ROUGHT TRANSCRIPT: William Deresiewicz
We talk to cultural critic Bill Deresiewicz about the paradigms of artists over time, the ephemerality of community, and the competing cultures that influence us.
The following is a rough transcript of our episode with Bill Deresiewicz “Welcome to the Content Age.”
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Adaam: Hey, Vanessa.
Vanessa: Hey Adaam. How are you doing today?
Adaam: Fantastic.
Vanessa: Uhhuh. I can see it on your face. Fantastic. You seem,
Adaam: I'm brimming with phantasms.
Vanessa: Isn't, wasn't that like another word for the miasmas that people believed like mm-hmm. Sunk over the atmosphere in the 18 hundreds. There you go. You do seem phantasmagoric.
Adaam: Later, later then reinterpreted as, um, I forgot the name. Something in Scientology. Something in Scientology. Next. Scientology has a version of that. Which of the little,
Vanessa: the Holy Ghost?
Adaam: The bad vibes that creep through the atmosphere into the human collars.
Vanessa: Right. And then give you cholera.
Adaam: Yep. Exactly. The bad humors are the result of little aliens blasted into the atmosphere. I think that's the essential narrative of the book of Hubbard.
Vanessa: That's a theory. That's a theory,
Adaam: yeah. Also, mask of Fantasm. If we're down that etymological rabbit hole is my favorite Batman product. The favorite Batman film possibly.
Vanessa: Is this a villain, a Batman villain?
Adaam: It's probably the apex of animated superhero craft for me at least.
Vanessa: Okay. I see what you've done here. You've brought us into the realm of high art. In order to segue us into our guest today, clearly this was your intention.
Adaam: Oh, all by design.
Vanessa: So today we have. William Deresiewicz, uh, author of many excellent books, including Excellent Sheep, uh, the Death of the Artist, the End of Solitude, um, and general kind of cultural analyst, I would say an essayist as well. Um, excellent writer, and I think we got into, we found him in a kind of roundabout way, which we talk about in the conversation. Um, but we're very glad that we did because his works cover a lot of ground and we got to dive into them in different facets.
Adaam: The thing that's cool about the way he writes is that whenever he has a topic that he wants to wrestle with, he develops an entire model around which, or through which he then examines the questions that he cares about.
Mm-hmm. By giving us these models, he also creates the. Tools by which we can have a more intricate discussion cuz we can challenge his conclusions, we can challenge the entire system. And, you know, this is one of my, um, dead buried and decomposed horses, um, that I like to beat. Cultural criticism is dying, if not dead and equally decomposed next to the horse.
If you search any kind of cultural quandary, the results will be people who have maybe engaged that work of art or this cultural question once in their lives. And if they do have deeper questions, they'll be freshman level. Whoa, that's deep dude level of discourse as opposed to somebody who's really immersed themselves right in the history, in the context and in how a variety of different trends in, in, in, in this case, from technology to economy to art.
Interrelate. So we talked about the role of the artist, but we also talked about the different mindsets that grip our culture, and that inevitably led us to our, our favorite lanes of urbanism and free speech at some point. Mm-hmm. Or
Vanessa: to be fair, there was an essay in his book, the End of Solitude, which gave me the excuse to bring up urbanism. But yes, we talk about our favorite topics, communities, solitude. Well, solitude is not necessarily a favorite topic, but could become one as it is the flip side of friendship. It is
Adaam: a seminal, I mean, I, I got to friendship through solitude. So for me, right. The realest challenging preparation was, where do we fucking draw the line?
Vanessa: Yeah. And we actually didn't even end up talking about the higher education stuff as much as I thought we might, because he's kind of well known for that being his beat and his criticism of higher education, which is something we've talked about a not ad nauseum with other guests, but we only touched on with him in the, in the realm of journalism. But, you know, fodder for a future conversation,
Adaam: I think we might slice out a little piece of it for our paying subscribers. Mm. But there's a, a chunk there where we talk about our experience with higher education and I thought that might be a nice little slice saved only for our members.
Vanessa: Okay. A little, a little tidbit for those who support us. We appreciate you.
Adaam: Um, with that
Vanessa: Bill Deresiewicz
Adaam: Vanessa and I spent the past two days reviewing our notes from your, uh, from two of your books, death of the Artist and The End of Solitude, which is a collection of essays, preemptive warning to you and our listeners. We, we have way too much stuff that we wanna talk about, so hopefully this won't be totally chaotic.
Um, but I, I do wanna start with a book that got us to invite you in the first place. It's, uh, death of the Artist, as I mentioned to you in the green room. Um, we ended up reading it because our friend and former, uh, guest in the pod, Ken Goshen, who is a, a classical. Art, classically class, classically trained artist, um, whatever.
Figurative artist. Yes. Recommended. Very talented, right? Who, who's a, a consumer of art history, art, philosophy, art, discursive, uh, content, and is constantly disappointed by the offering on the market. As stumbled on your book, um, I guess some algorithm has, uh, finally caught his, uh, preferences and recom and, and brought it to his attention.
And he immediately let us know that you need to read this and you probably should have him on your podcast. And, and here we are. So I wanna just dive into that, um, into the death of the artist because the subject of art and the way that the current market, the, um, algorithmically inspired market afflicts or affects or has changed, art keeps coming up.
In our conversations, it's not our focus because, uh, to the extent, to the extent that we do talk about tech and its influence on the content economy, it's more in the world of journalism, which we often get back to. Um, but we have talked to, uh, Rob Long, who is a, uh, screenwriter and, um, Adam Neely, who's a musician and YouTube influencer, um, as well as Lindsay Ellis.
And, and Thefor mentioned Mr. Goshen about these issues and the for all artists of all different types. The, the change in the market, the change in the reality and the way that the new economy af is, is completely morphed. The way they approach art has been, um, has been fascinating to me, but it's been fascinating to me, not just because there's a whole story about.
How the stories we tell are being affected by changes in the market, in our, um, technology, in our production, which is, you know, an old story in itself. But in that, it kept going back to something that, for me, until reading your book was, uh, remained, I guess, um, inscrutable or, or a little bit ineffable, which is that something deeper is changing.
And as you put it in your book, we are actually experiencing a paradigm shift. This is not just, uh, our production, our modes of production are evolving in a way that is, um, you know, making people just recalibrate how to sell their art. But there is a more fundamental change in our understanding of what art even is.
So I wanna start by letting you kind of recap your thoughts about the, how you've organized your thoughts on the previous paradigms of art and where we are now entering.
William Deresiewicz: Right. Okay. So the death of the artist. I don't love the title, the publisher wanted the title. It's the sexy title, gravity title. I worry that, that insofar as artists have heard of the book at all, the title might, uh, inhibit them from buying it because they'll gonna, they're gonna say, Hey, I'm not dad.
Fuck you. Well, okay, I, the subtitle is how creators are struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires in Big Tech. And, and I wanna, the subtitle is important because that's really what the book is about. It's not that artists are over or that they can't survive. It's how are they doing it? That's ultimately what the interest of the book is.
And most of the book is a very, uh, practical nitty gritty, nuts and bolts account based on a lot of interviews of how artists, and that means visual artists, but also musicians, writers, people who make film and television. And even among visual artists, not just the ones you probably think of first, uh, people who make unique physical objects like paintings and sculptures, but you know, there's all kinds of visual arts.
It's also digitizable and therefore much more directly affected by the internet, you know, animation and cartooning and illustration and so forth. Um, so how do they do it? That's mostly what the book is about. But there is a long chapter where I pull back actually two chapters where I pull back and try to understand the answer to the question that you just raised, which is how is all this actually changing the nature of art, the nature of being an artist, the way we understand what art is for.
What is its function in society? What is its, is its function relative to us as, as con as, for lack of a better word, consumers of art, or let's say the audience for art. And I, so there's a long, there's a long chapter about the current situation that's speculative as much as anything because maybe I shouldn't say speculative, it's provisional because we're just entering this new world where the internet defines and dominates and I'm just, I'm trying and I'm, I'm trying to tease out a phenomena that are still taking shape, but that's set up by a shorter chapter where I introduced this whole idea of paradigms to begin with and how they're four i I think that we're in the fourth paradigm.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the fact that while works of art may be eternal or, or at least transcend their own time. And it's a remarkable fact about works of art that they do that. In a way that nothing else does, that we can read. You know, the ID even in translation, a poem that was written 27, 2800 years ago in a completely different culture that we don't understand, in a language that we almost certainly don't understand if we're, you know, unless we're scholars, uh, we're reading it in English, and yet it speaks to us very deeply.
Okay? So this is a remarkable fact about art, but art does not exist outside of time either. So the conditions under which art is made affect, and I would e I would say structure. All those questions that I just, all those foundational fundamental questions I just went through. What is art to begin with?
Role does it play? And when I say the conditions under which it gets made, I mean specifically the economic conditions. So my four paradigms are, Uh, I mean, I'm not a Marxist, but I now that I, I'm telling you this, it strikes me as kind of Marxist in the sense that there's an economic base and a cultural superstructure, but I, I think that's true.
Um, they are defined by how artists get paid or supported. So first, and really I would say this is everything up to it, including the Renaissance. It maybe starts to change in the Renaissance in the 17th century. That's patronage. And artists, the, the, the, the word artist and artisan were the same word.
