It is precisely this exhausting culture war which staked its apotheosis — mostly after the murder of George Floyd, though also over the decade prior — on so many endless rhetorical battles over “wokeness” and everything it ostensibly represented. For moderates and liberals, this mostly meant conformity and a new regime of manners, a sacrifice many media and university elites happily made, since it guaranteed full capture of the groundswell of social justice sentiment throughout the 2010s. For genuine social justice crusaders, this meant the morphing of a once-positive term (“stay woke”) into a self-righteous moralistic movement which few could admit had become something of a parody of itself. For many conservatives, this meant the absurdity of “woke” calls for everything from prison abolition to Thanksgiving abolition; the general censoriousness of online progressivism and Twitter mobs; and a general plague of “cultural Marxist” shibboleths, encompassing everything from a conspiratorial trans takeover to the tyranny of DEI, conflating lame liberal platitudes with the entire history of Western Socialism. This, of course, led immediately into the even more parodic and censorious “anti-woke” backlash, fueling Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter and Donald Trump’s tech-billionaire-assisted accession to a second term in the Oval Office.

In reality, of course, trans people have spent the last decade as a maligned hyper-minority in Western society (a position made all the worse by the insufferableness of so many self-selected “allies”); DEI is a consulting industry worth billions of dollars, which largely exists so employers can wield even more power over their employees; and whatever “peak woke” was, it was never even close to offering up the kinds of state-socialist nightmares keeping Ron DeSantis up at night. In fact, many Leftist intellectuals and commentators were from the beginning completely at odds with the usual rhetorical trappings of “wokeness”: the vitriolic racial pessimism, the refusal to debate or discuss, the tendency to dismiss real-world working-class economic concerns by insisting instead on the need for a kind of perpetual re-education campaign. With the 2016 and 2020 defeats of Bernie Sanders, they saw the first chance in modern American history to renew the New Deal and take real steps toward Nordic-style democratic socialism derailed again and again by activists and mainstream Democrats, neither of whom ever stopped maligning Bernie for focusing on class over identitarian grievance.

Yet AOC’s statement was perfect for our moment, as if all that furor was just a vague, silly dream anyway. Which in some ways, of course, it was. As a maximally adaptive cultural signifier, “wokeness” masked, through the blustering and repositioning of its rhetorical opponents and advocates, processes that have been going on in America for centuries. America has always been a country whose Puritan elite founded their power on the enforcement of prudish WASP politesse, as well as one undergoing a perennial religious revival since at least the 1740s. The “woke era” was, if anything, the digital and televisual spectacle version of these eternal American facts. Which is why the new book by Catherine Liu — professor of media studies at UC Irvine, and one of America’s few interesting Marxist intellectuals — is such a breath of fresh air. Whatever you think of its conclusions, the only really compelling analytical approach to the culture war of the last few decades is the old-school Marxist one; and whether or not you agree with her prescriptions, Liu’s book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, is the clearest and most compact look yet into the culture war’s obscurantist machinery.

To do so, Liu seizes on one of our society’s central myths: the myth which the elite classes of America have learned so well to deploy, to protect their power; the myth which underlies all our empty, narcissistic therapy-speak; the myth which binds millions of social media users into disturbing parasocial relationships with a manipulative culture of celebrity confessional — the myth of the “trauma script”. Interestingly, Liu begins her analysis of contemporary trauma culture with a different AOC scene. This example comes from the Representative’s Instagram Live confessional, following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, during which Ocasio-Cortez was forced to hide in an office, fearing for her life. That February, she took to social media to share an hours-long, intimate confession about the ways in which her endangerment that day evoked memories of a former sexual assault. Liu is sympathetic, describing how she herself — at that point still marooned in the midst of isolation during the Covid pandemic — was genuinely moved by the narrative of trauma, recovery, and struggle AOC so personally laid out.

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In retrospect, though, Liu is far less sympathetic. Here, after all, was an elected politician, taking to a media platform, performing a particular ritual script, and appealing for personal sympathy, much as celebrities and brand ambassadors alike are expected to do, in order to maintain an invested audience. Whatever truth there was in AOC’s confession could not possibly be separated from the ways such trauma scripts have been perfected to boost already-famous people’s apparent authenticity, nor from the simple fact that she was undermining her own responsibilities as an elected official, encouraging the people who elected her to see her not as a uniquely powerful person responsible to them — but as a wounded, healed, and ultimately virtuous everywoman.

Liu sees AOC’s stunt as the zenith of a project begun by — of all people — Oprah Winfrey. In fact, Oprah is something like the arch-villain of Traumatized, an entrepreneurial savant of media communication whose famous televised confession of her own childhood sexual abuse, on her daytime talk show in 1986, is for Liu the ultimate example of the trauma script, one which “forged an image of the ideal liberal subject for the end of history in the televisual era… a story that countersigns every aspect of the logic of our media age”. What AOC was up to on that livestream, and what so many of us are up to these days, when we talk on and on about our “trauma”, was perpetuating an easily-digestible narrative, first honed by Winfrey, in a late-20th century liberal environment that valued sentimental stories of empowerment above all else.

On political grounds alone, Liu is appalled by this “tightly choreographed, standardized script of survival and recovery”. But on her way to the final Oprah chapter — which is so thorough and eviscerating that one begins to wonder if Oprah really isn’t one of the most destructive figures in modern life — Liu winds her way through the expected kinds of historicizing that make books like Traumatized worthwhile. So, for instance, we learn that the origins of modern trauma actually stem from 19th-century railway companies’ attempts to promote the talking cure, to avoid being made liable for “railway spine”, the era’s term for the invisible signs of shock suffered by the (mostly bourgeois) victims of train accidents. We learn how “mental health” itself was only coined after the Second World War, as a measurement of the fitness of soldiers, by a military keen to research new treatments that would get them back to the front lines more quickly.

We also learn about the bitter fight over the 1980 publication of the controversial DSM-III, which forever abolished the inclusion of psychoanalytic ideas from mainstream American psychiatry, and first elevated PTSD to a real diagnosis. Under the direction of Robert Spitzer, the DSM-III eradicated Freudian terms like “neurosis” and “psychosis”, and enacted what Liu sees as “a massive redefinition of mental illness”, one that functionally “erased childhood history from diagnostic consideration as a possible origin or ‘etiology’ of disease”. The laudable desire to make psychiatry a more exact science turned the profession away from psychoanalytic ideas of inner conflict, and instead pursued diagnoses of mental illness as physical, medically-treatable diseases of the body. Liu remains suspicious of the ways in which the proliferating lists of symptoms in subsequent DSMs have opened up further chemical interventions, largely as a way of making treatment easier for insurance companies.

For Liu, the origins of this new psychology are bourgeois, through and through. In a chapter on the history of modern middle-class obsession with safety and risk during childhood, Liu draws a stark straight line from Victorian campaigns against “cruelty to children” all the way to the Satanic Panic of the Eighties. There, the era’s new theories of trauma and memory loss were deployed to outright falsify media spectacles and horrifying stories of mass child abuse at places like the McMartin Preschool. Liu reminds us that elite moral panics around childhood abuse were largely liberal, middle-class affairs, long before the advent of newer Right-wing conspiracy theories about pedophile rings in pizza parlors. The anxiety of the comfortable, wealthy professional classes is a major theme running throughout Traumatized — a key origin of what we would now call “wokeness”. Since the creation of the bourgeoisie in the 18th century, this anxiety has always manifested as “a savior complex that loves nothing more than moral panics and the spectacle of philanthropic activism”.

Yet the “personal-is-political” mantras of Second Wave Feminism are suspect, too, and Judith Herman’s 1992 book Trauma and Recovery comes under fire as the foremost example of the ways in which that feminism — in league with anti-Vietnam veteran advocates like Robert Jay Lifton — began to shape our current image of the holy victim of abuse (or war), which Liu calls “an ersatz New Age religion with Protestant characteristics”. Such at least was the ideal put forward in 1988 by Ellen Bass, in her monumentally influential self-help book The Courage to Heal — and this same vision forms the basis for the trauma script Oprah would turn into the vernacular of daytime talk shows, celebrity confessionals, and, eventually, social media.

Liu is ultimately unsparing in her condemnation of the chokehold trauma culture has on our society. Not only does it make actual mental therapy difficult, giving the client a ready-made script to perpetually avoid personal responsibility for their own suffering, trauma culture also feeds the pointless culture war. Ever the good Marxist, Liu’s real complaint is that trauma culture — like the nebulous “wokeness” which it undergirds — ultimately functions as a way of disguising elite power. “Trauma culture’s regressive class politics exposes us to the reaction of conservatives who are willing to channel working-class resentment into a politics of rage against liberal hypocrisies,” Liu writes in her conclusion. “Professional-class liberalism, especially in its pseudo-radical form, continues to foreclose the building of political organizations in which the struggle against capital and for the interests of wage workers takes precedence over fetishized forms of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen.’”

What follows from this, unsurprisingly, is a straightforward prescription for more class politics. Liu earnestly believes in the Marxist dialectic, and insists that the pieties of the professional-managerial classes are the first real obstacle to enacting socialism. The reader is free to agree or disagree with her final prescriptions, but her analysis of the particular class character of our trauma culture seems to me inarguable. It is, by and large, a liberal, bourgeois phenomenon: sentimental, anxious, and neurotic. It obscures the material and economic causes of mass suffering, offering up only personalized narratives of trauma and triumph — narratives it can then use to filter out those marginalized people not “enlightened” enough to perform it correctly. This of course drives those people (regardless of race, gender, or religion) right into the arms of Right-wing politicians able to exploit popular anger at elite hypocrisy and censoriousness. Thus the two symbolic styles — elite prudery and proletarian rage — continue to feed into each other, just as the culture war feeds into itself, just as the endless cycles of “woke” and “anti-woke” only serve to perpetuate a meaningless spectacle.

