Haha. Another scientific field in which the orthodoxy needs to be uprooted. Archeology. Psychology. Physics. Now back to the drawing board for biology. I’ve heard hints of this but haven’t seen it in a concentrated form – so thank you to The Guardian and to Arts and Letters Daily for giving voice to a heterodox group of scientists who are contending that a lot more work needs to be done on the fundamentals of biology, that a century’s-worth of data suggests that the picture of evolution is vastly more complicated than the textbook version of natural selection would suggest and that phenomena like mutations, plasticity, and random drift need to be better accounted for in some new standard model. As laid out here, the case of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis crowd is logical, disciplined, and in touch with core principles of scientific inquiry – and they are surprise, surprise running into significant opposition from the doyens of mainstream biology, who for the most part refuse to engage with them.
Speaking personally and honestly, I’m not actually very interested in these questions. Species evolve one way or another and I haven’t been in a lab since 10th grade, but the pandemic really woke me up to issues with how the ‘scientific community’ does its work and reaches its conclusions – which confirmed a hunch I’d had about the scientific method going all the way back to school. Things like the replicability issue in research studies, the rise of the placebo, and just the omnipresence of ‘noise’ and what Charles Fort ‘anomalous phenomena’ all over the scientific discipline should raise more fundamental epistemological questions than they clearly do. And, more and more, I’m becoming convinced that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions really is the textbook for understanding how the ‘scientific method’ functions in the real world – i.e. that it’s about ‘consensus’ and that consensus can shift dramatically for reasons that have more to do with culture and politics as some breathtaking new evidence. As The Guardian article wryly puts it, “Wars of ideas are not won with ideas alone.”
Reading about EES – with the hood lifted to some extent on biology’s particular consensus-building machine – is like reading Aristotle or somebody on the natural sciences. The issues that are being dealt with are fundamental and on ‘first causes’ – how did life really form, how did the first eye, the first wing develop, what drives abrupt changes in behavior, such as the shift from living in sea to living on land, the sorts of questions that, I remember thinking, were somewhat elided over in my high school textbooks which purported nonetheless to present a stable and essentially complete theory of evolution. What the EES crowd is discussing sounds utterly fascinating – and, were I a biologist, these would be exactly the sorts of questions that I would be greedy to address: a vast series of anomalous observations, the discovery of the importance of mutations circa 1910, the realization circa 1970 that mutations could be the driving force in molecular biology as opposed to natural selection, and the ongoing observations of field biologists who cannot fail to notice the heretical and untoward ‘plasticity’ of their chosen species, the ways that certain species will undergo dramatic shifts in a generation that should take millions of years according to the standard evolutionary model.
Are these wayward phenomena just noise at the margins of the natural selection model or do they represent a kind of alternative paradigm – in the way that, I recall, mutations were cough coughingly introduced into my biology textbook in a throwaway paragraph after however many dozens of pages on natural selection? I don’t know or particularly care. What I do care about is the way that modern institutionalized science – as opposed to the ancient model – lords itself over the humanities with the promise of ever-increasing certainty, as opposed to the more honest and more accurate self-conception of being part of a never-ending, never-truly-advancing spirit of speculation.
Physics famously went through its own epistemological crisis at the turn of the 20th century and which resulted ultimately in the field losing its claims to certainty. But physicists, about the most rationally-minded, arrogant group of people conceivable, have been surprisingly generous in admitting the limitations of the Copenhagen synthesis and of the inability to reach a Grand Unifying Theory. This aporia has been a blow to a certain vision of the ever-progressing spirit of reason – there was a coziness in believing, with Lord Kelvin and Albert Michelson circa 1900 that the ‘great principles’ had all been discovered and that there could be nothing new in physics apart from ‘measurement to the sixth decimal place.’ By contrast, how shameful – in some sense – that the greatest minds of the 20th century discovered separate sets of rules for matter at the macro and micro scales and could never manage to reconcile them, but so be it: that’s where physics ended up, in a very Socratic place of not-really-knowing and having to come up with ever more outlandish and interesting theories to try and tie it all together. And it sounds to me like biology is headed in a similar direction – drop the ersatz synthesis of the mid-20th century, deal with the variegated landscape of contradictory inputs (natural selection and mutations and plasticity), worry more about what the data is actually saying as opposed to how it can be disseminated for textbooks and grant proposals. And, for those on the outside of science, there’s a similar obligation – which, actually, is a respect for the deeper principles of science – to steer away from reverence for the scientific achievement or scientific establishment, to accept with grace the limits on our knowledge, and understand that the real work of science isn’t synthesis or consensus but returning to first principles again and again to sort through the unholy mess of reality.
