endowment for the Arts, and its new director, announced a shift in funding priorities in order to take the institution out of the crossfire of the culture wars. Less and less of their money, it was decided, would go to individual artists and exhibitions, and more of it would go to support arts enrichment—to schools, outreach programs, arts camps, and educational campaigns. Mapplethorpe and Serrano were out. Sesame Street was in.
For Dave Hickey, a critic and ex-gallery owner, it was, finally, all too much. Not the opportunism of the Hamilton County sheriff and his allies. Not the predictable huffing from the bow-tied brigades, who took to the pages of their tweedy magazines to bellyache, as always, about what a precipitous decline there had been in cultural standards since the 1960s ruined everything. Not even the rednecking of the senator from North Carolina was the problem for Hickey.
Each of these parties was performing its assigned role in the passion play of American cultural politics. Narrow-minded prosecutors would always try to run dirty pictures out of town. New Criterion-ites would avert their eyes from new art. Senators from North Carolina would demagogue about queers from New York City. You could be angry at having to contend with these actors, but you couldn’t genuinely feel betrayed. You knew where they stood from the get-go, and half the joy of art, and of the artistic life, lay in trying to figure out how to shock, outwit, or seduce them.
The betrayal, for Hickey, came from his colleagues, from the critics, curators, gallerists, professors, and arts administrators with whom he had been uneasily mixing since the late 1960s when he dropped out of his doctoral program in linguistics to open an art gallery in Austin, Texas. They had been handed a rare opportunity to represent for all that was queer and decadent and artsy-fartsy in American life, to make the case that this—beautiful pictures of men seeing what it felt like to shove things up their asses—wasn’t the worst of America but the best of it. And they had whiffed.
“The American art community, at the apogee of its power and privilege, chose to play the ravaged virgin,” wrote Hickey, “to fling itself prostrate across the front pages of America and fairly dare the fascist heel to crush its outraged innocence. . . . [H]ardly anyone considered for a moment what an incredible rhetorical triumph the entire affair signified. A single artist with a single group of images had somehow managed to overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threaten those in actual power with the celebration of marginality. It was a fine moment, I thought . . . and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in.”
The Corcoran had been bad enough, throwing in the towel before an opponent had even stepped into the ring. But far worse, for Hickey, were the ones who had shown up to fight but had misread the aesthetical-political map so badly that they had gone to the wrong arena. The fight, he believed, should have been over whether it was okay or not in our culture to make beautiful the behaviors that Mapplethorpe had made beautiful. The fight should have been over what Mapplethorpe had done with his art. Instead, the public got bromides about free expression and puritanical lectures about the civilizing function of arts in society. Worst of all, in Hickey’s eyes, was how quickly the art experts ran away from the rawness of Mapplethorpe’s work, characterizing him as though he were a philosopher of aesthetics, rather than an artist, as though he chose and framed his subjects for the sake of what they allowed him to say, propositionally, about the nature of light and beauty and other such things.
“Mapplethorpe uses the medium of photography to translate flowers, stamens, stares, limbs, as well as erect sexual organs, into objet d’art,” wrote curator Janet Kardon in her catalogue essay for the exhibition. “Dramatic lighting and precise composition democratically pulverize their diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements.””
When it came to it on the witness stand in Cincinnati, even the folks who had curated the exhibition, who surely knew that Mapplethorpe would bring the people in precisely because he was so titillating—Look at the dicks! Hey, even the flowers look like dicks!—couldn’t allow themselves even a flicker of a leer. So Hickey called them out.
In a series of four essays written between 1989 and 1993, which were assembled into the sixty-four-page volume The Invisible Dragon, he launched a lacerating critique of American art critical and art historical practice. It was so unexpected, and so potent, that by the time he was done, his own intervention—a slim, impossibly cool, small-batch edition from Art issues Press—would be as transformative in the art critical realm as Mapplethorpe’s photographs had been in the photographic.
The Invisible Dragon began with a story. It wasn’t necessarily a true story, but it was a good one. So good, in fact, that it has conditioned and, in significant ways, distorted perceptions of Hickey ever since.
“I was drifting, daydreaming really,” wrote Hickey, “through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s Happening Now,’ drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘The Issue of the Nineties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, ‘Beauty,’ and then, more firmly, ‘The issue of the nineties will be beauty’—a total improvisatory goof—an off-the-wall, jump-start, free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic; wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don’t know, but the total, uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me.”