They sound the same. They at one point were the same. They come from the same route. They meant the same thing. Artists were a form of artisan and, uh, patronage, uh, revolved, uh, around commissions where the artists, and this is even true of the great Renaissance artists, they signed a contract that said exactly what they were going to be producing at what cost, with what materials.
It was not about personal expression. It was not about speaking truth to power. Those concepts did not exist yet. Uh, certainly not in respect to the arts. Uh, the very concept of originality as we understand it now had not emerged yet and probably wasn't valued at all. It, uh, It, it literally didn't exist.
The word or original meant beginning. Um, it meant from the origin. In other words, something was original, if it had always existed, if it had existed from the origin. And creativity was something that was associated with the divine rather than the human. It was God who created it or the gods. And this is why artists invoke the muse.
Adaam: And, uh, as a, adding a bit of Latin dork to the conversation, the term, even rest, uh, Nova, like a, a new thing. Was, was a pejorative, was something to be afraid of. It's, it implies revolution in the, in the scary, destabilizing sense.
William Deresiewicz: Okay. Yeah. And, and the standard for art as articulated by Aristotle, and again, all the way up through the Renaissance was imitation. Meaning the ima imitation of nature hold the mirror up to nature, as Hamlet said. Um, there was value in what we would call innovation and, you know, Vasari, praise Michelangelo for, you know, invention is the word. And that's also in the prologue to Henry. The Shakespeare uses, you know, invention, but it meant invention in the techniques of imitating nature. It's only in the second paradigm that all that starts to change. So what's the second paradigm?
Adaam: When you're saying invention of the technique, you mean the, you, you refine the craft by which you rediscover what is already out there, what got already created.
William Deresiewicz: Yes, that's exactly right. The, the, the techniques of mirroring nature.
Vanessa: So I'm imagine, for example, perspective that would be an invention, for example.
William Deresiewicz: Exactly, exactly right. And so the Ren, you know, the Renaissance artists were recognized as, you know, a great advance over what we call medieval art, but not, but there was no concept of self-expression or of originality or creativity or even genius as we understand. Although again, it's beginning to start in the, sorry, and you know, his understanding of Michelangelo and his contemporary, but it's just beginning. So go ahead.
Adaam: No, the judge is just reaffirming as an exceptional individual in, in the craft.
William Deresiewicz: Yes. Yes, that's right. That's right. Um, that's right. And even the word masterpiece meant the piece that certified you as a master in the sense of like, master electrician, like right apprentice, journeyman master.
That's what a masterpiece was. It wasn't sort of the crowning work of genius, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So, and all of this takes place within the structure of traditional society. Not that it was perfectly static, but you know, it was pretty stable. Traditional society, traditional beliefs, the church with a capital C, uh, the futile order or, or, or, you know, state formation under the aegis of monarchs in the Renaissance.
So it's when all of that starts to break down and break apart. Especially in the 18th century, um, traditional beliefs are called into question. We have the enlightenment, we have Voltaire, we have the American and French revolutions, people questioning the authority of kings, the authority of popes, the authority of received knowledge, the authority of Aristotle for that matter.
Uh, and we get political ideas of liberty and citizenship and so forth. And it's only then that the ideas that I think we most readily associate with art and the artists begin to take shape and art becomes an independent source of truth telling. Uh, in opposition to established authority, and the artist becomes a kind of, uh, prophet or sea, you know, s e e r, um, with this unique social role and the notion of the artist as a bohemian, as kind of existing on the margins of society, as sort of having a spiritual obligation to, you know, bring us forward into a new future. All of all that jazz. art with a capital A.
Adaam: So, I want, can you dwell a little on why you see that connection happening from an artist who is a, you know, like a ma Mastercraftsman, like you said, masterpiece could theoretically apply to, uh, a Welled chair, but to an artist that is now an, uh, a master of self-expression and the, the epitome of individualism.
You mentioned it's a, it was a proxy or a substitute to spirituality in the age of secularism. But why is that also associated with being a bohemian or being in the margins of society and, and to an extent, um, eschewing the markets.
William Deresiewicz: Okay, so that's great. That, and that was the next thing I was gonna get to. I think. So first of all, let's just say that, you know, uh, the most obvious touchstone for, for where all this begins is the romantics. I mean, this is what romanticism was all about, late 18th, early 19th century. And then there's kinda another great nce in modernity, which straddles the turn of the, of modernism rather, which straddles the turn of the 20th century.
Well, if artists are sort of the new prophets, there had always been this understanding that God, you can't serve both God and Manon, right? And so, um, money, material considerations, filthy Luke had always been seen as a threat to religious purity. Right. And religious devotion. And now if art is a kind of new secular religion, at least for the so-called progressive or educated classes, those same ideas come along.
Um, though Bohemian isn't just a bohemian, they are opposed, they're opposed to it, another new type. And the word bohemian is a new type. The word is a new thing. They're opposed to the bourgeois z new word, uh, uh, who are understood to be Philistines another new word. Um, that's why, but here, that, that's why, that's why the, so the solution is, uh, bohemian.
I'm gonna exist on the margins of the market. I'm gonna do what I need to do to scrape by and make a living. And maybe that means being supported by some aristocrat who wants to feel like they're cool because they're associated with cool people or a, a merchant of the more advanced type. But, um, I'm, I'm going as much as possible to keep my art separate from the market to me, keep my work separate from the market.
But I might have been wrong when I said that bourgeoisie was a new word, but certainly Philistine was a new word and the achieved this new prominence, obviously as a class, um, as a, as a kind of a cultural idea. Um, but here is the big contradiction. The whole, like I said, there's an economic substrate to these paradigms, and the first one was patronage and the artisan, the whole reason this is possible in the arts is because of capitalism.
The market freed artists from patronage by enabling them to sell directly to the audience or maybe sell through the intermediary of a, of a culture industry, you know, like a publisher or a printer as they were called in England or a gallery, right? But the point is, They can make enough money directly from the market so that they no longer have to be beholden, uh, not just financially and therefore ideologically to the, to e established authority to, to church and crown.
And there's a fame. I didn't, my editor made me cut this outta the book cause she thought the, the, the chapter and the whole book was too long. But there's a famous moment because I think really this happens first in, in writing, in, in the, in, in publishing and first in England. Uh, partly because England was the first place to have a copyright law in 1690.
And copyright is very important, right. Um, The, the famous moment was Samuel Johnson's letter to his patron. This is sort of famous in sort of English literary history. Uh, uh, a a patron who had, uh, an aristocratic patron who had promised him support for his great dictionary of the English language, which he spent like nine years on.
And the money never came through. And Johnson wrote this famous, famous letter that in his high johnsonian syntax said, fuck you. Uh, it's been called Literature's Declaration of Independence. And the person who coined the term, I think, did it advisedly, I think it was the 1740s, maybe it was even the 1760s.
I don't remember the exact date. The point is, it was right around the time of the, the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote. It's part of the same idea, this independence, but art, uh, the market freed art from patronage, but only by throwing it into the market. So there was always this kind of hypocrisy or tension or sort of game that we played with ourselves during the second paradigm where we pretended that there was no money in the arts, that artists didn't worry about money, blah, blah, blah.
Adaam: But why that, this is the thing that I th that interests me about this stage and that bias about trying to deny the material. I mean, I mean, you said it, you said the, the, the spiritual connection. It's a very Christian remnant, right? Like I, I I'm thinking one of our first conversations that we keep coming back to was with Tom Holland about the, the way that Christian thinking, specifically that aspect about elite culture, uh, or dominant culture disarming itself at, at least to perform some kind of self-op obligation or, uh, or performative impoverishment.
It's traceable back to the Christian ethos, and I can't help but see it as part of that because there is nothing inherent to art or for that meta spirituality that says that it has to be out completely out of this material world or not protected by the material world.
William Deresiewicz: Well, let me say a couple things. First of all, I think we see Christian remnants everywhere in culture and society. It's one of the key, uh, ways that I understand what I see around me now, and it, and it makes perfect sense. I mean, these, these energies don't disappear. The structures carry on in different forms, et cetera, et cetera. And I say that as a Jew, um, not only Christianity, but I think to a great extent, Protestantism, I feel like we're all Protestants, including me and I'm Jewish.
But the other thing is I do think there's something real to it. Which is that the idea, and I I neglected to say this, although I implied it, the standard of art goes from my mesis from imitation, a Aristotelian mimesis to expression. And this is explicit in sort of romantic art theory and so forth. It's about self-expression, your own vision.
Um, and this is sort of part of the home mythology of the artist and sort of enclosing yourself in your study or your studio and you know, sort of taking communion Well, I think there really is a contradiction very often in practical terms between giving voice to this, you know, truth that you find deep inside you and making something that people are gonna wanna exchange money for.
It's a, it's a tension that artists deal with all the time, and I think that that's at the genuine route, having to satisfy the, you know, the demand. I mean, it's not just that the market, um, you know, you know, through, through Liberated Art by throwing it into the market. But I mean, the market means the audience.
And the audience is, you know, really the middle class, which can be kind of the enlightened sort of German 19th century middle class, but it's still a goddamn middle class. And so you have to satisfy, you know, the taste of that, right? I mean, that's what we're.
