Inter Alia #6: DeWitt Goes Digital

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a fungus that grows on another fungus; a nuclear reaction fueled by the byproducts of nuclear reactions; and movies whose audiences watch an audience watching them. For this kind of derivative process, he invokes the adjective annular, which the O.E.D. defines as “ringlike” or circular, but which presumably shares some roots with “annul” – to make into nothing. Last week, reading John Freeman’s strange piece in the online Guardian (via TEV), I felt I was in the presence of annular writing: writing about writing about writing. I wade into yet another consideration of the state of book reviewing, then, at the risk of saying nothing about nothing. Nonetheless, I’m going to take this opportunity to advance a couple of propositions I’ve been thinking about lately.The first is that talk in certain quarters about crises in book reviewing, newspaper journalism, online recommendation systems, and so forth is really an extension of a conversation that’s been going on for at least decades now: one about a more general crisis of authority. Ever since the wheels of modernity set to work on the fixed stars by which we navigate our culture, we’ve been trying to figure out what to look to instead. Technology is only just catching up with us.Those attached to tradition have always tended to look at the democratization of information warily. For example, I learned in this week’s New Yorker about Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book Public Opinion argued that the average American “lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” According to Eric Alterman, Lippmann proposed that crucial decisions about that world be made by “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves with democratic preferences or public debate.This sounds like a nightmare, elitism reduced ad absurdam. Yet the assumption that the dispersal of the authority once held by, say, Edmund Wilson and The New York Times must, ipso facto, produce smarter decision-making doesn’t hold water either. The information superhighway may lead to enlightenment, but it offers exit-ramps to every conceivable variety of cant.For a while now, I’ve had the nagging feeling that there’s a third way we’ve been neglecting, some kind of solution to the crisis of authority. And then, in the Alterman article, I found another reason to love John Dewey. To wit:Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding… the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. [But] the foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy – the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.This, I think, is why book reviews play a vital, if circumscribed, role in any democracy. I’d also like to think (not coincidentally) that this is the project that we – you and I – are engaged in here at The Millions. Five years into a conversation Max started, I’m consistently impressed by the civility, acuity, and enthusiasm of those who comment on the site (as I invite you to do below). Which leads me to my second proposition: the problem with pre-modern notions of authority has always been that they’re non-consensual. For all its failings, the web is one arena where authority is earned instead of inherited. And so, on the occasion of our fifth anniversary, I’d like to thank you for granting authority, in whatever measure, to us.

Today on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, David Denby put in an appearance promoting his new book, Snark. I’m not sure what qualifies Denby, a movie critic, to save us from “a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation.” Nor am I entirely sure we are in need of saving. That said, I’ve enjoyed Denby’s recent feistiness in the back pages of The New Yorker (after some mid-Bush-era doldrums), and was perfectly happy to give him a hearing while I made lunch.

Suffice it to say, I was underwhelmed. The segment largely consisted of Denby listening to audio clips of SNL and Crossfire declaring whether or not they constituted “snark.” In place of any really useful distinction between “nasty” snark and legitimate discourse, we got a tendentious history lesson (Diogenes but no Juvenal?) and a jurisprudential approach to snark that amounts to “I know it when I see it.”

Do we need anything more than that? Do we need to define snark? I would argue that we do. Ever since Heidi Julavits popularized the term, in her March 2003 Believer manifesto, the word “snark” has been used as a cudgel against all manner of populist tomfoolery (Julavits singles out The New York Post), even as it has proven useless against the pungent attitudinizing of Gawker and its discontents. (For fun, check out the Denby comment thread.) Moreover, the pejorative overtones of the floating signifier “snark” imply that equally fatuous but positive commentary is somehow less damaging to “the national conversation.” If we’re going to have a conversation about that conversation, it seems worth knowing what we’re talking about when we talk about snark. So here, tendered with love and humility, are some notes toward a phenomenology of snark.

