Whether for it, against it or a little bit each way, all the standard positions have been staked out by now on why writer and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s most recent contribution to the ongoing David Foster Wallace publication memorial is, or is not, a welcome development. A book-length transcript of a five-day interview conducted and caught on tape by Lipsky in 1996, on the road with Wallace in the immediate wake of the publication of the writer’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is, first and foremost, a very compelling melange of two things: love letter and cash cow. On which side, you ask, does it come down more firmly? Probably the former. However, the question of whether the truth lies in one aspect of this text more than the other, of whether it is ultimately more sincere than in bad taste, is less interesting than the fact both components exist side by side in the the book together. The very fact that this book manages to so smoothly hold both of these opposites simultaneously within it, to have its cake and eat it too, thus not only involves David Wallace as subject matter but raises compositional questions of a deeply Wallacian nature.
In assessing the book’s value, reviewers have clucked their tongues and clapped their hands. Although there have been rumbles from most about the David Foster Wallace guru industry – best typified by the online circulation and subsequent gift book publication of a commencement speech he made to the students of Kenyon College in 2005 – the readers of Lipsky’s transcript, if a little leery about the whole ‘concept’, have, on balance, commented applaudingly on the execution of the thing: in particular, the true-to-life picture this unedited bumper interview ostensibly offers us of David Wallace at the height of his powers and career. Looking to retrieve from the subsequent suicide the living writer, the book has been commended for its revelation not of a dead man walking or of an infinitely gentle and intelligent genius but of a real, troubled, contradictory and very candidly confused man. Reproduced almost unexpurgated – which is to say, inclusive of peripheral trivia that accompanies Lipsky and Wallace as they travel, replete with stage directional stabs at mise-en-scène and dotted with observational notations from Lipsky of varying interest, which keep us loosely up to date on actions and surroundings as well as Lipsky’s pop-psychologizing evaluations of Wallace himself – the book gives us not just the best of the massive mind but also attaches a specific, touching profile to it: a tobacco-chewing, sexually frustrated, agonizingly involuted, strategic people-pleaser, a man who combines dizzyingly excellent discernment with the massively uncool faux pas of having a huge jones for the song stylings of Alanis Morrisette. So it is, we’re invited, apparently, to learn to love David Wallace, literary luminary, in all his living human frailty
And yet for all the corrective ‘depth’ the book seemingly offers just by being what it is, a transcript – whether it ostensibly reinvents a memory of Wallace as a valid, living person undetermined by his death (“That’s the other thing this book would like to be,” Lipsky writes, “a record of what David was like, when he was thirty-four and all his cards had turned over good, every one of his ships had sailed back into harbor””[xxiv]) or whether it outwardly works to recognize Wallace as something other than an impeccable genius, a boundlessly towering brilliance, and supplies instead, as Tye Pemberton has argued in a recent review, a portrait of “a young, expansive mind at work that was, at times, small and even a little creepy in ways that we could all recognize if we would only admit our own, similar failings, if we would only allow our geniuses the inconsistencies of being that we suffer every day” – whichever way one looks at it, what struck me overwhelmingly as I finished reading the 300 page interview was that this book was itself an almost textbook example of what Wallace means when he talks about “an entertainment”. For Wallace, an entertainment is not anything nearly as simple as a product of the culture industry, a vacuous aesthetic fetish that can be blithely counterpoised to the struggling glory and authentic universality of true art. It is nothing we can so simplistically condescend to, or disregard. Rather, an entertainment is a cultural item which – not in spite of but through content within it that is actually emotionally revelatory and even possibly of profound interest – is free to act entirely in accordance with its financial logic. Far from the absence of artistry, the presence of a very real profundity places a certain sentimental and cynical limitation upon our ability to discern manipulation in entertainment, to be seduced not only into satisfaction but into ‘doing the work’ (as Wallace was fond of phrasing it) that would allow us to reject not only that which appalls us but, more crucially, that which inspires or pleases us.
Discussing with Lipsky his intentions and hopes for Infinite Jest, Wallace explains at one point in the interview that his novel is meant to be an entertainment that fails to achieve integration as an entertainment, that uses the logic of entertainment to short-circuit its ends. In his words:
“the idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads to, I think, is the movie Infinite Jest. I mean, that’s the star it’s steering by. Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining – and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.” (79)
Wallace’s notion of an entertainment that works could stand as a critical review in itself of Lipsky’s ‘infinite transcript’. It’s not that Lipsky’s book is a bad book. Or even that it is in bad taste exactly. What’s troubling about it is that it’s an entertainment designed to pull off a certain trick – and which does pull it off, with sinister effectiveness. To begin with, take the fact that the book is almost literally hate-proof. It’s too valuable, for one thing. The look into Wallace it offers is indisputably a precious opportunity for those who have read and followed and admired his massive skill and achievements. It’s particularly intriguing also because it does not simply restate his ethos but places that ethos in a particularly personal atmosphere, an ambience of the author in the lull and whirl of his private and writerly life. Furthermore, the interview clearly archives certain significant ruminations, reflections and searching moments which would have been otherwise unavailable to us, a thing we find we can only be thankful for. Finally, as many reviewers have already noted, the conversation between Lipsky and Wallace is not exactly boring; a not unpoignant rhythm develops as the two beat backward and forward over the relationship between success, enjoyment and ingratiation.
Granting all this, however, it is precisely the superlative citability of the text (coupled with the somewhat tedious non-citability of the text at other points, as though its ‘unedited’ nature were a sort of insurance cover of authenticity for what would otherwise be its too obviously self-interested salability) as well as its pretensions to cosiness with Wallace a mere five days does not bare out that should give us pause. For while we need not doubt that this book is a well-meaning product of a true admirer’s sincere desire to share with the world all the amazement and complication of his lucky encounter with one of the titans of English language fiction of the last thirty years, such a sincere desire (and its entertaining outcome) is absolutely compatible and entirely accordant with a calculating agenda to advertise certain things. The book becomes a billboard, that is, not so much of Lipsky the writer or even of Wallace as a tragic, worthy brand (though of these things too), but moreover, and most importantly, of certain ‘challenging’ notions about art and acculturation which only end up working as a reaffirmation of (and provide press for) the very ‘cultural conversation’ with which Wallace’s own artistic ‘piety’ (his word) was so deeply at odds.
