On Incoherence, or Things Fall Apart
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man substacken
In his youth, i.e. his early to mid-thirties, the Feckless Bellelettrist succumbed to the temptation to comment publicly on larger world affairs. He was not a feckless bellelettrist then, but an editor of a new, young magazine. It was the early mid-aughts and both FB and the magazine were latecomers to the web 1.0 party, when it seemed all sorts of people had interesting things to say about all kinds of things on their blogs, or in fresh startups like Slate and Salon, and were getting paid real money for it. The magazine FB was involved with was devoted to print culture, did not pay its writers or its editors real money, but also needed to establish an online presence. So they looked for an angle, something to give them an identity in a crowded market of ideas, maybe, or just words, words, words.
There were so many words, and there are more now.
One thing the magazine did was decide to satirize the staid opinion column form—common at places like the New York Times—but with the editors' serious ideas and beliefs so subtly embedded that no one could accuse them of trying to be actual wonks or politicos. In editorial meetings this was referred to as "political surrealism," although the editors never used that term explicitly. They believed that the magazine's best readers would recognize the secret handshake. So, in 2004, FB co-wrote a modest proposal called "Palestine, the 51st State." (This was when Peter Beinart was an advocate for American Imperialism in Iraq.) And, in 2006, he wrote one called "Lower the Voting Age" (he wanted to extend the franchise to eight-year-olds—at least as rational as many eighty-year-olds—but was talked out of it by his fellow editors and argued instead for the almost dauntingly attainable sixteen); in between had come an argument for left-wing populism against wan Democrat centrism via a defense of Michael Moore.
Some of these pieces were, in retrospect, prescient. Others were more hit and miss: "Obama: American Gorbachev" (fall, 2008) got right that Obama was a manager of American imperial decline and featured sentences like, "Our new President presides over a recession (if not worse), a dilapidated infrastructure, an aging population, and more numerous environmental catastrophes: wildfires and drought in the Southwest, a longer and more brutal hurricane season along the Gulf coast and Eastern seaboard, harbingers of greater, unknown changes to come. We didn’t have a Chernobyl, but we had Katrina." But he did not adequately understand that the most transformative thing about Obama's election—in Obama's eyes—was Obama himself, nor the repercussions that attended the ill-conceived revolution among a small sector of American elites that proved to be his legacy.
In any case, prescient or off track, these arguments, analyses, and ideas failed to interest even a small portion of that small portion of American elites, never mind "the electorate," although they briefly resulted in FB being mistaken for a sincerely aspiring talking head: He was invited to moderate a panel about health care costs for C-Span, featuring a young data wonk called Ezra Klein, and participated in a debate at the New School with Ross Douthat.
My purpose here, however, is not to take stock of pieces written between 16 and 20 years ago. They were intended as ephemera: hot takes written slant, composed in rage or grief, both at the state of the world and of the commentariat. FB used to fuel his writing with emotions the way others he knew used cocaine and adderall. Looking back, FB was a little bit straight edge. He admitted recently that he was a snob about it, too. He didn't understand that writing from emotional juice is no better than writing aided by external stimulants, and comes with its own hangovers. He told me that he used to throw up after each of his political pieces were published, "from shame." FB's output also lagged behind his commentariat contemporaries. He had never wanted to be—that noxious phrase—"an opinionator," or, worse, "a columnist," i.e. a writer whose self-worth was indexed to their ability to fill out one part of a page of a physical magazine with serviceable copy or "content," as it was later called, on a regular schedule. He nurtured—he told me—a contempt for such people that was probably less well disguised than he imagined. Maybe that's why—he added—he remains uninvited to Aspen mountain weekends with Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein.
What I want to do instead is reflect on a certain incoherence or maybe decoherence is a better word that took hold of me first in the aftermath of Trump's 2016 victory and has only increased since. The arrival of the FB into my own life is one late-blooming symptom of this, though maybe also a partial solution. Some of it involves my own ageing, an attempt to avoid the prospect of my ever-approaching death, in my case through a kind of fragmentation and dispersal: life begins at thirty and again at forty and a third time at fifty; today is the first day of the vita nuova, who I am today is not who I was yesterday, I contain multitudes, I am capable of growth and change, etc.. Perhaps some of you will relate to this feeling, or will be concerned for my mental health. Others will not wish to understand me at all. The way I can approach that incoherence, right now, is through a response to two Substack posts—in a genre I recognized—that I encountered in the aftermath of last week’s election.