Snark is, above all, a tone, and this is what makes it so difficult to pin down. Julavits calls it a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt,” but forecloses the possibility that hostility and bitterness might be legitimate critical positions. And again, for some reason, online text often reads as more hostile than it actually is. (Think of the phenomenon of the misunderstood email.) No, it’s not negativity, but been-there, seen-that “knowingness,” that is the call-note of snark. (It is impossible to surprise a Snark.) However, allowance must be made for the fact that some people actually know things. Perhaps snark, properly understood, involves a tone of knowingness that doesn’t correspond to actual knowledge. (Truly great snark would thus be impossible to identify: persuading us of its authority, it would be ignorance that leaves no fingerprints.)
A related point: snark is a response disproportionate to the offense, a comment that outshouts the original post. The Snark expends more emotional and intellectual energy formulating his aphorisms than he did consuming, or skimming, their subject. Otherwise, we would have to recognize his hostility, bitterness, or contempt as legitimate. (We carp because we care.) Currently, the perfect object of snark for me is Benjamin Button; it’s a movie I’ll never see, but have put a great deal of thought into making fun of. This lack of regard is more deeply wounding to Benjamin Button fans than it would be if I actually had a legitimate grievance against the film.
The true Snark, perhaps by virtue of his reflexive contempt, cannot be bothered to understand the object of his snark – to expand the compass of his sympathies, to assume good faith. Thus James Wood, even at his most trenchant, does not get accused of snark, whereas Lee Siegel, for all his anti-web fulminations, often seems to be writing from the very heart of snarkness. Siegel believes the length of his essays, and their appearance in print, indemnifies him against his own charges, but is wrong (see numbers 1 and 2 above). Brevity is the soul of wit, but not necessarily of snark.
Snark is a kind of show of plumage, almost a mating ritual. As such, snark always calls more attention to the Snark than to snarked. But again, just because the dagger is driven in with a flourish does not mean it is done snarkily. The thoughtful, the passionate, and the justly aggrieved – Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Lane – are entitled to be stylish, without being shouted down for snark.
Morally, snark is no better or worse than genial puffery; indeed, it is its dark twin, its complement, an advertisement for the self. Snark is more aesthetically pleasing than puff, however, by virtue of the complexity of its defense mechanisms. It reduces criticism of itself to a negation of a negation – that is, to mere snark. Hence: Denby.

Such notes can only be preliminary. They attempt to prepare the ground for, but do not answer, more important questions: Is snark truly a conjunctivitic plague upon the nation? Or is it, rather, a form of hygiene, defending us against an epidemic of epiphenomena we do not and should not care about? Perhaps the answers are not to be found in intellectualizing, but in a tortured embrace of our own snarky sides. As Susan Sontag might say, in place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of snark.

As always, your thoughts (even snarky ones) are welcome.

This weekend, as part of a recent David Foster Wallace kick, I decided to revisit “Up, Simba,” an 80-page essay on John McCain and postmodern politics. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Wallace spent the final week of the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary embedded in the McCain campaign. McCain ended up losing to George W. Bush, and shortly thereafter withdrew from the race. This year, however, a resurgent McCain looks increasingly plausible as the national GOP nominee. I was hoping that re-reading Wallace’s essay (republished in Consider the Lobster) might offer some insight.Well, a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. Wallace’s sympathetic portrait of McCain the man and conflicted take on McCain the legislator struck me as entirely credible, just as they did eight years ago. “Up Simba’s” account of the tactical logic of primary politics, though, now looked positively prophetic… of the 2008 Democratic campaign.See if these phrases, scrubbed of their referents, ring a bell:”Something about [Candidate X] made us feel that the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear cliches as more than just cliches.””[Candidate X] drew first-time and never-before voters; he drew Democrats and Independents, Libertarians and soft socialists and college kids and soccer moms.””The grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – [Candidate X’s] humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness…. The people are cheering for [Candidate X] not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him.And then there’s Candidate Y, who as a member of a presidential dynasty has been the front-runner until some early primary upsets. Whose “campaign advisors… are the best that $70,000,000 and the full faith and credit of the [party] Establishment can buy.” Who “charges that [Candidate X] is fuzzy on policy, that he’s image over substance.” And who, in South Carolina, puzzles Wallace by “going negative.” When Wallace asks a shrewd group of network news technicians for their analysis, and they illuminate the “solid, even inspired” logic behind the move:[Y’s] attack leaves [X] with two options. If he does not retaliate, some SC voters will credit [him] with keeping the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy…[or as ] “appeasing aggression”… So [X] pretty much has to hit back, the techs agree. But this is extremely dangerous, for by retaliating – which of course… means going Negative himself – [he] looks like just another ambitious, win-at-any-cost politician, when of course so much time and effort and money have already gone into casting him as the exact opposite of that…. [The] race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical, charge-and-countercharge contest that turns off voters and keeps them away from the polls.Which pretty much captures exactly how I’ve been feeling lately about the Democrats.It bears saying that, in matters of policy, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are more like each other than they are like McCain or Bush. It also bears saying that the strategic carping of the Clintons doesn’t seem to have done them any good in South Carolina. Still, this year’s Democratic primary race seems to be unfolding along weirdly familiar narrative lines. “Up, Simba,” hamstrung by the Generation-Y affect of its tone, is not one of Wallace’s finest pieces of prose. But if you’re interested in a shrewd analysis of the presidential horse-race – in which no candidate is above the compromises and conflicts of politics – you might consider putting down the David Brooks and Maureen Dowd and picking up DFW.