One of Wallace’s recurring – and most astute – motifs in the interview with Lipsky is his appreciation that our system of cultural exchange is not simply designed to generate banality (a now familiar, somewhat stuck-up and, of course, totally ineffective objection to contemporary product circulation) but, rather, that our culture is drained to sickness and exhaustion by its own addictive need to incessantly extract value from enjoyment, to have it and triangulate it and communicate it. Thus, as he says in his own way, “It’s never as stark as pointless or not pointless. It’s, you know, what’s interesting, what’s advanced, what’s next? It’s gotta be – right? Not what’s true, but what’s fresh and novel and whatever. It’s very difficult to get out of that.” (232) To Wallace, not just the culture industry but the cultural conversational industry turns the struggle to parse personal and social meaning of the bombardment of cultural material into what Jodi Dean has called ‘communicative capitalism’, the reduction of transformative political, artistic, intellectual and affective energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings, “the materialization of ideals and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensify global capitalism”. In the deep freeze of the neoliberal years, long before the exacerbation of the logic had reached the point in which it could be granted a discrete theoretical name at all, Wallace perceived the strange tie between the abundant materialization of cultural ideas and the fundamental poverty of the public communication in which they aired and changed nothing. Indeed, this is precisely why he is so keen to emphasize to Lipsky that the effort to create a meaningful art is not a fight against vacuity, as such, but, on the contrary, a battle against sapience, against the capacity of cultural objects that are fundamentally delimiting, infantilizing and exhausting to possess within them that mix of acumen and erudition and fatuity we call ‘interesting’, to thrill and soothe us with very real intellectual depths, depths in which one could spend infinity grooving. As he remarks,
“These really – the really commercial, really reductive shows that we so love to sneer at. Are also tremendously compelling. Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what’s coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything’s going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won’t in any way challenge you. It’s like being wrapped in a chamois blanket and nestled against a big, generous tit, you know? And that, OK, artwise maybe not the greatest art. But the function it provides is deep in a certain way.
That all this stuff is deadly serious and really deep all the time. I mean, it doesn’t mean that you should go around being some kind of scholar of pop culture and dismantling all the stuff. But that it’s – that we find, that art finds a way to take care of you, and take part. Kind of despite itself.” (199)
Here, as in Infinite Jest, what captures Wallace’s attention is not the absence of any aesthetic integrity or intelligence in cultural entertainment – that which would enable us to objectively identity it as trash – but rather the way in which it assimilates epiphany into itself in such a way that it is both truly deep and truly non-threatening through its structural passivization of persons. But what’s most important in this is not just the profundity but the sneering at entertainments that seem lame and how we love it. It is exactly the ability of these objects not only to enamor with their depths but also to satisfy superiority through their permission of a certain status quo cynicism that is also their great comfort, their generous tit. For Wallace, the knowingness cultural junk allows, whether in appreciation of its glimmers of greatness or excoriation of its general shittiness, is exactly what defines the actual blurring of the line between serious art and the cultural items of everyday life: this rise not of junk culture exactly, or of a culture industry, but of an entertainment industry that fuses together discernment and blindness, deepness and deprivation. And from this, Wallace insists, there arises a fundamental critical crisis for people in formulating discriminating judgments on what counts in the culture at large, as the culture easily enlists art to take care of you ‘despite itself’. So it is, then, that if Lipsky and Wallace talk approvingly in the interview of honest moments in otherwise dishonest cultural phenomena, what becomes clear from a comprehensive view of the conversation is that, for Wallace, the interest in such moments lies not so much in their self-sufficiency as artistic glimmers but in the challenge they present to the artist, the cry of an inner genius in the culture which is collaboratively indentured to circuits of capital and yet, in spite of itself, begs to be liberated. Far from a rarity, artistry abounds in our culture but in parsed doses. It sort of nourishes even as it extracts, like a depressed wage system of joy: a quotient of real, deep pleasure doled out for a far larger expenditure and effort of consumption. The problem is then that we are inundated not with extraneous information per se but a sort of inevitability within that of redeeming art, an inevitability that immunizes the system against its own overload and allows it to extend the frontiers of its essential need to extract value from culture and promulgates the denial of pleasure which is crucial to that process. And beyond that, we are encouraged to convert our immiseration by this system of glutted scarcity into productions of knowingness, of communication and transmission, which may then also be vacuumed of value.
It is in this context that one can only begin to appreciate the sources of Wallace’s deeply troubled attitude toward success, integrity and the intellect. In a recent review of Lipsky’s book, Salon’s Laura Miller takes the recent effulgence of Wallace-related paraphernalia to task (even as she goes on to confer her essential approval on Lipsky’s book itself, thus, in classic Miller-style, making sure not to throw the bathwater out with the baby). As she writes, “Wallace’s death was tragic, but the actual tragedy has been further wrapped in a mantle of hysterical pop tragedy, that process by which virtually any self-destroying celebrity is transubstantiated into the avatar of each fan’s personal misery.” All this is very well and good but, all the same, such moralizing postures about the fan are not the critical outside to such ‘hysterical pop tragedy’. They are, rather, the ideological alibi of knowingness that keeps the whole torrid pop show going. In other words, it is this method of a ‘disinterested’ mode of critical approval for books like Although, Of Course that creates the very exploitation it castigates: or, to put it another way, the commentaries that exempt themselves from involvement by directing our evaluations to their deeper core are not against the cultural defanging of David Wallace (especially in the wake of his sad and difficult death) but are at the very essence of it. Surely this is why – despite Lipsky’s attempts to channel a Monte Hellman Two Lane Blacktop vibe in his introduction as a means to frame the book – the conversation, if we’re honest, mostly comes off tonally as a sort of hip, sanctionable version of Tuesdays with Morrie. And surely this is also why Lipsky heightens his irritating persona in the book, allows us to see him play the sap deliberately. While Lipsky’s painfully superficial greenness (best evidenced in his pestering, recursive questions about how good it must feel to be famous) is evidently a real part of the exchange as it took place, there seems no doubt that Lipsky’s “wised-up, padded-shoulder” attitude (as he dubs it) is left ‘uncut’ (or, in actual fact, is invisibly finessed: cuts to Lipsky’s part of dialogue abound) precisely so as to confer on Wallace the refined sense of an elder, a gnostic centre that incites the very ‘wise man’ quality he so desperately wishes to escape and that reviews like Miller attack as self-involved sentimentalism. As such, instead of an author whose work attacks the continuum of communicative capital, we’re given a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi of the waking mind, inflicted with a myriad of tragic human foibles, to boot. It is just this which makes Lipsky’s transcript not the raw ore of Wallace but mystification of him at its most exquisite.
