Some time ago—around the outset of the Crash Years—I began writing in an unaccustomed way. The reasons for this were not especially obscure, though neither were they without complication. Perhaps least discreditably, I was interested to discover what other kinds of tones of voice might be found, on the page, in the explication of a given object or idea, and in what that difference might allow. I understood myself to be pursuing an experiment in style, of the most familiar kind: an effort to figure out how to make sentences that carried thought with the desired clarity and density but that also, in their pace and patterning and inflection, sounded like me—and not just the me who stood behind lecterns. On any given day a person speaks in an uncountable number of tones and microidioms. What might it be like, I thought, to depart a bit from the disciplined modes of professional address and maybe start to play up and down the keyboard of lived-in voices?
Nor was it simply a question of composition. I had been reared up as a student of queer theory and had found there a galvanizing insistence that one of the things criticism might do is enable the circulation of broader, less invidious, more multiplicitous languages of apprehension. Wasn’t that where the twinned projects of queer world-making, the theoretical and the everyday—those of the classroom and, say, the bar—came into an especially vivifying contact? In the propagation of a finer and more habitable vocabulary, of some capacious “nonce taxonomy” (as Sedgwick long ago put it), through which we might better contend with the unruly array of loves and enmities around which lives are built?[1] So this was, for me, an experiment in writing with a particular theoretical lineage, reaching back toward the authors I most imitatingly admired, from Sedgwick and Hortense Spillers to Adam Phillips, Lauren Berlant, and a handful of others in that line.
But here things grew entangled. Around that time I’d been precipitated, with some abruptness, into a plummetingly unhappy season of life, and among the things disclosed to me there was an especially intense and, you might say, grasping relation to things like books and records and poems. I got interested in that residually adolescent neediness—but also in how it tended to work itself out. I started to think a lot about the ways we manage to talk about the things we love (books, records, etc.) and about just what that scene of improvised language-making had to do with the people we love. In broken little heaves of comprehension, which in those bad days were about the best I could manage, it began to occur to me that talking about what we love, often in the overheated tones of adulation and zealous dispute proper to our off-hours, was one pretty estimable way of making a life with other people, of falling in love with them and then, over the reach of miles and years, of sustaining those loves. The making, together, of languages of praise and dispraise: this was criticism, I insisted, but in a vernacular key, tuned as much to the fractious and nourishing pleasures of intimate life as to the objects themselves.
Minor experiments in writing, minor excursions into critical speculation: that was about the size of it. Or so it seemed to me. But I can see now that these were, in nearer truth, only the more daylit motives. Beneath them were dimmer currents. I told myself I’d gotten interested in the possibilities of that most pre-demystified of forms, the telling of stories. Anecdote, comedy, character, plot—these were elements that seemed to me to animate the objects of academic writing a lot more vibrantly than the writing itself, in ways that might leave room for improvisations of my own. But however I understood myself to be thinking concept and style into fraught harmony, and whatever “ideas” I inclined to pursue, some other part of myself had come to believe something very, very different. And this was that the only human things worth thinking about, or at least the only things I was capable of thinking about, were as follows: love (see also, ruination of) and sorrow. That was all. Anything I might write was bound to be magnetized by those poles. And so it was.
Then the first strange thing happened. This was back in the days of what Phillip Maciak has aptly named “The Good Internet,” when a lot of intrepid people, in varyingly precarious relations to a collapsing profession, and out of both interest and need, had begun testing out different modes of writing, largely on a range of self-made and (as the phrase goes) public-facing platforms.[2] I was proud, and to a perhaps unseemly degree remain proud, to have been part of that wavelet of venturesome new work. I wrote a lot of those pieces, and then I wrote some more, and then, eventually, these efforts scaled up, and I found myself entangled in something much larger and more involved. What this became was, of all unpredicted things, a book. Partly the story of dumbfounded private grief and faltering reconstitution, partly the story of vernacular criticism as a style of ad-hoc world-making, it was a thing that had at least the virtue of sounding like me, if none other. What kind of book did this make it? I wasn’t sure I could say, or that I wanted to. I had had most before me the radiant example of works like Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which knitted into exquisite seamlessness biography, literary criticism, naturalist exegesis, and grief narrative. (I want to do the same, I would say, for divorce, stepparenthood, and Carly Rae Jepsen.) So, fine: a memoir, I suppose you’d have to say, though like all right-thinking people I found the term a bit queasy-making.