Adaam: Yeah. No, I, I, I understand that in theory. It's just, I think emotionally never registered to me this idea of the, uh, the, the imp purifying effect of the materialistic middle class.
It doesn't, it doesn't hit me as reson as I think it, it would, you know, a nche or, uh, or for that matter, many of the, uh, artists today. But let's, we can move on to the, uh, to the next piece.
Vanessa: Before we move on, I do wanna just double back very quickly to Samuel Johnson because I hadn't, I, I'm familiar with Samuel Johnson, but I wasn't familiar with the, uh, literary Declaration of Independence. And I'm just curious who funded the dictionary, if not this patron. Like what, what was his recourse,
William Deresiewicz: if I'm remembering correctly, this is important. It was subscription, it was basically what we would call now Kickstarter. Oh, okay. I people, uh, if I'm remembering correctly, and I know Alexander Pope had done this a generation earlier with, with.
Some of his great works of poetry. You basically pre-sold copies before the thing existed and that funded the project. That's what happened. And that's the Right, that's the market,
Adaam: right, the, the audience was the patron,
William Deresiewicz: but a very Right. Uh, just to, just to, before I go into the third paradigm, and I love how slowly we're going through this, but lemme just say to the last point, AAM, that, um, this is what the whole phrase selling out, right?
Right. This is the reality that it gestured store. It's the sense that you're like, you know, you're, you're prostituting your art by making something that you're just gonna doing for money or you're sort of, you're sort of change, you know, you're kind of taring it up. You're making it more palatable. You are, whatever it is. Anyway, so look, yeah.
Vanessa: You had a phrase in the book that I think you suggested that the phrase has less, uh, Like maybe resonance nowadays. And I, and I actually didn't, I don't know if I agree with you on that score, but we can return to that later.
William Deresiewicz: Yeah, we should return to that. We should return to that. Ok.
And that'll help move us forward. Okay. So look, when I started to think about this stuff a few years ago, I assumed I wanted to know how we got from this second paradigm. I don't think I thought of it that way then. But basically the way I thought of it was just like the way we think about art. You know, the holy artist, the hero artist, the all that stuff, uh, to what we have now, which is this, in the most grotesque phrase in the world called, you know, creative entrepreneurialism.
And as soon as I started to think about it, I realized, you know what? We haven't had the first thing for a long time. We still have the ideology of it. We still have the mythology of it, the idealization of it. I think it's still transmitted in art schools. It's still absorbed by young artists, would be artists.
But the truth is that as early as the period between the world wars and certainly. Uh, after the second World War, a new paradigm emerged. Um, and that's what I call the artist as professional. Um, people talked then in the forties, fifties, sixties, about the culture boom. All of a sudden there was art became, uh, something that was subject to public support, to, uh, kind of massive foundation funding.
So we, and we built, you know, ballet companies, theater companies, Lincoln Center, the National Endowment for the Arts. The MFA barely was invented in the thirties, barely. There were eight programs in 1940 and something like hundred 50 in 1980 in visual art, comparable numbers, inri in creative writing. Now there's, I dunno, three to 500 in both.
So the artist became a professional and maybe now is not the time, but there's a lot to say about how that changed art. How it changed the position of the artist, how it killed the avantgarde. There's a, uh, there's a, an art historian, I think her name is Diane Crane, or Diana Crane, who talks about the Moen Guard.
The, the Avantgarde became a middle guard, a middle class. Um, it was still hard to, you know, there were still starving artists, but if you were reasonably successful, you could live a decent professional life often because you had a faculty position, you had grants, you had, you know, if you were a writer, I mean, it was a, you know, being a, you know, you could make a living writing novels.
You could make a living, uh, as a musician producing LPs. These things co actually caused money and people bought them, and artists got a decent royalty from them.
Vanessa: And to what extent does this, uh, professionalization. Emerge as a result of more higher education. Because when you say things like, for example, M F A, like I would assume that, I mean, everybody knows you don't need an M f A to be a writer, but there is a cultural, and same thing with journalism, which I struggled a lot with going to journalism school, like I don't need this. But there's a cultural cachet that comes now from an education and then the, the education kind of manufactures more of these artistic professionals.
William Deresiewicz: They were co-conditioned. They happened at the same time. The culture boom coincided with something that we called the higher ed boom, where I think the number of college students quintupled from 19 something like 1940 to 1980.
We were opening college campuses at the rate of one a week. For like 30 years, the professor had multiplied, as I said, the number of MFA programs, you know, multiplied by an order of magnitude or more. And so, I mean, part of it, what it means for an artist, artist to become professionals, that it is, that there became, there became this, uh, official credentialing system.
So no, you don't need an MFA to be a painter. It's just you kind of, you kind of have to have one if you wanna be part of the credentialing system, the networks that are associated with that. Uh, the whole apparatus of grants and residencies is, you know, is all tied up with the same system that also produces MFAs and, you know, teaching positions in MFA programs.
Adaam: It's just in, in, in a way, it's the new face for artisan guilds, right?
William Deresiewicz: Yes, you could say that. I mean, there are obviously differences, but you could say that, and I think one of the reasons you could say that is that the purpose of professionalization is to limit the numbers. Is to keep pay or the equivalent of pay to keep income high by restricting the field.
Uh, now again, that doesn't happen officially in art the way it does say in medicine where you're not allow your, your legally barred from practicing, but effectively, and that's what the, and what the guilds did too, right? They sort of, they were gatekeepers, right?
Adaam: With guilds. They were, they did have legal sanction to, uh, uh, yeah, to Barb, right?
Licensing. But, but the impact is similar and, um, not just by intention. It's sometimes even stronger in terms of its impact because you need the network and you need the, the legitimization of the people who are involved in that network to get access more so in some industries, I suppose, than others, but certainly true to journalism, which is as something that we keep getting back to as.
Absolutely absurd. And given that the craft of journalism is being able to ask questions and learn subject, the fact that you'd need any kind of credentials for that is mental.
William Deresiewicz: So you guys are journalists, and it sounds like you've talked about journalism a lot on the podcast. So we can just say that what's happened to journalism is what's happened to the arts.
So this professional, this third paradigm, which I date, you know, really from after World War ii, uh, is, is, has been, has been, is on the way to being destroyed by the internet and the way the internet has changed the economics of what we've now come to call content. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's completely undercut the whole, it, you know, it depends on exactly which art we're talking about and what your situation is, but it's, it's destroy, it certainly destroyed the business model for on the far, on the for profit kind of culture industry side.
Right. We, and we all know this because we all live it. Because we don't pay anything for our content anymore, right? Or we pay very little, so we're all at fault here. So we're not buying LPs for $11 in books and Right. It's all free or very low cost subscriptions. And it was, it was already hard. I mean, I said for, you know, the age of the professional artists made it easy for some people, some small percentage to, to do, okay.
Now there was still the starving artist. Now everybody's starving, everybody's a freelancer, everybody's a gig worker. Uh, everything pays less or pays nothing at all. Uh, you know, sculpture departments will have two tenured faculty and 40 adjuncts,
Adaam: but, but there are at least two. Different processes here, right?
There is the internet and the revolution that that brought to content and how cheaply distributable content has become. But on the other side, you have a transition, which I think is more broadly in the economy, might be because of the internet, but not necessarily, which is not exactly contraction, but at least, uh, soft softening growth in the economy in general from a period where you would have such an explosion that allowed for, um, you know, what, what, uh, uh, probably, uh, uh, a hyper capitas or libertarian would consider the luxury goods of the humanities, um, to, uh, and, and in, in a moment in time, a rare moment in history that has generated a lot, uh, like that produced a lot of creators in that world.
Um, with a legitimate expectation of some kind of remuneration to a point where pro we are producing the same, if not more amount of artists, creators, journalists, whatever, without the, the, the, the slots. There are no more positions, there is no more, uh, model for them to make the same kind of economy and nothing in terms of the, uh, pipeline that produces these people has changed.
William Deresiewicz: I agree with a lot of what you say. I disagree with some of it. So first of all, you're absolutely right that the culture boom and the higher ed boom, and that all came along with the post-war prosperity for sure. And the rise of a mass middle class that wanted to consume culture and had the leisure to do it, uh, and the money to pay for it.
But I mean, look, that that whole thing starts to. Slow down radically in the early seventies, right? The kind of post-war boom comes to an end and neoliberalism and real wage growth stagnates from that point. And I, and I don't think the effects really show up in the arts until I think it's really about the internet and not about the end of the post-war prosperity.
You know, like I said, there's like a 30 year difference. So if we look in the eighties and nineties, well, you know, now people are buying CDs and they're even more expensive. And it was the heyday of magazine journalism. You know, there were still expense accounts. So I think what I would say to what you're saying is, yes, we don't have the same prosperity, but the truth is we're not talking about a lot of money.
You know, in other words, what people spend on the arts, on CDs and books, it's not really a big part of their disposable income, it's just that everybody does it and it added up to, right. And this is the, okay, so the internet. We've talked about what's called demonetization, right? The demonetization of content.
But that's not the only thing that's going on. It's not just that more people are trying to do it now, an order of magnitude, more people, two orders of magnitude, right? Because the whole idea, the whole pitch of the internet is that you can be a creator too. And it's drawn in literally millions of people who quite frankly have no business doing this, are never gonna make a thin dime from their crappy songs that they make on garage band and put on Spotify.