On this point, we might also note the way that recognition of Wallace’s genius is used not to praise him exactly but praise him through the validation of the pathological anxieties that genius had about itself. To explain more clearly, what emerges in the Lipsky interview is not merely the sense that Wallace possesses an atypical mind, worthy of praise for its errant nature, for its restive recalcitrance to the circuits of acculturation, but that he becomes a genius only insofar as he thinks the way we all do, just better. This idea of the slightly gifted average joe is, of course, an attitude that Wallace actively encourages himself, in his earnest wish not to hold himself categorically above the heads of the people around him, as a different breed of being, well aware as he is that he is placed in the same communicative conditions as they, and all too conscious of the fact that intelligence – far from an owed, insured property – becomes stupidity at the moment it mistakes the capacity to have cogent insights for an infinite entitlement to declamate, when it ceases, that is, to pay deep mind to the intelligence of others. But if there is nothing pathological about this, Wallace also stretches his self-effacement further, into a desperate desire to eradicate all consciousness of his own intelligence, and it is this act of erasure, oddly, that earns his genius such approval. Take, for instance, Laura Miller’s oft-quoted description of Wallace as possessing “the careful modesty of a recovering smart aleck”. Is not the system of values implied in such back-handed approbation precisely what Wallace found himself struck dumb before, like a deer in the headlights? Where is the critical effort to undo this tangle, to separate Wallace’s recognized genius from our antipathies toward intellect in ways Wallace himself, out of confusion, modesty and sheer finitude, could not do? In the interview, Wallace tells Lipsky that the parts of him that used to think he was smarter or different “almost made me die” (216). It would stand to reason, then, that to critically praise Wallace’s intelligence, against the pathology that plagued it, would be to speak of its absolute inassimilable quality, not as an indication of its superiority, but as a sign of its fundamental waywardness and to meet its intrepidity at refusing to consider itself better than everyone else with the critical courage to acknowledge that it was much more than a heightened version of the natural genius of everyone else.
The fact is that a certain moral antipathy is directed at anyone in this culture smart enough to want to be smarter before they speak, even when they decide they must speak anyway. It’s no surprise, accordingly, that artistic experimentalists and theoretical and philosophical humanities academics are recurrently charged with elitism, inaccessibility and obscurity by the gatekeepers of the cultural conversation, for any intellectuality that prizes precision over access, that prolongs the realisation of itself, that sits at odds with communicative capital – which fails, in short, to fall in formation with the professionalization of intellect for the widest possible market – is considered ipso facto ‘undemocratic’ – which is another way of saying, ‘unmarketable’. The brittle mediocrity of the skill set of our commentariat culture is deeply dependent on a certain anti-intellectualism so as to sustain its own inflated sense that its cultural work is the best on offer, to assure itself that what it does has a mission past its own abstraction of issues on behalf of communicative capital. And so it is that David Wallace (who was himself seduced by this demand that one needed always to speak to the public, that any intellectual withdrawal from the widest production was inherently elitist) can only be lauded from within the cultural conversation for his relatability to that conversation, not its critical aversion to its terms. As Lipsky writes in his introduction to the interview, what thrilled him (and New York lit culture generally) about Wallace, at the time that his reputation began to catch fire, was not the freshness of his insights per se but, rather, that “he’d done a thing that was casual and gigantic; he’d captured everybody’s brain voice” (xxviii). It is this, more than anything else, that is the most tragic and unsettling part of Although, Of Course: watching the man struggling to fight down the fact that society punishes a mind that manifests itself too much, even when it is mindful, even when it works tirelessly to achieve an understanding of the complexities of the most disparate lives, things and subjectivities; his confused misunderstanding that too much intellectuality must mean becoming ‘out of touch’, especially if that intellectuality should involve acknowledging itself in any way as feeling okay with being at odds with this culture’s atavistic anti-theoretical drive, if it should embrace an understanding that such an acceptance of being at odds with the cultural conversation does not entail, thereby, an arrogance that automatically puts one above the public one writes for, but, on the contrary, more commonly insists on one becoming radically in touch with the reality of the public’s management, a reality that the public too, in its everyday life, perceives and gleans and struggles against, precisely because it, too, is not dumb.
An intellectual is a person who speaks from a position of theory, not out of love of the authority of the intellect but precisely because abstraction is the most concrete form of thought. The ‘cultural conversation’ – that which appears as concrete thought, grounded and down to earth – is entirely abstracted from the matters it turns into ‘issues’. It predicates the validity of positions by their cleverness (not their acuity) and sorts them by the mark of their professional success. It is this realization – the ‘elitist’ academic notion that the conversation is itself an elitist mechanism, regimented in its duty to raise up culture up (and thus hold culture down) to a certain level of (real but inadequate) middling competency – that commentarial culture detests, the understanding that it can only think through the coercive regime of ‘free’ opinion, that it thrives on the production of mediocre interventions that turn the productive mill of recursive – though certainly entertaining – reductivity. Toward the end of the five day interview, Lipsky puts the case to Wallace that his modesty is mostly a social strategy, a kind of act in which, while he does feel smarter than other people, he holds back his hits as though he’s playing in the kid’s softball game. Understandably distressed by this flatly crass provocation, Wallace eventually responds to Lipsky’s suspicion by saying, with beautiful accuracy: “…I mean I can talk intelligently with you and stuff. But I can’t quite keep up with you.” When the question of being intelligent is collapsed into a game of how adaptive and resistive you can be simultaneously, there is no way to keep up; the very playing field is rigged. In his effort to ally extraordinary insight with intellectual egalitarianism, Wallace often became fearful of conceit and forgot that conceit, while the enemy of any broad thinker looking to connect, is actually often also a weapon used against you, a device in the arsenal deployed against emancipatory thinking, an accusation which is an ideological component of the enforced logic of cultural passivity Wallace struggled to negate. Another sad thing we can see proven absolutely in Although Of Course is that Wallace was not always privy to the answers, as he constantly and sincerely said. But that’s the thing: it is hellaciously difficult to keep track of the perimeters of a prison when imprisonment is enforced in the very form of an open conversation devoted to the dimensions and density of the bars.
If I have been fairly unkind to Lipsky in this review, it is not because I doubt the goodness of his intentions in giving us this extended glimpse of Wallace. Rather, the question is why this book needed to be a book at all: why must it exist like this? Why, that is, did it have to be packaged and sold in such a way where it could only become the very kind of cultural object Wallace found so antagonizing and distressing? The larger point here is not so much about a fidelity to Wallace’s memory as to whether his self-appointed cultural flamekeepers have even really understood the true radicality of what it was he was so diligently trying to do. Although, Of Course is an undeniably important document and I am glad I have been able to read it. But it could easily have been disseminated in an entirely different and non-commercial way – posted online, for instance, for free, in transcript form, with the original voice recordings included, at a website devoted to it, as an unceremonious phenomenon. As it exists, it is not merely an intimate document on Wallace but is an advertisement for the cultural conversation’s tiresome appreciation of its own capacity to appreciate the man’s challenge to it, to spin his critical persona into another evocative, questioning, denuded entertainment for all. Perhaps this is pious but, as Wallace argued, perhaps we need more piety in a culture given to baroque and infinitely convincing justifications for essentially self-interested, artfully sentimental, exploitatively self-reflexive, expropriational actions. The failure of this book-length interview to provide a memorial that is not an entertainment is an additional aura of loss and loneliness around the Wallace we read and, even unedited, are not permitted to know.
