Does Adam Kirsch Get It?
I can’t decide if Adam Kirsch really, really gets it or if he’s so wrong that he’s almost bent back around to right, wormhole fashion. The whole essay on writer’s aspiration, fame, and the age of blogs and the Internet is worth a read, but here’s a taste that made me think:
The Internet has democratized the means of self-expression, but it has not democratized the rewards of self-expression. Now everyone can assert a claim to recognition—in a blog, tumblr, Facebook status update. But the amount of recognition available in the world is inexorably shrinking, since each passing generation leaves behind more writers with a claim on our memory. That is why the fight for recognition is so fierce and so personal.
Yet the bloggers who were so indignant at Gessen’s attempt to engross more than his share of recognition did not direct their indignation at literature itself. They did not want to dismantle the prestige of “being a writer,” but to claim it for themselves; they did not want to end the economy of scarcity but to move individually from the camp of the have-nots to the camp of the haves. In this they are like the snobbish narrator in Proust, whose fascination with aristocratic titles reached its height at just the historical moment when titles became completely meaningless. They are not revolutionaries but social climbers.
If that is the case, then the best strategy for writers in the age of the Internet may be to ignore the Internet and look down on it. If print is a luxury, make it a rare and exclusive one; if literature is antidemocratic, revel in its injustice. Make sure that the reward of recognition goes to the most beautiful and difficult writing, not to the loudest and neediest. Above all, do not start a blog, for the non-writers who wish they were writers will only despise you for choosing to meet them on their own ground. As one of the commenting voices on Gessen’s blog put it: “get off the Internet as soon as you possibly can. Every second you stay online…another 18-28 year old (that coveted demographic!) loses all respect for you.”
Kirsch definitely needs to read Here Comes Everybody which would provide further– and more insightful perspective– in the idea of celebrity and ego in the era of social media and networks. There’s both irony and revelation in the fact that Kirsch’s piece is fully available online, certainly managed by some kind of content management system… how is it different from a blog again (outside of a very narrow conception of blogging and an unseemly devotion to technological determinism)? Perhaps only really in expectation and execution– Kirsch himself clearly has a readership in mind that he feels bound to and, judging from this article, no plans to respond to even the keenest comments whose tenor and substance themselves belie his assertions.
That being said, the question of why we write and who we write for is never far from my mind, as is our place at the controls of the great participatory machine. I’m both suspicious of those who maintain that desire for recognition– or even readership– doesn’t play into the nature of their creation and cognizant that new intellectual and social currency is being coined for a multitude of new realms. I largely agree with Henry Gould, a fine poet, who asks in the comments:
… but is the desire for recognition really the essential motivation underlying art and poetry?
Major writers have certainly pointed in that direction. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes). “Fame is the spur…” (Milton). But my guess is that even these exalted figures were voicing their views, not while at the pitch of creative composition, but in a moment of analytical distance & fatalism.
And then goes on to answer himself:
No one will deny that fame & fortune (along with anonymity & failure) are fickle, illusory, and at the same time pervasive social factors; but this state of affairs does not mean one must accept Fame’s (& Adam Kirsch’s) seductive argument, that Fame is the actual SOURCE of artistic making.
My primary quibble being the repeated insinuation that there is “a” (single or essential) motivation or source for artistic making. Where Kirsch sees bloggers as hungering for recognition, it seems as likely to me that many publish their without any real hope or thought of gaining readers precisely because the field is so large that they expect to be swallowed up. But as I believe all writers recognize, there is something important about writing “out” that differs from private journalling and letters tucked away unsent… even if there is no expected or desired reader at all.
Generalization is always dangerous, but rarely more intensely so than in talking about a group as diverse and widespread as “blogs” and “bloggers.” Perhaps writers do and don’t want recognition, do and don’t think of their readers… and maybe this is true of all writers, bloggers included. But at the same time, while I believe we are (or should be) in control of the technology, it undeniably takes effort and creates an interactive context that places deep and different demands on the finite resource of our creative concentration. Given this, perhaps those who posit less engagement for better writing are correct, just for the wrong reasons.
Kirsch’s final paragraph tickled me, veering off as it does into prose poetry:
So too with the virtual mind of the inconceivable future. When it looks for traces of us, it will not turn to novels or poems, but to e-mails, blogs, and Facebook pages. Mind will treasure these evidences of its own past, and devote all its infinite resources to interpreting them. And because it is infinite, it will have more than enough attention to give to each of our lives. Even the least articulate of us will become the focus of a kind of ancestor cult, subject to the devoted meditation of innumerable intelligences. The first will be made last, and the last first. At last, the scarcity of recognition will give way to the plenitude that has always been the mark of the messianic age. If only we could be certain that this was the future we had in store, no poet would ever have to write another line.