But they do it anyway. And it, and it, it does a, a, a number of things. It, it, um, it just creates a mountain of garbage that people have to sift through to get to the good stuff. But it also just generally contributes to the de, to the, to the devaluation in the non-monetary sense that it's, this is just, you know, music is not special anymore.
You know, it's not like, you know, the Beatles, you know, release their LP today and like the world comes to an end and it's, you know, and this movie like Changes Your Life and that whole way of being a young person that existed during that cultural heyday. I just don't think that's a thing anymore. I mean, people still care about their favorite, you know, pop musicians and their favorite television shows, but it doesn't have this kind of spiritual urgency. And that has an economic effect, has a cause and effect.
Vanessa: Right. The, it's like the spiritual urgency comes less from consuming artists who are at their prime or, or at the cutting edge of their field. And more from the self-expression, the, the spiritual urgency is that I want to create the thing, I wanna put something out in the world whether it's good or not. Right. But that seems to be more where the, where the onus has moved.
William Deresiewicz: I think that's a good point. That, and I would also say, you know, politics. Politics as it ex, you know, you know the whole, the whole, we know what we're talking about. The whole religion of politics that the internet has, has created. Really.
Adaam: What I love about that section, in that chapter, when you come to the point about how identity defined broadly becomes the, uh, purpose of art.
Art is no longer art for art's sake, but art for, for something. And that something is usually identity. And the identity. Yeah. Could be identity politics, but it could also be your identity as a Star Wars man. Yes. Right. You quote Harold Rosenberg, the genuine work of art takes away from its audience. Its sense of knowing where it stands in relation to what has happened to it.
Art means breaking up the crowd, not reflecting its experience and reading that definition. It sets such a complete contrast from what we understand today to be not just art, but content in general, from journalism to, um, to, for that matter streamers, um, on Twitch where everything is subservient to the audience and to the sense of the audience as, uh, quote unquote one of my, my least favorite words in the English language because of its abuse communities.
Yeah. The idea that you are creating something to, rather than challenge your position in the world, you have it reaffirmed and Yes, and, and solidified. Yes. And that's the, the disgusting thing about what's happening to the art. That was to me, the aha moment in reading this and seeing how this process really is happening across our cultural landscape, from politics to the way we consume songs and play computer games.
William Deresiewicz: Absolutely. It's a, it's a, it's, it's a change. We want art to affirm, to affirm us. It so we're, our whole conception of artists changed, but also our whole conception of the self has changed. Right? You in the, in the, in that second paradigm, great, you know, age of art with a capital A. The whole idea was that the self was this en glowing fluid project of self.
And the word identity meant this effortful creation, search for, and creation of a unique self identity meant the, your unique self. And that's how people wrote about like in the fifties, you know, Eric from people like that. And now identity means the opposite. It means this group thing. And you also point to what may be, and I think I start that long chapter with this, what may be the most important thing about this new fourth paradigm post professional paradigm?
Internet age. It's the. This new thing. Now, the word fan, it's like couple of hundred years old. But I, but you know, I, you know, the old I, the old fandom, I use that image of the Beatles showing up in New York and, you know, the girls weeping uncontrollably. And in this, in this position of subservient and submission and frustration in this passive role and the hero up on the stage, uh, now it's the opposite.
Now it's the artist who's screaming and weeping with need. And the fan is in the driver's seat. The fan is in charge. And we can talk about the relative politics and maybe even the gender politics. But the fact is, I as a, as a, as a member of the audience, I don't wanna be in charge. I want the work to seize me, to live me, to read me. But that's not how people think of it anymore.
Adaam: And, and one of the. Offshoots of that, which you bring up, and I was actually, um, arguing about this topic last night, is the new understanding of representation where you're, you're looking to tell the story of a group, or you're looking to tell the story of, uh, uh, like this is some, some, some, some cultural idea that, or social idea that you're trying to promote.
But it, in the way that it's done, in the way that it's, um, trying to placate the audience rather than challenge it, it ends up being, I, I want, I don't wanna use the word authentic, it ends up being. Water down and, and universalized in a, in a meaningless way, as opposed to the opposite, where the creation was about trying to tell a story that was particular, that was about an individual experience, and whether that individual was, uh, wasp or telling the story of black class relations in Bel air.
Those were individual stories that had a particular resonance. And I'm mentioning the Fresh Prince from Belair because that was my, my, the way I brought this argument up last night was I, I, I suddenly realized that as a child raised in Israel, light-skinned, uh, Jewish, It never even occurred to me that, um, that the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is talking about an experience that is irrelevant to me and the most resonant scene in it was a scene that had nothing to do with my personal story or my, or, or, or the political dramas that I was facing.
But it stuck with me until, uh, uh, to, to today in terms of exposing me to, first of all, to a culture that I didn't, uh, know directly, but also an idea that a universal idea that made me, that had an impact on me. And that was Will and Uncle Phil arguing about whether the revolution was successful. Will is basically calling him a sellout by being a a, a upper middle class, um, successful businessman.
You're playing the white man's game while we are still suffering in, uh, in the streets. And Phil lashes out and says, you think you're such a rebel because you have a poster of Malcolm, Malcolm X in your room. I heard the brother speak. What you are doing isn't helping us. That, that little like tension, that was like a tension that was just unaware of that was not part of my story.
Really impacted me, like just in the way that I think about the world in a way that so many of the content that I'm seeing today, whatever identity group it's trying to represent, when it's trying to be groveling and too pristine and um, and to the point of dishonesty will never affect me, will never have caught me.
I will just have tuned it out regardless of who's represented in there. Like there are so many stories about the Jewish experience that I find to be so dishonest and so empty that I see myself less in them than I do in, in The Fresh Prince from Bel Air.
William Deresiewicz: I agree with all of that. I mean, it just, it makes it so saddens me how people are contracting their own sense of their humanity.
By, by, you know, it's like, well, it has to be people who look like me. It has to be people who reflect my, well, what is my experience? Well, what is your experience? I mean, I have a whole book about reading Jane Austin as a man. And, and, and how I learned to see myself through the Jane Austin heroines and how that helped me grow up when I was in my twenties.
Um, the, these, these sort of identity stories are all, as I think you're suggesting generic, they all follow these scripts of what the, what, and this is what Rosenberg was talking about in 1948 that, you know, the, the stories that the group wants to tell about itself and any true artist is going to be at odds with their group.
And you can think about Philip Roth and the Jews. And the Jews hated what he was writing because he was telling uncomfortable truths about the community. Um, you know, as I understand it, Carol Walker is not in good odor in the black community for the same reasons. There's too much irony and complexity in her work.
The ideologues Baldwin writes about this, the ideologues want the rev. He talks about how revolutionaries and artists are always at odds that they both look at society from the margins, but they do so differently. And revolutionaries are usually not kind. They tend to suppress artists. And now we have this, this cadre, this class of professional revolutionaries who are actually the establishment, the cultural establishment at this point.
And they're dictating, uh, these generic, you know, group scripts. And if you don't follow them, you know, you're quote unquote not really black or you're not politically black or whatever. That's a, that's a phrase, right? You're not politically black.
Vanessa: Mm-hmm. I think this, this gets back to the, the higher level question of what is art for, and I think, I think you and Adam would agree that art, well, you'll tell, you'll tell me if you disagree, but I believe you would agree that, um, art is to exist in order to reflect ourselves and who we are to challenge.
What we, what, what we think we are. To have a sense, I think you would say something in the book, like a sense that is as near to life as possible. Um, in order to be, to better interrogate and investigate what, what life is about. That's what good art does. And in the age of the internet and the artist as producer, I believe you call them, that's not what artists for, right? Artists for something fundamentally different.
William Deresiewicz: Well, yeah, I mean, so, you know, uh, three paradigms and then this fourth paradigm that I look at from various angles. And then at the end I try to propose a word for it because I don't like creative entrepreneur and worker doesn't quite fit either. And I come up with producer because I think it, it indicates that you're this creature who's fully in the market.
So if the bohen, if the art isn't existed effectively before the capitalist market and the Bohemian existed on the margins and the professional. Part of what it means to be a professional is that you're shielded from the market by an institution, the university you work at, or even like the galleries to sales for you.
You know, you're, you have a mediated relationship, so you're sort of semi free from the market. And the whole thing about the fourth paradigm is now you're all the way in and you're just a producer, whatever that means, earning whatever money you can, however you can. And that, that, and a lot of that is on the internet and it's on crowdfunding sites.
And it's, uh, you know, it's all about finding a niche, right? And marketing to that niche. This puts you at, uh, at the mercy of your audience in a way that hadn't been true before. Your audience is much smaller. You have an immediate, an unmediated relationship to it. You're literally hearing from it on a daily basis, right?
I mean, that's how these sites work and social media works. And of course you have to be on social media constantly to maintain a presence. And so, You have no choice but to give the audience what it wants and the audience, generally speaking, wants to be affirmed. I don't think that's true just now. I think that's always true.