[...] contains an interview he did on TV in France. I like how she says ‘pee-doh-file’. 2. At Transductions, David Rylance considers David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road [...]
David, this is a lovely piece of writing, and I happen to agree.
I would say the former word rings a bell, without reading the piece of shit. Searching for a word here… Craven, comes to mind, actually. I feel toward David Wallace what I feel toward all writers (including myself, it must be said); that the gestation of work and your development makes for a great product, but as soon as the salesmen (besides oneself) show up, it is over… A plague on the perceptions of the living reader, opposed to the will of the thrice-dead author, who was more often than not trying to “get out of the way” of the same reader with imaginary prose. The afterlife of literary character, its maintenance and monitoring, strike me as the heart of how literary speech is taxed (even in death. ie Why it makes much more sense to stay alive as long as one can absolutely tolerate (to the point of pain), so this type of shit doesn’t happen to you. Not to say that I don’t like conceptually positive analysis, or remembrance where it remains textured with an equivalent temperance, but David Lipsky is not James Boswell. Ahem.
If I could revise, I wouldn’t.
The afterlife of literary character, its maintenance and monitoring, strike me as the heart of how literary speech is taxed (even in death. ie Why it makes much more sense to stay alive as long as one can absolutely tolerate (to the point of pain), so this type of shit doesn’t happen to you. This was a really great point, a part of what I was trying to get at in this, though I’m gathering you think I repeat the error?
Adorno lives! There are some very clear-sighted points here, especially about Wallace’s idea of “an entertainment,” but I would say your investment in genius doesn’t sit well with Wallace stated commitments to the reader, to conversation, and to democracy. I think Wallace would have been suspicious of the elitism involved in such a critical assessment of the culture industry. Infinite Jest isn’t a modernist example of oppositional high culture. What about its therapeutic side, which you underplay, but which seems to me an undeniable part of the reading experience?
Adam, thanks so much for your comment. Forgive me: I ended up writing a fairly protracted reply.
In a way, I feel my interpretation here is much more influenced by de Certeau than Adorno. Perhaps I didn’t manage to convey myself clearly enough but I wished to make the exact point that the distinction that matters in culture is not about mass culture v. high culture but, rather, how the real value of cultural objects is extracted and enclosed through an effusive communicative dispersal. In other words, if Adorno might define mass culture by its monochromatic operations (i.e. ‘the problem is everything’s the same; there’s always a dimension of superficiality’), I’d argue that Wallace was concerned by its relentless abstract expressionist colour (i.e. ‘the problem is nothing has one tone in itself; there’s always a dimension of profundity’). So, in that sense, I’m not sure if I imply that Infinite Jest is oppositional in the modernist high cultural sense, either by intention or in practice. Or if I do, I mean exactly the opposite. I think IJ – and all of Wallace’s writings – are very grounded in the commons and the culturally relevant. And, while the word ‘therapeutic’ leaves me guarded, not least because such medical overconfidence was a large part of what undid Wallace in the end – I agree that his novel is absolutely meant to be an act of critical care and of solidarity between addicts (i.e. the halfway house).
Again, I find it interesting that you felt obliged to resort to the term ‘elitism’ to respond to the angle of the criticism I was (attempting to) articulate in this piece. I mean, I think my reading here is not that mass culture is junk but that what we know as cultural junk simply isn’t junk, and how that’s exactly the problem. It has this very palpable infinity to it and it’s not ‘fake’ in the slightest. But it’s the wrong infinity, or, better, it’s a jealous infinity, which will brook no other idols besides its graven own. It becomes even more tyrannical because of the supposed ‘choice’ it offers between idols (so many things to like, so many ways to self-style) for to want something more than choice is anathema in today’s ‘democratic’ age. And yet it’s exactly what, for instance, the far Right understands and banks upon: as we become freer to choose under this system, we become more obsessed with law and order, with controls upon the choosers.
When I speak of genius, I really only mean the unique transformative energies, both of the writer (Wallace) and of the culture. Because, in a sense, it’s not that the products of companies like Starbucks and Apple oppress us, or even that they tyrannize us with their false liberation, but, more precisely, that they subordinate joy to gain in an consumerist enterprise bargain and enlist us in their service. So our predicament is that we produce intensely meaningful goods but at the price of ceding the right to economic democracy. When the real ideological trick is that to make us believe you couldn’t have economic democracy and fascinating consumer objects. In other words, capital coerces us into a type of liberal blackmail in which the things we like about mass culture – or the freedom provided by consumption itself – can seemingly only be had at the cost of remaining in capitalism. Rather than capitalism being the very thing that dumbs down and inhibits the most intriguing energies of consumption; that, in other words, only wants to dole out doses of pleasure rather than communize its full value. In practice, what I would mean is you might enjoy a crime show, for instance, say Monk, or a video game, say Mass Effect 2, but these things are not the norm of cultural production. They are the lure. And we deserve a better relation to cultural creation, that doesn’t function on the entrapping dialectic between lure and norm. This system of immiseration is designed not to let it happen, though.
So, in that respect, I’d argue that a book like Infinite Jest tries to be a failed entertainment not to show up the culture, but to show the culture what it already really is and what more it could be. Its genius. And as for the question of genius in terms of Wallace himself: I’m sure he would have fundamentally resisted the implications in being called any such thing. However, it’s not the superiority of his intellect that I was trying to rescue or defend. I was trying to argue that the worth of his mind needn’t be thought in terms of how level it was with the cultural conversation: ‘everybody’s brain voice’. In this, I was actually criticising Wallace’s tendency – in not so many words – to dump on the academy and on experimental literature. I was trying to oppose the restoration of a low/high culture divide in the very accusation of ‘elitism’ that avant-garde or academic work is routinely subject to. Like, simply because high theory or experimentalist art does not communicatively conduct itself in terms of maximum accessibility does not mean it assumes a conceited relationship toward culture. Rather, what avant-garde and high theory has is not a high but a marketless relationship to culture. That isn’t to say that it’s free of market rationales or motives, that it doesn’t have readers or a financial logic, but that it has no bankable base, no prospectus, and that it forges relations with cultural items and objects in a way that isn’t about a demographic exactly or the production of opinion in a cultural moment. Many people cannot read an experimentalist or academic text spontaneously and grasp it comprehensively, perhaps, but difficulty is not against democracy; it’s at the very heart of it. If anything, the ‘irrelevance’ of experimentalism (from the perspective of the cultural conversation) is exactly the sign that it is not in opposition to mass culture but is repugnant precisely in its advanced engagement with it. What the cultural conversation tries to do at all costs is obscurify difficult texts, to not translate the work of high theory and art into a larger language – which is what used to be the function of public intellectuals who are now much more interested in becoming opinion columnists (it’s less work, for one thing).