Hickey, an experienced provocateur, had been expecting some kind of pushback. (Beauty?! That old thing? The issue of the ’90s? You gotta be kidding me.) When he got none, he was intrigued. His fellow panelists hadn’t jumped in to tussle. The moderator didn’t seem ruffled. No one from the audience harangued him after he stepped down from the dais. Rather than setting off sparks, he had soft-shoed into a vacuum, which meant he had misjudged something, and in that misjudgment, he sensed, there lay potential. (“I was overcome by this strange Holmesian elation. The game was afoot.”) He began interrogating friends and colleagues, students and faculty, critics and curators for their thoughts on beauty and its role in the production, assessment, and consumption of art. What he got back, again and again, was a simple and rather befuddling response: When asked about beauty, everyone talked about money. “Beauty” was the surface glitz that sold pictures in the bourgeois art market to people who lacked an appreciation for the deeper qualities of good art. It was a branding scheme of capitalism and the province of schmoozy art dealers, rich people, and high-end corporate lobby decorators. Artists themselves, and critics and scholars, were more properly concerned with other qualities: truth, meaning, discourse, language, ideology, form, justice. There were high-brow versions of this argument in journals like Art Forum and October, and there were less sophisticated versions, but the angle of incidence was the same.
Hickey was stunned. Not by the content of such an argument— he knew his Marx and was familiar with left cultural criticism more broadly—but by the completeness of its triumph. He hadn’t realized the extent, almost total, to which beauty had been vanquished from the sphere of discursive concern.
“I had assumed,” he wrote, “that from the beginning of the sixteenth century until just last week artists had been persistently and effectively employing the rough vernacular of pleasure and beauty to interrogate our totalizing concepts ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’; and now this was over? Evidently. At any rate, its critical vocabulary seemed to have evaporated overnight, and I found myself muttering detective questions like: Who wins? Who loses?”
The quest to reconstruct what had happened to beauty soon evolved for Hickey into a more fundamental effort to understand what even he meant by the term. What was he defending? What was he trying to rescue or redeem? The critical vocabulary and community he had assumed were there, perhaps fighting a rearguard battle but still yet on the field, had winked out of existence without even a good-bye note. It was left to him, in the absence of anyone else, to reconstitute its concepts and arguments, restock its supply chain and armament.
So he did, and he called it The Invisible Dragon. The issue, he wrote, is not beauty but the beautiful. The beautiful is the visual language through which art excites interest and pleasure and attention in an observer. It is a form of rhetoric, a quiver of rhetorical maneuvers. Artists enchant us through their beautiful assemblages of color, shape, effects, reference, and imagery, as a writer ensnares us with words and sentences and paragraphs, as a dancer enthralls us with legs and leaps, as a rock star captures us with hips and lips and voice. The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.
Beauty, in this equation, is the sum of the charge that an artist, deploying the language of the beautiful, can generate. It is a spark that begins in the intelligence and insight of the artist, is instantiated into material being by her command of the techniques of the beautiful, and is crystallized in the world by its capacity to elicit passion and loyalty and detestation in its beholders, to rally around itself constituencies and against itself enemies. Like all arks and arenas of human value, beauty is historically grounded but also historically contingent. In the Renaissance, where The Invisible Dragon begins its modern history of beauty, masters like Caravaggio were negotiating and reconstructing the relations among the Church, God, man, and society. They were deploying the tools of the beautiful to hook into and renovate primarily theological systems of meaning and human relation. In a liberal, pluralistic, commerce-driven democracy like America, the primary terrain on which beauty was mediated, and in some respects generated, was the art market.
To dismiss beauty as just another lubricant of modern capitalism, then, was to miss the point in a succession of catastrophic ways. It was to mistake the last part of that equation, the creation and negotiation of value on and through the art market, for the entirety of it. It was to mistake the exchange of art for other currencies of value, which was a human activity that preceded and would persist after capitalism, for capitalism. It was to believe that the buying and selling of art in modern art markets was a problem at all, when, in fact, it was the only available solution in our given historical configuration of forces. And it was to radically underestimate the capacity of beauty to destabilize and reorder precisely the relations of politics, economy, and culture that its vulgar critics believed it was propping up.
Beauty had consequences. Beautiful images could change the world. In America, risking money or status for the sake of what you found beautiful—by buying or selling that which you found beautiful or by arguing about which objects should be bought or sold on account of their beauty—was a way of risking yourself for the sake of the vision of the good life you would like to see realized.