In the cynical phase I’ve gotten to in my life, I’ve been finding it important to strip apart any locked-in narrative that feels like ‘consensus’ and then is hallowed by institutional approval across time. The usual story of modern art is one of those, and Louis Menand has an excellent piece based off Hugh Eakin’s doorstop Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came To America that replaces the narrative of revolutionary purity in modern art with something that’s more tangled and in a word, more corrupt.
The standard narrative – the one that sells coffee mugs and churns out art history papers – hinges on the outsiderness and newness of the modern artists. It’s a variation of ‘first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win’ and pits brave, mad radicals against the stuffed shirts of the establishment – always and forever the Impressionist show of 1874, the trial of Henri Matisse for ‘artistic murder’ in 1913, gallery audiences puking at Rauschenberg exhibits in the ’50s. There’s a notion of linear artistic progress embedded here. The premise is that if an idea or a talent is powerful enough, then it forces its way through the network of guardians and at some point a crowd wisdom takes over – everybody feels the inherent strength of the work of art in themselves and the newfound popularity of the previously demeaned work of art proves, all by itself, its underlying merit, its worthiness to occupy a place at the center of the culture and then to serve as a springboard and source of inspiration for the next stage of artistic evolution.
I used to accept this as a matter of course and spent time at MoMA or the Whitney or the New Museum staring veneratingly at work I found incomprehensible under the assumption that if it was popular, stamped-with-institutional-approval, and/or influential, then it was important in and of itself to some master narrative of art history and it was my problem if I didn’t get it. But I just don’t believe that anymore – simply because I’ve started to see too clearly the impact that money, power, and conformity have (and of these three, as St Paul might say, the greatest is conformity) – and can think of no reason why art should be somehow exempt.
The counter-narrative advanced by Eakin and Menand is to follow the money. The focus, as Menand writes, “is on figures most people have never heard of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics.” And the story of modern art becomes something other than the impoverished radicals of the Left Bank tilting away at the edifice of the art world and more about a shift in patronage – a period where a nouveau riche got ahold of new trends in art as a preferred symbol of conspicuous consumption in contrast to the more historic (and more expensive) collections of the old money crowd. So a really key – and not exactly sexy – event in the history of modern art is the Wall Street lawyer John Quinn, tireless advocate of modern art and fervent anti-Semite, successfully rewriting a tariff provision to give modern art the same exemption from duties that J.P. Morgan had successfully insisted on for ‘historic art.’ And this becomes the underlying dynamic for the sixty year or so period of art that everybody remembers so fondly, the period that runs, let’s say from Picasso to Warhol – a group of dedicated patrons (Quinn, Albert Barnes, Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim, Abby Rockefeller, etc) who muscled a series of shows and museums past an apoplectic public, which, with time, begrudgingly accepted the mix of artistic innovation and whimsical patronage. It’s not so much that they call you crazy and then they accept you – it’s more that, once somebody crazier and richer than you has put your art in the Armory or MoMA then, sooner or later, you’re accepted.
This is not to say that the now-canonized modern artists themselves weren’t original or interesting or radical – they were all of these things. But the artists we remember best, whom we’ve been most influenced by, tended also to be the best operators – I remember being sort of suspicious when I went to some show of famous modern artists and had it occur to me that everybody exhibited had been friends with each other and seemed always to have these thriving connections with dealers and patrons. And it’s very possible that in the next arrondissement, or in some other city, were equally brilliant, dedicated original artists whose imaginations were taking them in different directions and who didn’t have the ear of Peggy Guggenheim and whom you might hear of only decades later (c.f. Alice Neel, Hilma af Klint) or never at all.
In fact, artistic production works in a very different way from how I was trained to see it at any stage in my schooling. Basically, it’s a racket. We kind of all know that it was a racket in the dark days of court commissions and aristocratic patrons and we know that it’s a racket now – nobody is really very fooled by the Jeff Koons tax shelters accumulating value in their climate-controlled storage facilities no matter the price affixed to them - but it’s been harder to subject the Modernist peak to that kind of cynical scrutiny and a line of argument like Eakin’s and Menand’s is a useful corrective to the aura of artistic purity and revolutionary fervor that still tends to surround that period.