You know, we see how that's changed. The nature of art. I mean, I think it's, at best it's this kind of fake transgression, but it's always somebody else who's being transgress. It's like we imagine sort of the transgressed, you know, I don't know, I don't know who Trump voter white man sort of this figure, this, this, this straw figure that we, that we, we still put on this paper mache thrown as if it was still the 1950s and we're transgressing against this figure by, you know, I don't know, talking about race or capitalism, but it's like we're the ones in charge now.
It is our pieties that are the reigning pieties of culture. And a real artist is going to challenge those. And I would say to, to pick up Vanessa on what you, you know, your definition of what I think art is for, it's not even in the first instance to challenge us. I think that's a byproduct. I don't think that's actually a good way for artists to, to proceed.
It's to tell the truth. Understanding the truth that discovering and communicating the truth is really hard. And most of us shield ourselves. We spend most of our lives shielding ourselves from the truth about ourselves and our world. It's, it's, it's either hard to take or just hard to discern.
Adaam: Although this is where truth becomes, uh, I mean, obviously words like truth will always be a, a source for disagreements, but, The way you think of truth is clearly intention with the way that truth is understood by the cultural mainstream.
Right? Now you imply truth as something that is by definition, and I do too complex, contradictory, nuanced. That is that, that that has a lot of internal, um, conflicts that sometimes cannot be resolved. And you, you, I think several times when you. Refer to the qualities that have been lost in this current content age. You talk about irony and complexity and nuance. Yeah, yeah. Um, nuance is a bit of a band word on this podcast, but I'll allow it. Um,
William Deresiewicz: ambivalence, ambiguity
Adaam: the problem, uh, aren't you proud of me, Vanessa, that I didn't say cognitive dissonance. Uh, the, the other side of this, there is a, a piece by, um, Washington Post Media, uh, media professor and the Washington Post about the true push for push away from objectivity and to big T truth and big T truth in the media and Big T truth as defined by that piece.
Um, repugnant enough is, My truth is the lived experience and the lived experience is, um, um, lacks exactly in what Vanessa mentioned, which is the challenge because it, it is the lived experience as, as my brain lets me experience it, which is usually gonna be self favoring and simplifying and, and it will come at the expense of complexity because I don't want to know the complexity about myself or I don't want to know the contradiction of myself. I want to know my hero strike as, you know, my superego. I want, I want to exist in the world as the superego inside of me. And that's what's understood as truth today.
William Deresiewicz: Yeah. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna make a, I wanna make a careful distinction here. I mean, first of all, that piece that you just referred to, that instantly notorious piece, you know, which is kind of deserves to go into a time capsule that, that this horrible idea.
So we talked before about how the job of a journalist is to gather and present the facts. They're different. They're different truth creating disciplines, and that's the journalist's job. And it should not be guided by some kind of capital T truth or capital N narratives. There's the sciences and history, and they have their own ways of, of, of establishing the truth and they tend to be, I.
Involve in personal procedures. There is a great piece in the Journal Liberties, which I also write for by a, I think a historian of journalism at Rutgers a few issues ago, talking about what journalistic objectivity actually means. And it's not this idea that we can be objective as a journalist. It's really a set of practices where we try to filter out individual biases by not just having one person on a piece, right?
So the editor challenges and a fact checker and multiple reporters. And you need to have more than one source and all that stuff. And history has its historiography, has its methods, and of course science has its methods. Now, here's where we need to make a careful distinction, because the way that art establishes the truth and my understanding in Harold Rosenberg's understanding, I think from that same essay, which I believe is the great, the Herd of Independent Minds, which everybody should read, um, is by starting with the artist's individual experience.
It is by starting with your experience. And to me, part of the devaluation of art, paradoxically, is that we in a sense don't have the same belief in the value, in the validity of individual experience as a way of understanding the world. Now, here's where the careful distinction has to come in, because we do talk about lived experience and my truth, but to me that's a very different thing.
First of all, lived experience, again, is only valid as long as it fits these generic, uh, scripts that have been established by, you know, the official, you know, Abraham, Ken of the world, the people who who have been, who have ed to themselves, the power to speak for the group. So your experience, you know, there's that other famous recent thing, the interview in the literary journal, Hobart, that was given by the Latino writer.
I don't remember his name. He grew up working class in Miami. And he writes about his homeboys, and they're not very attractive people, but it's the reality of his, you know, Cuban American gruff and tumble macho experience. And the nice white ladies who run publishing in Brooklyn, as he put it, they don't wanna hear that story.
That's not what, you know, that's not the story that you're supposed to be telling about the Latino community. So even if you're Latino, it doesn't count. So, um, that's the first problem with quote unquote lived experience. And the second problem is that I think it takes an artist to really look at one's own experience in an honest way.
Otherwise, you just end, you know, in my truth, I mean, my god, my truth is really just an excuse it. What it, what it really is, is an excuse for using personal experience to overrule those other forms of truth telling. Like, I don't care what science says. I don't care what history says my truth. Is X, Y, and Z.
You know, my truth is that the Bible was written by Africans. I her overheard somebody say that. It's like, well, no, actually that's not true. And it doesn't matter what you know. So your truth means what you prefer is true. That's not what I, that I'm talking about when I talk about an artist searching their own experience and, and, and telling them, telling themselves in the first instance, truths.
I mean, look, this is, this is why sometimes, you know, artists drink and artists kill themselves and depressed because they're looking things in the face. Poets, you know? Right. Classically, they're looking things in the face that most of us prefer to avoid. It's, it's an act of incredible generosity and courage. It's not my truth and my lived experience.
Vanessa: I mean, I think this, this gets back a little bit to this idea of, uh, creating art for niche communities so that people can feel affirmed in their. Communities, um, and as, as kind of antithesis to the kind of artist as outlier, I suppose. Like this is the new, the new form of art.
Yeah. And it, and I do think there's a very strong parallel here with how the internet has affected us more broadly in terms of our social relations and how we seek relationships that is taking us to art in this form, right? We want a quote unquote sense of community because we feel the lack and therefore we seek out the art that is gonna affirm our sense of belonging in this very small and niche, niche place.
Adaam: I mean a very shallow, cheap, and ultimately I'm nourishing, in my view, form of community.
Vanessa: Right, but what, what? But this is the, this is the reality of the internet age, right? There's, there's very little real,
Adaam: just leave your phone. Just go out and meet the people. Just talk to the people.
William Deresiewicz: They're also on their phone.
Adaam: Problem solved.
William Deresiewicz: They're also on their phone. Look, I wrote my dissertation on ideas of community in 19th century, uh, British fiction. The time when I was younger, when I spent a lot of time thinking about community. And, and, and I thought a lot about exactly what both of you guys have said, which is that the word has become completely cheapened.
And it's just this idea and, and quote unquote said, we, we have a, we want a sense of community because we don't have actual community. And, and look, this is all because, you know, modernity broke down traditional communities. And now we live these atomized ex existences in cities, and it's only gotten worse.
And we used to have kinda a civic society or the classic bowling alone. You know, we bowl, we used to have bowling leagues in various forms of civic association. And now we have the internet and. You know, as you know, in, in my essay collection, the End of Solitude, I start with two or three essays about this and how, uh, our social life migrated to social media.
And it is now, it's not, I mean, it's now ano, it's now yet another kind of, um, uh, it's another step beyond this quote unquote sense of community. It's, it's sort of almost like a sense of a sense. It's like, you know, you look at your Facebook friends and you sort of pretend to yourself that they all form some kinda social group, but they're not, they're just individual connections and they're virtual.
It's a of Aacm. That's exactly right. But look, we also, you know, we can, we can be ironic about it and, and criticize it, and so, but we need to, you know, remember that this, that these are real human needs that aren't being met. And we're finding the best ways that we think are available to us, even though there may be ones that are better, but we're doing our best.
And it sucks. But this is the reality, and you're quite right, Vanessa, that this is absolutely played into the way that we experience. I mean, this is what fandom communities are about, really. Mm-hmm. That's what they're about. And, and you know, you don't wanna put, you know, nobody wants a turd in the punch ball.
Right. In that situation. Nobody wants some truth telling goddamn artist. Right. Bemoaning it.
Adaam: I mean, it's, it's that
Vanessa: don't mess the vibe.
Adaam: It's that and, and, uh, substitute of, uh, uh, tribal spiritual ecstasy. Right? Like when you watch those big Star Wars conferences of everybody shaking their plastic lightsabers, you are watching some similar acrim of a similar ACR of, uh, religious, tribal experience.
William Deresiewicz: I think that's right. I think that's right. And, and, and just to draw the point out, uh, fully, uh, the work of art exists. To make that community possible. So the work of art is just kind of a waste station, right? It's not the terminus. Mm-hmm. It's the excuse.
Adaam: And that's why if your art betrays this purpose, you are excommunicated.
William Deresiewicz: Right. That's exactly right. I
Vanessa: would love to actually,
Adaam: go ahead. It's inevitable.
Vanessa: I know it's inevitable. I would love to unpack the, um, the essay, the End of Solitude Essay. I believe it's the End of Solitude essay. Uh, it's one of the first ones in the book. Yeah. Uh, where you talk about, um, the concept of solitude as it existed in the romantic era and it's transformation through modernism and then and urbanization to suburbanization to the internet.