The good guys in Hickey’s story were those who put themselves on the line for objects that deployed the beautiful in ways they found persuasive and pleasure-inducing. They were the artists themselves, whose livelihoods depended on participation in the art market, who risked poverty, rejection, incomprehension, and obscurity if their work wasn’t beautiful enough to attract buyers. They were the dealers, who risked their money and reputation for objects they wagered were beautiful enough to bring them more money and status. They were the buyers, who risked money and ridicule in the hopes of acquiring more status and pleasure. They were the critics, like Hickey, who risked their reputations and careers on behalf of the art that struck them as beautiful and on behalf of the artists whose idiosyncratic visions they found persuasive or undeniable. And finally they were the fans, who desperately wanted to see that which they loved loved by others and to exist in community with their fellow enthusiasts. The good guys were the ones who cared a lot, and specifically.
The villains were the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and funding institutions that had claimed for themselves almost total control of the assignment and negotiation of value to art, severing art’s ties to the messy democratic marketplace, which was the proper incubator of artistic value in a free society. The blob cared a lot, too, but about the wrong things.
“I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally,” wrote Hickey, “as the ‘therapeutic institution.’”
In the great mystery of the disappeared beauty, the whodunnit that fueled The Invisible Dragon, it turned out that it was the therapeutic institution that dunnit. It had squirted so many trillions of gallons of obfuscating ink into the ocean over so many decades that beauty, and the delicate social ecosystems that fostered its coalescence, could barely aspirate. Why the therapeutic institution did this, for Hickey, was simple. Power. Control. Fear of freedom and pleasure and undisciplined feeling. It was the eternally recurring revenge of the dour old Patriarch who had been haunting our dreams since we came up from the desert with his schemas of logic, strength, autonomy, and abstraction, asserting control against the wiles and seductions of the feminine and her emanations of care, vulnerability, delicacy, dependence, joy, and decoration. It was the expression of God’s anger in the Garden of Eden when Eve and Adam defied Him to bite from the juicy apple of knowledge and freedom.
In one of the most extraordinary passages in the book, Hickey turned Michel Foucault, a favorite of the blob, back on the blob. It was Foucault, he wrote, who drew back the curtain on the hidden authoritarian impulse at work in so many of the modern institutions of social order, particularly those systems most committed to the tending of our souls. Such systems weren’t content with establishing regimes of dominance and submission that were merely or primarily external. Appearances can
be too deceiving. Too much wildness can course beneath the facade of compliance. It was inner consent, cultivated therapeutically through the benevolent grooming of the institutions, that mattered. Thus the disciplined intensity with which the therapeutic institution had fought its multi-generational war to crowd out and delegitimize the market, where appearance was almost everything and where desire, which is too unpredictably correlated with virtue, was so operative.
“For nearly 70 years, during the adolescence of modernity, professors, curators, and academicians could only wring their hands and weep at the spectacle of an exploding culture in the sway of painters, dealers, critics, shopkeepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, and American expatriates. Jews abounded, as did homosexuals, bisexuals, Bolsheviks, and women in sensible shoes. Vulgar people in manufacture and trade who knew naught but romance and real estate bought sticky Impressionist landscapes and swooning pre-Raphaelite bimbos from guys with monocles who, in their spare time, were shipping the treasures of European civilization across the Atlantic to railroad barons. And most disturbingly for those who felt they ought to be in control— or that someone should be—‘beauties’ proliferated, each finding an audience, each bearing its own little rhetorical load of psycho-political permission.”
After getting knocked back on their heels so thoroughly, wrote Hickey, the bureaucrats began to get their act together around 1920. They have been expanding and entrenching their hegemony ever since, developing the ideologies, building the institutions, and corralling the funding to effectively counter, control, and homogenize all the unruly little beauties. There had been setbacks to their campaign along the way, most notably in the 1960s, but the trend line was clear.
In this dialectic, Mapplethorpe proves an interesting and illustrative figure. He was so brilliant in making his world beautiful that the therapeutic institution had no choice but to gather him in, to celebrate him in order to neutralize him, to pulverize his diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements. But it turned out that he was too quicksilver a talent to be so easily caged, and the blob was overconfident in its capacity to domesticate him. It/they missed something with Mapplethorpe and made the mistake of exposing him to the senator from North Carolina and the prosecutor from Hamilton County, who saw through the scrim of institutional mediation. All the therapeutic testimony that followed, in the case of Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, wasn’t really about defending Mapplethorpe or fending off conservative tyranny. It was about reasserting the blob’s hegemony. In truth, Senator Helms and the therapeutic institution were destabilized by complementary aspects of the same thing, which was pleasure and desire rendered beautiful and specific.