What is most interesting, though, is something else which Liu suggests only briefly: that our current model of therapy — centered as it often is around the repetition of the trauma script and the rehearsal of a narcissistic ego — is a dead-end, leaving us the easy prey of expanding bureaucratic diagnosis and pharmacological control (though how a socialist state would avoid reinforcing such a medicalized bureaucracy, Liu never considers). One practical answer might be a partial to the psychoanalytical model — that Oedipal father whom modern psychiatry had to slay, to legitimize itself as a science. At points, Liu suggests that our obsession with particular ideals of “mental health” are doing real harm to us, since we’ve largely abandoned the idea of mental illness as an internal conflict requiring actual psychic resolution. Liu puts the issue neatly:

“In a real-life therapeutic setting, the path to recovery begins with giving up the ‘me’ that is demanding to be seen; in collaboration with a therapist who is able to resist regression into the mother/infant dyad, an ‘I’ can emerge as a subject responsible and guilty, but also capable of grasping troubling truths about an objective reality that cannot be bent to the fantasy of ‘me.’”

A society overflowing with “me” fantasies, stuck on the trauma script, has little defense against people who exploit that script for professional or economic gain — whether that’s celebrities like Oprah, politicians like AOC, or the professional managerial class itself. What Liu does so well in Traumatized is to lay out the ways media, celebrity, and contemporary psychiatry have collaborated to reinforce a vision of our own psyches that ultimately makes us ill. I myself don’t believe there’s anything like a political solution for what is essentially a tangle of persuasive and enticing symbols, which no one person has the wherewithal to untangle. But the psychoanalysts, in their naming of metaphors like the “unconscious” or “repression” or “the ego” (metaphors which we all still use on a daily basis), at least gave us ways of thinking and talking about those symbols that remain ripe for rediscovery. It’s time to see “mental health” and “trauma” for the metaphors they are, as well. Only by understanding where they come from — understanding them as recent inventions born of specific historical moments — can we begin to choose a better model for our lives.

Though in 1996 this might have sounded like a late conservative mea culpa (Camille Paglia certainly thought so), another 30 years on, Sontag’s admission sounds positively quaint. The internet has now had about three decades to hobble print journalism, scatter established criticism to the wind, and reduce almost everything else to advertising. Most of what passes for film, literary, or music criticism these days is deathly afraid of offending what little audience it has left, while internet commentators nearly always suffer from that debilitating blogosphere tendency, to evaluate art by whether it appropriately offends the opposing side of the culture war, or else placates their own (e.g. “One Battle After Another is bad because Woke Hollywood loves it”, “Sinners has pointed racial allegories, therefore it’s a great movie”). That transgressive Boomer counterculture Sontag once championed may have devolved into a thousand marketable Gen-X subcultures by the Nineties, but since then neurotic Millennials and dissociated Zoomers have had little but identity tags, brands, and message boards around which to orient artistic taste. 

Sontag wrote about everything that made her own era a period of such dramatic cultural upheaval — Pop Art, Happenings, avant-garde theater, postmodern novels, Civil Rights, world cinema. Everything, that is, except for the era’s centermost axis: the music. With the Rock Revolution came a new, upstart criticism, which aimed to take exactly those “lower” music forms — pop, rock, blues, R&B — and apply to them the same loving, discriminating attention which had previously been reserved only for High Art. Magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, and Melody Maker made the reviewing of rock and pop records a distinct department of journalism and the magazine industries. Eventually that culture even bled into other media, with MTV, by which point, in the Eighties and Nineties, magazines like NME, Spin, and The Source had become the hipper alternatives to the old Boomer mainstays. Many of these are still around. But none of them quite managed to survive the end-of-millennium transition to the new digital ecosystem with anything like their previous cultural cachet intact. Only one fledgling publication truly managed to define itself in the ensuing digital world of the new millennium: Pitchfork.com.

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While Sontag was writing those words in 1996, a young man named Ryan Schreiber was founding that website from his bedroom in Minneapolis. Within the next 10 years, Pitchfork would go on to become the internet music review site par excellence, averaging one million monthly readers, credited with making the careers of unknown artists, and even breaking those of others. In 2006, Pitchfork even managed to create its own significant music festival in Chicago (and later in Barcelona, too), while its sometimes harsh and frequently flippant snobbishness marked it as an essential center for Millennial Hipsterdom, perhaps the last time anything like an identifiable “counter-culture” existed (at least in terms of its generation’s consumption of music and culture on the internet). Just as the last 15 years or so of pop culture can be seen as an aggressive overcorrection against that stereotype, of a particular kind of obsessive snob (which the website came to embody in its reviews), Pitchfork itself has spent the last decade and a half slowly winding down into post-Web 2.0 irrelevance. In 2015, Condé Nast bought the site, and the next few years saw a considerable change in tone and editorial direction, sanding down its last edges until Anna Wintour promptly folded the company into GQ two years ago. 

On 20 January 2026 — 30 years into its reign as the last bastion of genuine music criticism — Pitchfork announced it would be transferring to a subscription model, allowing its users to generate their own reviews, and aggregating them, á la Rotten Tomatoes, while putting the entirety of their archive behind a paywall, like every other media operation still limping along online. This move is a perfect symbolic death knell for music criticism in the Internet Age — the final gasp of a culture in which the popular art millions of people regularly consume might be handled with even a partial version of that “seriousness” all art forms deserve. 

The idea that a group of discriminating obsessives might gather in one place to argue vociferously for good taste, and for music which would otherwise never have a chance (and, also important, to argue against music they perceive as deleterious or fake) — this vital idea seemingly has little place left on the internet. Perhaps very few people really bemoan its passing. But when the rest of the web has been winnowed down to only endless marketable content and reviews which are really just covert advertisements for said content, people will soon find themselves nostalgic for the days when the music snobs swooped in with their poison pens, to declare some unheard-of band’s new record brilliant, or some pop star’s latest project an unredeemable piece of shallow trash. If we don’t already, we’ll miss the days when critics had teeth and the gall to actually dislike things everyone else liked — not to simply acquiesce to every internet fandom’s lamest dictum: “Just let people enjoy things.”

In this way, Pitchfork’s slow descent into irrelevance really does mirror the general progression of popular music in this century: the waning subcultures of the 2000s (ending in that stereotype of the Millennial Hipster); the subsequent rise of streaming services in the 2010s and the ensuing struggles of all but the biggest artists to profit from massive changes in the industry; and, finally, the increasing hostility of massive fandoms and media outlets to any kind of unforgiving criticism. In its heyday, Pitchfork was frequently lambasted for its system of assigning points to its reviews (as one of the great Onion headlines read: “Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8” ). But even more than this, it was the site’s willingness to be harshly dismissive of certain artists, while being hyperbolically supportive of others, which made its reputation. Brent DiCrescenzo’s wild 2000 review of Radiohead’s Kid A for the site famously garnered a bit of negative, mocking attention — yet the fact that the site awarded the album its rare perfect 10.0 rating, and later named it the greatest album of the decade, played no small part in the record’s popularity and success with critics over the years. The site’s ecstatic review for Arcade Fire’s debut 2004 record Funeral had a similarly sizable impact — some people have gone so far as to say it actually made the group’s career. 

But the opposite was also true. Many of their negative reviews drew considerable ire. Even today, some people point to the site’s 3.3 review of the Jacksonville indie band Black Kids’ first record — which consisted of a single picture and a frowning face emoji, along with the word “sorry”— as a major reason for the band’s failure. Perhaps the most infamous of all Pitchfork reviews was the 0.0 rating it awarded to the Australian band Jet’s 2006 record Shine On: the review consisted solely of a video of a monkey peeing into its own mouth. Though most of the time their pans were hardly so bitchy or dismissive, still the attitude was important. Schreiber and co. weren’t afraid to appear snobbish, yet neither were they afraid to be overly sincere about the music they loved. They rarely reviewed records by major pop stars and if they did, they tended to pan those, too. And when they set about in the 2000s making their own lists of the greatest albums or songs of previous decades, they were keen to canonize the music they saw as especially influential on the underground, experimental, forward-thinking indie rock, hip-hop, and electronic music they usually championed.

Over time this earned them the rather unfair reputation of being biased toward largely white, male indie rock acts — while being a tad dismissive of female musicians, or even primarily black styles of music. Cherrypicking certain reviews could possibly support this argument, but I’ve never quite bought the critique. Until the site began deliberately to combat this perception of its own chauvinism, it was if anything simply engaged in an older Gen-X-style rooting out of inauthenticity — trying to spot and designate fakes, sell-outs, or poseurs. But after the 2000s, the climate of the blogosphere was quickly growing more concerned with themes of empowerment, social justice, and a general cringey Millennial desire to stamp out all offense. The idea that popular music could be criticized for being shallow or fake was increasingly anathema to a neurotic generation which tended to seek out its own self-esteem and identity via the unthinking worship of pop stars and enormous movie franchises, while conflating all criticism of cultural products as criticism of the kind of people who liked it. 