Because I, I mean, I often try to bring urbanism into their podcast, into the podcast because it's my, my interest. But I feel like it's rare that humanities or humanities oriented thinkers. Use urbanism to explain kind of what's going on with us on cultural levels. So I was just really appreciated that, and I, and I do think it's really fundamental to understanding what's going on with us as humans. So I would love for you to unpack a little bit h where we, where how, how we used to think about solitude in the romantic era and, and take it forward.
William Deresiewicz: Let me say, first of all, you know, I, I lived in New York for, throughout my formative years, 15 years from the time I started college, till the time I finished graduate school.
Uh, I would be living there now if I could afford to. It's my spiritual home. It's the only place on earth that I feel at home. I love the city, I love cities. I don't ever wanna live anywhere other than a city. I hear, don't hear the best things about what's happened to New York. But, uh, you know, and we maybe don't, don't need to talk about that, but, um, and what's happening to cities in general.
But let me go back before the romantics because, and you can, you'll see immediately that this is the same way that I thought about. Art, you know, trying to go back in history and tr without being an expert and just based on whatever I could read and think and have, you know, learned, uh, to try to trace some kind of history.
Um, I wrote a different essay in which I referred to the loss of solitude. And a smart editor said, Hey, could you write a whole essay about that, about solitude and the loss of solitude in the internet age? So I, so my first thought was, well, where does this idea of solitude come from in the first place? I already knew, and I already talked about her, uh, in connection with art, that there's a whole con, there are a whole constellation of ideas that we think are eternal, but only arose at the dawn of modernity.
So the late 18th century, um, privacy, boredom, these are new concepts and maybe even new words. Um, in addition to art with a capital A and genius and originality and all that stuff. So I guess what I wanted to, my first question was, is solitude, as I understand it, which is a positive condition of aloneness in which one engages in that practice of building a, a self, an inde, an identity?
Is that just a modern thing? And I thought about it, I said, well, well, no, actually there were religious traditions of solitude. There were, there were prophets and hermits and you know, and, but what, but so it was relatively few people, but we can see examples of it and that what happened to solitude, to religious solitude is what happened to so many.
We talked about the Christian heritage, what happened to so many things, uh, in the last few centuries, which is that Protestantism democratized it. They might not have used that word, but in the sense that we understand it now, made it the possession of everyone
Vanessa: Something every individual could access.
William Deresiewicz: Could and should, right? I mean, this is the whole idea of Luther translating the Bible into German.
Now you are supposed to read it for yourself and have that encounter yourself, and there's no longer a mediation of a hierarchy. It's you and God and then Romanism, roughly speaking, or you know, the beginning of modernity secularized it. So now, instead of, you know, being an encounter with God, it's an encounter with, you know, the spirit or the world spirit or just the human spirit or yourself.
Well, but yourself, but yourself, right? So if, so, if, if it was about reading the Bible, uh, now it's about reading secular literature or listening to Beethoven or looking, looking at visual art, and that's how you have that encounter with the self. What about going into nature? Going into nature? Of course, Emerson, Thoreau world is, yep, absolutely.
Absolutely. But the central idea is that there's this thing called. Uh, what I call the modern self. I mean, this is not my own idea. What I believe, according to Joshua Cohen, at least, Rousseau is the first person to call the individual in the way that we use that word now. And it's sort of part of your, you know, it's, it's incumbent upon you, it's kind of your spiritual duty to, to do all that.
And you do it through various forms of solitude in the encounters that can happen, including even to stretch the word solitude a little bit, uh, friendship, but a certain kind of friendship that's intense and, you know, wordsworth and colored and, you know, Emerson and Thoreau and so forth.
Vanessa: And they were a bit of a yin and a yang, right? The, the solitude, the friendship.
William Deresiewicz: Yes, Emerson says that explicitly solitude equips you to be a better friend. Friendship equips you for better solitude. And, uh, that's another thing that's going down the, because of the internet. I mean, the whole reason I started to think about this is cuz I was teaching a class in a different subject and the literature friendship, and for reasons that I don't remember, uh, we can imagine, uh, one day we ended up talking about solitude.
And I had one student say, yeah, I don't like to be alone. Even when I have a paper to write, I will go sit with a fr in a friend's room while they do their own work. And another student said, why would anyone ever wanna be alone? What can you do by yourself that you can't do with other people? So I think that's where we're at.
Vanessa: Okay, so we we're in the romantic era in which solitude is something to strive for as a way of being a, I suppose, better individual, somebody who engages in, in a spiritual aspect of, of life that requires solitude.
William Deresiewicz: Just to just, just to be really clear, I wouldn't even say that they thought of solitude as something to strive for.
I cuz I think that they just took for granted that it was a possibility. In other words, it was practice through which you strove for, you know, those, those things, the encounter with the self and so forth. But it, it's like solitude was available.
Vanessa: But it, but in terms of the growth of cities, I think there is a bit of like a fear factor there, right? Of cities are getting bigger, they're getting more crowded, they're getting, uh, you know, polluted. Polluted, right? And there's a sense of I must escape this. Urban mass and, and go, go forth and find solitude to have that sense of clarity.
William Deresiewicz: Well, here's the thing. You see, like I said, I'm a New Yorker. To me, that was the best place ever for solitude.
And Hmm. And I think someone else thought that too, and that person was with me. Hmm. Right. So in other words, solitude doesn't have to mean that you're by yourself.
Adaam: I was even, I was bring this up one in, in preparation the other night to Vanessa, because I remember Jane Jacobs, one of her, one of the reasons that she saw cities as unique is that they allow you to make the choice within themselves without having to exit.
You can become part of a group and you can anonymize yourself and be completely on your own. All within that single institution that is modern cities. But I think there is a point also to, to the other side of that, the, the, the dread what Hannah s called the super fluidity of mankind. And the anxiety that that creates populism is energized by seeing kind of the, the squalor of mankind and feeling that it's like a moving swell that's gonna take you.
And then for the populist it is to define who, who it is that is who, who, who, who is the face of this squalor, but ultimately that, that image and anxiety is created by some sort of, um, Over presence that to a person who might not be as comfortable with, it feels suffocating.
William Deresiewicz: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. That is one of the big strands in the, in the sort of, uh, the, the experience of, of, of urban modernity. The imagination of urban modernity. No Wordsworth, you know, he did not have a positive experience of that kind of London crowd. And he writes him and he runs away to the lakes for sure. Uh, and I think it takes a certain kind of personality who thrives on that.
And even then, I mean, there, there were times in New York where especially, you know, coming home on the subway at the end of the day and you're exhausted and you feel completely beset and, and suffocated by the crowd. For sure. That's part of it too, but for the person for whom it suits. I'm, I'm in the middle of, uh, writing a piece about Elizabeth Hardwick, the, the great literary critic and, and fiction writer in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and her, her great, uh, work of fiction, sleepless Nights.
I mean, it, it's kind of a fictionalized autobiography work of memory. Uh, it's really about, you know, she lived on 67th Street. She was alone at that point. Uh, it's about that, it's a celebration of that experience of being in your apartment in the city and, uh, running through your mind is, you know, your memories and the books you've read and, and your sense of a city full of other people like you in their apartments living their own highly individual lives.
I mean, that's another great thing about New York and other great modern cities is. Is that the individual can flourish in, can, can, can cultivate their own individuality in ways that I think any community, including those ones we might be nostalgic for. I mean, mark talked about the ID of village life, right?
And I Orthodox Jewish community in the New York suburbs. And, you know, there's, there are pressures to conformity in a small community and, and, you know, uh, the modern metropolis gives us a, a relief from that. And that's why people run to the, to the cities, especially when they're young. Especially when they're creative.
Vanessa: Right. And I think you, you, you note that the, the move to suburbia kind of coincides with this fear of being individual, this kind of sense of being drawn to conformity. And we go from maybe perhaps idolizing solitude to fearing it to being something that we want to. Avoid, and it's happening at the exact same time that we're physically more separated from each other because there's more sub, there's what suburbanization means, that people are growing up literally with more space between us.
And I thought that was interesting is that you drew the through line from that to the internet because even if we, we might be physically closer to each other. Let's say we've returned to cities and we're, and we're more quote unquote connected than ever because of the internet, there is a sense of actually more space between us because we're not actually interacting face to face.
We're constantly having the. Virtual, uh, life. And, and therefore the, the, the fear of being alone is, is I think ex like accelerated.
Adaam: It's funny how the suburbanization stage already, as you described it, is paradoxical in, in both being a, a, a rush from the over individuation, but also a hyper individuate, like in a, in a, an escape from the masses.
Um, just the, the, the inherent problems of thinking about where, what, what is, what circle do you call the individual circle in, which do you call the community?
William Deresiewicz: Yeah, and let's, I mean, uh, not to pull the rug out from under you, but, uh, and I grew up in a suburb, as I said, and I fled a suburb, and I never wanted to live in a suburb.
But we need to remember that the suburbs were great for people who were, uh, leaving cities that were not pleasant places to be. You know, you know, the sort of the, the immigrant working class, they were unhealthy, they were incredibly crowded. Um, also, you know, without, without any spiritual snobbery, like that city individual apartment thing is not for everybody.