“It was not that men were making it then,” wrote Hickey, “but that Robert was ‘making it beautiful.’ More precisely, he was appropriating a Baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution.”
Confronted by this beautiful provocation, the conservative and art establishments, whatever they thought they were doing, were, in fact, collaborating to put Mapplethorpe back in his place. The ostensible triumph of one side was the secret triumph for both. It was beauty that lost. The Invisible Dragon was a howl of frustration at this outcome. It was also a guerrilla whistle. Not so fast . . .
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Reading list:
* A personal and stirring guide to the great Dutch painters, by Sebastian Smee
* Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters, by Benjamin Moser
* How Gayness Changed During My Lifetime, by Benjamin Moser
* Enemies of Promise, by Cyril Connolly
My guest on the podcast today is Benjamin Moser, who was born in Houston but has lived for the past twenty plus years in Utrecht in the Netherlands, a city he describes as the Brooklyn to Amsterdam’s Manhattan, close by but different vibe.
He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. His subsequent book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His new book is The Upside Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, which is about his personal encounters, while living the last two decades in Utrecht, with the great painters of the Dutch golden age, folks like Vermeer and Rembrandt but also a host of other, lesser known but still quite extraordinary painters of that era from the late 16th century to the late 17th century.
I framed the challenge of my conversation with Ben as having to simultaneously accomplish two objectives that are in tension: to pay serious attention to his book, which is primarily about a rather distant past, while also honoring the ethos of my podcast, which is about the present and recent present. And we needed to do it in a real way, not a phony “the great painters of the past still breathe vibrantly in the present” sort of way.
I think we pulled it off, with flying colors, but I suppose that you, the listeners, will be the ultimate judge of that.
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Reading list:
* An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him, by Cedric Johnson
* The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness [a reply to Johnson’s open letter], by Ta-Nehisi Coates
* The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now, by Cedric Johnson
* What Black Life Actually Looks Like, by Cedric Johnson
* The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
* The Coates Chronicles: The White Period, by Daniel Oppenheimer
My guest on the show today is Cedric Johnson, professor of political science and black studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author, most recently, of After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle.
I asked Cedric on to talk about two things, but I think in a sense they’re one thing, or at least very continuous with each other. The first is Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most significant American public intellectual of the last few decades. The second is Cedric’s recent book, After Black Lives Matter, and its critique, from the Marxist left, of both Black Lives Matter and the broader antiracist liberalism of which, according to Cedric’s analysis, it is a manifestation.
Coates doesn’t play a role in the new book, but he is, by my lights at least, the figure at the center of the ongoing race vs. class intra-left debate in which Cedric continue to intervene. Here’s how Cedric describes it in his 2016 piece for Jacobin magazine, “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him,”
Ultimately, Coates’s views about class and race — and this nation’s complex and tortured historical development — are well-meaning and at times poetic, but wrongheaded. The reparations argument is rooted in black nationalist politics, which traditionally elides class and neglects the way that race-first politics are often the means for advancing discrete, bourgeois class interests. … Most of all, Coates is wrong about how we have achieved black political and social progress in the past, and what we should do going forward. From the antebellum anti-slavery struggles to the postwar southern desegregation campaigns to contemporary battles against austerity, interracialism and popular social struggle have been central to improving the civic and material circumstances of African Americans, and at the level of daily life, such movements have confronted racist habits and perceptions, sweeping aside old boundaries to create new notions of communion and solidarity.
Cedric is the author of, among other books, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now (Verso, 2022), Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and this year's After Black Lives Matter. He is also the editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). His writings have appeared in Labor Studies, Catalyst, Dissent, Nonsite, Jacobin, New Labor Forum, Perspectives on Politics, and Historical Materialism. In 2008, Johnson was named the Jon Garlock Labor Educator of the Year by the Rochester Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He is a member of UIC United Faculty Local 6456.