But then a second strange thing happened. Across platforms both professional and more widely public, a suite of loosely affiliated categories began to cluster toward solidity and, with this, toward a certain prominence. You will, by now, have seen them: memoir and the personal essay, yes, but also auto-fiction and, inevitably, auto-theory. From where I sat, discoursing around these terms tended to kick two ways, both of them a bit estranging. On the one side, the kind of ardent writing-with-the-other-hand I’d been so pleased to have been a part of began the wide turn toward its unhappy reemergence as, in essence, a qualification, a calculable bit of value-added proficiency a candidate might bring to the already mercilessly fucking gladiatorial scene of the academic job search. Jesus, was that depressing. And it was so in a way not much aided by the drift, in non-precarious professorial circles, toward a mannered mistrust of merely “academic” prose, of works whose writerly aim was but to inform and not, say, enchant. “I can hardly even read the quarterlies anymore” is a sentence I encountered, in varying iterations, more times than memory rejoices to recall. (To which one yearned to reply: A hollowness of argument, a yawning want of insight—all of that can be accomplished in lovely cadences and sentences that sing!) For a long time I had said that it was a pure good to be able to speak about objects in all the ways your life teaches you to do so, sometimes with patient scholarly deliberation and also, sometimes, with unchecked vernacular exuberance. So it was hard to watch, with anything but a distinct sinking of heart, as that impulse boomeranged back into the world as just so much elite credentialing, another tool in the bag of what is essentially administrative labor discipline. A person could start to wince at the words beautifully written.
The flipside of this was weird in a different way. Here, in largely academic appraisals, was a critique of these burgeoning personalish genres, keyed to a certain style of historicization. Its terms went roughly like this: we live an era of the ever-expanding decimation of public services and collective social care, whose signal political-economic disposition is, precisely, privatization. All the new I-tropic writing, on this score, indexes nothing so much as this prevailing neoliberal order of things. Those dewy valorizations of “experience” and “personal truth”? We do well to read these as but symptomatic stand-ins for what are, in fact, sterner protocols of socially disembedded self-reliance and an anti-collectivist individualism. Indeed, insofar as it everywhere prizes confessional immediacy and the assiduous cultivation of first-person expressivity—making paramount “the values of creativity and experience,” as Mark McGurl puts it in The Program Era—such writing might best be grasped as less a considered reflection upon the privatizing neoliberal turn than, in nearer truth, a compliant accessory to it. Call it a “there is no society” Thatcherism avant la lettre.
There are without question interesting things to be said about the entanglements of first-person writing and the environing crises of the Long Downturn—and indeed have been said, by scholars as virtuosic as McGurl, Alison Shonkwiler, Anna Kornbluh, Sarah Brouillette, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay. But in this as in much else in life I incline to follow the lead of Jordy Rosenberg (another of the genre-cracking stylists I admire and imitate). In a recent essay concluding a volume called Transgender Marxism, Rosenberg asks us to regard rather more warily readings that in this way conjoin neoliberalism with the ascent of memoir and its associated subgenres.[4] For whatever its real conceptual purchase, Rosenberg suggests, this is a move that can induce us to misappraise both the writings in question and, more grievously, the state of planetary affairs that gets called “neoliberalism.” With respect to the first point, we might wonder about the clarities of a reading practice that collates into the same generic silo writings as fractally various as those by, say, Leslie Feinberg, Michelle Obama, Edward St. Aubyn, Hanif Abdurraqib, Anna Burns, Anne Boyer, Macdonald, Rosenberg, Berlant, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Miller, and Fred Moten. The manipulations of address and encounter played out in the first person, the intricacy of apostrophe, the political content of the forms of impossible presence conjured in these rhetorical maneuvers, and in their interaction: none of these particularities of writerly execution, it seems fair to say, comes especially clear at the level of abstraction required to compress together so hectic a range of thinkers and stylists into one symptomatic defile. This can seem a lot like the polemical impulse, so familiar to literary scholarship from these insalubrious years Method-War’ing, doing its not uniformly salutary work on the objects that fall into its orbit.
