The emptiness of literature written for the market
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it.
> Peer pressure is not censorship, but we still need to talk about it.
Right - we can talk about it as peer pressure. We don't need to group all modulations of the public discourse as "violations" of "free speech" or "failures" to support "free speech."
I think the correct response to seeing a comment that appears "self-contradictory" is to read it again, and see if there is some alternative meaning behind the comment that makes sense--some interpretation other than our first impression. That's what we do with literature, and I don't think we should be lowering our standards for reading comprehension just because we're online.
It pretty effectively construct the context to culminate in the sentence:
” How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”
Which is a great summarization of the point that the author is going to discuss in the way they want to discuss it. That artists are not bad, or evil, but they are doing art with the emptiness of corporations’ public relations.
I read it as a brilliant way to start an essay. It introduces the topic with a concrete example that provides context of what the author is going to talk about, in a short, straightforward form (unlike, e.g. how the New Yorker tends do these introductions, with long, writer-centered ramblings).
I saw no intention of fabricating outrage or t baiting in this introduction at all. Not a single drop of it to be honest. Much less that is supposed to be pointing to the fact that this example is something big, strong to any side of the current ideological disputes. On the contrary, it is there just to show how empty it all is. Irrelevant one-Star reviews, about irrelevant concerns of association to the current war, followed by an irrelevant stance, justified with an irrelevant speech, all coming together to become an irrelevant act of pseudo-activism. All so empty. Which is the whole point.
I'd agree with you except for this sentence, which frames the controversy as about free speech.
It doesn’t frame the controversy as about free speech at all, in my opinion.
Definitions matter. To me, art is emotional impact over time. Good art can impact you emotionally from hundreds of years ago. Bad art doesn't even hold your attention all the way through the presentation. (The impact does not have to be positive or negative; some of the best art can really bum you out)
I was watching an interview with an animator a while back. What did he think of all the new cool animation tools?
He gushed over the awesome tech and the wonderful talent that's out today. It's amazing and incredible compared to just a few decades ago.
Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way.
We have seen this happen to fiction over the last 50-70 years. Even when it's good, it's all kinda the same anymore. It's different and excellent, but in the same ways all fiction is. It's not unusual when experiencing a book or movie to get all hyped up by what you expect the experience to be, to gush while experiencing it how awesome it was, and to have no recollection at all even a month later what was so good about it.
If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.
It's all stuff over the past ten years, and it always is. We are in a state of perpetual forgetting and recycling canned emotions. The classics aren't the classics because they're better. They're the classics because they encourage us to create the same level of quality material. Sometimes they do so over our lifetime.
This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think most artists see this. But there's a hella lot of denial going on, mostly from folks looking to pump up the next plasticine marketing special effects kabuki dance.
I, in general, agree with your perspective, but this example does not follow in my opinion.
In particular if you add the expression “the best X of all tine”, then I certainly expected the opposite bias. People will ignore what was done in the past 20 years and go to classics.
And if the audience answering the question is people around 20 years old, then I would expect a lot of “I don’t know if all time, but my preferred is…” and then something recent. I.e., I expect humility in the answer and providing an answer from what they know. Which is not, IMO, an effect of marketing or commoditization, but just of the limited time they exist in the Earth.
I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism ultimately tend to lead to converging on one or a very few solutions. In some cases that's good. We want things that are cheap and highly abundant, especially in cases where it works for most the population. Having affordable groceries works very well (let's ignore recent trends of inflation).
But I don't think we always want converged solutions, I think there are many cases where as a society we want a lot of diversity, we want a wide selection to choose from, we want that sort of natural redundancy with some variance that occurs. It both helps make life interesting when it comes to things like the arts and in some cases I think having real choice of selection (not the illusion of choice where there are 10 options that are basically identical for all practical purposes) is very useful.
