Tár, talking vs. writing, when to write for evil magazines
Hi, all! I have a new piece out, two pieces of news, and a reflection.
The piece, which came out in New York Magazine, advances a different reading of the film Tár than the ones I’ve seen thus far. In my view, the film (which I love, predictably) is about the catastrophic effects of careerism, and the ending doesn’t represent a fall from grace so much as a shot at redemption. You can read the piece here: https://www.vulture.com/2023/01/lydia-tr-is-not-an-art-monster.html
The two bits of news: first, my conversation with Agnes Callard about whether writers should talk is now on YouTube. I had so much fun talking to her that I’m sort of convinced to talk sometimes, even though I’m not convinced I’m any good at it. The timing of this discussion is a bit bittersweet, because I published the essay that prompted the event in Gawker, now the latest in a long line of wonderful literary magazines to shutter. (R.I.P. Bookforum, forever my favorite magazine to read and write for.) You can watch/listen to my conversation with Agnes here if you want (I hate the sound of my own voice, so I haven’t listened and have no idea if in fact I sound like an idiot; luckily, if you think I do, I can just say that I warned you):
Second, I’ll be doing an event with the wonderful Russian writer Maxim Osipov at Brookline Booksmith next week; if you’re in Boston, you can come, if you want, and if you’re not, you can poke around on the website and find a way to livestream it. (Evidence that Agnes sort of convinced me: against my better judgment, I seem to go on talking!) Info about the event can be found here: https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/event/maxim-osipov-becca-rothfeld. We’ll be discussing Osipov’s excellent new book, Kilometer 101, which you can and should order here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/kilometer-101?variant=41905417584808. (The other collection of his put out by NYRB, Rock, Paper, Scissors, is also very good. A man who saw me reading it in a cafe said I looked like a “good advertisement for the book” because I hadn’t looked up once, which is a pretty low bar, since I tend to actually read whatever I’m reading, even if it’s bad. Nonetheless, in this case, I didn’t mind not looking up; I don’t mind being an advertisement for this particular book.)
As for the reflection:
Recently, I was asked to write for a magazine that has published a number of pieces I think are morally questionable, indeed, a magazine with a morally questionable (in my view, anyway, and I know that reasonable people can disagree about such things) editorial line. I spent some time thinking—and arguing with colleagues—about what I should do. Did I have a moral responsibility to rebuff the magazine and Take a Stand? Or did I have a moral responsibility to try to change the minds of the magazine’s readers? Or is the world so corrupt that we’re bound to lend support of various kinds to evil institutions, to the point where it doesn’t matter very much if we write for a magazine that’s also pushing positions that we think are a little bit evil? Or is contributing to one magazine rather than another simply not the kind of thing morality constrains? (Clearly no to this last possibility: whether you contribute to Hitler Quarterly is surely a moral matter if anything is, but answers to the other questions strike me as less obvious.) Ultimately, I decided to say no to the magazine, and to explain my reasons as honestly and respectfully as possible to the commissioning editor. But in the course of poking around trying to find something to read about what I should do, I realized that there isn’t much writing on the question of when and whether to refuse to contribute to a publication, although there is much judgmental discussion among writers to the effect of “so-and-so is writing for such-and-such now, yeugh!” I thought a record of my own thought process might be useful, if only as a punching bag should it prove hopelessly misguided.
I think we should start by imagining the purest version of the sort of case at issue—one in which there are no confounding or exculpating factors. In this version of the case, I’m not too busy to write for the magazine (I am in fact too busy), I am not desperate for money (I am currently desperate for money, but not yet so desperate that I have to write for magazines that routinely publish people I consider a little evil, thankfully), and what I’ve been asked to write is not itself objectionable (I was asked to write something completely innocuous). The magazine in this thought experiment is also a particular sort of outlet—one with a clear editorial line and relatively evident commitments. It isn’t one that was very bad several editorial regimes ago but that has since been sold a few times, or one that published one awful thing back in 1980; it also isn’t a major newspaper that makes a point of publishing people with diverse and conflicting viewpoints, like the New York Times. A person who writes a piece for the New York Times can’t be reasonably construed as endorsing, e.g., everything Brett Stephens says, since there are plenty of pieces that contradict everything Brett Stephens says in the same publication. In other words, the magazine in the case we’re imagining is such that writing for it reasonably indicates endorsement of or at least tolerance for the positions it champions. Magazines of this sort (none of these are the one that invited me to write) include, on the right, The National Review and Compact, and on the left, Jacobin and the Baffler (I have contributed to these latter two magazines, from which you can conclude what you will about my own political convictions). Finally, let’s assume the publication is not totally dumb and bad, that is, not the kind of thing you’d refuse to write for solely on grounds of its poor quality, before you even get to more difficult moral stumbling blocks. (It’s an open question, and one that I’m setting aside at the moment, how many politically questionable publications are also of questionable quality, and what the relationship between aesthetic/intellectual and political failure might amount to.)
I think the question of whether to write for the fictional magazine I’ve conjured up in the fictional circumstances I’ve conjured up hinges on a further question: what are contributions to a magazine? Are they raw ideas, transmitted in regrettable but presently unavoidable linguistic vehicles only because direct injection is not yet a viable alternative? Or are they pieces of rhetoric? When we read them, are we in the business of grasping implications (roughly, strict logical entailments), or are we in the business of sniffing out implicatures (suggestions, innuendos, connotations)?