Selling out to Condé Nast in 2015 only pushed Pitchfork further along this line. Schreiber himself left in 2018, replaced by Puja Patel, who served as general editor until 2024. In 2019, the site began issuing extremely positive reviews of old Taylor Swift albums, which it had never bothered to review in the first place, nakedly framed as an apology for all that erstwhile snobbishness and failure to be properly deferential to mega-pop fans. Two years later, it offered an editorial — maybe the lowest point in the site’s entire history — entitled “Pitchfork Reviews: Rescored” in which the editors offered about twenty re-dos of old reviews, rescinding their pans of a few records and demoting others they’d praised highly. The funniest of these being the much lower adjusted score for Grimes’ record Miss Anthropocene, released only a year earlier — reflecting widespread distaste for the pop star’s ridiculous and very public relationship with Elon Musk. As it shifted further toward music news, away from committed editorials, Pitchfork also started to re-do several of its “Greatest Songs” lists, ostensibly to reflect a newfound commitment to pop music. In 2002, the site had declared the great cult band Pavement’s yearning slacker classic “Gold Soundz” the best song of the Nineties: in 2022, it was now Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” — and not even the original but, inexplicably, the even duller, inferior Remix version. Between the tops of these two lists lies the whole silly history of music criticism in the 21st century so far.

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As of this January, to go back and actually read any of this history now requires a $5 subscription. What was once important enough to share with everyone has been conveniently priced at the equivalent of your average cappuccino. And what was once the last true outsider voice — the last reliable alternative to the crush of endlessly proliferating online content — has been rendered definitively toothless and irrelevant. Is there any hope that another site could spring up to take its place? There are certainly endless blogs and magazines which still run music reviews, gather industry news, and attempt to break new artists. Places like The Quietus and Gorilla Vs. Bear have had their own excellent writing from time to time; many old behemoths like Rolling Stone itself still soldier on, trying desperately to keep up with a culture that is only growing more and more fragmented, cheap, and difficult to parse. But none of these places have anything insightful to offer, and all are far too deferential to the whims of the markets. Is there any place left for the kind of criticism that might actually tease out a cultural narrative from the music of our time, or defend some sort of standard of artistic “seriousness”, or champion the tiny unsuccessful artists too obscure to break through to bigger audiences? 

I would be lying if I said the chances weren’t low. And yet, anytime a cultural vacuum opens up, it tends to reveal the need people previously took for granted. Surely there are still hundreds of thousands — millions, even — of passionate music obsessives out there, in the world and online, dissatisfied with only the streaming catalogs, genuinely interested in encountering something new, something innovative, something that feels as if it’s pulling the culture forward, not merely trafficking in cliches which even the best popular music can never truly avoid. One of the sad facts that most defines our current period is the obvious lack in it of any viable artistic counterculture. But this is a state of affairs which can only go on so long, before “serious” music lovers begin to itch for an actual alternative to gather around. Whatever form that takes — counterculture or no — will be what fills that same vacuum, offering up an actual challenge to the current generation. Hopefully, it will take the demise of Pitchfork as its example, and learn its lessons: 1) That a critic should always trust their own obsessions over any identity, brand, market demand, or audiences; and 2) That “snob” isn’t such a bad thing to be called, if the people saying it happen to be philistines.

This is deadly earnest stuff, pitched like a sermon: in a lesser writer’s hands it might tilt toward the sentimental. But in Baldwin’s voice (which, by that point in his career, was nearly the same in talking as it was in writing), it is graceful, perennially relevant, and true. These days, when even the word “empathy” sounds to some like the language of stuffy social justice activism, the mere mention of race or sexuality only sets off the same dull culture-war script we’ve been playing out for decades. In our general hangover from the whole “Woke Era” (for lack of a better term) — which essentially canonized Baldwin as a kind of guiding shaman/saint — we run the risk of forgetting the pressing racial and sexual issues that era ultimately failed to address. We may be tired of hearing about them; we may resent the proliferating academic vocabularies with which they were often  discussed; but we’re still not free of them. Nor are we free from the insight and genius of James Baldwin himself, who really was one of the most important writers on the intertwined evils of racism and sexual bigotry.

Though really, Baldwin was one of the finest American writers full stop: an excellent novelist and a moral essayist without any peer in the 20th century. He was also an unbelievably complex man: self-loathing and self-indulgent; courageous; jealous; a born performer, who enjoyed his fame, yet remained essentially religious in his sincerity and commitment to civil rights campaigns in America. These were the same paradoxes out of which he penned numerous of the most personal stories and essays of his time — and it’s this picture of Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs’s tremendous new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, gets perfectly right. The key is in the subtitle, A Love Story. Since, at least in Baldwin’s writing, everything always came back to that most easily over-complicated, easily-dismissed, ubiquitous four-letter word.

In pursuit of its subtitle, Boggs’s book divides itself into sections, according to the great male loves of Baldwin’s life. The first — not a sexual relationship, to be clear — spans his early years under the influence of his mentor, the great Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin met as a young man in Upper Manhattan. The rest of the book covers several longer periods, in each of which a particular man (generally a bisexual, often married, man) became the focus of Baldwin’s artistic and romantic imagination: first the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, then the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, then the French artist Yoran Cazac. These periods roughly correspond to those passages of time which Baldwin spent in France, in Turkey, and finally, in France again. Indeed, despite his many trips back to America — particularly in the Sixties — Baldwin spent most of his life in relative exile from the United States, bouncing between paramours.

Besides his many smaller love affairs, Baldwin’s greatest romances revolved around vague domestic fantasies about these “mostly heterosexual” men, and the commingled “family” of people he gathered around him: artists like Delaney, friends like Mary Painter, or personal assistants like David Leeming, Baldwin’s eventual biographer. Boggs is exhaustive in his attempts to tie these romantic pursuits — along with Baldwin’s developing sense of himself as a black, gay man in a time of absolute upheaval around American society’s relationship to those identities — into the progression of his novels, from Go Tell it On the Mountain (1952) to Just Above My Head (1979), and his greatest works of non-fiction, from Notes of a Native Son (1955) to The Devil Finds Work (1976). There is almost nothing in Baldwin’s own books which Boggs can’t trace back to what was happening in the writer’s life as he planned, wrote, and revised these works, sometimes over years.

At times, this gives the reader an insightful look into Baldwin’s actual creative process. Yet Boggs’s biographical literary-critical method verges on becoming a vice, hewing pretty closely to the most clichéd ideals of writing-as-therapy, sometimes leaving little room for the possibility that Baldwin’s creations might have come from a deeper imaginative space, and not just from an attempt to achieve personal catharsis. Still, if it is a vice, it’s the only one, in what is otherwise a remarkable book of social and personal history. Some passages are so vividly rendered, Boggs manages to do the near-impossible, making one of the most tumultuous times in American history — the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and 1964 — seem furiously present-tense and unpredictable. This is especially true of the episode encompassing Baldwin’s near-breakdown, while trying to stage his first play, Blues for Mister Charlie, with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York. Baldwin’s unbelievable levels of stress make sense, when one realizes he had only recently traveled to a violently desegregating South, afterwards organizing his infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy, to get more explicit support for civil rights campaigners. He had also just participated in the March on Washington, where his scheduled speech was pulled, partially due to Baldwin’s reputation as a known homosexual.

Given his intimate relationships with fellows artists like Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, and Lorraine Hansberry — as well as his his brief friendships with civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael — it’s no surprise that a biography of Baldwin also doubles as a social history of American culture from the Forties to the Seventies. It reveals him as one of his own time’s greatest and sharpest moral voices — a man writing with unforgiving clarity about the inner struggles of black Americans and sexual minorities, not to mention the moral rot of a white America that couldn’t let go of its racial divisions (nor its deep psychosexual angst about those divisions, something Baldwin insisted was irrevocably intertwined with the roots of white supremacy). And at a certain point his expatriate exile and homosexuality both left him nearly adjunct to the newly forming canon of black American art.

Yet what remains most inspiring and influential in Baldwin’s writing is how he recognized, from the start, that the struggle for freedom for Black America (and White America, too, in the end), was inseparable from his own search for personal freedom, for the freedom to create himself. Like his close friend (and fellow genius) Nina Simone, the righteous rage which radiated out from his words was an undeniable personal rage, not just a greater, symbolic one. For Baldwin, the need to be free — free as a gay man, and as a black man — in a society set up to punish him for being either, was no different from the call for greater freedom across America, or across the globe. Yet for him the American Dream was a fairly monstrous myth, a myth of American innocence: one in which the country’s vision of freedom always came at the expense of the enslaved and the persecuted. Real freedom would require those who profited the most from the arrangement — white Americans — to let go of their innocence, to realize the horrors which had been required to create that naïve Dream.

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That is, seriously grappling with American racism would mean understanding just how much it had to do with sexual fear and jealousy (as all racism ultimately does). But what was clear to Baldwin — one of his darkest but most important insights — was that there is no greater nightmare than America’s perennial wish to believe in that innocence. As he stated many times over, the creation of “white” as a category not only built a framework excluding black people from free society, it corroded the souls of white Americans, too — by only ever allowing them to be white. Reducing their lives and identities, to arbitrary ideals of racial purity, which would have to be defended (no matter how absurd, or immoral) in order to preserve the institution of slavery. For Baldwin, the restoration of abused black Americans, after centuries of horrors, would mean getting to the bottom of the historical disaster that was “whiteness” — which had left white Americans as confined to that destructive racial category as their black compatriots were to theirs.

Of course, there is a kind of fatalism that crops up, when we consider just how long this historical situation went on, how much it still defines American society. Baldwin himself spent much of his career growing weary and pessimistic about the hope for this kind of large-scale change. There are echoes of his later stance — his sadness about how little could be done to really achieve equality for black Americans and sexual minorities — in the general pessimism which has plagued so many social justice movements this century. Indeed, there is still widespread exhaustion with how much still has to be done, not least in combating poverty, or dismantling America’s hellish prison system (not to mention the kinds of outright white supremacist rhetoric and sexual bigotry which the MAGA movement has been happy to popularize again, even ironically). Across the 2010s and into the early 2020s, this pessimism tended to manifest as a directionless obsession with guilt, atonement, and the moral surveillance of other people — something our social media panopticons make too easy. Yet puritanical strains of social justice campaigning simply run counter to reality: freedom can’t be achieved by defining and enforcing any particular creed or morality. In order to be free, people must, as the philosopher Hegel once said of Shakespeare’s characters, be able to become “free artists of themselves” — a phrase which fits Baldwin’s own personal mission of freedom perfectly.

