I don’t know that I’d suggest that this is any sort of trend, but I found myself thinking about takedowns this week, and this is what led me to spend some time with Hate Read (and to be more forthright about a pet peeve of mine) in my last post.
The rabbit hole began with Lauren Oyler, a writer who’s built a reputation in recent years for a series of high profile takedowns of some fairly canonical contemporary women (Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, Sally Rooney, Jia Tolentino). With the publication first of her own novel, and now a book of essays called No Judgment, the tables have turned. The blurb for the latter describes Oyler thusly:
Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature--whether celebratory or scarily harsh--have become notorious….No Judgment is a testament to Lauren Oyler's inimitable wit and her quest to understand how we shape the world through culture. It is a sparkling nonfiction debut from one of today's most inventive thinkers.
As you might expect, Oyler’s work is undergoing no small amount of scrutiny. And last week, as Leigh Stein put it, quoting a friend of hers, “Lauren Oyler got Lauren Oyler’d.” The Oylering takes place in Bookforum, in a piece by Ann Manov called “Star Struck,” which fires off observations like “Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.” Manov concludes witheringly that “The pieces in No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises in typing by a person who’s spent too much time thinking about petty infighting and too little time thinking about anything else.”
It is kind of fun to sort through this tangle. Stein’s recap (linked above) is solid, though she does sort of position herself as one of the people who will stand by and chant “Fight! Fight! Fight!” when a tussle breaks out. She does raise an interesting point about literary culture which I’ll return to in a moment.1 To be honest, even though it’s much longer and more detailed, I preferred Freddie deBoer’s account of both Oyler’s book and the ensuing fracas. I felt better prepared to decide whether or not to read Oyler for having read his review. But all of this is just prelude; I want to return to that point of Stein’s.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
After noting that both Oyler and Manov are fighting “fair,” Stein writes that “I far prefer a literary feud in the pages of Bookforum to reader-driven cancellation campaigns waged on Twitter and Goodreads.” I want to take that notion and tie it to another piece about “Oyler v Manov,” Ross Barkan’s “The Death (and Life) of Takedown Culture,” which prompted me to think about the bigger picture. Barkan explains that “Feuds connote a healthy culture; literary culture, right now, is not very healthy,” and later provides a more detailed diagnosis:
As newspapers collapse, review sections disappear. Most writing on books devolves into coverage: exhausting “best of April” lists and “books to look forward to” and soft focus profiles and brief, inoffensive Q&A’s.
You might begin to see how this discussion would appeal to me specifically, even though I’m not someone who spends much time in literary culture, healthy or otherwise. That “health” depended in part on a media infrastructure that in turn relied on a fairly captive audience and had serious issues with representation. But it also aggregated that audience in a way that provided material support for the culture: “Literary existence wasn’t so precarious. It was possible to declare, if you felt that way, a book was very bad.” As that infrastructure, tied as it was to traditional media, has dissolved, what’s left (or so we might argue) is a race for attention and likes, a world where promotion matters more than quality. (I wrote a bunch about “the sad world of content capital” a couple of months ago.)
[If it helps, what I’m describing here is the deeper current behind what I was writing about in my last post: the naive optimism of putting “the world at our fingertips” ended up being an alibi for tossing the babies out with the bathwater. We thought we were building out the world when in fact we were replacing it with something much more precarious and extractive. Like Uber, but for culture. Surge pricing may apply.]
In a sense, Barkan’s argument boils down to a case for “joining them” if you can’t “beat them,” although I may be crediting him with a certainty that I’m not sure he would accept. There’s a great deal of pragmatic wisdom in that approach, though:
Manov, for the gun-shy, does offer another way forward today: distinguish yourself. Write, truly, what you think. If certain colleagues flake away, a greater audience might await you. In this uncertain age, your voice is all you have. If, once in a while, you write with furious honesty—if you aren’t boring—you’ll have the greatest prize of all: people who care about your work.