November 20th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
You probably won’t be surprised, but there’s lots I disagree with in Kirsch’s post. You’ve pointed your finger at some of it, but I’m perhaps a bit less forgiving. For instance, it continually bothers me how some (Kirsch included, apparently) seem to equate the word “democratic” with “egalitarian” (read those first sentence and tell me this ain’t so).
But, as usual, your observations and criticisms are astute and thoughtful here, from pointing out Shirky’s influential work to “quibbling” with Kirsch’s claims about bloggers.
I for one rarely bother with the question “why do we write”. I know why I write, and it’s no single, solitary, or monoidolithic reason. This is a conversation better suited for, well, conversation, but I will say my justification is more akin to Hyde’s observations than to Kirsch’s assumptions.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Wow, someone less forgiving than me? That’s rare!
I think about the “why do we write” question all the time, and not just in the context of traditional creative writing. I think about it all the time because I can’t help but believe that the radically changing context of the last 30 years has an effect on– and creates new opportunities to expand on or change– the reasons I, at least, write. But I agree, obviously, that there’s no single reason and that Hyde is certainly closer to the mark than Kirsch.
But wearing me “we control the technology” hat and my “try to assist in getting at the real riches of participatory medi” sandwich board, I think Kirsch is– in his own, outsider-ish way– working at some real quirks as things are situated right now. Particularly when examining the example (and cautionary tale) of Gessen.
November 21st, 2008 at 6:05 am
Is it just the linguistic dork in me that wonders why there is so much dramatic drang about “Why we write” whereas there is none about “Why we talk” or “Why we converse”?
I think a lot of those things form the base of why we write. And then on top of that there is this idea of doing something timeless, that exists in the platonic realm, untouched by time.
I don’t agree with much in the analysis you quote. I think the timebound conversational nature is the more interesting thing about lit on blogs. Lit on blogs trades in a little of the timelessness for a bit of immediacy. It brings speech into a very contextualized realm.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:09 am
Mike– for the most part I think you are comparing apples and oranges. What speaking compares to writing a novel or a poem? What conversation is like writing an essay? But I grew up on Derrida and Saussure and the like after a lot of ancient Greeks, so my perception is highly skewed in that particular direction. Acting is one kind of speech that is comparable (in a way) and I know actors ask themselves why they do what they do all the time.
It’s funny that you disagree, but Kirsch is making at least one point that is the same as yours: there are trade-offs in seeking immediate exposure. You focus on the good, Kirsch focuses on the not so good… Conversation is ephemeral. Traditionally, “writers” have in some way been seeking the immortal. That’s the apples and oranges of speech and writing. But somewhere in between we have blogs, perhaps eternal in some way, but not immortal, mostly filled with speech made solid rather than writing with intent. Not that they have to be, but so they are. Including this one for the most part!
That’s why I think Kirsch might just actually be so wrong that he’s at least partly right, at least for a certain kind of writing– the artistic kind, I’ll call it– and he doesn’t make claims about anything else.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I think he doesn’t get it, though of course some of his points are going to be close to right, because writing is way too big a topic to generalize about. Nor am I as cynical about motivation; most of us know why we write and have made a sort of peace with the literary world as it is. Personally, I’m grateful for living at a time when I can write online and discuss ideas with others, regardless of where I’m living or working, or whether some publisher decides my words are worthy.
I was also bothered by “People who are reconciled to the injustice of this world console themselves by dreaming of another” and “People who are not reconciled to the injustice of this world, but also don’t believe in the justice of the next, take refuge in the imagination of redemption, which is always hypothetical and probably useless.” Huh? Are these the only two paths? What about people who aren’t reconciled to injustice but decide to do something about it, even – God forbid – by writing?
November 24th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I agree with your second paragraph, though there is a certainly a broad argument to be waged as to whether writing is an action that can work toward a most just world– for every “there’s no news in poetry but every day people live and die for want of what is found there” is a “perfect art is perfectly meaningless” and for each “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” is a “If art is doing something then the one thing it can’t be doing is working.”
I was glad to see the revision of the first part of your comment– I was going to list some great writers who are/were significantly cynical (at least at times). But I really think that comments like that– and like some others here– are omitting the context of the full article and the specific example he cites.
Kirsch generalizes some, but mostly he is reasoning from example and I think that his reasoning is mostly sound, just not for the reasons he intends. Can we do the job as well and provide examples for our objections? The entire upper-tier of authors, in my estimation, doesn’t blog or even participate in lightweight social networks to any degree. Why is that? Who are the great authors that contradict that trend?
November 25th, 2008 at 9:32 am
[...] comments on my post regarding Adam Kirsch’s essay have been quite interesting. It’s clear that I didn’t convey my point particularly well [...]
November 25th, 2008 at 9:56 am
[...] comments on my post regarding Adam Kirsch’s essay have been quite interesting. It’s clear that I didn’t convey my point particularly well [...]