Baldwin was adamant, always, that though the world may be broken, though pessimism may in fact be realistic, people still always have a choice to love. We may call that trite, or dismiss it as sentimental. We may complain about how unrealistic it is, or about how many complicated political issues there are that get in the way of ostensibly simple ideals like love and peace and, yes, empathy. Yet if we don’t accept the possibility that love is always a choice — vulnerability, difficulty, pain be damned— then we doom ourselves (and each other) to hate, violence, ignorance, and evil. In a way, it’s exactly as simple as this. A lot of political rhetoric is only designed to make it seem ridiculous compared to, say, the realpolitik of immigration or law enforcement (as if human morality and spirituality could ever be reduced to a political argument). But if there is any lesson to be taken from James Baldwin’s life and work, it is that no matter how fatalistic we are, no matter how “realistic” we may wish to be, the only things that matter in the end are the things we do out of love. And that real human freedom would be the highest possible expression of that love.

We quit our jobs (if we can afford to). Perhaps we take a sabbatical. When we do, we discover a whole other economy designed to help us properly pay attention (note the metaphor): fancy mindfulness retreats, self-help literature, a cottage industry of “brain hacking” tips, apps designed to keep us off other apps, and influencers on those apps promoting their chosen method for digital detoxing. “I’m worried about my child — should I limit their screen time?” a parent types into Chat-GPT, and spends two hours refining the responses. Somewhere a Zen master laughs and claps his one hand together.

But what is being lost in this collective hysteria around the loss of our attention, and our frantic attempts to preserve it? For one thing, our extremely narrow definition of it. Even a brief look at scientific attempts to study and measure attention will reveal this. The term “attention span” is the limited product of countless 20th-century laboratory experiments — often funded by advertisers or through military research grants — which studied not the human experience, but very specific forms of response to stimulus. They often focused on simple screen-based tasks, like seeing how quickly a person can push a button on an aural cue, or watch a radar without distraction. Much of this research was done directly with marketing in mind.

Even today, you can look at an institution like the London Centre for Attention Studies, and find among its staff computer scientists, professors of marketing and entrepreneurship, software analysts, neuroscientists, and media studies experts. But not one historian, religious scholar, philosopher, or artist of any kind — no matter what these people might be able to teach us about different modes and practices of attention.

Today, then, when we worry about our inability to pay attention, when we lament the damage being done to our “attention spans”, we are doing so within a very specific context. The joint project of behavioral science and market research defines our attention in an extremely narrow way, as watching a single thing over a particular duration — life reduced to a mere stimulus response. Ironically, our attentions have been trained and focused upon a very specific idea of attention, and the entire realm of our embodied experience confined to what can be measured of our lives onscreen.

It’s this apparent trap which the collective calling itself the Friends of Attention has set about attempting to address. Associated with the Strother School for Radical Attention in New York City — and guided by the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, the filmmaker Alyssa Loh, and Strother School Director Peter Schmidt — the Friends have published an official written salvo for the public, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Their stated mission: “…to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies”. It’s a good metaphor — “attention fracking” — and it appears often throughout the manifesto.

On the one hand, the Friends are concerned with how to get people together to practice what they call “radical”, or un-fracked, attention. Most of which they maintain is already being done every day, by religion practitioners, artists, hobbyists, or craftspeople. They also preach the clear value of places like museums and libraries as “sanctuaries of attention”, and within the manifesto’s self-identified aspiration to become “a kind of Silent Spring for our era”, it is in fact quite good at painting a damning portrait of those technological and corporate ventures, the advertising-and-cybernetics blitz which the Friends aptly call a “demented behaviorist arms race”, which has invaded our sensual lives for decades.

Attensity! lays out two particular definitions of attention, which the Friends intend to harmonize. The first — that narrow technology-dependent idea which gave us the “attention span” — is exemplified by the 2001 book by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy. The influence of Beck and Davenport’s work on our limited popular idea of attention heavily reinforced the old instrumental concept of attention as a tool to be used towards discrete tasks. However, the second kind of attention has much more to do with the larger picture of human consciousness left out from the first, exemplified by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s 2008 book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. As Stiegler points out, this deeper, more static kind of attention is contained in the French root of our English word: attendre (“to wait”). This is the kind of practice at the heart of most religious, mystical, and meditative traditions, which often strives to prolong held attention into a sense of infinity.

The proposed alternative to these two extremes, the Friends’ “radical” attention, comes from — of all places — literature. In their attempt to define it, they turn to a poetic phrase from the American novelist Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: “an empty cup of attention.” In the context of the Friends’ manifesto, this phrase remains unfortunately vague, a half-baked Koan never really suggesting anything concrete. For the Friends, “radical” attention is something both full and almost nonexistent. But how this differs from the kind of mystical, held attention (attendre) available to the contemplative traditions they mention, is difficult to discern. The manifesto frequently suggests that what is going on already in many artistic, religious, and scholarly practices, if wedded with their version of attention activism (which seems to consist of collective study, meditation, and other communal activities of the Strother School), would produce this third more ambitious kind of attention.

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This would then be a step towards unfracking our attention, the Friends say, if we could only get together more often to practice less constricted attention on things we find important — whether that’s making art, visiting museums, staging Happenings, or engaging in intense academic study. This makes sense, insofar as the manifesto calls for more places like the Strother School, places with the explicit mission of providing “sanctuary” for attention, perhaps even training us to deal better with all the attention-fracking we face in our day-to-day lives. Yet this last idea leads to one of the manifesto’s more inadvertently disturbing ideas, in what the Friends imagine as a kind of “gym for the mind”. Just as the fitness revolution over the last few decades has led to the ubiquity of gymnasiums to counter our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, so the Friends imagine there might eventually be an analogous place for people to go to work out their sedentary brains.

To be clear, Attensity! has several valuable, noble things on its mind. Just like the Strother School itself, its mission is genuinely important and good — yet that’s why it is only right to quibble with certain particulars. Being presumably fit middle-class people, the Friends don’t seem to notice the darker picture their metaphor suggests. Tellingly, they do not suggest a “church for the mind” or a “school for the mind,” nor do they even consider something like “a swimming pool for the mind”. No — they go immediately to the gym, one of the least natural places possible. Though I doubt they intended it, the metaphor immediately conjures up pictures not of free bodies in movement in the real world, but a wholly artificial indoors, itself dedicated to dissociated, repetitive physical tasks which have little to do with the way human bodies evolved to live in the world.

This is to say nothing about the reality of today’s quasi-fascist gym culture, or the ways many men and women distort and chemically abuse their bodies in pursuit of physical perfection. Nor even to mention the clear class dynamics at work, where the replacement of aristocratic leisure with bourgeois athletics has become one of the most plainly middle-class ways of signaling one’s alignment. This is then almost always contrasted against those poor, stereotypically obese lower classes, who can’t afford good food, and who actually have to use their bodies at work. Is there anything really “radical”, then, about ideals of mystical awareness being yoked to this idea of a secular practice of repetitive attentional fitness?

One may well ask: how exactly are we going to get beyond our current prison-language of attention? There is one alternative considered in a very different book, Attention! A (short) History by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, first published in 2013. In fact, many of the points Cohen makes about the creation of modern attention theory, through that unholy conjunction of information theory and advertising, seem to have covertly or overtly influenced the Attensity! manifesto. There are many other reasons to suspect the debt, and not just the title, since Cohen himself also buttresses his opening chapter with examples from Henry James. Cohen’s version of Attention! is exhausting and exhaustive, yet as literature it has the virtue of communicating more naturally through story and history. Essentially, it’s a long, sustained meta-joke on the absurdity of such an idea as attention itself, unfurled in the form of a hyper-detailed and deliberately overwritten book, covering everything from the Phoenician alphabet to the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in ADHD as a nebulous modern diagnosis.

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Cohen also has the immense advantage of not having to preach: since his concern is literature, he can embody the paradoxes he’s examining, taking the reader through ancient Sumerian scripts, the development of typewriters, or the complex philosophy of time in St. Augustine’s theology — all for Cohen to admit in the end that the entire thing was written on speed, and so over-researched he can barely remember doing it. In the course of Attention! memory itself becomes a joke, attention itself a droll riff on the simultaneous nonexistence of past, present, and future. In the characteristic Cohenite non-formation, such a thing as “radical” attention could only mean an impossibility, an absurdity. As Cohen states, finally: “Wondering why fictionalists and poets didn’t write much about attention at the turn of the twentieth century is to wonder why they didn’t write much about climate change, or Islamo-theoterrorism—the topic hadn’t yet occurred to them, or hadn’t yet occurred. They didn’t feel their attention had been threatened, perhaps, because they hadn’t been conditioned to regard their attention resourcefully.”

That is, Cohen suggests that simply having written an exhausting, overpacked history of Attention is a dramatic exercise in attention, and in the futility of trying to define attention. Since we’ve been conditioned to consider our attention as a conditionable thing, now we pay more attention to attention than anything else. The trap reproduces itself, in an infinite regress. As the Friends of Attention make clear, and argue passionately, the real issue at stake is freedom — the freedom to treat our attention as something that truly belongs to us. Cohen suggests that the greatest freedom doesn’t lie in simply rejecting what society has to sell and signing up for a movement rebelling against it. This freedom isn’t going to be gained by turning to some “gym of the mind” or to any specific communal exercises. Rather, it may be that the most subversive thing one could be doing today is cultivating an irony which goes to the real heart of the situation.

