New Romantics Against Tech, Queer Theory Against Gay Men, Everybody Against Judith Butler
Links and readings for the week of March 22.
I’ve been meaning for months now to start writing up a weekly digest of the links I read and thought about during the week, the sort of things I write in scattered emails to friends and correspondents. I never succeed because what are supposed to be short blurbs inevitably turn into mini-essays that are undercooked, and I don’t have time to turn them into long essays that are fully cooked.
But I finally did it, sort of. The time constraints of having a full-time job again are, as is always depressingly the case, making me more focused and productive. We’ll shoot in the future for more frequent and shorter, but this is a step in the right direction.
In this edition: historicizing bloggers, various gay stuff, and attempts at putting labels on our current cultural moment.
The 2000s Digital Media Generation Passes Into History
It’s not all from this week, but a few apparently disconnected bits of media have all pointed in that direction. Most recently, this Slate oral history of Pitchfork, which is above all a reminder just how different the internet was 20 years ago, the vertigo of figuring out you could just make something you thought was cool and suddenly find yourself treated like a legit publication. Pitchfork was my Bible, not only for music but for how to make an online magazine. The other one was the much-discussed Emily Gould essay on almost-divorce, which besides being a powerful personal essay that challenges a publishing trend and a dominant cultural posture, had an uncanny effect on me. On the one hand, upstart 2000s NYC media kids like Gould are now established literary stars; on the other, she’s now writing a mature version of the kind of soul-baring essay that first made her great back then. Kind of like with Julia Allison, it’s strange to realize you’ve been reading and reading about certain people for nearly two decades, that we’ve all grown up together in a way.
That’s also the weird feeling I got reading the first hundred pages or so of Ben Smith’s Traffic this week, and the same one I had reading Meet Me in the Bathroom: realizing that what for me at the time was just the water I swam in was in fact a concrete historical and sociological phenomenon. Those bands and those Gawker writers created the version of NYC I moved to and saw myself as part of, my “imaginary” if you will. It’s not just weird to get old enough to have your time written about as history, but weird to realize how little of the big picture you saw at the time.
Everybody Hates the New Judith Butler Book…
…even the people who want to like it. I look at Butler much the way I look at aging-but-still-prodigiously-publishing French theorists like Alain Badiou: too much of an institution to be strongly for or against, and too much of an institution to say much that’s new or interesting. Synthesizing their takes a bit, sympathetic critics like
in the Washington Post, Brock Colyar in The Drift, and Joanna Wuest in Jacobin seem to want more from Butler, to find their deconstructionist style of continual open-ended questioning inadequate. Colyar wonders if the theoretical obsession with language is enough without a “positive vision.” Rothfeld similarly wants Butler to theorize more about the “freedom” they see as the ultimate fear of the reactionary critics of “gender ideology.” Wuest, a trans political scientist and author of the very good and provocative Born This Way, argues in her usual Marxist vein that Butler’s psychologizing of the anti-“gender ideology” movement misses its role in advancing the concrete material interests of the right-wing coalition—i.e., the Kochs behind the culture wars.All of these points are right in a way; perhaps Butler’s work suffers simply because they are the author of an aging theoretical paradigm. Gender is so obviously performance that reiterating that fact no longer teaches us anything fresh. What other angle could we find to produce new insights? What else besides performance might gender be? What substance might it have after all? Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of the misuse of biology that we stop being curious about it?
Queer Theory vs. Gay Men
If you are a regular reader of
’s Substack, this essay in the Chronicle won’t say much that’s new to you, but even so it’s a helpful summation of his previous takes on the state of gay male culture, gay men within (against?) the current Queer agglomeration, and queer theory in the academia. The argument here is that queer theory, and as a result much popular thinking about LGBT identity, has exchanged the concrete experience of being a sexual minority for a valorization of abstract anti-normativity. In other words, what makes you “queer” is not actually being homosexual, but being marginal in relation to dominant identity categories. (Thus “white gay men” become just another avatar of empire, capitalism, toxic masculinity, etc, while Osama Bin Laden is a revolutionary “fag.” Yes, somebody with a PhD apparently wrote that.) Someday I will write a longer post on Blake’s answers to all this, which I disagree with in part but which is notable for being a provocative dissent from the tedious, pseudo-progressive cant that too often passes for queer thought.Are We Taking a Romantic Cultural Turn?
That’s the question
addresses on a recent episode (I’m behind) of , his (excellent) podcast on the state of American intellectuals and contemporary discourse. Along with special guests and , Oppenheimer reviews signs of a romantic revival in contemporary culture: the escalating backlash to the domination of tech; the widespread alienation from the large, rational systems represented by politics and science/medicine; the flowering of weird online spiritualisms; the total absence of a vocal atheist and/or rationalist current on the contemporary intellectual scene; and the recent fetishism of previously dead physical mediums. (They don’t mention these, but I’d point particularly to Gen Z’s revival of vinyl records and cassettes.) Pistelli and Barkan, who are both vaguely religious and gently anti-rationalist, have cautiously positive takes on these developments, though the general tone is neutral and observational.The group begins by defining historical romanticism. Oppenheimer then asks what the politics of romanticism were, and Pistelli gives it a shot. He walks up the right steps—the failure of the French Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon, the reassertion of a reactionary order—but stops at the door to the correct answer: nationalism. The most characteristic political expression of European romanticism was nationalism, the defense of particular (not universal) identity, of local specificity, of irreducible complexity against the (supposed) Enlightenment project of flattening, homogenizing, universalizing. This is worth noting because it might help connect the concept of romanticism to our own moment. Nationalism is an identitarianism and is famously slippery, a force both of bottom-up emancipation and top-down authoritarianism. It could be helpful to analogize the present to an earlier period in which rapid, universalizing technological change produces a bitterly fracturing, potentially violent and deadly, obsession with particularity.
Fortunately, this group doesn’t fall too far into the “Enlightenment vs. Romanticism” trap. Romanticism indeed understood itself as a backlash to the culture of the Enlightenment, but as a matter of historical reality, the two cannot be reduced to “rationalism vs. irrationalism” or “science vs. mysticism.” The Enlightenment was riven with weird spiritualisms and esoteric rationalities, and Romantics were often ultra-modern technology enthusiasts (see John Tresch’s wonderful Romantic Machines.) This is why I think we could find it useful to identify “romantic” currents in the present, but romanticism probably fails as a general descriptor.
That’s more than enough for one week. See you next week, hopefully.
Yes! I remember when all those movies about Oakland came out, and I was like...wow, was living in Oakland in the 2010s kind of a thing? Here we thought we were just bored kids going to shitty house shows.
Blake's essay is good, but he ignores the counter-argument--is there actually anything interesting or revolutionary (anything 'queer', so to speak) in being a man attracted to men?
Personally I'm left very cold by the trans theorists who see being trans as inherently revolutionary--that's very much not the way I see it or experience it. At its core being trans is very boring--you wear different clothes, talk differently, some (but not all) flip a switch and start seeing you as a woman. It's interesting to me, but less inherently revolutionary than, say, being a goth (which at least is _intended_ to shock and unsettle people)