The Verso Office
Just before I went to California go to the Pornhub awards[i] I saw on Twitter the poster for an event at the Verso Office[ii] called “Criticism and the Left” that’d be happening the week I’d get back. It would be a panel featuring Arielle Isack, Grace Byron, Jake Romm, Jose Sanchez, and Zoe Hu. And who are these people? Most of them Twitter mutuals, some I’ve met a couple times. Writers, ones who write for the magazines. The things they write? Criticism. Their politics? Left, communist, anti-imperialist. So far so good. Some of them went to grad school I think, but these aren’t exactly “the academics,” that’s a different subfaction of the literary leftists. I’d say they have more in common with the familiar downtown writer-arrivistes who hustle odd jobs by day and pitch articles to magazines out of their own personal ambition for clout and relevance by night, though unlike the archetypal downtown writer-arriviste, they’re quicker to mention their personal connections to Fredric Jameson rather than to Julian Casablancas.
It was that commonality that gave me the idea that this panel discussion could have something good, important, even urgent to tell me. This Substack, as many leftists have told me, is in crisis. The contradictions are insurmountable. My success has degraded me to the level of an appendage of the clout machine, alienating me from the intellectual potentialities of my labor. By “signifying” the reactionary downtown scenesters with my writing, I’ve given oxygen to their movement, turning me into not just a collaborator simp for the fascism that just took power, but also “a fraud and a fucking loser,” and an “embodied caricature of the grotesque bourgeois [that I was] always groomed by [my] pig family to become.” To add insult to injury, I’ve supposedly abandoned Marxism and sought refuge in “boomer Lacanianism” and “a particularly pathetic and orientalizing fake Buddhism” to avoid accountability in a manner “typical of cis beta males and abusers,” and so on. In other words, an unremarkable leftist man. But these are obviously all things I want to avoid, though I don’t want to give up writing entirely. Unfortunately there is hardly anyone trustworthy and authoritative I can think of who can help me work through this weirdly layered artistic-political dilemma. If only we had one big reliable Communist Party to tell me how to submit my art to the cause. In the absence of that, maybe the closest thing right now is the pre-party cadre formation that is the Verso critics’ panel. It’s worth a try.
It occurred to me just how naïve that idea was when someone started the panel off with the mundane observation that “if we had an answer to the ‘crisis of criticism’ we wouldn’t be having this talk.” I mean, of course. They’re not giving marching orders—they’re just as lost. How could I have possibly thought otherwise? I was embarrassed by this submissive impulse, no doubt an unconscious repetition of the “dreary and sexless values of the imperial capital” that critics say I had internalized in childhood, values that inform both my own Oedipal neuroses and the wider ongoing campaigns of genocidal annihilation… they say it’s the same psychic-libidinal mechanisms leading me to seek validation in the insecure New York media world that also guide the American-made bombs to the children they will shred in Gaza. Sounds about right. This is the hellish backdrop of the “crisis of criticism panel,” the relentless stream of atrocities that you can’t turn your gaze away from, flittering among the mangled piles of human flesh and “the clumps of Nobu and Pinkberry swirling like dervishes in the toilet” in the Honor Levy book everyone was supposed to have had an opinion on. What does it mean to skewer some hack’s book to delight a few hundred New Yorkers—the last intellectuals on earth—in the face of this? The stakes sound like they couldn’t be any higher. But then the magazines don’t even pay.
After the preambles, the panelists got down to business. Grace lamented the fractured landscape of the online literary landscape: “Should we divest from Substack? Should we consolidate resources into one main platform? Do we need fewer left mags?” After a few mentions of the “utopianism” of critique, Jake voiced his disagreement with talking about criticism as a utopian stance because it’s so geared toward negation. The role of the critic is to determine among the various repugnant forms of power we are faced with. Arielle (not the same Arielle who appears in a previous Crumpstack) said that her critique of the Barbie movie in n+1 spawned from the feeling of being oppressed by seeing the Barbie movie, and that the feeling of being oppressed by liberals is essential to criticism. For the revolutionary reader, every text can be Soledad State Prison. Her latest piece, in The Baffler, is a review of Sophie Kemp’s quirky-sexy debut dating novel Paradise Logic framed in reference to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz—in Paradise Logic, the argument goes, the narrator is a “Muselmann” (a prisoner who is resigned to their death) in the concentration camp of gender. Kemp’s book apparently doesn’t really talk about the holocaust (I haven’t read it yet), but the critic’s task is to strip the text naked by hallucinating its hidden reality, which in the case of Paradise Logic is the lobotomized yappings of a mind-slave of the patriarchy. The panelists also agreed that writing for The New York Times must be avoided at all costs. Those are just some of the things I wrote down in my notes.
It was when I started hearing a bunch of mentions of “the Red Scare girls” and “Curtis Yarvin” as objects of critique that I started taking those notes. It was like I was being reminded that I’m actually on the job. Criticism never sleeps… No matter what, it’s all one big Dimes Square scene report. Soon enough everyone seemed to be coming back to calls for, among other things, “a profile of Curtis Yarvin and Red Scare from a real leftist sensibility,” the most urgent object of criticism today, such that the purpose of left critique is to interpret Dasha and Anna K’s inscrutable desire. How did these evil emaciated mommies pull off making white supremacy chic among coastal elite trendsetters? How did they do it while hitching their wagons to such impotent and unsophisticated tech nerd autists? What’s the secret ingredient in their ᛋpecial ᛋauce?
It caught me by surprise because I get so much shit from from all the “comrades” for fixating on this. I’ll try not to dwell too much more on what a misunderstood genius I am, I know it’s tedious. Some other self-proclaimed geniuses on here who get more far more praise than they deserve will go on and on about how the leftist magazines are smearing them with such odious lies and vendettas, when in fact these writers are just arrogant and insecure and take themselves way too seriously and then base their whole politics around that, and everyone else knows it but can’t say anything because these writers are such bullies and have such platforms that it’s rarely worth the effort of calling them out. But there can be a poetry to whining, if you do it with love, which very few people can do well.
In any case, I thought it was somehow symptomatic of something how the riffing of the left critics sort of just idled toward the fascists’ jouissance, though it’s not something I feel like I need to “diagnose” or whatever.
[i] Still working on that.
[ii] Not the same as the old “Verso Loft,” which was before my time.