Because Cohen’s deeply literary irony (embodied in a book that disavows its own subject) is something like the insights of Zen, Christian contemplative prayer, Sufism, and any number of mystical traditions. It is an irony which recognizes that freedom is not part of a dialectic with unfreedom — that a “liberated” or “radical” attention is not the opposite of a “hacked” or “fracked” one. Instead, within the purview of the mystic, at least, freedom consists in the recognition that one is already free. One cannot “have” attention to begin with — the idea itself was created precisely to confine us within the idea. The real lesson of something like Cohen’s Attention! is that, once we’re done with the book, we ought to go find some real literature to read and stop paying so much attention to ourselves. It’s a recognition of an essential paradox of human life: it’s only once we recognize something doesn’t truly exist that we can start to understand why we need it.

Yet what’s most fascinating about that world was how fragmentary, improvisational, and messy it appeared to the artists living in it at the time. Most of them didn’t have national or international renown, living sordid lives, scrambling to find patrons, collaborating on magazines nobody read, staging exhibitions that puzzled the public, and worrying more about ideas than fame or posterity. They were unafraid of experimentation, and willing to be misunderstood. They had little or nothing to do with universities, foundations, or established institutions. If they couldn’t find their way into journals, galleries, and publishing houses, they simply made their own. These artists deliberately opposed the contemporary world, even as they dragged it like a cadaver into the future with them. Their real allegiance was to the idea of the artist as a free agent in the world: they understood that their true audience was other artists; that the goal of art was to redeem a culture always on the brink of forgetting everything; and that most people, rich or poor, will always be far behind their own times.

By the end of its first quarter, the 20th century had already seen what many now consider its most groundbreaking artworks: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire; Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. A quarter of the way through our own century, do we have a single novel, poem, composition, or work of art that can measure up to these? The answer is nearly always “no”. And if it’s ever “yes”, the examples offered are never really satisfying. Some might suggest the environments of Pierre Huyghe, or the films of Terrence Malick, or Helen DeWitt’s wonderful novel The Last Samurai. But as brilliant as they are, these works simply don’t have the same sense of having revolutionized the medium in ways unimaginable before them. There is far less distance between them and the modernism of Man Ray than there is between Man Ray and the paintings of someone like J. M. W. Turner, a century before him.

When future critics write the annals of our era, I suspect that what will actually strike them most is just how little has happened in our time. Rather than a litany of genius artistic accomplishments, it is much more accurate to see our moment as the height of industrial mass culture’s revenge upon art — a period in which creative industries, academic training, popular taste, assembly-line content production, and distribution technologies have fused into a monolith without qualities. The idea of artists as pioneers and outsiders has given way to a professionalized class within contemporary academic and media institutions. Yet with the arrival of each new digital technology, even these artists risk being taken out of the equation. What’s more, the characteristic experience of art in our time has become divorced from all previous eras in human history: there are few amateur art societies remaining; connoisseurship has been mocked almost out of existence, and patronage reduced to market speculation. For most people, art has next to nothing anymore to do with religious ritual, or even the pursuit of commonality and sociality. Audiences are now individual people behind individual screens — voyeurism is the ruling principle of the digital experience of art.

Everyone knows this: significant portions of these spaces are devoted to discussions about how miserable it is to be there. Even so, what most people seem to want from their media today is the chance to watch other people do things. The most consistent experience of anything resembling art is not happening in galleries, in the pages of journals, at the cinema, or in the concert hall. It consists of watching other people play video games, watching other people make food, watching other people listen to music. Those future historians will likely conclude that life in the first part of the 21st century was something that happened to other people. They will feel pity for the hundreds of millions of human beings whose yearnings were so thoroughly diverted from the world of sense into a state of passive surveillance.

Many of us now spend a majority of our waking lives trapped in a continuous flow of the possibility of experience, instead of experience itself. The revenge upon art is also revenge upon experience, since this is just what we do when we participate in the cacophonic theater of digital spaces — we take revenge upon the difficulty and pain of our experience. The aesthetic of our era is mostly a flight away from art, since art embodies all those things — real sex, death, history, feeling, pain — which we are desperate to escape. Plainly, the modern world has become too complex for us. There is too much news, too much noise, too much action — too much for any one person to handle. Our bodies rebel against their conditions through illness, fatigue, and depression: hence the common sentiment that interacting with serious art is just too difficult, that what’s really needed at the end of the day is mindless, numbing escape. Art must now compete with the universal desire for dissociation.

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We have of course been preparing for this escape for a long time. Our anti-art era reached its apex in just the past two or three years, with the arrival of machine-generated versions of visual arts, music, and literature. Whether by accident or design, the makers of these “artificial intelligences” have come close to achieving what many creative industries were tending towards anyways: the abolishment of the artists themselves. The endless scroll is now replete with machine-generated “art”, but so long as the average consumer is seeking to numb their reality, there’s no reason for them to care if what meets them are human- or machine-made images. If our hypothetical future historians are accurate, they will perceive that the dominant tone of our time is anesthetic, since the role of nearly all popular media now is a panacea, meant to assuage an underlying anxiety, but only worsening it in reality.

Anesthetic is a perfect term for a deeper reason, too. Given the meaning of the prefix “an-” (“without” or “lacking”), the word quite literally means “lacking aesthetic” — without feeling or perception. We’re living in a time in which the average consumer’s experience is in tacit collusion with a mass-produced media world that has successfully propagandized on behalf of hollowing out our aesthetic experiences — and which now has the technology to eliminate artists from the production of it. This revenge upon art has so far been successful for two reasons: first, a 20th-century mass culture created by the perfection of major broadcast technologies; and second, the aforementioned conversion of artists to a professionalized class of aspirational elites.

The development of radio and television in the 20th century created the largest interconnected mass culture in history. The values of this monoculture quickly combined with the centralizing and propagandizing dictums of the century’s globe-spanning states. Whether Soviet propaganda, or the leading US television networks, or TIME magazine, or The Times, the idea was the same: whoever reaches and sways the most people wins. Monoculture relied on technologies of mass persuasion, broadcasting from single sources to millions of listeners, readers, and viewers. And the people who experienced this world passed on those same values, creating the newer world of digital information. We on the internet today have inherited this idea that mass culture ought to exist, even though it would seem alien to most times and places in human history. The ideal only exists because of those broadcast technologies, because the point of the game being played through them was to monopolize the maximum amount of airspace and human attention.

The internet, however, is not a single medium, but a fabric of mediums. In its networks one finds broadcast technology but also telephonic and text-based technologies. Social media platforms were able to disrupt the original internet by essentially constructing sociality-themed meta-games in the midst of what was once a decentralized network of libraries, messaging systems, and sites. But where the 20th-century mass culture required many people tuning into a limited range of channels such as radio frequencies, television stations, even cinema screens, social media algorithms curate distinct channels for each user. This traumatic loss of collective experience has been partially substituted by the chaotic “public square” of those platforms. Yet creative industries and tech companies are still based on the old incentives, and have generally monopolized every digital outpost to deliver only their content to huge numbers of people.

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Our problem now isn’t a lack of cultural production, but too much of it. So much so that the vast majority of artists simply can’t compete with the tiny number of hugely popular names with the full backing of the media conglomerates. At the empty center of this era of over-production is what the critic W. David Marx has called the “Blank Space” — the name of his recent cultural history of the 21st century. Marx’s Blank Space deals above all with the force of “Poptimism” — a rising idea among many critics that their duty was to advocate for popular commercial products as an antidote to the hipsterism, snobbery, and elitism of the 20th century. As Marx argues, no matter how open-minded these critics thought they were being, the actual result of their rhetoric gave the media and the public carte blanche to reject high-minded art in favor of shallow pop culture, ceding the once-transgressive powers of the avant garde to a resurgent Right-wing often allied with the very tech companies who want to automate away cultural production. This has desiccated creative subcultures and made it harder for critics to get attention for unknown artists, while audiences themselves increasingly reject any attempt to argue for better art as aristocratic arrogance. As the saying goes: “Just let people enjoy things.”

However, part of this resentment against elitist critics also extends to the whole field of modern art itself — something Marx doesn’t consider. The mass culture of the late 20th century — which is what really made the radical art of the early century famous, reducing artists like Picasso and Duchamp to memes and flat cultural icons — continued to harbor at least some of the old oppositional avant-garde sensibility. Even popular artists could be respected for challenging and shocking their audiences. But over time, the paradox was simply too great: if the main imperative is to get as much content out to as many people as possible, then challenging or difficult art can only ever be in conflict with it. This is why Poptimism as an idea has been so deleterious: it preys on the part of the audience which rejects difficulty, which regards the old avant-garde attitude as snobbery, and dislikes critics because critics often tell them that what they like isn’t very good. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exactly what happens when you combine a global mass-commercial imperative, the hamstringing of serious criticism, and the diffusion of physical countercultures into the internet. The result is the Blank Space: an alarming rate of technological change, ironically counterposed by an absence of novel artistic movements.

As a legible history of the past 25 years, Marx’s book encourages us to imagine something better — to imagine the return of physical subcultures, of serious criticism, and the development of something resembling an avant garde. But this is a forbiddingly difficult thing to do, since the place of artists has shifted so far from what it once was. On the one hand, there is the idea of the artist in popular culture — one which might sometimes contain the old ideal of aesthetic excellence at all costs, yet has for the most part given way to influencers, celebrities, and brand managers. On the other hand, there is the reality of artists within cultural institutions. Look at the blue chip galleries and recipients of huge foundation funds; the majority of “upmarket” authors published by the major houses; the poets who win major literary prizes; the young writers who work their way from unpaid internships to staff jobs; the people who run the arts non-profits. You will find an extreme bias towards upper-middle-class backgrounds and university educations. Looking at the biographies of emerging artist award winners and grant recipients, you might be bewildered by how many of these people have BFAs, MFAs, even PhDs in their area.