For me, the Eakin/Menand argument puts in dollars-and-cents terms a dyspeptic chain of thought I was having around three or four years ago. I had gotten somehow very upset about a line of Picasso’s that was being used to advertise a National Geographic biopic. The line ran, “My mother said to me ‘if you are a soldier you will become a general, if you are a monk you will become the pope.’ Instead, I was a painter and I became Picasso.” Around that time I was being exposed to malignant narcissism in a way that I hadn’t before and was becoming acutely aware of the way that narcissists were capable of creating a ‘reality distortion field’ around themselves and of essentially recrafting the world in the shape of their narcissism. This happens all the time in politics and business – it’s what we’re dealing with with Trump and, to I think a remarkable extent, it’s what our whole digital addiction is about, an extension of Steve Jobs’ personal narcissism – and I have the feeling that it’s at the center of the story of modern art. Picasso’s narcissism was vast and extraordinary and it created a kind of force-field that extended for generations after his death – the idea that the work of art in and of itself wasn’t particularly important but that it was a kind of piece of the puzzle of the overriding genius of the work’s creator, so that the sole criteria for evaluating art was whether or not the artist was genius, high-status, worthy and, if they were, then anything they created, blank canvases, ‘found objects’ urinals, etc, was automatically genius as well. And that paradigm might have worked for people like Picasso and Duchamp who were, at the same time, dedicated, hard-working artists, but, like all narcissistic vortices, it’s a sort of weak magic and its spell dissolves eventually with time – and in a way that has really warped the public’s interaction with art, so that, in fealty to the Picasso model, a whole series of alleged ‘geniuses’ are pawned off on the public, Warhol and Basquiat just as much as Koons and Damien Hirst, but it’s become much harder somehow to take them seriously.
The other thing about narcissism is that it has a way of magnetizing wealth, which made the connection between the Picassos and the Guggenheim-ish patrons particularly fruitful. There was a common language that was being spoken there – the veneration of the pure ego untouched by questions about ‘objective’ quality; the ability to generate commodities out of thin air – and the more one thinks about it the more one starts to perceive somebody like Picasso less as a superlative artist who was so much better than everybody else and more as a hustler of unmatched genius.
The Drift On The State Of Fiction
I appreciate The Drift’s putting together a roundtable of writers on the state of contemporary fiction. I find this sort of thing irresistible. The Drift claims, in its snarky editors’ note, that it organized the roundtable under protest – knowing that it’s an inevitable endeavor for a start-up intellectual magazine, although, in fact, the editors are “bored by contemporary fiction” and specifically forbade their ‘first cohort’ of writers from pitching anything about it.
And maybe, unfortunately, The Drift’s editors were right in their initial misgivings – what they’ve published is a dreary assortment of opinions that, I’m contending, completely miss exciting developments in fiction and frame everything in publisher-talk that has nothing to do with how aesthetic movements actually occur.
The discussions circle around a sinkhole of familiar tropes – should there be action or aimlessness in fiction (plot or no plot); should fiction lean towards characters or thinly-disguised memoir (the roundtable participants seem all to be working under the assumption that high-end literary criticism means, first of all, either griping about autofiction or griping against the gripers); should fiction engage directly and earnestly with contemporary calamities or transcend slash escape from them in some credo of art for art’s sake.
The working assumption in each of these tired debates (which the surveyed writers themselves are clearly tired of having) is that fiction functions very much like the fashion industry – a new line comes out and, like it or not, that’s the style for some particular period before it’s supplanted by something else, which usually is the polar opposite of whatever the most recent style is. Industry insiders might complain that a particular look – say, autofiction – has been around too long and is inhibiting more imaginative forms of expression, but there’s nothing really to be done, if that’s what the market wants then that’s what the market shall have. The job of writers, other than to talk each other up and to plug their own books and be radiantly optimistic about the new season, is to take some care that the subject matter being covered as a whole by the publishing industry is in some way representative of the psychic concerns of the era. Are there enough books about climate change? About social justice? Too many by writers in Brooklyn? Etc, etc.
It must be said that this desire to synchronize the output of the literary community with the state-of-the-world-as-it-is leads a few of the The Drift’s writers to some bizarre injunctions. There’s, as to be expected, a certain calling for alms and for a redistribution of wealth, the concern of Tope Folarin that pandemic coverage within fiction was skewed towards “upper-middle-class writers writing about the boring apocalypse while stories about the essential workers who kept the lights on have been absent.” More unexpectedly, Lucie Eleven expressed the “craving for writing that gives space to the reader, that is good company, that tries to keep me on the line but, like a friend on the phone, acknowledges my independence” – which sounds to me like requesting that the music industry produce more Muzak or Hollywood take care that its films be as inoffensive and un-intense as possible. Really? That’s the desire when opening up a book – a friend on the other end of the line to say nothing very important and to not interfere in one’s personal space? But I think what Eleven means is that, in an age of blaring Twitter and toxic masculinity, fiction should be the antidote, gentle, nourishing, and deeply respectful of boundaries. And Alexandra Kleeman gets really carried away with a version of the same idea. “I’d like to see a novel with no people in it, no anthropomorphic anythings, no characters at all,” she writes – and which she can’t possibly be serious about. The novel with no people in it? Can’t wait to read that one! To try to comprehend how Kleeman pretzeled herself into that imaginative dead end, the best guess is that she took completely for granted the idea of the consonance between social reality and literature. If we are in the era of environmental collapse brought on, ultimately, by oversized egos, then the proper artistic response can only be to eradicate egos (together with the individuals that house the egos) altogether.