But then too there is the larger question of what we think we’re talking about when we talk about neoliberalism. To identify our current conjuncture with the rituals of private personhood, or with the protocols of self-cultivating self-management, Rosenberg contends, is not in the least implausible, and certainly not wrong—though it is, in its way, misapprehending. For contemporary capital, as Rosenberg invites us to see it, is an order defined by a fantastically dispossessive violence that masquerades as a regime of self-management and self-cultivation. Ours is not an era of the triumph of the Personal so much as one of an “uneven distribution of violence domestically and globally” that describes itself, with altogether exhausting relentlessness, as an era of the triumph of the Personal.[5] Hence, for Rosenberg, “self-management,” properly conceived, “is both a form of accumulation by dispossession, and the fiction that is produced by this violence.”[6] “Self-management is the fiction capitalism tells about itself,” he goes on, “and as such I am not sure how much hermeneutic force we can derive from also claiming that this is the fiction that fiction tells.”[7] We are considerably better served, then, “when our point of reference is not the information economy as such, but rather the uneven distribution of violence as the means by which value—informational or whatever—is valorised.”[8] So there is a mistake, for Rosenberg, that comes from identifying the current conjuncture too evenly with something like the apotheosis of the self, free of inhibiting mediation and/or an established social infrastructures. Read the contemporary scene like this, Rosenberg suggests, and you can surely learn something—though you may also miss a lot. Not least, you may miss the social forms—familial, steeply gendered—upon which privatizing austerity depends, as writers like Melinda Cooper and Gabriel Winant have so persuasively shown. And you can miss what I would just go ahead and call the solidifying fascism—or, if you prefer, the total securitization, with its racist brutality, disposable populations, and staggered distributions of death—at the wretched heart of secular stagnation.
It can leave you, this stark crossing of imperatives around first-personish address, just a faint bit downhearted about what I had, for at least a little while, described to myself as the pursuit of writing otherwise. I say this despite my own persevering affection for sentences as companionable as they are acute, and for work as attuned to grief and ardor as to the rigors of conceptualization. No sensible person would for a moment deny that there are other absolutely venerable goals for writing, critical or otherwise—and god knows that joyousness, like sorrow, can take lots of forms, none of which require the first person. Then, too, in respect to the habit of addressing objects through the ardors they induce, there are a wealth of potent counterclaims. One especially strong version goes something like this: having feelings about art is one of the least interesting things you can do with it. To which I would say, Fair enough! There is an entire tradition that makes a lot out of a cagey withdrawal of private responsiveness or affective engagement from the scene of criticism. That’s not my jam, but this isn’t because I can’t see its power. I work among a veritable phalanx of Friedians; I promise you it has been explained to me.
And yet. My own instinct continues to suggest that the things we make collaboratively around the objects that agitate us, the languages we mix up and invent in concert with one another, have a gravity of their own; and that, relatedly, things like sorrow are poorly, are weirdly conceived as individuating, solitary, aspects of the austerity-making Regime of the Private. So it is that I find myself ongoingly interested in our variously agitated responses to the objects that populate our lives, and also in the languages such responses propagate, which range more or less feral and ungoverned across first and third person, private and public, personal and impersonal. In this vein, I think a lot of a long-ago conversation, in a strobe-lit bar on the Lower East Side. “We must not be fundamentalist in our distinctions,” a wise older friend once told me about erotic self-nominations (we were speaking, I seem to remember, of the nomenclature of “top” and “bottom”). They were trying to nudge me toward a wider acknowledgment, not only of the variousness of myself, but of an ampler answering variousness in the world. The memory of it inclines me even now to wish to surrender precisely zero of the available modes of encounter and exposition, however their formal vocabularies might be entangled (as, in truth, any venture into the mediations of langue is liable to be) in the more malign impulses of our collapsing present tense, and however acrobatic the effort to disentangle them must accordingly be. You couldn’t call it a program. More like an unforesworn weakness for praisesongs, descants, whatever gets you through the night.
← Memoir Dossier
Notes:
[1]Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23.
[2] Phillip Maciak, “The good internet is history,” The Week, December 2, 2019, https://theweek.com/articles/875251/good-internet-history.
[3] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18.
[4] Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword: One Utopia, One Dystopia,” In Transgender Marxism, eds. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 259-295.
[5] Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword,” 276.
[6] Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword,” 277.
[7] Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword,” 277.
[8] Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword,” 277.
Works Cited:
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Brouillette, Sarah. “The Talented Ms. Calloway.” The Los Angeles Review of Books. December 10, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-talented-ms-calloway/
Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Kornbluh, Anna. “Immediacy: On Style Lately.” Fellow lecture at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois Chicago. February 4, 2021.
Macdonald, Helen. H Is for Hawk. New York: Grove Press, 2014.
Maciak, Phillip. “The good internet is history.” The Week. December 2, 2019. https://theweek.com/articles/875251/good-internet-history.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Rosenberg, Jordy. “Afterword: One Utopia, One Dystopia.” In Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke, 259–295. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Shonkwiler, Alison. “Neohomesteading: Domestic Production and the Limits of the Postwage Imagination.” Public Culture 32, no. 3 (2020): 465–490.
Spillers, Hortense. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Together, in the First Person.” Chicago Review, 2020. https://www.chicagoreview.org/new-narratives-impersonal-voice/
Winant, Gabriel. The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.