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This is the professionalization of the artist in our time. It is well known just how difficult it is to get published, or to get one’s work seen, without the right resume: a degree certification, specially curated portfolio, the requisite recommendations. The artist in this professional climate — whether a young composer, painter, poet, or filmmaker — faces an enormous bureaucratic barrier of entry to their field. Their style has to conform to a certain industry expectation, has to fit in with the current understanding of sales trends, and can’t risk offending or upsetting anyone at any step in that process. So, for decades, university programs have sprung up with the intention of training young artists for entry into these careers, in workshops and fine-arts programs designed to maximize their legibility at the expense of idiosyncratic style.

In our current environment, an artist like Man Ray — who turned down a university scholarship, working as a technical illustrator and taking classes at the Ferrer Center, an anarchist day school in New York — would get nowhere. But, of course, artists like Man Ray have never got anywhere in these environments. The early 19th-century Romantics rebelled against the school of Joshua Reynolds; the later Impressionists against the reigning Paris Salons; the fin-de-siècle Vienna Secessionists rebelled against the Association of Austrian Artists; Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and other avant-gardists rebelled against the ossified remains of those previous revolutionary styles. Today’s young creatives may want to think of themselves as a crusading vanguard, particularly regarding social justice causes, but, more often than not, they are themselves the producers of the stuffy bourgeois academic style which all great modern art movements have defined themselves by rejecting.

This state of affairs has only contributed to the suspicion that today’s creatives are hustlers and grifters making risk-free art. Where former eras regarded them as confusing freaks, even exiles, the public now sees them as poseurs and snobs. The undifferentiated style of these artists’ exhibitions, novels, poems, and compositions only reinforces the sense that their only audience is other professionals and academics. At the same time, as hemorrhaging industries concentrate more and more on sure-fire market successes, the professionalized caste is kept on life support solely by grants, residencies, foundations, and legacy media attention. Potential audiences drift further towards mass-produced slop and digital numbness, yet these artists still sand away every bit of risk, experiment, or novelty to make it in the shrinking creative industries. There is very little room in this equation for the creation of new artistic movements — and little incentive for anyone to want one.

So what is to be done about this? Well — many things. The first is to be clear about the situation, no matter how depressing. For the time being, the majority of the public is too distracted, numbed-out, and tech-addicted to respond to much art. Still, this is only a despairing thing from the point of view of that 20th-century monoculture. For most of human history, the production of culture was meant to exalt God, or give prestige to the ruling aristocracy. In the wake of the Romantics and modernists, the highest value became the creation of great art as the ultimate mode of human experience. When this becomes the ideal pursuit, even at a social cost, and the artist is understood as an essential outsider, public disinterest becomes the norm; it even becomes a sign of health. One of Man Ray’s consistent refrains was that whenever he noticed his work confusing someone, he knew he was really on to something.

We also have to admit that the current academic style is moribund. My generation — made up of young Millennials and elder Zoomers — has yet to produce a truly great novelist, poet, composer, or painter. And that is because too many have given up the time and energy that should have gone to their true education in formal history, to pursue professionalized academic tracks promising elite approval. As Marx pointed out, these careerist industries have left the old transgressive spirit of the avant garde to be subsumed by trolls and reactionary Right-wingers, who are themselves nearly incapable of producing art, their transgressions limited to stepping on liberal social norms and indulging in half-ironic bigotry. Not that progressives have fared much better: the last two decades of social justice politics produced no great art, with proponents largely choosing empty pieties over practical liberatory politics. Once elites figured out how to use the language of those movements, they quickly adopted it to police established class boundaries in the media, and plenty of artists adapted to the situation immediately.

What is clear is the need for secession. The need for greater numbers of serious artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who exist outside of the academy, legacy media institutions, and the major creative industries. Artists who create their own smaller institutions, their own laboratories, their own publications, their own exhibitions — all with the clear intention of avoiding trends, embracing experimental collaboration, and rejecting the need for a large audience whatsoever. At the beginning, the only audience should be other artists. Artists need spaces outside the confines of the internet, even outside the confines of society. Yet much of what goes on now, in the burgeoning scenes of New York, London, or Paris, are only small magazines, artsy parties, and showings with an eye towards sexy contemporary issues. A lot of it only happens in conjunction with small presses, or on Substack.

These people certainly have the great avant-garde artists in mind — they yearn for the days of bohemia, for Paris between the wars, or the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. But so far, their attempts to forge new art scenes have been too much scene, and too little art. The point there is less to experiment and envision some genuinely new movement, and more to imitate the romantic social lives of older artists. Until these scenes take the collaborative process of art-making and art-theorizing as seriously as they do their parties and online publications, they will be transitory. What’s more, artists need to be far more sincere about mixing with different kinds of creatives. One of the most remarkable things about interwar Paris was just how many kinds of people mixed together — aristocrats, socialites, commercial artists, designers, filmmakers, painters, playwrights, poets. They didn’t segregate themselves by medium, only by the groups they’d dedicated themselves to (and even then those boundaries could be quite porous). Judgment and taste were the sole currency. Artists who didn’t measure up to their standards were quickly dismissed as kitsch-mongers. Today we mischaracterize this posture as elitist — but it is only elitist if it comes from an actual powerful elite. For artistic movements, strict standards are self-preservation, the only thing with any chance of revitalizing a calcified aesthetic culture.

The art of the future is not going to come from our current institutions and academies. Yet neither is it going to be purely Romantic, or purely modernist. It will have to emerge from the technical mastery of all forms that came before it. Artists will have to spend far less time seeking facile “personal expression” and more time practicing old-fashioned methods, understanding them inside and out — which is the only real way to imagine something beyond them. Only an intimate understanding of the history of an artform can really respond to the world as it is now, a world which has tried to take its revenge upon art by robbing artists of their role in society, and drowning the masses in assembly-line slop.

The new contemporary art will have to be part evangelism and part theater; the artists will have to be unforgiving preachers of the gospel of aesthetic excellence. They will have to be stringent in their commitment to experimentation and their rejection of the current style. For the sake of real creative freedom, they will have to reject positioning and political signaling (though this hardly means rejecting politics itself). What is needed, in short, is a theory of contemporary art which aspires once again to shock its audience, when it finds it — not merely to transgress against social norms, rather to shock people back into reality, back into the stream of experience. The role of the artist in the anti-art era will be the person who sees the world as it is — numbed-out, anxious, resentful, overwhelmed, half-asleep — and tries to wake it back up again, by whatever means necessary.

But since wrapping up those volumes, Knausgaard has embarked on a return to fiction with his “Morning Star” series, the fourth book of which, The School of Night, comes out in English translation this week. The same techniques from his autofictional works remain in this newest work: minute descriptions of monotonous actions, threaded with microscopic reflections in unremitting first-person monologue, peppered with long riffs on grand ideas of history, photography, family or the artistic ego. The reader is easily overwhelmed by Knausgaard’s exhaustive, solipsistic obsession with the moment-to-moment thought processes of his narrator — in this case a self-important young Norwegian artist who quickly turns out to be one of the most unlikeable, unsympathetic characters in recent fiction. “Meet Kristian Hadeland: you’ll hate him,” says one of the book’s taglines, and boy is that right.

The School of Night is an agonizingly self-aware Faust story, set mostly in a rundown Deptford, in late-Eighties Thatcherite London, with a leap forward to the present (or ostensibly close to it), later in the book. The story’s loose plot sees the young photographer Hadeland arriving from Norway to study, encountering a Dutch artist named Hans who may or may not be a demon of some kind, and negotiating a fall-out with his parents, his own growing egoism, the accidental murder of a homeless man, and the possibility that he has sold part of his soul without consciously realizing it. In the last third of the book — a cancel-culture critique that does little which wasn’t done in a far more incisive way in Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár — Hadeland falls from grace, then pays for his vague Faustian pact with the death of a loved one, shattering what little world he has left. All throughout, we are privy to the misanthropic spite Hadeland shows towards nearly everything and everyone he meets. But we’re also treated to a series of speculations on mirrors, alchemy, photography and Christopher Marlowe, whose play Doctor Faustus appears frequently, and whose occult Elizabethan brotherhood gives the book its name.

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These long topical disquisitions — which will be all-too-familiar to readers of the My Struggle books — are the most interesting parts of the book. They promise a proper reflection on our image-haunted, technology-obsessed world; a proper retelling of the Faust myth, for what is surely the most openly Faustian time in human history — when AI evangelists and tech billionaires quite literally warn of the Antichrist, and engineers brag about creating daemons in the data centers. And yet the book’s reflection never really leaves the level of chatter: instead it drifts like flotsam on the surface of a narrative which doesn’t seem to be capable of anything deeper than a long, slow drag through its narrator’s many attempts to achieve some greatness in his work, and avoid too much emotional entanglement with other people.

All of this happens, of course, in the same anti-style that has marred so much contemporary literary fiction, from Sally Rooney to Knausgaard himself, obsessed as it so often is with a numbly realist accounting of modern people’s narcissistic internal worlds. One would hope that a book which took for its subject the central myth of soul-killing technological and scientific progress — not to mention the occult nature of mirrors and man-made images — would depart at least somewhat from the most mundane contemporary forms of fictional narration. At the very least, it might craft for itself a proper style to reflect its key interests, or find a more expressionistic route to convey the eerie and fantastical aspects of its story. But with Kansugaard it just isn’t so. The man can apparently only tell a story in one way. At this point, I can think of no surer sign that the fixations of contemporary autofiction (and much fiction in general) are completely tapped out than the exhausting 500-or-so pages of The School of Night.