There are many cases when things dictated by the mass market aren't what I want/need. I still want an easily swappable battery in a flagship phone as a simple example and expandable memory in the form of SD slots but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with poor alternatives if I want those functions. Or on a more practical note, I'd love to select from various airlines, there's dozens and dozens of them but the fact is I often ride coach and they're all just as crappy and customer hostile as each other. It doesn't matter if you pay just a little more for a ticket, you're out of luck. The tendency for markets to converge on the same price points to remain competitive makes them also converge on the same or similar solutions and that tends to lead to a lack of choice.
Maybe consumers need to be willing to not always pay the lowest price for everything but I argue the issue isn't just there, it's systematic because the average consumer is also the average person producing the consumables and the way in which they get resources to consume which dictate to some degree what choices they have and so on and so forth. We seem to just be continuously converging on optimal solutions that don't fit everyone and are slowly fitting a handful of people in power more than anything else.
I keep seeing this phrase again and again on HN. "The market has spoken".
Here's the context to which I responded to it earlier [0].
I literally don't think "The Market" exists in the same way that Margaret Thatcher said "There's no such thing as Society".
"The Market" has come to represent a conveinient abstraction if you want people to stop thinking and asking deeper questions.
Not only animation. How do you tell tv series from each other? They have like 4 themes with different skins.
How do you tell superhero movies from each other?
That's what you get when you're happy to 'consume content'.
Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings"
This was a great feeling!
Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it.
No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato.
And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality.
You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity.
I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked.
My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
Themes, setting, tone, art direction, plot, characters, etc.
animation today does not all look the same. There’s wider creativity now than ever before. There’s a larger volume of lower quality stuff because it’s cheaper, but art is not defined the median work.
Classics are classics because in an era of limited information sharing a much smaller population of works gained recognition and staying power. It’s cool to see that themes are durable. It’s cool and sobering to watch Citizen Kane today and see the frustratingly obvious parallels. But that’s really more of a novelty. If citizen Kane came out today you’d perhaps just roll your eyes at the direct associations to your present day parallels that are now “too obvious”.
Second, industrialization on large scale in Siberia happened first since 1905 after the Trans-Siberian railway was built, and later only in WWII in the '40s, when factories from the Western part were evacuated.
In '30s, the majority of population were villagers, and for them the biggest concern in late '20s were taxes, in '30s it was the dysfunctional state farms that everyone were forced into, and famine. And industrialization for them was a new American tractor that produced in a licensed factory, and some factory in the district capital, where some people could go become low-skilled workers. IDK, if it tells about rural or urban areas -- but cities were small (Novosibirsk that has 1.6M now, had just 120-150K then) to make a factory or coal heating in individual houses a problem.
Environmentalism in the USSR came to agenda probably in the 70s, but became openly discussed after 1987 with Glasnot policy, when lots of such ideas started penetrating from other countries.
But to respond to your comment in a larger sense, McLuhan once wrote that everyone sees reality in the rear view mirror and only artists look out the window to see what is really happening and what is coming. (I always think of Paul Verhoeven and Robocop when I think about this, since Robocop is uncannily prophetic,or even Die Hard, which in two hours seems to contain the conceptual ingredients of the 2000s in a little over two hours.) The point is that artists are by nature alienated from the public anyway - most truly enlightening messages are the kind of thing few people want to hear. It has always been the trick of good artists to smuggle those ideas into people's brains via one Trojan Horse or another, penetrating whatever guardrails exist at the time to police the mental life of the culture. So, in that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Unfortunate perhaps for my counterpart 100y from now if the article is correct and there isn't the 21st century to sample like I can read the 20th, but I think that's hard to judge in the moment, especially when (inherently in the argument) critical 'edgy' unpopular classics-in-the-making aren't getting the attention.
In the meantime, there's a large pool that's stood the test of time to draw from, and if you know what you like and just want more ('instant gratification') of it, it makes sense that that would be churned out contemporarily, as I'm sure it was in the past - especially serialised in magazines and newspapers.