I left that interior link intact (which goes to another of Barkan’s posts about writing in general) because I find a lot to agree with there. But lurking at the back of my mind, if I’m honest, is the question of what happens if we accept these circumstances. Stein quotes Eleanor Stern who notes that “It kind of disturbs me that so much of the popular literary criticism ecosystem right now is basically people becoming literary It Girls by writing viral reviews taking down other literary It Girls.” And DeBoer describes the Oyler/Manov kerfuffle in terms of “the emergent geometry of this fractal pattern of ever-multiplying takedowns, an Apollonian gasket2 of writers shitting on each other’s work.” We’re already in the midst of seeing how difficult it is to separate signal from noise; when volume is the metric, the next person up is incentivized not to be better but to be louder and more acidic. I don’t know about you, but my skin’s not that thick (as I’ve previously noted).
Acid Testing3
There’s another layer to this, at least from my perspective. The idea of takedown culture coalesced for me this week because I had my eye on a couple of other conversations that were happening as well, surrounding a couple of high-profile book releases from the past two months:
The first was Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, the “Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller” that makes the case that cellphones and social media are directly responsible for the mental health epidemic afflicting those who were born into our current ecosystem. The second is Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage which, among other things, attempts to account for what it calls the “patriot paradox” (the idea that “the citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles.”). Also an instant NYT bestseller,
Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies.
I realize that I’m stacking the deck a bit by citing these books’ blurbs (a time-honored genre more concerned with attention-grabbing than nuanced description), and I must also confess that I haven’t read either one. What stuck out to me, though, was how each of them offered confirmation of a perspective that was already pretty commonly circulating. Haidt’s book arrives at an opportune moment; The Guardian’s review of it even says as much: “it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media.” The first time I read that passage, I completely glossed over the neat flip of cause and effect that takes place. I know that it’s not intended literally, but still, the idea of a “foundational” text is that a movement grows from it, rather than the reverse. In Schaller and Waldman, mainstream media found rationale for the “deplorable” thesis that dates back to the 2016 presidential campaign. Paul Krugman, for instance, can’t for the life of him figure out why rural voters don’t just get what they get and not throw a fit.
I don’t mean to come off as salty; like I said, I haven’t read the books myself, and honestly, I’m not sure how much I’ll disagree with either if and when I do. But I came across a couple of critiques that gave me pause. Parker Molloy talked with Siva Vaidhyanathan about Haidt’s book. There are several important points, but one is that Haidt’s thesis, that phones are the single (or primary) cause for this “epidemic,” misses the forest for a single tree.
He doesn't seem to be interested in listening. He's only interested in talking, which means he's less of a teacher and more of a preacher. And I think that's basically unhealthy. Look, you know, a lot of us, people in my scholarly community and intersecting scholarly communities have been trying for two decades to get Americans to think in more complex and sophisticated ways about the communication technology in our lives and constantly entering our lives. We want people to understand that these systems are socio-technical.
That reference to listening is about Haidt’s unwillingness to engage the qualitative work that’s taken place over those 20 years, writing that tried to foreground the “actual experience or perspective” of the people (particularly women) experiencing mental health issues. Tyler Austin Harper’s account of Schaller and Waldman is even more damning in this regard:
I spoke with more than 20 scholars in the tight-knit rural-studies community, most of them cited in White Rural Rage or thanked in the acknowledgments, and they left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.
As far as Harper is able to determine, most of the interaction that the authors had with these scholars involved cursory email exchanges generated solely for the purpose of being able to name-drop them in the acknowledgments. Instead of allowing that scholarship to influence and/or temper their claims, Harper writes, the authors “warp the evidence to deflect blame away from metro areas, onto rural ones,” a pattern described as “academic malpractice” by at least two of the scholars Schaller and Waldman cited. “This book amounts to a poor amalgamation of disparate literatures designed to fit a preordained narrative,” according to one of the political scientists that Harper interviewed.