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Reading List:
* “Why the Culture of the So-Called Great Books is Hostile to Trans People,” by Naomi Kanakia
* “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true. Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” by Laura Miller
* “A Review of ‘The Late Americans’ is Sending Book Twitter Into A Tailspin,” by Katherine Esters
* “The New, Weirdly Racist Guide to Writing Fiction,” by Naomi Kanakia
* “How to start your para-intellectual career,” by Naomi Kanakia
My guest on the podcast is Naomi Kanakia, author of 3 extant books as well as roughly 18 forthcoming books in seven different genres. We're going to talk about two big things. One is Naomi herself, her writing and what I would characterize as her unusually meta- approach to thinking and writing about the work of being a writer, her fascination with the subterranean motives and status moves that lie just underneath the wholesome public narratives that writers provide to the world and why and how they do what they do. Before we get to that, though, we're going to spend some time on novelist and substacker Brandon Taylor.
Taylor is a 34-year old black gay writer, primarily of fiction, now based in New York but born and raised in a small town outside of Montgomery, Alabama in a conservative Christian family. He spent a number of years in a graduate biochemistry program at University of Wisconsin Madison before leaving, without finishing the PhD, to focus on fiction, soon after earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Taylor has since published three works of fiction, the 2020 novel Real Life, which was short listed for a Booker Prize, the 2021 collection Filthy Animals, and most recently this year's Late Americans, which is maybe a collection masquerading as a novel. He's written book reviews and review essays for fancy places like the New York Times and the New Yorker, and he has a very popular substack, sweater weather, to which Naomi and I are both subscribers.If I had to briefly characterize why I think we find Taylor interesting for the purposes of this podcast, it's less because of his fiction, which is solid but not super distinctive, than because of the ways he deals, as a queer writer of color, with a few different conflicting tendencies within him. He loves the books he loves, irrespective of the race or era of their author. He has a somewhat agonized relationship to woke politics, seems to feel allergic to it in a lot of the particulars but can't shake a kind of global allegiance to it. He has a strong desire to connect with his readers, and he also has a somewhat thin skin. Naomi Kanakia is the author of three books, the YA novels Enter Title Here and We Are Totally Normal, and the nonfiction semi-self-help tract the Cynical Guide to Publishing. She also has three, count 'em three, forthcoming books: the YA novel Just Happy to Be Here, the adult novel The Default World, and the nonfictional What’s So Great About The Great Books? And she has a great substack as well, Woman of Letters , which you should subscribe to. She got her undergraduate degree at Stanford, and then an MFA at Johns Hopkins. I don't usually list my guest's academic credentials, but I think in this case it will prove relevant to our discussion.
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If you live in Austin as I have for the past 17 years, the phrase “new Austin” is pretty self-explanatory. Over the past few decades, the population of Austin has exploded, going from about 340,000 in 1980 to just shy of a million today, and that's actually a little bit of an understatement. That's just Austin proper rather than the whole metro area.With that growth has come a comparably dramatic shift in the city's culture. What was once a relatively low key college town with a great music scene and a strong hippie vibe has become a tech yuppy wonderland, for good and ill. Austin used to be weird and didn't have to think or talk about it. Then there was a period when it was visibly losing its weirdness, and we would say, "Keep Austin Weird," and that meant something meaningful. Now no one even says that anymore. We're dynamic and fascinating and great in many ways, but we're not weird, and we're even less weird every day.The building of Tesla's white, gleaming, vast and futuristic gigafactory is about as heavy-handed a symbol of this change as you can get. Construction began in the summer of 2020. The factory started producing cars in late 2021, and it had its official launch party, which had been delayed because of Covid, in April of 2022.And the Gigafactory isn't, in a sense, just the Gigafactory, it's the centerpiece and symbol of Elon Musk's whole empire, much of which has either relocated to or expanded into the Austin area over the past few years. So the Boring Company, which is his tunnel building endeavor, is now headquartered in Pflugerville outside the city. Neuralink, which I'm pretty sure is his mind control company, is building a big space in Dell Valley. SpaceX is building a facility in Bastrop and Tesla already has plans in the works to expand the Gigafactory, which at present has a floor area of about 10 million square feet, by another million or so square feet.So what does all of this mean for Austin? Other than to say it's new Austin versus old Austin. To help answer that question, I have Randy Lewis and Craig Campbell. Randy is the chair of the American Studies Department at UT Austin and the author of many books, many of them on film. He is also the founder and creative spirit behind the End of Austin, an online project dedicated to the change in Austin. Craig Campbell is an associate professor of anthropology, a scholar of visual culture and the Soviet Union, among other things, and one of the guiding spirits of the dystopian named Bureau for Experimental Ethnography. And Randy and Craig are here in particular because they're also collaborators on a new project that is focused on the Tesla Gigafactories in Austin and in Germany.