In a way, your attitude is akin to only reading scientific articles from more than 50 years ago because those have "stood the test of time." In science, you can see how silly this is - not only is that material often just wrong, undeveloped, etc, but relegating yourself to only papers older than 50 years would leave you totally blind to contemporary scientific progress, including whatever seeds are presently germinating that will change the world in the future.
The best literature stands alone, in time and space. The world that created the Epic of Gilgamesh no longer exists and is completely alien to us. And yet the epic is reskinned every century for a new audience. Things change and yet everything is the same.
Maybe you're not old enough to realise. I was a neophile too, once.
In fact, rereading your post I'm not even sure where you get the idea that I'm a "neophile." I have no particular interest in the contemporary. My argument is just that the past cannot hope to comment comprehensively on the present or future, which I think the analogy with science makes pretty clear. Things genuinely do change. Our genes change, our technology changes, our philosophies, sciences and religions change. I agree that the past has much to say about the present and a really informed person could not possibly ignore it, but it simply doesn't follow that we don't need any more literature or new ways of telling stories or interrogating our lives.
The GP's frustration, I believe, lies in the fact that you've been presenting the trappings of modern society as if they're the bedrock of modern existence; as if the findings of a science article today act on the soul the same way as realizing a dead Russian wrote a cartoonish parody of the actual personality one has cultivated for twenty years (a reaction I see commonly!). All writing may share similarities, but not all writing is literature, and recognizing that distinction would resolve the disagreement you first posted.
Many analysts would say the limiting factor of Plato on today's audience was not the total population, but the shift in interpretations (and related, writing) which make it so difficult to translate. And still, classics departments are offering fresh takes on the works, even through the 20th century, radically shifting the meta-level conclusions that we teach as takeaways. I hope you can acknowledge that this is more due to the underlying human nature which the works speak to, rather than some inherent unending depth to the writing - and that literature as a field carries this interpretive depth as its activity, rather than just cobbling object-level tools to interrogate their premises.
After all, we know that fiction writers were often clueless about the subjects they wrote on.
Almost all the innovation in storytelling and communication is happening in mediums that don't lean as heavily on longform writing as literature. Case in point, if you want to look at the biggest influence on discrediting CNN's propaganda it would probably be ... Trump, on Twitter, screaming "Fake News!" endlessly. That did a lot more to undermine their brand than any academic analysis.
It's a bit of mystery why this happens. Since there are many more creators today, it seems their best output should be above the best of the past, but no. My best hypothesis is that we're in a phase of decline: all Western arts peaked at the end of the 19th century, then the world wars broke something important, and it's not going to recover. Similar to how Rome's decline was accompanied by a decline of art quality.
Moreover, claiming such a peak followed by a decline, and drawing comparisons with Rome, is so often linked to a reactionary politics that even many conservatives feel is extremist, your interlocutors are going to be suspicious of your motives.
That might have been true for you, but I don’t think it is a general perception for everyone.
The problem I see is just of filtering. The best current works are a few among thousands of new works coming up every year. While the best past works are the only works that remain from the past. You see a good list of past books from some erudite person with similar perception of the world than you and you are set.
While the same person doing a similar list from current works will be much more hit and miss. No one would have the time to read all that is published everywhere.
While the past has a filter that allows you to be able to read such diverse great works as Kafka, Cervantes, and James Joyce.
There was plenty of trash written in the early 20th century. We've forgotten about it, for the most part. Anything still in print from 100 years ago is probably the best that the early 1900s has to offer. We've had 100 years to curate the list of the "best literature of the 1910s". Easy to find the good works in there.
Doesn't have to be. There are plenty of extremely well read literature lovers who have both the time and the taste to sample works both past and present; these will become the tastemakers of people in the far future.
The number of books published each year in the US has grown by something like 300x over the past one hundred years, if you only count traditional publishing (and not print-on-demand).
Heck, do you think Homer was the only poet to ever don a toga way back in the day?