the 'doxa of the diktat' at The Drift

James Wood's bad writing for dark times

I’m not sure whether to be more embarrassed by my flirtations with the institutional right (writing for City Journal, attending Jack Miller Center events) or by my periodic episodes of self-duping with hope for the left. The former, at least, gave me money (the JMC is a great junket—100s and 1000s to show up!—although I spoiled any chance of future invitations by making fun of Steven B. Smith); the left always makes me pay.

Giving 500 to Bernie in 2016 has moved from a political alibi (“well at least I…”) to a matter of embittered speculation about what else I could have done with the money. But nothing was as much of a waste as a year’s subscription to The Drift 2022-23. Did the left need yet another magazine in which self-hating grad students snark about popular culture, emptily-apocalyptically theorize neoliberalism, and work towards the definitive fusion of bad autofiction and second-hand Jameson?

Some residual hope, or a hope to have hope, must be what makes me still open their emails. Today The Drift sends a sales pitch to renew my subscription, disguised as a response to Jeff Bezos’ recent announcement that the Washington Post is now a libertarian newspaper. The latter news is genuinely concerning, especially if you were dumb enough to be reading the Washington Post (a paper I’ve been boycotting ever since they spotlit woketard Rokhaya Diallo as a France-expert—their coverage of the hexagon in the late 2010s and early 2020s was about as subtle and fair as that of AlJazeeraPlus; it’s as though memory-mongering race-fetishization and ‘personal liberties and free markets’-ism were just two avatars of the global dollar out to ground down anything that, like a certain image of France, would impede the free circulation of symbolic grievance and dematerialized finance).

The pitch comes from James Wood of The New Yorker, and begins thus:

When a text helplessly screams to be interpreted, a literary critic may sometimes be needed to put the poor thing out of its incoherent misery.

On Wednesday, February 26, Jeff Bezos announced such an extraordinary shift of policy at The Washington Post that the editor of the opinions section of the newspaper, David Shipley, resigned rather than enact it. The doxa of the diktat are grotesque enough. But the wording of Bezos’s text may be, if anything, even more alarming than its contents.

Wood offers a ‘reading’ of the email’s ‘rampant illogic’ and concludes that, in these troubling times, now more than ever, we need to support alternative sources of opinion (oh wait that’s a right-wing talking point, sorry) like The Drift. I hate to summon the fat ghost of Eve Sedgwick (one imagines Slimer from Ghostbusters…) but there’s something pathetically paranoid about the idea that Bezos’ email—in which one of the most wealthy and powerful men in the world declares that his newspaper will propagandize on behalf of his class—cries out for interpretation. It doesn’t!

Worse—and here I go doing amateur literary criticism—Wood writes as if interpretation could kill Bezos’ email (“put it out of its misery”). The only thing interpretation can kill is another interpretation. Actually, I’m not even sure that interpretation can do that. Maybe interpretation only ever just adds interpretation. (Unfortunately, unlike poetry, it does not reside in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper; the executives are tampering!)

Wood seems to imagine that criticism/interpretation can (still) do political work, by showing how complicatedly wrong (illogical, incoherent) a text written by an oligarch can be—and thus how wrong, I guess, the text of that oligarch’s world is? But the world is not a hieroglyph and neither is this email. As that reparative reader Trump himself once said, 9 years ago: “The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that are very well known” (see me on Trump and Sedgwick here). No one promised us that these means would obey any logic, such that exposing their incoherence would make them disappear.

The wording of Bezos’ email is not more alarming than its content, and for Woods to say that it is reveals the very sad and common wish among intellectuals that beneath the obvious, stark brutal awfulness of things there exist some deliciously intricate wickedness. The bully pummeling the nerd, the latter reasons, is himself the pawn of a vast, subtle system of evil only someone as smart as a nerd can helplessly decipher. This illusion gives the nerd a way to enjoy himself during and between pummelings. Moral reasoning as masochism—a way to get off from being beaten.

Maybe there’s nothing else for us nerds to do, now or ever. I have little faith that anything hangs on the wording of our criticism, interpretation, or emails—that by reading cleverly or writing well we gain any sort of leverage, except in our self-paralyzing fantasies, over accumulating brutalities.

But if we do want to have some faith in, well not even the left, or literary criticism, but just in writing reading talking thinking, then we ought not to imagine our interpretation as acts of ‘resistance’ much less as sales pitches, and certainly ought not to write clunkers such as The doxa of the diktat are grotesque enough, which reads like a line rejected from Of Montreal’s “Forecast Fascist Future.”

Good writing I think no more contributes to good politics than good sandwiches get you into heaven (it’s true of course that living with stupid culture and bad food is ethically degrading, but it does not follow that nice things make you a good person—I have been shopping at Erewhon while living in Pasadena and despite the sea moss jelly I’m still an asshole, albeit with radiant skin)—but maybe being able to tell the difference between good and bad writing, being able to exercise taste, might remind critics editors and writers that there are such things as virtues (even the very minor ones that exercise themselves in ‘aesthetics’) or even gods, powers that summon us into the demanding standards of pleasure, connect us with fellow enjoyers and sunder us from our lazy piggish self-contentment and enthrallment to cliche.

Those aren’t political capacities—being able to tell a good sentence from a bad one is more like knowing what wine to order than knowing ‘what is to be done’ politically—but I suppose I still have to hope that they can help us develop something like a (and I hate to say it) pre-political capacity for not always being retarded. At any rate, if the left, via The Drift, wants me to waste money and hope on them again, they’re going to have to put literary critics like James Wood out of my misery.