I mean, the classic pattern is you grow up in the suburbs, you go go to the city to establish your career, find a mate, and then when you wanna start having kids, you move out to the suburbs because you know, you don't wanna do the, the city thing and you wanna give your kids more space and it's not as expensive.
And, and between the individual community is the family. And specifically that suburban configuration of family, which is the, you know, the nuclear family, which has its own pro its own problems. It creates this kind, pressurized, you know, domesticity. But it's also a good thing in a lot of ways. Um,
Vanessa: but I would, I think, I would argue that the, because the family is not enough for a, i, I feel like the new, just relying on a nuclear family is not enough to have a fulfilling Yeah.
Life essentially. Because I think what's happened in is that there's, the people's worlds have become too prescribed within just the family unit, and they, and I do think things like friends have been lost or things like social circles have been lost. And it's, we, we have the, the, the virtual version, but it's the kind of low touch.
Less, uh, less physical, uh, interaction. I'll squeeze it in, but really my only priorities are the kids and the, and the parents or whatever it is. And, and I do think that that's actually a. Uh, contributing to the sense of loneliness and aness of, of a kind of internet age.
William Deresiewicz: I think you're absolutely right and you're making me think about, you know, has the experience of sur ity itself of suburban living itself changed?
So two things that immediately spring to mind. One is something we talked about before, which is civic association. I said that I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community and how oppressed I ended, ended up feeling about it. But the truth is my parents chose to be part of that community because it gave us a community and it was a wonderful civic.
I loved until I had puberty. I loved it. I think the adults loved it. They had, you know, most of the kids that I grew up with, I think ended up reproducing that in their own families, but that kind civic association is less and less common. And then the second thing is, and I know there were gender issues with this, but just the fact that back when I, you know, one parent, usually the father, Could support a family at a comfortable middle class level without even himself having to work excessively, which meant that you had a lot of time for family life and for civic life.
And you could hang out with the other couples, you know, Reid Updyke, that wasn't a North Ducks community that was like, you know, people sleeping with each other or going to the club or whatever it was they did. But it was this very rich kind of backyard socialization. Now the father's working himself to death and the mother's working herself to death, and nobody has time for anything outside the family.
Exactly what you just said. So now you really do have suburban families that exist as atomized units with, and the kids, uh, you know, I know this is, I'm gonna sound like an old foggie, but it's so true. We would just, you know, we were like, turned out like sheep. It's like go run outside and play with, I was like eight years old, walking three blocks every day to my best friend's house after school.
I was eight years old. This is inconceivable now. So all of this is conspiring to make suburban life itself very different from what it was originally intended to be.
Vanessa: Mm-hmm. And I, and I do think that there's like a, a, even if you live in cities, there's kind of like a, the effect is still with us. Yes. I still think even, even urbanites have this kind of suburban mentality when it comes to community and family and, and where you're gonna exert your time and effort.
William Deresiewicz: The thing that makes me so sad about New York in so far as I understand what's happening now is that they're like, they're building, you know, housing luxury, quasi luxury housing that's designed to make it possible for you never to leave your building like that home monstrosity on the far west side, past Penn Station, all those giant silver towers, they're supposed, they're, yes. They're like the idea Hudson's life. Yeah. And that is the direct opposite of what city life and specifically New York City life is supposed to be.
Vanessa: It's the Mall-ification of New York. Yeah,
William Deresiewicz: there you go.
Adaam: Yeah. I mean, it's funny how Hudson Yards is a recurring villain on a right next to Chomsky. Uh, so. Let's, uh, we, we've already gone long and we, we don't wanna overuse your,
William Deresiewicz: this is so fun. Come on. It's, it's ok. This is great,
Adaam: But yeah,. I definitely don't wanna miss out on the, the culture
Vanessa: Oh, the, from the essay culture versus, or culture against Culture. Yeah. Yeah, that one.
Adaam: I mean, as we've, as we've discussed Mo most of our notes were just notes as opposed to questions and,
Vanessa: cause you had, you had a point of contention that you wanted to bring up, but I feel like we shouldn't launch
Adaam: point content. Uh, but, but I, if you can maybe just like set up the, um, the premise of the two competing ideas of culture from the, the, uh, was it the engineering version,
Vanessa: engineering mentality, kind of, of that form of. Unconscious culture versus the more cultivated, conscious form of culture.
William Deresiewicz: And I understand, I mean, I think it would, it's one of the more speculative, kind of looser essays in the, in the book.
Vanessa: I really enjoyed it. And I, and I tried to get my programmer husband, um, to read it and he was like, well, what's it about? It's like, I can't, I can't explain it in 10 seconds. You have to read the first three pages. But, which is a good thing.
Adaam: We're, we're not, we're not headed to, I think forward to a fiery debate about this because, uh, my, my quibble was a quibble of quibbles. Um, and that we might, uh, might end up being just a boring semantic disagreement. Okay. Uh, but let's, let's go
William Deresiewicz: that, that, uh, essay, uh, which originated as a talk, actually that talk in turn originated in, in a question that somebody asked me after a different talk, which, He asked me about culture and what I, I think he asked me what I think it is or, and so I was thinking on my feet and I realized that there are two, at least two, but I think two main meanings of the term.
So there's the term that I think we've been, even if we haven't used the word we've been talking about, which is culture as sort of art, that realm of art, which is conscious, what I call conscious culture. And I, in the essay I quote the classic Matthew Arnold definitions for the best that's been thought and said and how culture in that sense.
And he's got a book called Culture and Anarchy, right? Um, is about a cri is a criticism of life as he puts it. And it's really what we were saying before about art, you know, being a, um, and then there's culture in the anthropological sense. Which is just the total pattern of practices and beliefs. I don't know if that's the perfect official definition, but, you know, and, and we use that sense all the time.
We might even talk about Jewish culture, American culture, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it occurred to me that in some sense, these two ideas are opposed or the two things are opposed. Conscious culture is a critique of the total pattern and habits, right, of our society, right? It's, that's what art and culture are critiquing, is the way we live.
Um, and then I go on to talk and eventually I'm getting to. CP snows the two cultures that essay from the 1950s about science versus the humanities. Because if you haven't read CP Snow, people think that it's just an even-handed description of the two cultures. It's not at all. He hated the humanistic culture of his day, and he thought the scientific culture was much better.
And I'm saying, look, at this point, to a significant extent, our unconscious culture, our anthropological culture, is dominated by scientific understanding. It's the engineering mentality which says that science is adequate to answer all questions. This is not the only thing going on in our world. Maybe even it's less dominant than it was when I wrote the essay before the rise of Trump.
But it's a big thing, and I think it's a big thing for the liberal elite. And I think especially if somebody like Stephen Pinker who doesn't understand that there are questions of value that can only be settled, that can't be settled scientifically. He thinks that somehow we can, you know, Write out all the equations and come out with the ideal society. And it just happens to look like what he and his colleagues at Harvard already believes. So it's perfect.
Vanessa: And this is related to technological salvation, technological through technological and
William Deresiewicz: technological solutionism. And you see this ins from Silicon Valley people all the time. I just read something about this that I don't remember who, it was someone who I sure never read my essay and, and came to this themselves that, like the Silicon Valley mentality is that society is an engineering problem
Adaam: and that, okay, so first, just taking one step back, your distinction between the two cultures. Uh, I, I, I find this just, I, I just love that and I, the, the, the anthropological side of the culture or culture as the ent anthropological reality of society is sometimes what I. Try to bring up when having conversations about many political attitudes. And, uh, I, when I hear somebody having an argument with me or, or sometimes not with me, or just in the abstract online, as one argues these days, say something about, uh, capitalism or the, the, the horrors of late stage capitalism and the details of their criticism almost always come down to you hate the culture of greed or the culture of, um, um, devaluation, um, or, um, merc many aspects that have nothing to do with the idea of, of free markets and, and growth, but with the way that it's being exhibited and displayed that sometimes as, as your, um, Marxist read of culture, um, shows that those are not.
Unrelated, but, but we need to be careful about what, what it is you're criticizing. I think same similarly to the, um, criticism of the Second Amendment, um, that comes from the, from the left. I, I think there's much more, um, in our reaction to gun culture, to the culture itself than to the legality. Many solutions to, um, America's, uh, gun problem seem much more a knee jerk, angry frustration or disgusted with American gun culture than it is with the actual.
And culture as a culture is defined, the, the, the, the attitudes around guns rather than really a solution that would reduce meaningfully the um, Death from Gods. And I think when you make this distinction, you start seeing it all over the place. Um, where the response is to, to that level of culture, to the, um, um, I guess that's the unconscious culture, right?
Yeah. That's the pattern of behaviors. Um, so that's just a, a, a minor remark. And I think in, in that sense, i, I, I like to, I hope mass aspirationally that our type of journalism is, is a conscious culture, thinking about that, but, um, or least belongs, tangentially, peripherally to the, to the efforts of the conscious culture.
Um, but to your, to your deeper analysis, um, about where we are in terms of engineering, to me that sounds a lot like, um, like something that definitely precedes Silicon Valley and is far like dates back and probably belongs to the d n A of modern. American life, but at a minimum it goes back to the progressive movement, the original progressive movement.
Right. This is, this is John Dewey..
William Deresiewicz: Right. You're absolutely right. I realized that a second before you said it, you're saying John Stewart Mill.