This is a shame, because Knausgaard is often an interesting thinker, with no small amount of insight into the peculiar character of our modern compulsions. In a cover story for Harper’s this June, entitled “The Reenchanted World”, Knausgaard bridged autobiography — his youthful introduction to computers, tending the garden in his London home, and a recent visit to Greece to meet the scientist James Bridle — with his trademark musings, to investigate what he describes as contemporary society’s “loss of the world”. The world, he writes, was for most of history a place that human beings might turn to, in escape — whether from God, death or self. But in the world we’ve constructed for ourselves, “everything addresses us”, all technology seems bent on abolishing the world and only further reinforcing self. And that’s not all: our technology has flooded us with an informational approximation of the same world substituted for the actual. As he writes, with no small sadness: “All the images I’ve seen of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met create a kind of pseudomemory from a pseudoworld that I don’t participate in.”

Knausgaard’s general distaste for technology — and his quest to understand how science and mathematics might be used to complement our understanding of nature’s mystery, rather than reducing it — shares much with other vaguely Romantic critiques of contemporary scientism, like Iain McGilchrist’s recent books, or those of the venerable American iconoclast Wendell Berry, or Paul Kingsnorth’s recent polemic, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It helps to paint a picture of our era as one in which technology has run riot and escaped from our control. In one sense this seems all too similar to the first Romantic era. Then, as now, Enlightenment confidence in new scientific discoveries and technologies began to slide into the Industrial Revolution — beginning with what the Romantic poet William Blake called England’s “Satanic Mills”.

This end-of-Enlightenment period inspired the definitive modern Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s huge two-part poetic drama. Along with Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s play is mentioned in Knausgaard’s The School of Night — a tissue of Faust stories connecting the story back to Marlowe’s play, and the alchemical legends before it. But unlike the Romantic reaction against the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe, or even Mann’s evocation of Nazism and the technological destruction of both world wars, Knausgaard’s Faustian story is too shallow to measure up. His most interesting ideas about cameras, mirrors and art can’t survive his insistence on that exhausting monologue, which only burrows further into the contemporary preoccupations such a Faust story ought to be criticizing. And besides, Knausgaard is simply too committed to the ambiguity of his scenario to make it a proper retelling of a myth. Quite simply, the novel could have used much more of the spirit of inquiry and immediacy that animated his Harper’s article. Or perhaps Knausgaard is constitutionally too personal and autofictional a writer to weave genuinely imaginative literature.

Regardless, the result is, if not quite a failure, at best half-done. The autofictional style — Knausgaard’s, yes, but really anyone’s — has simply run out of things it can do, and as The School of Night proves, is finally incapable of producing the kind of new myths we need to understand our moment. We live in an era of unprecedented acceleration and global instability. Much of our time is now spent staring at computer-generated golems cooked up by technological con-men, many of whom claim (without exaggeration) to be building a new kind of superconnected divinity. We have never been more in need of stories that speak to this insane reality — not to a continual literary addiction to the same single, narcissistic inner monologue, which one can after all already find multiplied across the internet, much of it made by machines. If Knausgaard’s novel shows us anything, it’s that the Faustian story is one of the most perennially relevant modern stories: somebody just has to figure out how to tell it again. When they do, it won’t be like this.

The cliché of the artist as outsider remained an essential part of the pop mythologies of several generations. Even some of the most wildly successful musicians of the late 20th century — The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, even Madonna — became broadly admired not just for courting enormous audiences, but for their consistent unwillingness to compromise. The masses might still gobble up whatever was served to them but they were kept partially in check by discerning and knowledgeable obsessives and critics, insistent on at least some kind of standard for artistic integrity. Even the most kitsch-hungry audiences still maintained a sense that great artists were by nature opposed to the mandates of the cynical corporate bottom line of the music industry itself. As the last young people of the 20th century, Generation X summed up the ethos perfectly: there was nothing less cool or less authentic than “selling out”.

Now, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, it seems clear that almost every vestige of the sentiment has been summarily obliterated. The reigning value system of the arts in this century — sped along by the internet’s uncanny ability to fuse micro-celebrity with social media styles of personal brand management — has been one of increasingly unabashed obsession with wild financial success, naked greed, grifting, and cynical re-branding. Beginning in the 2000s, and ramping up to a fever pitch with megastars like Lady Gaga, Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ed Sheeran, pop music became a field of nakedly-corporate brand ambassadors and stars happily turning themselves into avatars of narcissistic self-actualization. 

Gaga and Swift, for instance, have developed armies of loyal fans by crafting broad messages of inclusivity and churning out vicarious anthems of personal achievement. Beyoncé has turned herself into an empty symbol of political and cultural revolution. Singers with little interest in art, from Ariana Grande to Doja Cat, have carved out huge successes by presenting themselves as simultaneously ultra-perfect and ultra-relatable. The message everywhere is the same: the greatest artists of our time are the most famous; they have everything, and they deserve everything. To say otherwise is not only snobbish but discredits the mass popularity into which millions of distracted, depressed, and over-stimulated people have invested all their attention and aspiration. 

The usual name for this strangling monopoly of the mega-famous is “poptimism” — a phenomenon that crossed over to massive TV shows, film franchises, and fashion lines. At first an obscure internet discourse conducted mostly by critics and journalists, the term has come to signify the reigning ideology of our day, in which the old values of the avant garde are dismissed as out-of-touch and elitist (and, of course, trashed as too white, straight, and/or masculine). In the meantime, pop is associated with an enlightened sense of inclusivity, conveniently ignoring the many forward-thinking avant-garde cultures historically associated with LGBTQ artists and racial minorities in Western countries. 

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One accepted starting point for this contemporary discourse is music journalist Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New Yorker article, “The Rap Against Rockism”. In the article, Sanneh defended the aspiring popstar Ashlee Simpson after a disastrous SNL performance. Simpson’s backing track had faltered, and people quickly realized she had been lip-syncing; the blowback essentially cost Simpson her music career. But what Sanneh articulated — which he opposed to the stereotypically old-white-guy rhetoric of an early-2000s “rockism” — was a defense of Pop as product, and popstars as patently commercial projects. His defense became central to the rhetoric of many internet critics after him. What began as a fairly anodyne plea for a more open-minded idea of “authenticity” in a music industry dominated by capitalistic necessities, became a steamrolling social ethos in which artists were valorized for their business savvy and their ability to represent popular dreams of self-actualization and economic domination. Naysayers were merely snobs and bigots, to whom the response was always the same: “Shut up and let people enjoy things.” 

But it is 2025 now — and the high days of poptimism are over. Just a few months ago, Sanneh himself penned a remarkably unselfconscious article called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”, bemoaning how toothless music writers have become in a world that rewards valorizing the most popular, while disincentivizing critics from championing lesser-known artists, knowing a review of the newest popstar’s record will generate more web traffic and revenue. Sanneh himself sounds wearied by the paradigm he helped usher in two decades ago. “Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it.” he writes. “This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with.”

The first sign of this slackening grip may in fact have come from Charli XCX’s Brat. Like her contemporary Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX was a confusing figure in the 2010s. Both were initially “indie”-coded artists who went through heavily-corporatized windows of popularity, before settling down to work with specially chosen producers, honing distinct internet-savvy aesthetics. They positioned themselves on the edge of genuine stardom, and yet maintained a delicate sense that they were still first and foremost creatives, willing to make occasional sacrifices to preserve their own right to self-direction. It wasn’t unusual to find listeners and critics with a lingering distaste for poptimism, who were quite willing to make an exception for them: Charli and Lana represented an interesting compromise between poptimism’s valorization of striving stars and older ideals of artistic integrity and autonomy.

On the surface, Brat was ostensibly a victory for the poptimist ideal of self-marketing — though if anything, there was something old-fashioned about the record. Even that spectacularly successful campaign and rollout saw Charli going against suggestions from all sides, releasing the album after a rough renegotiation with her label, with little concern for whether the record would be considered commercial enough. What resulted was an exciting cultural moment that was at least as exciting because of the music itself. Like Madonna bringing voguing to the masses, Brat came close to mainstreaming subgenres of hyperpop and 2010s electronic club music, the closest things to actual underground subcultures in that decade. Still, Brat wasn’t quite the monocultural success many wanted it to be: it made next to no dent on the US Billboard Singles Chart, it was denied album of the year at the Grammys, and a year later the streaming numbers are still nowhere near that of much bigger stars. But this only helps to preserve a sense of cool. Brat Summer became cringe quickly but it hardly took Charli XCX to the same heights as Taylor Swift. This is ultimately a good thing.

The question all of this begs is just what will fill the vacuum: what will the popstar of the near-future look like? The younger generation of up-and-coming popstars all seem cannily aware of their era. Singers like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Addison Rae are all savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet “aesthetic” curation, and eager to declare themselves the vigilant students of previous popstars and eras. They’ve learned the lessons of Lana and Charli, working with specific producers (often Jack Antonoff, or The 1975’s Dan Nigro), rather than massive teams of rotating writers and engineers. And they each stand in unique relation to poptimist notions of “authenticity”. 

Two of these women have already reached levels of popularity to rival their forebears. Eilish initially seemed the most likely to become musically and aesthetically interesting, though she’s since backed away into far more conventional pop territory. Rodrigo has worked almost exclusively with Dan Nigro on both of her albums. And though she started off as something of a Taylor Swift copycat, her most recent record GUTS felt different. Compared to the ultra-compressed sound of contemporary pop, GUTS did spectacularly well without sacrificing great production and an actual dynamic range: certain tracks could’ve passed master on a Nineties alt-rock station. Sure, it’s pure throwback music, and the ballads are maudlin; there’s really nothing even vaguely experimental or new to be found anywhere on any of these young artists’ albums. But the anthems sounded bigger and better than just about anything else on Top 40 radio in the US or the UK Rodrigo became the first Zoomer starlet to make something that felt like good, solid, old-school pop-rock from a different time.