Uptake vs. Takedown
Both of these books, I might argue, provide popularized versions of work that’s been happening in academic institutions for a long time, and as far as I’m able to tell, both draw on the ethos of that work even as they represent it in flawed ways. In some ways, then, they opt for the acid test rather than peer review when it comes to judging their quality. (We might also say that they prefer to ask forgiveness rather than permission.) And they do so in order to capitalize on the narratives that they support. That’s where they overlap with the Oyler/Manov discourse.
But the stakes are a bit higher for books like these than they are for book reviews, which are understood to be evaluative, opinionated, or judgmental. For better or worse, books like Haidt’s will be cited exhaustively for the next decade by educators who are wrestling with the appropriate place of technology in the classroom, by parents looking to dispute those policies, and by school boards hoping to pre-empt those disputes. The trope of “white rural rage” already builds on a long history of anti-populism in this country, and while it may contain some truth, it also functions to alibi a shift in electoral politics over the past couple of generations that has deep economic roots. If the media reception of Schaller and Waldman is any indication, their book will only further entrench policy decisions (and political strategies) that dismiss rural populations as “flyover.”
I’m not a snob when it comes to pop treatments of academic work—a lot of the reading that I do outside of my own field starts there. And there’s been a great deal of discussion in academic circles about writing for public audiences (to leave the ivory tower and make the case for the value of what we do, e.g.). But there’s an exceptionally fine line between translating academic research for a general audience (which is, in part, what I’m trying to do with my project) and cherry-picking that research to chase after attention. This is not a new problem: Julia Belluz wrote a piece for Vox almost ten years ago about how badly media coverage has warped medical research, for example4. Driven by consumer demand for the newest, cutting-edge treatments, medical journalism tends to seize upon the latest, unreplicated research at the expense of more nuanced (and thus boring) work. Belluz writes that “All told, an estimated 85 percent — or $200 billion — of annual global spending on research is wasted on badly designed or redundant studies.”
Popularization is great when it translates ideas for a general audience and gets us to see things in a new way, reduces complexity enough so that we can take action, or adds complexity so that we’re not ruled by our mistaken assumptions. But when it pulls that little cause and effect flip that I noted above, when the “foundational text” is written in order to confirm a pre-existing movement or thesis, selectively piecing together decontextualized research? That feels a bit like the tail wagging the dog, to borrow an old expression. And when you combine that with a publishing industry that biases towards pre-built audiences and guaranteed uptake? Dog-wagging is incentivized, if not guaranteed. And depressingly enough, takedowns only feed that particular cycle. It’s better to be loud and wrong than quietly right. Like, follow, subscribe!
In Immediacy, Kornbluh explains that “Capitalist production has been contracting. A compensatory expansion of circulation is underway.” Ultimately, that’s the issue I have with the idea of a “takedown culture” that might return some energy to the forms of culture that were grounded in older media. The energy being returned is circulatory (and extractive) rather than productive. One person’s takedown builds them rep that they translate into a book deal that someone else takes down, earning them rep, and on and on, the fractal geometry DeBoer refers to. And yeah, I know that I’m contributing to the cycle by aggregating the conversation, even if I’m trying to critique the ecosystem that generates it.
It’s hard to know what else to do. I’ll continue to work on my project, try to publish it and promote it eventually, and I’ll keep supporting the writers that are doing good work (in my opinion, of course). But I don’t think the answer to the noise is to try and be noisier. I’ll let you know when I find it.
I also think there’s something to Stein’s idea of “recreational judgment” that taps into our fixation with reality television and phenomena like the AITA subreddit, itself a contemporary remediation of newspaper advice columns (Dear Abby et al.). But spinning out that claim here would send me in a different direction.
I had to look it up myself.
The title of this section is a bit obscure, but an acid test refers to the historic practice of using acid to test whether or not gold was genuine (if it was real, then the acid wouldn’t corrode it). Keep reading.
I’ll ask you to ignore her assertion that “Through the internet, we have this world of knowledge at our fingertips.”