This isn’t to say that there aren’t institutional problems and stagnations in experimental and academic cultures and institutions. But condemning art for a failure to be accessible is like burning astronomers for failing to place the stars at a closer distance. To me, Wallace’s own anxiety about conceit or elitism wasn’t wrong – obviously, as a trait that interferes with being open and egalitarian, one wants to avoid both like the plague – but his apprehension about conceit was too caught up in the social pathologization of emancipatory thought. His fear of being egotistical did not result in the desire to get out of the reader’s way, as JW writes above, alone, but the imperative to become someone fundamentally else. That, of course, is a desire I’m totally in sync with: rare is the day I wake up as myself and wish I either hadn’t woken up at all or, at least, woken up as me. And so while there is a brilliant critical awareness in the idea of ‘although of course you end up becoming yourself’, there’s also a fatality about the intellect in it, a fatality which this culture zeroes in on, as a means to shame and castigate as elitism or snobbery the wish to communicate one’s own alienation into the desire for other people also to be free to become something fundamentally else: to think entrapment systematically and systemically. Any emancipatory thinking of this kind invariably is attacked as a type of standing over or bullying of the people. I think this is exactly why Wallace was so intrigued by the addict as a metaphor. The addict, to break addiction, needs the imposition of something over them, some structure or sociality or supportive sincerity, because addiction is an illness of ability to do differently. But this over-view is not a standing over; it’s a kind of alliance between the social and the self as a way to reactivate the self as a collective, as a body with actual options. I think Wallace thought art needed to do that ’standing over’ so that we could begin to imagine fundamentally new ways of wanting and, as follows, of being in the world. The problem is that he didn’t allow himself the conceit that even artists need to be stood over by something too. That’s what experimentalism does: it’s the exterior resource for the wielders of public power, how they can be kept honest and learn to democratically disperse it. No wonder, then, that it’s relegated by those institutions of public power to a periphery of irrelevance: it is those institutions, not the people, who do not wish to read.
The problem is, David Foster Wallace’s suicide wasn’t a tragedy. It was the act of a man who, a professional postmodern and therefore a purveyor of mendacities, had nonetheless belatedly realised that it was time, as Auden put it, ‘for the destruction of error’. Wallace’s suicide was his only Modernist act.
David, thanks for your extensive reply (mine has turned out long too). Firstly, I hope my initial comment didn’t appear flippant. By “Adorno lives!” I meant less to assimilate your whole critique to the ideas of Adorno, than to praise you for continuing the spirit of his critique while developing it in your own way to operate in the altered cultural and economic context of “the deep freeze of the neoliberal years” (a beautiful phrase to describe an unbeautiful phenomenon). I’m not familiar with de Certeau’s work, so you’ll have to forgive me that.
Though I read a lot of blog posts, I rarely if ever respond with a comment, so posting one was mainly to mark my appreciation for such a full analysis of the material status of Lipsky’s book. A proper response would be something more akin to a line-by-line commentary, but that’s obviously impractical. So I’ll just respond here to a couple of specific things in the original post and your reply to me.
I agree completely that the question of whether Although Of Course “is ultimately more sincere than in bad taste is less interesting than the fact both components exists side by side in the book together.” I have written elsewhere about this problem, and agree that it gets to the heart of what you call “compositional questions of a deeply Wallacian nature.”
Following on from this though, I wonder could you parse a bit more the phrase about an entertainment being “free to act entirely in accordance with its financial logic.” I understand your point (or Wallace’s point, I suppose) about the interest of cultural objects being in the emotional content they embed in often profound ways – and the possible damage of this for radical thought – but I’m struggling to think of a cultural object that is not “free to act entirely in accordance with its financial logic.” I’m not nit-picking here, but the phrase “financial logic” seems crucial somehow. I mean, Infinite Jest is a book that sells, so although it strives to offer an example of an entertainment that doesn’t work, it still seems to me to operate in accordance with its financial logic. You mention high theory in your response as an example of something with a “marketless” relation to culture, but you also say it has a financial logic, but is such theory not then free to act in accordance with it? Perhaps I’m just missing the theoretical reference that underpins the argument.
All this is important because you argue specifically at the end of the essay that Although of Course shouldn’t be a book, because it then becomes “the very kind of cultural object Wallace found so antagonizing and distressing.” But my take on this (and it may be that I’m simply less materialist in my convictions) would be that Wallace won’t judge a book by its cover, so to speak, because the reader is not absolutely deprived of the potentially radical content of a text by the mode of its presentation. Surely the consistently Wallacian position would be that it would not in fact be possible “to provide a memorial that is not an entertainment” – remember that Infinite Jest is also an entertainment, just one that doesn’t work. It may be that you prefer the form of high theory to the failed entertainment of Infinite Jest, but I think Infinite Jest gains a huge amount by attempting to speak to the “cultural conversation” and by doing so trying to shift its terms.
Speaking of which, my other main point (implicit, I admit) was that I think your equation of democracy with marketability (and the whole discourse that builds upon that assumption) would worry Wallace. I understand that you’re referring to a contemporary context in which the slur ‘undemocratic’ is thrown around as a slogan of anti-intellectualism. But one of the signal merits of Wallace’s work in my view is his attempt to reevaluate positively a series of sentimentalised terms – love, sincerity, democracy, faith etc. – by refusing to remain within the sphere of negative critique. This is normally understood as an attempt to get beyond irony, which I think is a bad way to put it, but it certainly involves a kind of public-spiritedness that seems to me to put the capitalist sphere, and “communicative capitalism,” to one side (see “Authority and American Usage). I’m sure you’d probably reject that separation, but it seems to me to be there in Wallace.
I guess I think, finally, that there is real value in Wallace’s conservatism as much as in his radicalism. The point is that the things he wanted to conserve, the boundaries he wanted to draw, were there to delimit a selfhood conceived as other than capital and its forces of addiction. That’s what I meant by therapeutic – that’s another term Wallace tried to reevaluate in his uniquely undecidable way. That kind of reevaluation seems to me to be what he felt people needed – not simply that it was spuriously “relevant” to the cultural conversation, but that there were terms in that conversation that could and should be maintained, but evaluated upwards. You might say it’s about not throwing out the bathwater with the baby, Miller-style.
