I wrote the following a few months ago for a venue I sometimes write for; they didn’t want it, I suspect in part because it critiques some people they like and questions, more generally, the project of the humanist little magazine. Or possibly it’s just a bad essay! Anyway, since I never found a home for it—here it is. It could be read alongside my essay on Fukuyama in Foreign Policy, or the essays on BAP and Arendt in Tablet, where I tried to think, rather despairingly, about what seems like the impossibility of public intellectuals intelligently addressing a public. Here I am a little more optimistic, seeing Rachel Aviv’s work as representing real possibilities for non-academic public thinking—and attacking Mevre Emre and Hua Hsu as examples of moronic para-academic pseudo-thinking. (I am btw genuinely jealous of Aviv’s style and brilliant organization of her essays—comparing her profiles with my recent attempt at something like one on Roland Barthes made me wish I were a better writer, which is I guess as nice a thing as can be said!)
essay below—
The future of humanistic scholarship seems ever-more bleak, but a broad reading public—and those who write for it—remain, for some reason, interested in stories about scholars in our imperiled academic institutions. This is not necessarily good news for humanists. Most of us work in obscurity, worsening precarity, amid the din of shrill political polemics, while a few figures at prestigious institutions are granted, in addition to their other privileges, intervals of the celebrity treatment. An already, and increasingly, unequal academic system designed to produce small numbers of ‘stars’ rather than sustainable lives for ordinary PhD-holders finds it match in a media system that promotes singular figures endowed with auras of interestingness.
Writing about scholars and their work in mainstream middle-brow publications drifts, perhaps inevitably, to the genre of celebrity profile, focusing on imagined attributes of the person rather than the context, significance and validity (or not) of their ideas. This is not only because the academy and media are star-struck, however, or because readers are (rightly or wrongly) assumed to demand piffle. There is a real problem faced even by writers who might mean earnestly to bring news of an important new idea to the attention of a general readership: the latter is hardly ever qualified to evaluate the former. Equipping readers with the information necessary to make judgments that would be authentically their own (and not accepted on faith in the writer’s ex cathedra pronouncements) in the space of a few thousand words is almost—maybe simply—impossible.
The difficulty of this task, and the pull toward the form of celebrity lifestyle reportage that it generates, struck me as, over the last few years, I saw a number of professors from my former employer, the University of Chicago, appear as the subject of reviews and essays in popular media. Comparing these pieces, it became apparent that writers for such venues have a repertory of pseudo-solutions and dodges—and, in a few cases, thrilling techniques—by which they shift focus from the claims advanced by a thinker, and the context necessary for their proper evaluation, to the thinker’s presumably fascinating—or execrable—character.
Take, for instance, Merve Emre, reviewing Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick in 2020 for The New Yorker. After four paragraphs of throat-clearing before getting around to Ngai, Emre briefly passes over her subject’s first two books, then lays out some of the main arguments of Theory of the Gimmick. She notes, with facile contempt, that Ngai thinks through a Marxist framework—as Emre puts it “[l]eaning long and hard on Marx.” We hear nothing from Emre, as she works her way through some of Ngai’s examples of ‘gimmicks’ from literature and popular culture, about what it means, at this moment in the twenty-first century, in fields such as literary and media studies, or aesthetics, to take up an avowedly Marxist perspective—or how such a perspective, as developed by Ngai from a range of possible Marxisms, differs from other perspectives available in the contemporary academy for thinking about the demands for novelty in cultural production that underwrite the rise of the ‘gimmick.’
This kind of intellectual contextualization, situating Ngai’s work within specific debates, would enable the reader to see her claims not as an idiosyncratic personal investment in Marx (framed by Emre in glib, libidinal terms—a pressing of herself “long and hard” against the Marxist corpus) but as comprehensible, and evaluable, moves within a number of interconnected debates. Instead, Emre abruptly concludes, in her final paragraph, with a series of statements about, not her own objections to Ngai’s ideas, but rather the suspicions that some mysterious third person, a “we” or “one,” has been developing. “One senses,” thus, “Ngai working harder and harder to equate the techniques of artistic production with the productive processes of capitalism.” This is indeed a central, obvious aspect of Ngai’s thesis, although it is not clear why “one” must imagine her as an unhappy Sisyphus struggling with increasing weariness to shove it uphill. With Ngai worn out, apparently, by the labor of Marxist analysis, “one could hardly imagine Ngai, or anyone else, pulling this trick off again. But while it lasted it was very good.” Ngai, the theorist of gimmicks, has made a theoretical geegaw that offered “us” and “one” some “critical pleasure” before collapsing, exhausted.