These logic-defying lapses notwithstanding – as well as a certain seminarish vibe of praising everybody else and trying to let the professor know that everybody is great friends outside of class – I mostly liked The Drift’s writers themselves. They were eloquent and witty and, clearly, impassioned, serious readers. Clare Sestanovich, Missouri Williams, Hannah Gold found their way onto my list of writers I’d like to read.
What’s a bit distressing for me, though, is that basically not a single thing that I find interesting in fiction – or think is a promising direction for contemporary writers – made it into the discussion.
These directions are:
- An interest in the world outside of America. The social topics addressed here all have to do with the sense of decline within the United States – the fractured body politic. I’ve always found it a bit mysterious why, in an age of American imperium, more American fiction writers aren’t interested in grappling with what that means or what that looks like outside of American borders. The only contemporary writer I can really think of who does that in any meaningful way is Garth Greenwell, who is, for exactly that reason, probably the best prose writer around and who surprisingly doesn’t come in for a mention in The Drift’s roundtable. Within the treacle of the immigrant narratives and the woke battle hymns, there is at least some attunement to the moral legacy of imperialism, but virtually none at all among the hipster crowd.
- A real interest in the landscape of contemporary sexuality. There’s a subtext in The Drift’s conversation of an allergy to ‘realism’ – the two options on the table are affectless autofiction so deeply embedded in an individual’s subjective experience that, as Williams notes, the narrators never seem to have the external awareness to give themselves names; or, alternatively, the shaggy character-spewing fiction that was proliferating around 2000 before James Wood kiboshed it. The assumption is that the golden tradition of realism as it unfolded from Chekhov to William Trevor or Eudora Welty has been completely played out and that anything new in fiction has to occur somewhere in the realm of post-modern effects. Even leaving aside the great fallacy here, that fiction has to be new or different, that there’s any aesthetic obligation beyond whatever what happens to be true to an individual writer, there is very rich territory to explore in the realism of the mixed-gender, post-sexual revolution society. The realist tradition that we’re all taught in school operated in a society in which, fundamentally, sexes were separated except in marriage and in which stringent taboos inhibited the ability to write directly about sex. The lifting of those taboos, the shifting in the social fabric – together with an unexpected new streak of puritanism – gives writers all kinds of tools to revamp the golden tradition. That’s what Mary Gaitskill, Curtis Sittenfeld, Alan Hollinghurst, etc, have been up to with tremendous success – but for some reason that’s seen as atavism within the New York publishing world and as reflected in a discussion like The Drift’s.
- An intense pixelization of contemporary experience. This is the thread of David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker, which stretches back to Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. The theory here is that writers are obliged in some way to grapple with pop culture, the automated world, and the fragmentation of consciousness that accompanies our evidently deranged new reality. The successful narrative strategy has been to mirror that fragmentation – to deal with the mad new world in such pointillist attention to detail that it becomes both ridiculous and, in very interesting ways, holy. In The Drift’s piece the critic Christian Lorenzten deals with this style briefly, as the ancient history preceding autofiction, but with his shtick of being overpoweringly brilliant I can’t figure out what point he’s actually making. To be fair, everything I’ve read that tries to get into the minds of computers and of AI is awful, which may be a function of the inherent near-impossibility of writing compellingly about automation. But the related topic that’s also missing is psychedelics and the new age – the idea that there is some way of reenchanting the world, that just being very present and aware and attuned to the minutiae of daily life is a convincing way of reacting to the tech dystopia.
- The hyper-realistic ‘non-fiction novel’ posited by David Shields and actualized by W.G. Sebald and Benjamin Labatut. I’m not convinced that this really is more than a curio of literary criticism, but it does solve the wearying either/or problem of novels-with-lots-of-imaginary-people-wandering-in-and-out-of-rooms or autofiction-that-never-seems-to-extend-beyond-one’s-difficult-childhood-or-maybe-the-time-one-spent-a-gap-year-in-Europe. In the non-fiction novel it’s possible to have both individualized subjective experience and a free-floating exploration of the wider world, but the sense with The Drift crowd is that it’s simpler all around to complain about autofiction and to keep writing it as one complains about it until the day when it falls out of fashion and the new look comes in.
Thrilled I discovered this! This is great! Keep it coming plz!