Adam, hi. Thanks so much for the extensive and deeply thoughtful response. This is long again, sorry, but I did try to keep it reigned in, so forgive me if I maybe make more assertions (meant for further consideration) than comprehensively proven arguments.
First off, to your point about the difficulty of thinking of *any* cultural object that does not accord to its financial logic, I agree that financial logics are ubiquitous (if not universal). And naturally, academics and experimentalists fall within those logics the moment they affix a value to them that seeks to many any remunerative profit. But while I was certainly making a case for piety in the post above, I wasn’t intending to argue for a sort of monasterial attitude, the kind of conceits about authenticity that come about in the call to subtract oneself from the market. While that can salve the individual or local conscience, like living green etc., socially that’s a nice recipe for effectively doing little to nothing at all. Having said that, however, I think there’s an apologetic tendency, an entrenched anxiety even, in both experimental and academic circles, an obligatory “humbling” need to forestall the dreaded elitist charge in any critique of the relation between culture and capital by quickly moving to note that finance implicates the culture products of the experimentalist-academic nexus, too. This is factually true, of course, no argument. But what its rhetorical misuse does is factually mistake the rivenness of the ubiquity of financial logics (in the plural) for a solidarity, a common fate of being trapped in a unparticularised financial logic, pertaining to everyone (middle class) all and everywhere the same. In a sense, the flat fact high theory and experimental art has a financial value and thus a logic does not place it in the same relation to cultural capitalization as, say, a very tasty hamburger or an iPhone. It’s not that these latter items are more capitalist in themselves than high theory (a mistake I think leads into self-defeating pseudo-Marxist aspersions on consumerism) but this similarity in involvement should not lead us to accept the capitalist notion that there is simply no difference between them in terms of financial aim and accumulation. The fundamental de-capitalization of the arts, the fact most experimental texts and academic theory simply don’t make all that much money ever, and must rely on institutional politics of state/private donation dispersal, or upon intellectual waged-labour in the university, to sustain them, is all for naught when we simply cave to the idea ‘we’re in this too’. We are, but how? Why I say that experimentalist and academic work has a “marketless” or “unmarketable” relation to culture is that – no matter how much money it makes – it is fundamentally superfluous in the business ontology of accumulative, growth-driven finance. Take, for instance, the recent expulsion of the philosophy school at Middlesex university. While the center for philosophy was actually capitalizing the university both in terms of funding and reputation, and thus acting in accordance with its financial logic, it was nonetheless decided by the management that philosophy in and of itself bore no inherent necessity to the extension of higher education’s financial logic. For whatever it was worth, it was worth more worthless. That’s the “marketless” or “unmarketable” aspect I refer to: this fundamental ‘bare life’ of the experimentalist and academic humanities, even when they’re inculcated in private patronage or make a rare hit on the bookstands.
In terms of your point on Infinite Jest acting according to its financial logic, we move to a slightly different terrain, as we’re looking here at a book that was developed and released via a large NY publishing house and which, as you say, is very deliberately aimed at the wider reading public. Indeed, as a book that knows in advance it will gain about the widest exposure a literary book can get, it means to test the self-serving consensus on just what that wider reading public will accept. Yet, there’s an interesting point in his talk with Lipsky where Wallace suggests something to the effect (I’m not citing directly as I don’t have to book to hand right now, sorry) that readers of long popular fiction books won’t be likely to read his own book, or that they won’t be able to just because it’s epic or because it manages to create its own sense of a fictional world, in a manner similar to Tolkien or Stephen King or Tom Clancy (to take three very different examples of popular fiction world-making). I found this especially interesting, as it reminds us that Infinite Jest isn’t everybody’s book in everybody’s brain voice. From this, I’d argue that Wallace’s novel was not really designed or intended to speak to the literate non-reader or the popular fiction ‘everyperson’ so much as its failed entertainment was designed to derail the quite literate and well-read mandarins of the ‘cultural conversation’ and their investment in evaluating art in terms of its successful entertainment value. Its not that I think Infinite Jest could not be, or isn’t, read and loved by readers of popular fiction, or, for that matter, that I mean to take a dump on popular fiction as less than Infinite Jest (since popular fiction, especially popular horror fiction, is manna to me). Rather, the point is that the bounding, common element of Wallace’s prose is a kind of schooling in exactly what the cultural conversation should itself be doing, the ideas it should be developing, transforming and translating to the public. It’s a novel that is what an actually sophisticated, non-entertainment enamoured but still connective and entertaining cultural conversation would look like. It contains, in itself, the transfigurative communication that the cultural conversation deliberately does not.
It’s that challenge of the book that I think has been airbrushed successively out of it. In fact, I wonder whether it was ever really appreciated or understood. Since it was meant to be called a ‘failed’ entertainment but ultimately never was: not a salable title. Still, I mean, it’s not a matter for me of preferring the form of high theory or experimental literature to the wider outreach of something like Wallace’s Infinite Jest – that is to say, it’s not that the ‘marketless’ forms can only be the truly emancipatory forms. On the contrary, I don’t really view the issue in a structure of preference but see the two as being locked in an emancipatory relation with one another. Just as I don’t think the mandatory aim of theory and art should be accessibility or simplicity, that they both become ‘elitist’ if they fail to comport to that criteria, I don’t think theory or art can only have integrity when it avoids cultural communication, even in conditions of communicative capitalism. Rather, capital depends upon the prohibition that divides the two: so that the key relation between cultural communication and the experimental-theoretical is lopped off by the belief that experimentalists or academics wont be relevant until they speak to the public or that the promotional work of cultural communication has nothing to do with the culture of theory and art.
Why I took Lipsky’s book to task, specifically, as a book I feel could easily not have existed, was not because its content seems an alibi for the desire to put out a product; not at all. My question is this: if the thing is actually quite valuable, if it needed a public existence as I strongly believe, did it need thereby to become a New York Times bestseller on its way to the public? Why I suggest this could have easily been given an online life, without charge, is precisely to retain its status as a document. It’s not that I think it loses something its worth because its published; it’s that automaticity implied between the two things. I have no idea of course what Lipsky has done with the money this has made him (I read online somewhere he received a $100,000 advance, though I don’t know if that’s at all reliable) – he could have given it to charity, or the Wallaces, or David’s wife, or bought himself a bitchin’ new stereo. I don’t really care, actually, because my point is not to expose David Lipsky. It’s to ask why it is I bought this book, and why I had to buy it, both why my interest in D. Wallace would lead me to snatch it up and why it was a thing that, in a sense, was designed not just to be bought but bought exactly that way. Is this document better in its current existence? I honestly don’t think so, for all the reasons I mentioned above – the ode to communicative capital (ie. the way it makes ’success’ such an annoying value the reader is above even as it instils success as the pinnacle of all things desirable), the reduction of Wallace to guru, the problematic domestication of intelligence, not to mention, too, the copyright entanglements this public document is now exposed to through being rendered via the publishing house book form. And it’s not just about this book. Many cultural items today have great justification for existence but that justification is translated into a necessity for existence in the commodity form. It’s not that I’m against people wanting to publish in book form, or naively overstating the net as a democratic, non-market platform. I’d have the same problem if the book was online but subject to charge for access. Mainly, my point about *this* book was that it not only could have been delivered but seems far more logical to deliver as a public service: public was preferable to private. But we so automatically justify any value as prospectively monetary, we now even overlook the very possibility of an option. This is the very definition of an entertainment that works, not because it entertains (so does theory, at least to me) but because it pulls off the trick of instrumentalizing value as having no alternative but the financial product it exists in. It works.