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Reading list:
* “The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace,” by Mary K. Holland
* “I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” by Lauren Oyler
* “Lauren Oyler tries a fun thing David Foster Wallace never did again,” by Sophia Nguyen and Lauren Oyler
* “Where be your jibes now?” by Patricia Lockwood
* “The Wonder of Wallace-L,” by Maria Bustillos
* “Reclaiming David Foster Wallace from the Lit-Bros,” by Jonathan Russell Clark
* “Too Much Information,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan
My guest on this episode of the podcast is Matt Bucher. Matt is the founding president of the International David Foster Wallace Society and the managing editor of the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Since 2002, he's been in charge of the David Foster Wallace listserv, Wallace-L. He's organizing the 2024 David Foster Wallace Conference, which is being hosted in Austin, Texas, where we both live. And he’s the co-host of The Concavity Show, a podcast about literature that often touches on Wallace and Wallace-related themes.
His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Electric Literature, the Dublin Review of Books, the Austin Chronicle, and other places. His first novel, The Belan Deck, is out now.
He’s on the show to talk about—wait for it—David Foster Wallace (DFW) related matters. In particular, I wanted to talk about two things. One is the world of hardcore DFW enthusiasts, the people who populate the listerv, attend the conferences, read and contribute to the journal, etc. What are the contours of this world, who are the major players, what are the key themes? And is there a certain kind of person who Wallace has an especially intense effect on?
The other thing I wanted to talk about is the discourse around so-called DFW Bros, and the connected discourse around Wallace’s personal history of exploitative and in some cases abusive treatment of women. Is the DFW Bro a real thing? If so, is Matt not just a bro but the ultimate bro? If not, why has the concept become a real thing? What is it standing in for? Also, how much should we care, as readers of Wallace, about his record of treating women badly?
You may notice that this episode of the podcast is considerably longer than previous episodes. This is because after we’d recorded what I thought was the episode, a new and much buzzed-about essay about Wallace was published in the London Review of Books, and I felt like I would remiss in my podcasterly duties if I didn’t hop back on the line with Matt to discuss it. So we did, which pushed the length of the podcast to over 2 hours, which would be too long except that it’s all pretty so interesting (scout’s honor).
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Reading list for episode:
* “John Pistelli,” by Blake Smith
* “The Souls of Yellow Folk, by Wesley Yang,” by John Pistelli
* “The Souls of Yellow Folk—A Review,” by Daniel Oppenheimer
* “Platonic Complex: Why Do the Intellectuals Rage?"“ by John Pistelli
* “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” by Wesley Yang
Critic, novelist, and sorta-academic John Pistelliand I have two things on our agenda for this episode of the podcast. The first is Wesley Yang, the author of the 2018 essay collection The Souls of Yellow Folk and arguably the single most influential writer of the past decade when it comes to articulating the basic premises of the more substantive anti-woke perspective. John and I both wrote early reviews of Yang’s book, and both of us have remained relatively close Yang-watchers.
My review, though it included a few modest criticisms of the book, was immensely admiring. Of the book’s centerpiece essay, “The Face of Seung Hi Cho,” I wrote:
There aren’t many essayists alive today who can sustain the level of brilliance Yang maintains in the essay for as long as he does. Zadie Smith can do it. Dave Hickey and Joan Didion could do it once, but are too old now. David Foster Wallace could do it, but although he should be alive, he is not. Ta-Nehisi Coates looked like he was on his way toward being able to do it, but he made other choices. A few other writers, maybe, but not many.
The essay doesn’t just teem with sentence-level excellence. Through all the micro-level fascination Yang has a larger point to make about what it is like to be an unlovable young man in America, a loser in the sexual and cultural marketplace, and the ways in which that loserdom intersects with and reinforces the experience of Asian-American-ness.
John’s review of Yang’s book is a much more mixed assessment. He thinks some of it is brilliant, some not, and in general takes it to task for being a rather slapdash collection of things that don’t entirely hang together. He also makes the case (accurately I think, though I don’t have the theory background to confidently affirm) that Yang misdiagnoses the theoretical ancestry of wokeness and identity politics. For Yang it is post-structuralist theory that sets the stage. John writes:
A deeper flaw … makes itself known in the concluding pages of this book, when in essays from 2017 Yang provides a detailed critique of the social justice left. He accuses its activists of having absorbed a set of lessons from poststructuralism that posit both language and institutions as nothing other than vectors of power, obviating the old liberal ambition to reform institutions by using language to persuade a majority to abandon its prejudices and alter its practices. By contrast to the social justice left’s radical ambition to bring in an egalitarian millennium through linguistic and institutional engineering, Yang concedes the manifold injuries social life deals to those who have lost its lottery while also worrying that attempts to reduce harm through new forms of undemocratic social control may only entrench new hierarchies under the false labels of peace and equality.
