Regina Cannot Explain It All

For those of you (like my best and devoted reader, Frank, who listened very patiently as I attempted to explain Gawker and The Awl and Tumblr a couple of months ago) who might have missed the skirmish between Keith Gessen of n+1 and Tom Scocca/Choire Sicha of The Awl, this post contains a lot of helpful links to catch you up on the narrative timeline.

Because I place a premium on clarity (more on that later), I’d like to break some of the issues down:

“Anti-Intellectualism”

So Tom Scocca hated Mark Greif’s “On Repressive Sentimentalism,” which appeared in the latest issue of Gessen’s magazine, n+1. The essay is a radical tract that essentially calls for the dismantling of traditional human interaction; its tone is mercilessly academic. It’s not hard to imagine someone disliking it on its merits. But Gessen said Scocca’s criticism “boils down to: What is this intellectual mumbo-jumbo?? Speak English! I can’t understand you!!” which Gessen further said was part of a “pose of incomprehension” designed to undermine Greif’s argument(s).

Having read Scocca’s comments, I don’t see him taking Greif to task for incomprehensibility or overintellectualism nor do I necessarily get the sense that he’s pretending not to understand. I think Scocca’s complaint is that Greif’s piece sounds like it was written in between campus panty raids with Ted Hughes — its sensibility, or lack thereof (the use of first person plural, a straight man commenting on the responsibilities/significance of homosexual relationships), seems like a relic of a bygone era (also: horny). So if you were to tease out a specific criticism from Scocca, I think it would not be that Greif’s tone is overly intellectual, but that it’s overly academic (and overly old academic) and I think that’s an important distinction.

However, it takes some work to locate Scocca’s specific problem with Greif because you have to look past bon mots like “Has this person ever HAD sex?” and “Jesus, are you offering to show folks your ETCHINGS?” (it’s here that I think Gessen got a whiff of anti-intellectualism) which brings us to…

Rhetoric vs. Argument

I will not begin a long rant about snark. Snark is almost always entertaining, often useful but also deeply problematic. When Gessen called Scocca out on the perceived “pose of incomprehension,” Scocca countered that he was not pretending not to understand Greif’s high falutin’ language, but was using incredulity (“What the fuck is this?”) as a rhetorical device.

But at what point does rhetoric begin to replace argument? Lines like “N plus one is to thinking as a Renaissance Festival is to warfare” are funny but they are also shockingly content-free. So when Gessen writes that Scocca’s comments were little more than heckling, he kind of has a point. The last three paragraphs of Scocca’s blog post are probably the best example of snark that actually has content and is doing what it’s supposed to be doing: making a damn point. But the stuff before that? Try finding a line that is actually satiric in the conventional sense and not just empty, reductive snarking. It’s difficult!

Clarity (Responsibility of the Author vs. Responsibility of the Reader)

This is another point that was referenced in the comments section of Gessen’s blog post re: Greif’s writing: someone mentioned Orwell’s “good prose is like a window pane,” and Gessen stated that inevitably some quality work will be “knottier” (e.g., Adorno).  While I did not personally find Greif’s prose that knotty (as I have my own issues with long sentences), I still think good writing is clear writing. But! Gessen’s view is one with which I think many academics would sympathize and it leaves me wondering whether n+1 is experiencing a kind of identity crisis; it’s an intellectual journal with an academic worldview…being analyzed by intellectual non-academics (this is like one of those logic games: some intellectuals are academics; all academics are intellectuals; not all intellectuals are academics).

It also reminds me of why I did not go into academia. Brief anecdote: In my senior year of college, I attended a lecture on Heidegger hosted by my university’s philosophy department. The visiting lecturer made a number of salient points that I was able to follow and understand, and many more that I could not. As the lecture ended and the Q&A portion began, I was silently cursing the limits of both my knowledge and intellectual capability when a professor in the front row calmly raised her hand. “I won’t pretend I understood everything you just said…” she started before asking her question (which I don’t remember). This was a distinguished professor! In the same field as the lecturer! Who couldn’t understand him!

It really drove home two things: 1) the insularity of academia (pick a subject, a niche, and there are probably only five other people who will truly understand whatever the fuck you’re on about, but most of them will probably be too crippled with fear that they’re about to be discovered as intellectual frauds to actually listen to you anyway) and 2) that if you place any kind of premium on communication, you have to value clarity and accessibility. The printed (or digital) page isn’t a university faculty lounge or a professor’s office where you “work out” your thoughts. Unless it’s critical to understanding the point, readers don’t have to journey through the author’s mental process. That’s what drafts and editors are for. Great thinking doesn’t compensate for ineffective writing.

General Thoughts on the Article Itself

So I haven’t even touched on the source material, Greif’s “On Repressive Sentimentalism.” I think it’s because it’s the least intriguing element of this hubbub. It’s radical — really radical — in its suggestion that homosexuality has somehow been crippled and subsumed into (oh, irony) heterogeneous human relationships. Greif’s tone isn’t condescending but I understand why the very notion of a heterosexual man offering his worldly insights on homosexual relationships (and lengthy commentary on abortion) would piss people off. But reading Greif’s essay was like reading about radical ecological feminism or, conversely, like anything Phyllis Schlafly has ever written. It’s almost too radical to imagine it effecting any real change. It’s an intellectual (academic?) think piece, an abstraction. It exists in its own universe, which is why the plural “we” struck me as, actually, kind of sad. I never assumed Greif actually meant or was including me; I was instinctively imagining a world of little Greifs. Hard to get angry at that.