Emre’s review is not a celebrity profile, and has hardly any details on Ngai’s life or personality. It is meant to discuss her book. But it seems unable to avoid transforming Ngai from an author among other authors into a character in a fiction—a short story in which “we” also appear as a character who apparently find Marxism, on principle, tiresome and pointless. This character (who remarkably shares Emre’s own prejudices) sees Ngai as hard-working and pleasure-giving, but not as a thinker with ideas to be taken seriously. If this character were an older white male, “one” might suspect that he is racist and sexist in his trivialization of an Asian-American woman.
Such belittling reviews that fall into shallow personalization of their subjects have their counterpart in fawning hagiographies. The year before Emre’s review of Ngai, The New Yorker published a profile of Lauren Berlant by Hua Hsu, who declared the Chicago professor a political prophet. Berlant’s analyses of the affective dimension of American cultural texts in books such as Cruel Optimism (2011), Hsu announced, amounted to an indictment of our national illusions about the conventionally understood ‘good life,’ and to a prescient warning of how some Americans might, in their disappointed but persistent attachments to such outmoded hopes, be preparing in their innermost longings the grounds for reactionary politics.
Hsu provides more context for Berlant’s ideas than Emre does for Ngai’s, setting them within a larger movement of affect theory, some of the actors and institutions of which he names. Yet he gives no recognition that Berlant’s approach represents only one strand of affect theory (to be distinguished, for example, from a genealogy passing from Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi), or that this approach has been contested by advocates of other approaches, not least from traditions that approach the intersections of private and public feeling through psychoanalysis. Perhaps no response to Berlant’s version of affect theory—and prose style, which Hsu is at pains to praise as “bewitching”—has been more withering than that of psychoanalytic queer theorist Tim Dean, who blasts their “abstraction and incoherence” and the “doctrine” by which they understand psychic life in a “deeroticized” framework unable to account for our constitutive tensions.
Rather than granting readers an awareness of the debates through which Berlant developed their arguments, Hsu presents them as an explorer in a previously uncharted country, making such discoveries as “many people seem to derive their greatest pleasure from making other people feel bad.” Stripped of their context in scholarly debates, and repackaged as insights about human nature, these statements appear pathetically banal moralisms—or as confirmations that for Trump’s supporters, as Adam Serwer claimed the year before in The Atlantic, the cruelty is the point.
Hsu asserts that Berlant’s ideas have a “sweeping complexity” while reducing them to echoes of the moment’s tritest progressive catchphrases. Who, in 2019, needed retrospective predictions of Trump or academic restatements of Serwer’s projections about the conservative mind? Apparently Hsu—who perhaps longed to see Berlant as a moralist and prophet because his own 2009 predictions about the American future, which he envisioned as bringing about the disappearance of a white racial majority and an end to “the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals rather than as members of a caste or identity group,” had proven so foolish.
The New Yorker, whether in portentous praise of Berlant or unserious disparagement of Ngai, seems unable to provide readers with grounds for making their own judgments. Its reviewers tell us what we ought to think (or rather, in Emre’s case, what “we” already think), without giving information about alternative views and scholarly debates that readers would need to begin thinking for themselves about the utility of Berlant’s contributions to affect theory or Ngai’s to Marxist theory of cultural production. We are imagined, as it were, waiting open-mouthed for an idea softened by the reviewer into a swallowable mush.
It may be, ironically, by embracing—rather than lapsing unconsciously—into the genre of the profile that magazines like The New Yorker can give readers the means to draw their own conclusions about supposedly seminal thinkers. Rather than provide failed imitations of academic reviews, with all the scholarly context left out, writers can provoke thought and debate among readers using literary skills alien to the methods of academic writing and middle-brow vulgarizations of it. If it is not possible, in the space of a magazine article, to catch intelligent but uninformed readers up to speed on the debates about, for example, controversies in literary studies, with sufficient depth to come to their own conclusions about a set of scholarly claims, some journalists shows us that is possible for those claims to be skillfully put in a different kind of provocative conversation, playing them alongside, and even against, the life of thinker herself.