Why do I call this theory flawed? … Social-justice theory comes ultimately from Marxism, which is the attempt to overcome existential alienation by altering power relations within political and social institutions. Marx began as a Romantic rebel and ironist, hailing Prometheus and imitating Sterne, until he became convinced that his alienation could be ameliorated through a total social transformation, one premised on what we now call identity politics. What differentiated Marx’s scientific from his precursors’ utopian socialism was precisely the identification of a mechanism—in the form of a social class—that could effect the transformation of an inegalitarian society to an egalitarian one. A social class whose exploitation was the engine of the entire system could, by resisting that exploitation, bring the system to a halt; having been exploited, this class would not replicate exploitation in its turn but rather abolish the class relation as such
John and I talk about the brilliance of Yang at his best; his snarky aside, in his review, about my review; his subsequent penance for his snarky aside; the possible connection between Yang and old school neocon Norman Podhoretz; and Yang’s recent descent into anti-trans, anti-woke monomania.
The other thing on our agenda is the emergence of a newly influential cohort of writer intellectual types who earned their PHDs in humanities fields—in particular English and English-adjacent departments—who are exerting influence primarily through non-academic channels.
They are writing for high or middle brow magazines—The Point, Compact, American Affairs, Tablet, etc—or, as in John's case, they're writing the vast majority of their words for their own websites and newsletters. I proposed this to John in an email exchange before our conversation, and he wrote:
I do see what you're getting at with the post-/para-academic set and the full emergence of the humanities into the online public sphere. ... I would personally draw a distinction between people I see as trying to transmit to the public the current ethos of their academic fields ( Merve Emre would be the chief example here, probably also becca rothfeld and Jon Baskin) and more strictly renegade figures making a public bricolage of academic theories past and current extra-institutional or countercultural energies (e.g., Geoff Shullenberger and, well, me), with Blake Smith and JEHS somewhere in the middle). From the perspective of a certain kind of, say, economist, though, this might be the narcissism of small differences, as we're all talking various sorts of unverifiable gibberish! (Not meant as self-deprecation: I am only interested in unverifiable gibberish.)
Some of these folks have academic posts, but often rather marginal ones (John is adjunct at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, for instance; Justin Smith-Ruiu is at the City University of Paris). Other have left the academy entirely. That these people constitute a coherent group, I should say, is very much a hypothesis in progress. I described it to John, when inviting him on the podcast, as a "very wobbly, inchoate hypothesis." My hope is that it is slightly less wobbly and inchoate by the end of our discussion. John is the author of four novels—The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and The Ecstasy of Michaela—as well as diverse short fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism that has appeared in many venues. He writes a weekly newsletter on literature, culture, and politics at SubStack. A longtime teacher with a Ph.D. in English, he has uploaded the lectures for two full university literature courses at YouTube, alongside other lectures, audio essays, and audio fiction. His fifth novel, Major Arcana, is currently being serialized for paid subscribers to his newsletter. I reached out to John after Blake Smith, a writer we both follow, wrote a whole post on his newsletter about how great John is. Here’s a bit of what Blake wrote about John:
John Pistelli is my favorite critic—one of the few people I ‘read,’ in the sense of regularly checking his substack/tumblr (GrandHotelAbyss) and recommending to my friends (I am a very poor ‘reader’; I don’t have much room in my head for contemporaries, or maybe I already have too much room devoted to them and have to tetchily defend the cramped remainder from my own tendency to envy, revile, etc., them—one of the reasons my Twitter is locked!). He’s erudite—with an easy, expansive mastery over the modern canon and its scholarly-critical adjuncts—and abreast of ‘internet culture’ in ways that I’m not but (mostly) appreciate someone else being (more from the implied ‘however’ later).
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My guest on this episode of the podcast is Timothy Lensmire, professor of Education at the University of Minnesota and the author or editor of, among other works, White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America; Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching; and Whiteness at the Table: Antiracism, Racism, and Identity in Education. He is also a co-founder of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective (MCWC).