I think it’s valuable to have places where we do our imperfect best to assess ideas themselves, rather than chunks of speech or writing, insofar as ideas are even separable from their expression (are they? I don’t know). I like philosophy reading groups for the same reason I do not like getting up on a stage and saying what I Really Think to large groups of people—because sometimes, in the course of figuring out what we really think, we need to be able to mess around with claims without worrying to much about the phrases they’re sheathed in, or what the context of discussion might suggest to an enemiy bent on misconstruing what we say. Trying to discuss a claim and not its context or mode of presentation is a particularly relieving and soothing and indispensible practice at a time when suspicion and paranoia and accusation are such dominant interpretive modes. I love philosophy in part because it (sometimes) carves out a space for us to toy with implications sheared of the web of implicatures. Not all philosophy is like this, of course, and much of my favorite philosophy (Bernard Williams, Heidegger) is not like this precisely because it’s more literary. Nonetheless, as I say, it’s useful for us to dedicate some swatches of time and space to caring about what philosophers call “propositions,” instead of everything else there is to care about.
But by the same token, an entirely implication-only world would be a hell devoid of aesthetic savor and social interest and perhaps much sociality at all. People live, after all, in the land of implicature, and that’s where most of their concerns originate. Maybe it would be good if one or two publications for a general audience set out to become The New York Review of Implications, Not Implicatures. But not only am I skeptical that this is a real possibility—it would be reasonable to worry that the publications declaring themselves implicature-free zones were in fact disingenuous participants in “the culture war,” and once we started worrying about disingenousness we’d be back in the kingdom of implicatures—I’m also skeptical that it is desirable. I don’t think public writing, at least not all or most of it, should be a matter of raw implication, because things like literary merit and style and having a point of view all require suggestion and double entendres and fruitful imprecisions and allusions and gestures. To rule out rhetoric is to rule out art and, with it, most of the fun. The hyper-rationalist econ bro types who wish all speech acts were just sets of bare propositions don’t really get what most public discourse is for; in essence, they wish the popsicles could be melted down into sticks. They aren’t in the habit of assessing literary writing, and if they were, they’d know that we often have good reason to care about its context: where and when it was published, what world-historical events were ongoing, what its author was up to and whom he or she was implicitly addressing, because these things all bear on what the work communicates. (You can’t understand Kleist without understanding the crisis he experienced upon reading Kant!!!) The extent to which we’re called upon to turn to implicature in assessing a given piece of writing is probably a matter of degree. On one end of the spectrum are Animal-Farm-esque allegories in which everything is a veiled reference, on the other are works of maximally analytic philosophy, perhaps just works of logic proper. Most public writing falls in the middle, but it falls closer to the Animal Farm side, and I think that’s as it should be. And by the way, I don’t think this is a problem unique to the era of “wokeness,” if there even is such a thing, but a perennial problem facing anyone writing for a large group of people in even a vaguely literary way. Social signaling is not just a sad side effect of writing literary stuff for a wider audience comprising many groups with different frames of reference but…part of the point. Welcome to the world where propositional content blossoms into art, however feeble.
So, given that pieces of public writing are and ought to be pieces of rhetoric and not sacks of propositions, it’s reasonable to ask what it means that they were published in one magazine instead of another, and what their placement signals about their writers’ endorsements. Obviously, we can’t interpret every piece of rhetoric the same way, and there are certainly cases in which a piece’s appearance in an Evil Publication signals something reasonable (and, also obviously, what counts as an Evil Publication is always up for debate). It also makes sense to ask, sometimes, on the days when we’re feeling especially consequentialist, what sending a certain signal about our endorsements does. Does it hurt people around us, people to whom we have special obligations? Does it contribute to bringing about an intellectual culture in which there’s more good-faith debate? And these considerations can also be weighed against others. If the Evil Publication is the only one that will run your piece, and your piece is AMAZING, then the signals you’ll be sending about your commitment may simply matter less than the fact of the piece’s publication. Or if the various exonerating circumstances bracketed out above come into play in reality, it may be that you simply have to write for the Evil Magazine because you really, really need the cash.
There are also likely times when the signal you send by writing for an Evil Magazine is that you want to correct the record. Something people often say is that you should not legitimate an idea by giving it a platform, but I think they usually say this about ideas that already have large platforms. Andrew Tate has an enormous platform, and many already regard him as legitimate, so the choice at this point is to argue against him or leave his audience blissfully ignorant of all that he gets wrong. I also don’t think that you need to have strong evidence that the Evil Magazine’s audience is hungry for good-faith engagement. There’s no way of knowing for sure how open a readership is to an unfailiar set of arguments, but if even one person can be coaxed to reevaluate, the contribution is valuable worth something.
But—but!—even though I think there’s rarely a danger of “legitimating” a position you’re writing to refute, I think there’s often a real danger of legitimating a publication. Newer, smaller publications, like Compact, want to be able to boast that, alongside the insanely sexist/otherwise awful and inane screeds they run, they’ve also published some celebrated and respected bigwigs (for instance, Zizek, whom they have in fact published). I think this danger is especially strong if the piece you’re contributing to the Evil Magazine is not about the things the Evil Magazine is wrong about but about something orthogonal. I’d write for Compact (go ahead, losers, invite me) if the piece were about how it’s actually good that women get to be in the workforce, but I probably wouldn’t write for them if the piece were about a German novel, because the former signals that I’m writing for them as a way of undermining their message and convincing their readers to defect, while the latter signals that I’m actually okay with the rest of what they publish.
This doesn’t add up to a set of rules about when it’s okay to publish work in an Evil Publication, much less does it add up to (or make any effort to add up to) an account of what makes a publication Evil. But it is at least a start, in the form of a sort of rough guide about how to think what we’re even doing when we write for that mysterious entity, “the public.”