The first of these was the resplendently disinhibited Sam Kriss's "I told you so" post, which might have been subtitled "Bernie would have won." The other is a post by Daniel Pinchbeck, former co-founding editor of the literary magazine Open City turned internet new age guru, and, in his own words, "monistic idealist," who wrote a more cosmic version of what could also have been titled "Bernie would have won." To these I would add Peter Beinart's piece in the New York Times, arguing that Harris lost the election because she hadn't endorsed Peter Beinart's views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a sentiment echoed by other anti-Zionist activists in the Guardian and all across my Instagram feed; and Elizabeth Spiers' pointing the finger at men.
What was immediately noticeable to me in these posts was the remarkable certainty that had allowed each of these writers to produce, within scant hours of the result, some clearly articulated sentences and paragraphs and arguments that they might have written at any point in the last year and maybe had already done, only needing to change or tweak a sentence here or there. I had gone into the election expecting a toss-up, but really without any idea what might happen, or why, and was still digesting my astonishment at the extent of the Democrats' collapse on Wednesday morning when the first of these pieces popped into my inbox, and I was in the same state on Thursday when the others arrived on queue.
I clicked on them semi-automatically, really for reassurance. Not only had the sun come up in the morning, gloriously, but people were still churning out opinions and takes, the same ones in most cases; this is a continuum and not a rupture. My clicking was the same impulsive response that has haunted me ever since, when I was 19 years old, the first thing I did after the paramedics removed my father's corpse from our dining room was sit down and read that day's New York Times, still on the coffee table, next to where my father's body had lain.
The writers in question might have written their pieces for similar reasons of coping, for all I know. What would my life had been if I had turned to my journal that morning and put down a couple hundred words instead of picking up “All the News That Was Fit to Print?” FB confided that he, like me, believes he belongs to "the best who lack all conviction...better that, in the apocalyptic age, than being filled with passionate intensity." Well the second coming of something is indeed at hand, and here we are doing what we can do and trying to figure out what it is that only we can do.
I confess too that all these posts and opinions antagonized me as much as they reassured me. I had been meaning, for a while now, "to update the Stack." One week before the election, I had delightful menu of distractions prepared for you, my readers and friends, several essays in various states of incompletion that I fantasized about posting here until it was all overtaken by events and everything I'd been writing seemed like it would be in bad taste.
It seemed best to say nothing, but "gotta update the stack." That’s what the interior entrepreneur whispers to me mornings and evenings. So I was going to draw up a reading list of the great writers of silence: Blanchot, Cioran, Beckett, the first two silent fascist sympathizers and the latter an active member of the French resistance. Then I remembered that one of FB's last political commentaries was a variation on themes from Blanchot (https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/election/the-disaster/). Even the whole silence argument would have just been repetition, something that could have been written last week or last year or eight years ago. The mind is recursive, and as much as it wants to split itself into many lives, many minds, before and after, then and now, it recovers itself with a kind of dull tragic consistency under the pressure of deadline, "gotta update the stack."
There has been and most likely will be again a lot of talk about “normalization.” “Don’t normalize the second Trump term,” people will say, and have already been saying.” Yet normalization is what so many of us are wired for, even those opposed to “normalization.” What if, under workplace pressure, an idea of my self-worth, or just social pressure to exercise my now tech-enhanced right to speech, I had merely, unthinkingly, regurgitated some version of the Blanchot chunk from 2016? I nearly did. Normalization is the malady of the quotidian, the habits we reach for. My friend wants me to go harder here and attack the unthinking repetition of these old ideas. I’m not so sure. I will leave the people alone in their grief and anger.
In the coming weeks and months, I look forward to providing you with absolutely zero political analysis and commentary and concentrating on exactly the kind of distracting pieces I was at work on before this happened.
These may be:
An essay on Mimesis and Erich Auerbach in Turkey.
An essay on string lights in time for the holidays. Just joking.
A long deferred memorial essay for Bernard Pivot, who died in May, the French host of the television program "Apostrophe," which is also meant to serve as an introduction and excuse to post audio for four live events I conducted last spring.
A memorial essay for one of my most important teachers who died on October 18th.
An essay on string lights, but I’m serious this time. Yes, an essay on string lights that is really a series of vignettes that would work like, well, string lights, and function as a meditation on our fundamental interconnectedness, but also on the retrospective importance of what once seemed merely ornamental and decorative, and how the order and significance of our lives can be suddenly altered, its patterns rewoven. And sure, why not, ideally in time for the holidays.
6. An essay on two recent types of novel characters—the hipster and the activist—and their literary antecedents in the 19th century novel.
Oh, and…Bernie would have won.