This takes me to your last point. The whole question of ‘democracy’ is a difficult one. From a leftist perspective, the two general tacks you can take toward democracy, it seems to me, are either to contend that what we have to today is imperfect democracy and seek to extend it in the name of a true democracy to come or else, on the other hand, argue that democracy is precisely the barrier to a real emancipatory politics and we need to become ‘post-democratic’ – without becoming authoritarian. I don’t have a pre-ready answer to this, though I do kind of feel as though the solution to this lies in both terms, as contradictory as that sounds. At any rate, this is a theme I’ve been working on, that I’m still at work on, and a larger topic than I sort of wish to follow up on right now, sorry. But leaving aside my answer to the question, what I would say is that the simultaneity of democracy and the market is, nonetheless, the fundamental equation of our ‘democratic’ moment. If it would perturb Wallace, it isn’t simply my assertion. Indeed, is not the fundamental anxiety of the financial crisis not the idea that we will lose democracy (think, especially, of the Tea Party movement)? I absolutely agree with you that one of the signal merits of Wallace’s work was to rehabilitate sentimental terms like love, faith, sincerity etc. but I’d suggest there was a distinctly “undemocratic” DFW too, evidenced in the grammarian. I never much cared for Wallace’s pedantic grammatical rules but I did like how it was an area where the value he places on accuracy over democracy is allowed to break through his usually impeccable shield of average-Joe modesty. I would firmly agree with you (and with Wallace) that there is a public-spiritedness that is able to exceed or subtend communicative capital but I don’t think it is able to exactly put it “to one side”, to use your words. Putting it to one side is, in fact, the communicative capitalist move par excellence – for when capital is put to one side, one can cleave to the fantasy that we don’t need to do anything about capitalism to achieve democracy, that all democracy is perfectly achievable in capital. (I’m thinking here, especially, of Richard Rorty, who Wallace fantastically tears apart in his story from Oblivion, ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’.) That’s the very ground zero of capitalist utopianism – not today, not tomorrow but someday this system will get there, so we must be patient and suffer it.
Wallace wasn’t a Marxist, I can’t even say for sure he was clearly anti-capitalist, but that doesn’t matter to me. In fact, the very fact that isn’t clear and it doesn’t matter is exactly why I agree with you that public-spiritedness can subtend or exceed communicative capital. But if, as you say, “the things he wanted to conserve, the boundaries he wanted to draw, were there to delimit a selfhood conceived as other than capital and its forces of addiction”, I’d suggest that his means of doing this was to make ‘therapy’ (if you want to use that term) seductive, not a shock doctrine (a la Klein). Or, in other words, to addict one to the hard work of taking responsibility (which is very much in the spirit of Marx). However, I can’t really see this as an elevation upwards of the terms of the cultural conversation precisely because that would mean we would have to accept that terms like ‘faith’, ‘integrity’, ‘public’, ‘democracy’, ‘love’, ’sincerity’ in their capitalist circulation only wear their sentimentalist ideology like a bunting a more valorous attitude can cast off. The problem is the spaces of those terms are absolutely corrupt in the terms of their current usage and the corruption carries upwards in each new movement of reform. So, in essence, far from elevating them, Wallace’s positive contribution was to take those terms and turn them into the sphere of negative critique, to refuse the very idea of their sentimentality or desentimentalisation, the poles of either their ‘earthiness’ or their ‘obsolescence’. He resuscitated them by treating them not as idealistic but as the only realistic way to live. It’s a move that has a lot to teach us today where we’re clutching around for a language to take on the capitalist realism of our time and keep coming up against ‘values’ politics and its twin, cynical reason, the market Stalinism of ‘no alternative’.
David et al, the staggering intellect and fierce insight proposed in this piece (and the comments/replies) is wonderful.
It made my brain hurt.
I am gathering strength for a second read through, this time with a high lighter!
Please keep up the absolutely stunning writing.
Peter, David,
This piece has really stuck with me since I first read it, and I’ve been wanting for ages to respond again, taking the last long comment by David into account. I just haven’t been able to put aside the time it would require. At some point I will. In the meantime, perhaps Peter can take up the mantle?
In case either of you are interested, I’ve just published an article examining the development of Wallace Studies here: http://www.ijasonline.com/Adam-Kelly.html
Adam: Thanks so much for the kind words. Not a problem at all on responding – I’m more than a little snowed under myself. I’ve been meaning to sit down and read your review article and am very keen to and will definitely get to it soon. If you’d like, I’ll email you any thoughts that occur from reading, as well as general impressions. Thanks again, and all the best.
I share a mailing list with Adam Kelly, who posted there about this conversation, and I’m loving reading it. I haven’t thought this deeply about the financial logic of cultural products in quite a while, so excuse me for some naivete. But I feel somewhat dim for being unable to make out David’s underlying theoretical assertions about the mutually emancipatory relationship between marketless (academic/experimental) art and capitalism, and/or between theoretical art and popular art. Surely, each of these things have value (in a more abstract cultural sense than a capitalist one) but I don’t understand how one is emancipated by the other. In fact, when you argue that capital or capitalism) depends on the prohibition of any overlap between ‘cultural communication’ and ‘experimental/theoretical art,’ I’m inclined to vehemently disagree, if only I could be sure that’s what you really meant to say.
I worry deeply about the complex relationship between capitalism and democracy (as did Wallace), and am tempted to agree that Infinite Jest is an anti-capitalist work, in the sense that it proposes an ethical scheme for judging personal achievement that is largely outside materialism. But criticizing Lipsky for publishing his transcript as a salable book instead of as a free website or some alternative scheme ignores the value of the publishing house itself, in terms of its ability to market and publicize important work that people ought to consider. I’m all for transfiguring the relationship between arts and capital, but I’m not sure what you propose makes any sense, even as an anti-capitalist stunt.