Tim and I talk primarily about two things: the powerful critique that he and his MCWC colleagues have made, from the anti-racist left, of Peggy McIntosh’s seminal essay on white privilege (commonly known as the “invisible knapsack” essay), and Tim’s own work on whiteness and white identity.
We also just talk, in general, about the ways that both the left and right over-simplify the complexity of being white in America, and how these over-simplifications get in the way of getting to where most (or at least many) of us would like to get.
Episode reading list:
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Reading list:
* Corey Robin's Facebook Page
* Not Yet Falling Apart: Two thinkers on the left offer a guide to navigating the stormy seas of modernity, by moi
* Straight Outta Chappaqua: How Westchester-bred lefty prof Corey Robin came to loathe Israel, defend Steven Salaita, and help cats, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy
* Online Fracas for a Critic of the Right, by Jennifer Schuessler
* Scholar Behind U. of Illinois Boycotts Is a Longtime Activist, by Marc Parry
A few years ago, I got this text from a friend after my guest on this episode of the podcast, Corey Robin, said something nice about my book on Facebook: “When Corey Robin is praising you on Facebook, you’ve arrived, my friend.”
He was being funny, but also just saying a true thing. Corey Robin is a big deal on the intellectual left in America, and for the better part of a decade, from about 2012 to 2019, his Facebook page was one of the most vital and interesting spaces on the American intellectual left.
Back in 2017, I wrote this about Corey and his most influential book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin:
The Reactionary Mind has emerged as one of the more influential political works of the last decade. Robin himself has become, since the book’s publication, one of the more aura-laden figures on the intellectual left. Paul Krugman cites him and the book periodically in his New York Times columns and on his blog. Robin’s Facebook page, which he uses as a blog and discussion forum, has become one of the places to watch to understand where thinking on the left is. Another key node of the intellectual left is Crooked Timber, a group blog of left-wing academics to which Robin is a long-time contributor, and another is Jacobin, a socialist magazine that often re-publishes Robin’s blog posts sans edits, like dispatches from the oracle.
I've long been fascinated by Corey's Facebook page, in particular, because it was such a novel space. It couldn't exist prior to the internet, and if there were any other important writers who used the platform in that way, as a real venue for thoughtful and vigorous political discussion, I'm not familiar with them.
It didn’t replace or render obsolete the magazines, like The Nation and Dissent, that were the traditional places where the left talked to itself. It was just a different thing, an improvisational, unpredictable, rolling forum where you went to see what people of a certain bent were talking about, who the key players were, what the key debates were. And Corey himself, in this context, had a charismatic presence. To even get him to respond seriously to a comment you made on one of his posts was to get a little thrill. To be praised by Corey, in the main text of a post, was to feel like you were a made man.
Over the past few weeks I've spent some time dipping into the archives of his page, and while there I compiled a list of notable names who showed up as commenters. My list included: Lauren Berlant, Matt Karp, Tim Lacy, Miriam Markowitz, Annette Gordon Reed, Doug Henwood, Jeet Heer, Freddie Deboer, Raina Lipsitz, Elayne Tobin, Scott Lemieux, Paul Buhle, Jedediah Purdy, Jodi Dean, Alex Gourevitch, Tamsin Shaw, Rick Perlstein, Greg Grandin, Katha Pollitt, Joel Whitney, Liza Featherstone, Andrew Hartman, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Samuel Moyn, Tim Lacy, Yasmin Nair, Bhaskar Sunsara, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Gideon Lewis Kraus.This is just the people I recognized (or googled ) in my brief time skimming. The full list of eminent leftist Americans who populated Corey's page over the years would surely run to hundreds of names, which is to say that a significant portion, maybe even a majority, of the writers and intellectuals who comprised the intellectual left in those years was reading and participating in his page. How this came about, and what it meant, is one of the topics we cover in the podcast, which ended up being a kind of stock-taking of sorts of the very recent history of the American left. We also talk about Corey’s involvement as an organizer with GESO, Yale's graduate student union, when he was getting his PhD in political science; his retrospective thoughts on why he over-estimated the strength of the American left in the mid-2010s; what he got right about Trump and Trumpism; and why Clarence Thomas may be corrupt, but is at least intellectually honest about it.
Corey is a professor at Brooklyn College and the author of three books: Fear: The History of a Political Idea, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (revised and re-issued as Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump), and most recently The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Jacobin, among many other places.
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