One of the most brilliant practitioners of this kind of writing is Rachel Aviv. Her New Yorker profiles of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum and Agnes Callard are painstakingly crafted, shuttling between, on the one hand, claims about the moral life and human nature from the philosophers’ writings and Aviv’s own interviews with them, and, on the other, their own stories about themselves, matched against observations about them by their colleagues, family members, and Aviv. Only rarely and subtly advancing her own point of view, Aviv allows her subjects to advance exciting, seductive ideas as well as breath-takingly hubristic self-descriptions, which she deftly undercuts.
The profile of Nussbaum, for example, finds its subject insisting on the importance of vulnerability and emotion, yet—even in the first paragraphs, in a short but devastating sentence tucked as a detail into a longer introductory anecdote—judging her mother, dead only hours before, for her pedestrian taste in bedside reading. Aviv’s profiles are full of such moments, in which the claims made by a thinker are set in a kind of dramatic dialogue not with scholarly interlocutors but with her life. Readers respond to the texts in many ways, imagining them as everything from charitable interpretations of how prominent intellectuals bring thought and life together, to finely cruel observations in the spirit of Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe.
Aviv would have made an excellent modern novelist; she is perhaps our finest writer of unreliable narrators. Yet she is never merely satirical—much less hagiographic or glib. Rather, she shows, with almost Nietzschean psychological flair how ideas arise out of life. The claims one makes about oneself and about the world bolster a desirable, and often false, self-image—but, precisely because they compensate and cover over our personal shortcomings, may see further than we do. We can think, Aviv shows us, past the limits of our characters—in a kind of intellectual ascesis passing through the ridiculous.
Her profiles invite us to consider how celebrity culture and the mass-market magazines that sustain it might be, paradoxically, a critical resource for the public humanities. After all, we might recall, canonical thinkers such as Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault, from without and within the academy, used interviews, press conferences, television shows and other media spectacles to generate attention for their personae and ideas. If savvy thinkers can use the media to further their careers, generating prestige that helps them secure academic positions, it can also be at least imaginable that thoughtful journalists might be not merely their dupes and press agents—or superficial, self-satisfied critics—but serious interlocutors making sophisticated points in their own, distinctively non-academic style.
Journalists like Aviv are doing a kind of thinking, in a specific sort of venue, to which academics ought to pay better attention—if only to avoid appearing comically unself-knowing in their own New Yorker profiles. We have perhaps paid comparatively too much attention to what seem to be higher-brow, and at any rate more comfortably familiar, publications. In his 2022 book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, for example, John Guillory points to “little magazines” like The Point and N+1 as examples of how the forms of thinking generated by (a handful of elite) humanities departments are perpetuated and extended into the public.
Such magazines are usually tethered, either through formal affiliations or merely through their networks of readers and authors, to the universities and disciplines out of which they emerged. They bring something like, in the case of The Point, the spirit of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought to a wider audience—staging the specific version of the ‘life of the mind’ practiced among a certain number of current and former Hyde Park residents.
Part of the pleasure, and the risk, of such an enterprise is that the little magazine constitutes a little world in which a delimited number of thinkers, texts and concepts circulate as signs of a common identity (of ostensibly apolitical nuanced liberal humanism at The Point or ‘Theory’-adjacent sharp-elbowed progressivism at N+1). They are to the graduate seminar what a catalogue is to the department store. Publications like The New Yorker cannot fulfill such a function, although at their all-too-frequent worst they serve up bungled imitations of it. What they can do, at their best—or at least at Rachel Aviv’s—is to incite thinking and enable independent judgment.
LOL this is good. New Yorker profiles: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
I think a New Yorker profile is the sign of greater notability than a mere Wikipedia entry, yet not quite as notable as those who rate actual books of biography.
Only a handful of genuine superstars get actual books of biography written about them, yet the NYer profile is accessible to the semi-stars. E.g. Ingrid Sischy, "girl of the zeitgeist" 1986, and Chloe Sevigny, unknown 1994 East Village scenester.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1986/10/27/a-girl-of-the-zeitgeist-ii
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/11/07/chloes-scene
Freddie de Boer is good on N+1
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-is-n1-for