George: Thanks for posting. Forgive me for the delay in writing back – and also too if I take some time to respond to any response, I’m a little detained at the moment, I’m afraid, as well as a touch under the weather. However, to your comments:
First off, when I call academic or experimental art ‘marketless’, I mean it in a very specific way. It is not that the humanities or the experimental art world is without a financial logic, that it isn’t money-oriented, but rather that it is without logic in terms of the financial – that it is, at most, existentially assigned to the concept of the boutique, elite and indulgent so that, in relation to the market, humanities and art work are held to live on a kind of sufferance and, in response, engage in a mad treadmill of attempts to make themselves ‘relevant’ to the culture – and such indexation of relevance could, perhaps, be defined as ground zero of the banality of the cultural conversation. Part of what draws me to use such a categorical term like ‘marketless’, however, is precisely the dominance of the idea of our total saturation by capital. Reports of capital’s ascendance are greatly over-exaggerated. Again, it is not the case that academic research or experimentalist art is less ‘actually capitalist’ than, say, a HD-DVD player or a Starbucks latte but it is, rather, that the logic of profit cannot sustain itself in the same way in terms of those respective items. This is a crucial point because one of the fundamental blockages, I believe, to a more principled acceptance of anti-capitalism on the Left is the weird lingering idea that anti-capitalism must mean being against the real joys and freedoms of the consumer item. But it is not the items per se – it’s the way value is quite violently extracted from them.
To this end, my criticism of Lipsky was not about publishing books through publishing houses as an overall practice. It actually had little to do with an intervention on the publishing industry at all. There is a certain critique to be made of publication houses and the attendant troubles of copyright enforcement but opposing the unique public statement of a bound book that is a quite particular object of one’s own was not what my argument was angling at. My criticism went, instead, to the issue of whether this book is not already and in itself a ’stunt’, to use your own word – and why it is that an alternative scheme – something superbly reasonable and eminently doable – comes to be treated, even in theory, as, at best, something like a stunt only, a thing not to be taken seriously or as fundamentally irrelevant, as it will ‘change nothing’. Imagine one of the indexes we began to judge cultural items on was not whether they were worthy enough to exist but whether they best existed in the medium they came to us in. This is really what an anti-capitalist consumerism would begin to be all about: returning circulation of items of consumption to the commons.
The topic and issue is much much bigger than Lipsky’s book, of course, which I only treat symptomatically here not because it’s a special instance of the problems I outline, but precisely because it isn’t. And also because it happens to run headlong into a writer who, it’s always struck me, had very distinct ideas about cultural delivery systems and existential entrapment. But to your specific rebuttal re: Lipsky’s book. The idea that a publishing house is superior in terms of publicization and marketing seems, at best, quirky, given that the internet is publicisation and marketing become the sea we swim in – if the internet were to have a big Other, surely it’s that. If one were to publish a book online, I can’t really see thereby why the word-of-mouth procedure would not draw the needed attention to the work – remembering too, in this case, that one can notify most inveterate ‘Wallace-heads’ to the existence of the thing via the communities they’ve already established to spread news to one another – i.e. ‘The Howling Fantods’. In fact, the Wallace commencement speech became a book published by Little, Brown precisely because of its immense trending popularity online: kind of going to show that publication was an inverse enclosure and capitalization on an online phenomenon, which indicated that there was money to be made (although I’m sure the brains behind the book also assured themselves it was about giving such an excellent speech the deluxe design it deserved – and I don’t doubt their sincerity; I’m saying that sincerity is the problem). So what people ‘ought to consider’ – to use your on phrase – is partly what I’m taking issue with, I guess – in that there is a distinct imperative that anything of value must make financial account of its value in order to register that it has, indeed, been considered. Thus, to quote from above, again my question is this: “if the thing is actually quite valuable, if it needed a public existence as I strongly believe, did it need thereby to become a New York Times bestseller on its way to the public?” Pointing out the business-ontology of the cultural conversation – which thrives on eschewing such worldiness with its exquisite regard for the ‘finer things – is what my alternative free online version of the Lipsky book was about. It’s not intended as a solution in itself for the transfiguration of the relation between the arts and capital – it can be better thought of as a kind of thought experiment in how inclined against publicity we are by business ontology, even when providing a resource to the commons makes more sense than putting out a privatized object for cultural adjudication and perusal.
To be clear, then: there’s no underlying ‘program’ in this post – least of all one built on the simplistic model of ‘let the arts go online’. Not least because of the clueless emancipatory attitude toward the net that would involve. One of the most pressing anti-capitalist questions today is about the exponentially expanding exploitation of information workers – the fact that information work does not begin and end in a regulated eight-hour work day – and the growing responsibilization (read: sacrificability) of said workers by an increasingly insulated managerial class. That isn’t even to mention the fiercely accelerating enclosure of all forms of public or communal rights to information, and the difficulty determining what it would mean to compensate labourers for their ‘work’ in an age of ‘crowdsourcing’ – a question that is getting zero air time in the ‘traditional’ medias, which can only lament (deceitfully) how the web is threatening to put them out of business.
I should also add that this post isn’t even against salable publication (except insofar as publication entangles something like a transcript – a document – in copyright enclosure). Making money from the thing isn’t so much the issue as the indexation of value as value through the value-extraction process of the cultural conversation – as if the document had to somehow get the recognition of New York book reviewers before it could be meaningful or it can be considered ‘considered’. Oppositely, I’ll add that academic publishing houses are the worst offenders at enclosing value through a system of ‘necessary’ value-extraction: take Routledge – it charges exorbitant costs on the basis that such costs can only justify the expense of publishing books that wont sell. Baloney. What they have in academic books is a secure market: the university library system. Hardcovers that sell for $90 a copy or more are not intended for any audience beyond university libraries – the assured sale. And like such overblown prices, scholars that publish with these presses are very good at ensuring that circulation of their ideas is appended to a scholarly system of academic review of these over-priced books few others can access, a thing that ensures disciplines remain communicative mainly to themselves. One of the biggest barriers to cross-disciplinarity, then, or public reach, is precisely how expensive the books of other disciplines are. In this instance, what we have is a case where the rejection of the promotional work of cultural communication is part of promulgating the irrelevance of knowledge – and, also, too, it shows that ‘promotion’ does not necessarily have to mean ‘advertisement’ or ‘marketing’ but basically using funding to reduce prices so that they are affordable for someone interested outside the discipline and without access to an institutional resource like the university library, so that the book, as it were, can find its people who ought to consider it by being an object that exists in an actually accessible mode. In that sense, the idea in writing this was not to turn ‘put it online’ into an anti-capitalist slogan but to interrogate the sense we have that the capitalisation of items equates to the growth of their relevance, as though the only way to be free was to be valuable, a case of capitalist ontological blackmail par excellence.