Adaam: John Dewey.
William Deresiewicz: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Um, absolutely. Um, it's sort of technocratic, progressivism,
Adaam: technocratic, pr, pragmatism, and yes, and pragmatism. By the way, this is al also interesting, a propo our discussion of truth. It's, I think John Dewey's definition of truth is that which is proven to be useful and, and effective in working.
And I, I think that's one of the dumbest, um, dis levels of discussion on, on the right. I think today the, one of the dumbest levels of cultural criticism on the right is attributing everything to post-modernism. And, and, and ignoring the way that post-modernism is embedded far goes far deeper in, in American thinking.
Um, and I think like, I mean, John Dewey is, is a post-modern, is a pre post-modernism, post-modern, like you don't need fuko to get John Dewey. And that, that, that notion that, because the underlying assumption is. Everything is fixable. Everything is engineerable. We have conquered, uh, we have eliminated God, we have conquered nature.
And now we can use these, uh, these powers We have, we have become our own, uh, God, the gods of our own destinies. Or at least the autism is inevitable. Yeah, we can, we can fix things. Um, it's just a matter of tweaking it the right way, and that is truth, and that is the good. The funny thing is that this engineering mindset seems to be something that Trumpism and Populism act, all the craziness that we see now in, in our politics claims to be a response, a reaction to the engineering mindset.
One of their scapegoats is the World Economic Forum, Davos, all the planners, all Bill Gates, all those arrogant. World leaders who think that they can use their power to micromanage our lives. But the funny thing is that this reactionary, uh, populist right Trump Orban Theiss are all offering their own version of hyper engineering.
They just want to be the engineers that quote that I love coming back to from Thomas Soul. That, uh, the, the, the, the tension between the progressive engineer and the, uh, pessimistic conservative is between the, the worldview of the tragic, those who think you can't really control human nature and the worldview of the anointed.
Those who believe that you can control the way people behave and and engineer society to a t The problem is now that we don't really have, or we have a diminishing number of people who hold on to the. Pessimistic, tragic worldview. The only argument really is who, who gets to be the anointed.
William Deresiewicz: Hmm. Yeah. Those are great terms because one of these that I'm trying to get at in that piece, culture Against Culture is that we can never eliminate the contestation of values. So what, what sort of pragmatism or progressivism, or the engineering mentality or Stephen Pinker does is, and what I think the liberal elite does is that it turns values into facts.
So you have Obama talking about how we just need, you know, common sense solutions without a recognition that this is not just an, this is not just a matter of how we implement our priorities. It's about what our priorities are to begin with and an understanding. That what we find ourselves as Isaiah Berlin also talked about in a tragic situation where ideals conflict with each other. Equality and freedom are persistently intention with each other, and other values are intention with other values,
Adaam: individualism and community.
William Deresiewicz: There you go. And, and we can't, we can't shuffle that away by just, we, we can't, we cannot engineer our way to, so, so, you know, we, we, we can't engineer our way around values and also the contestation of values never ends and never will end.
And we can't think of politics as being something that's gonna get us to some steady state, whether it's the communist utopia or the progressive utopia, or the reactionary Utopia. And. Which also means that we need to, we can't pretend that the other side is going to go away. Exactly. They aren't going to succeed.
And we aren't gonna all move to Canada like they want us to or die. Right. We're stuck with each other and we have to recognize that. And that also means that we have to, I used to hate the concept of tolerance because I thought like, who the fuck are you to tolerate me? You're just gonna tolerate me. And now I realized like, yeah, tolerance is like really hard to achieve, actually it's a really high bar. we've completely lost sight of tolerance.
Adaam: I remember pluralism for me. Sorry, Vanessa. I, uh, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll just have this remark and, and, and shut up. But, um, but pluralism to me was, uh, such a, a eyerolling generic phrase growing up when I remember thinking about this. But w this is, this is my own sin of in gratitude and taking for granted that which takes hundreds of years to establish as a norm that you get to take for granted and how quickly it dissolves, um, and how antithetical to human nature it is.
And, and prob because I mean, ultimately the, and this is what it's at the heart of. I think the, the vision of the anointed and or the engineering culture is that the un solvability or ere solvability of the human condition is just abominable. To people of that mindset. It, it, it, the and, and then any other explanation.
And, you know, arguably this is, this is what takes people to religious fundamentalism or to any kind of cultural fundamentalism, peop that's why people do yoga, um, um, or, or go on crazy diets because they think they're gonna resolve their internal contradiction and, and maybe ultimately death by being really, really committed to that discipline. Um, but when it goes on the political level, when you take that, um, self-help approach to politics and think that you can just think your way out of the problem, or, or confidence. Confidence your way out of the problem, you get our, our current reality.
William Deresiewicz: Yeah. Um, as, as I've, as I've been reminded recently, I think by a number of books, including the Constitution of Knowledge, um, this whole liberal project, Emerged in the 17th century out of the wars of religion.
Adaam: That's Jonathan Rauch, right?
William Deresiewicz: Yeah, I think so. Mm-hmm. Uh, I, um, and but the whole, this whole idea of what you call pluralism and I mentioned tolerance, like as you say, it's a very hard one and very important thing because otherwise you have annihilator wars of religion and tolerance means that you accept the existence of people in your society who you find abhorrent, but you recognize that they have as much right to be in the society and to have an equal voice in society as you do. And we don't see that on the right or the left now.
Adaam: Right. Greg Lucianov, uh, a point, I think it was. On, on the remnant. Um, but I'm sure he, he brings it up in his speeches and his writing. He's the, um, head of, uh, fire. Yeah. And he makes the point, or he draws attention to the sophistication of our, of old American cliches that worked as heuristics to reinforce pluralism, like phrases like that just sound hacken made and, and eyerolling like pluralism. Um, like, um, e e everybody's entitled to their, to their own ideas or everybody has a right for their opinions. And this is a free country. And those things,
William Deresiewicz: I don't like what you say, but I'll defend with my life your right to say it.
Adaam: Right, right, right, right. And just those things that you just casually have in the, in, you know, in the back of your mind. And, and you can't, like, you, you want to gag when you hear somebody bring it up. But ultimately, the, the sophistication of preserving this, this notion by, by almost religiously repeating those cliches is like hard to, um, Overestimate. And when you, when you contrast that with the, the, the new grown heuristics of things like my truth or, or you know, words or violence, they're starting to establish a completely different culture of, um, of, of, of approach to difference.
And if these get cemented, if they completely supplant the old heuristics, you know, we are fucked. Pluralism has to start from scratch. And, and, and like you pointed out, it takes hundreds of years of, of religious warfare to, to get there. I mean, at least it did. Absolutely. Thats even replica.
William Deresiewicz: Absolutely. The new left is illiberal, it's anti-liberal. It rejects ideas like tolerance, uh, equal rights and so forth. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah, I mean, some of our very first episodes were just understanding the value of liberal democracy and why, why it's, it's a, an in the imperfect system that is the best we ha we have come up with so far. Yeah.
William Deresiewicz: I think we need to talk about it as much as we can because we need, as you say, to remind ourselves what this is all about and why it exists in the first place.
Adaam: Vanessa, you had something to final question.
Vanessa: I did, but it was kind of going back to what we were talking about before, so I don't know if we wanna go back.
Adaam: You can give it to shot. See, see if, if there, there, there. Civics there.
William Deresiewicz: Okay. One more question. Yes.
Vanessa: Um, well, I mean it wasn't really a question. It was more of a comment that when you were talking about the engineering mentality and this idea of, um, measuring, like there's this expression of like, you can only manage what you can measure.
Right. And to me it seems like. It actually defines what the values can be. Right. You were saying that there's like contestation of what values are. Right. And when, when you def have this, this mentality of we must measure and we must quantify, there's actually only so many values that you can on hold because it's, you're using data sets as your, as your, uh, foundation. Um, and then, and then there is no open messy com competition of values because we, we have, we have the way that's the path.
William Deresiewicz: I think that's, I think that's a really good point. Um, the engineering mentality or the technocratic mentality is also a managerial mentality. And we see this especially in the two things that I think about the most care about the most, the university system, which has become really managerial and the things that can't be quantified or not valued, like the humanist, educa humanistic education.
Like, like a certain kind of teaching, you know, so it's all about outcomes and metrics and you know, they've got lots of numbers that are meaningless because they've measured the wrong things and they probably can't even measure those things. And then in the arts, or at least insofar as, uh, philanthropy as I understand it, is really moving away from the arts because this new generation of philanthropists who are tech people and hedge fund people, finance people, they don't, you can't measure what the arts give
Vanessa: only with freaking influencer numbers. Like how, like what's the, what's the, am I gonna be return on investment in this? Yeah, exactly. Exactly,
William Deresiewicz: exactly.
Adaam: Well, thank you so much. This was awesome. And like this was great as we said, so for dragging you so long. Um, no, this is great. This, we're not even close to concluding our question, so thank
William Deresiewicz: we'll do second episode sometimes.
Adaam: We'll do so Be wonderful. Thank you so much. Okay. Take care. Thank you for listening to Uncertain Things. We're at uncertain.substack.Com or wherever you get your podcasts. Share us with your friends and enemies, and if you're feeling generous, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. It helps a lot. Till next time, stay sane.