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This same kind of Zoomer nostalgia for the late 20th century also marks Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan’s music as well. For all Roan’s dramatic drag costumes and theatrical performances, the music is pure Eighties synth-pop and feels more cohesive and sounds better than any regular radio fare. Carpenter’s newest album Man’s Best Friend — which caused a firestorm of backlash online for its possibly-sexist album cover — is filled with lyrics straight out of the current internet discourse on dating woes and heterosexual resentment; but the music itself is pure Seventies AM radio, country, and the occasional Prince-lite Eighties disco track thrown in. Even if it’s relatively insubstantial, it still feels more “real” than most of the anonymous processed songs we’ve been subjected to for the past two decades. 

Strangest of all is Addison Rae — the massively successful TikTok dance star — who earlier this year released her debut album Addison to astonishingly good reviews, becoming the ultimate poptimist redemption story. She released a slew of grainy MTV-referencing music videos, rebranded herself as a fervent student of Madonna, and hunkered down with producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser to produce a record full of Nineties house, trip-hop throwbacks, and obvious nods to Brat. Infuriatingly, it sounds fantastic. Rae’s savvy turn was clearly meant to dazzle doubtful audiences with its sense of curated cool, and it worked: comments online are full of listeners in awe of the change, saying things like “this is how you rebrand”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a particularly strong singer, or whether she actually wrote a single line. What matters to people is the sense that she played the re-brand game the smart way. Rather than chase the anonymous sounds of the charts, Rae pursued something that felt cohesive, and gestured toward an older sense of cool. It shows that the future for aspiring popstars like her may lie in cultivating good taste.

This is the strange legacy of the last days of poptimism. What began as a rejection of previous standards of cool has left us with decades of empty pop music, uncritical critics, and huge fandoms deeply resentful of anyone who suggests that the pop idols they worship are not brilliant simply because they’re massively wealthy and successful. The decline of poptimism has opened space for aspiring popstars to define themselves by their taste again. This is a step in the right direction. Still, the return of really exciting and adventurous pop music requires the return of authentic subcultures, too. This is going to be difficult: the victory of poptimism hampered the ability of subcultures to protect their sense of cool, just as it strangled the ability of critics to argue for anyone other than the most popular musical artists.

“The only alternative to criticism,” the great film critic Pauline Kael once said, “is advertising.” We have lived for many years now in a world that has increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the two. The job of critics now has to be to reject the market; to advocate again for neglected artists, and a sense of cool, and to push back against stan culture. But this also means recognizing and celebrating better pop music when it appears. If the young popstars are any indication, and the years of poptimism are giving way to a slight chance at a change for the better, then what artists need most is to be empowered to shift towards making good music for its own sake. This can only be done through the establishment of trustworthy critical voices. Such trustworthiness can only appear when enough people insist that art is not better simply because it’s more popular, and that commerce will always be a partial enemy to art. Do so long enough, and history tells us that audiences will eventually adjust. And it is at this point, when audiences really begin to adjust, that popular artists become free to make something truly new.

The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had traveled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.

Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.

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From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programs in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.

As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channeled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centered religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanized popularizations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.

Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicenter of the coming digital revolution.

Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgment of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”

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Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidized monopolies.

The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalized the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.

Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratizing” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarization and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centers, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behavior to murky influence on the rich and powerful.

Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterized the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.

It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.

The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

But this time around, as many reviewers have already pointed out, we are presented with a maturer version of Rooney’s concerns — and a longer book with it. Gone are the characters who write for a living. Gone, too, are the earnest disquisitions on capitalism and inequality. Her characters are now more likely to discuss logic puzzles, or Christianity.

There is Ivan, and there is Peter. The brothers Koubek, who have just lost their father. The much younger Ivan is a brilliant chess player, who could have ended up as an incel but is instead having an affair with Margaret, a woman 14 years older than him. The older Peter is a lawyer and one-time debate champion. He’s also something of a Zhivago, with one woman to suit his heart’s deeper yearning, his former girlfriend Sylvia, and another to suit his needs, his sort-of-girlfriend Naomi, a younger collegiate OnlyFans type, who is such a cliched self-destructive beauty, she seems to have wandered in from Rooney’s first two books.

It’s not, then, all that new. But there is the injection of something, which marks a real divergence from her other novels: an attempt at self-conscious prose style. Rooney has never been much of a stylist, confessing to relative indifference to the language itself. When writing about Ivan or Margaret, Rooney works in her traditional third-person present-tense narration — a partial return to the mode of Normal People. But when writing about Peter, Rooney adopts an internal monologue generally broken up into terse, subjectless fragments.

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By Poppy Sowerby

This monologue will probably get Intermezzo called Rooney’s most Joycean novel. Though other than her essential Irishness, the charge doesn’t properly stick. There’s nothing like Stephen Dedalus or the toddering Leopold Bloom, ordering the whole cosmos in his head, as if he were both God and Falstaff. Not even if the conspicuously educated Peter Koubeck is constantly referring to Hamlet, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the most interesting writing in the book is often here, in the certain wandering monologues of Peter Koubek:

Says she’s staying with Max for the month, good old Max.
See him sometimes at Sylvia’s still. Useless he was too in
competition. Too nice, not ruthless enough, always seeing both
sides. Funny though. All her friends are. Lightly she has to hold
the world, lovingly but lightly…

It’s the first time I’ve read Rooney and felt the excitement of the writer at work with words. After reading those lines, it’s hard to say that Rooney is a writer uninterested in language. Even if it’s sometimes laboured, the freer syntax is a welcome change — it made me realise just how bare and overly-crafted her writing could be before. And as her former embarrassment with the artier side of the equation evaporates from many of the novel’s best pages, Rooney can now write something like that last sentence: “Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.” It’s among the most musical, most balanced phrases in her oeuvre.

Unfortunately, she cannot really sustain such a musical construction. Perhaps this isn’t entirely fair on Rooney: chess, logic, and debate are more clearly the organising themes of the book. And they’re especially good metaphors for all of her books, which have featured tight units of desperate people, engaged in romance as if it were a game they somehow had to win. Intermezzo is much the same, reading like nothing so much as Rooney’s account of a chess match. The way characters manoeuvre to get what they want, while poring over their own motives. These character dyads are very much opponents, and Rooney writes them as though forced to chronicle every last rhetorical move.

This makes the novel absolutely infuriating. And it brings me to the crux of Rooney’s wild success: that Rooney is indeed the perfect writer for our times, but that this may be a very sad thing for our times. For as good a writer as she often is, Rooney’s novels are stubbornly, even obsessively, about constructing ultra-realistic accounts of social behaviour between individuals in the 21st century. Rooney is consumed with psychology. So are her characters. Margaret, Sylvia, Naomi, and Ivan and Peter Koubeck are only the most recent in a long line of Rooney characters who are constantly musing about their own psychology, constantly searching for breakthroughs and finding that their insights don’t always bring them the peace and confidence they’re looking for.

This is wisdom on the part of Rooney, I must admit. She’s too smart and fine a writer to allow a character to have a revelation and then wrap it up, pat, in a nice truthy ribbon. She’s too cunning a psychological portraitist to let her characters off the hook. All are to blame, all are selfish, yet all need grace and compassion. One of the reasons people adore her books is, I imagine, because they would very much like to reach out and cradle these characters the way they, too, wish they could be cradled. I feel it when reading her books: an immense tenderness for these poor lonely people, the desire to help them because they remind me so much of me.

In this way Rooney is the great portraitist of the age — and that is precisely what depresses me. Because ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else. What else but a self-obsessed culture would be so consumed with therapy as a substitute for life? The trouble with Intermezzo is just how little there ends up being in it besides this exhaustive play-by-play of human behaviour. In the narcissistic jail of contemporary life, Rooney is hardly a Prison Warden, yet neither is she a true accomplice in the escape. More like a priest on the eve of execution, there to dispense forgiveness but incapable of intervening in our ultimate doom. This is not to say she must intervene: there’s nothing Rooney ought to be doing, if we’re to regard literature as free in any meaningful way.

But there is, I think, a failure to interrogate the deeper myths which her books have all come up against, and skated over. This isn’t unique to Rooney — she’s merely in the position of most exemplifying it, because she’s become so adept at realising the minutiae of our contemporary psyches. The first of these myths is the most contemporary one. Our culture is fundamentally still reeling from the introduction of the idea of the Blank Slate, somewhere during the Enlightenment, after aeons of belief in essential nature. It’s there in contemporary gender theory, just as much as it is in the Silicon Valley techno-utopians transforming themselves into efficiency-machines. It’s the myth that at bottom we are infinitely changeable — that there is no bottom, really. Only the infinite input of senses, into an empty box.

Early in Intermezzo this rears its head in Peter’s monologue, as he muses about “classical conditioning”. It haunts the rest of the book. Isn’t it all just conditioning? Isn’t it all just bodies cajoling, persuading, conforming to other bodies, atoms colliding blindly in the dark? Yet in our world, this myth has become inseparable from another: that of the passing away of Nature. Just as we are watching a planet slowly dying because of our technological progress, so we’re trying to choke ourselves of any sense that there is a similar Human Nature — any set of instincts, beauties, or talents which are mysteriously inherent, or inheritable. We’re not sure which to hate more: the idea that there is something inherent in us, or the idea that there is not.

However, what lingers at the edge of Rooney’s fictions, and of all our contemporary fictions, is something deeper and stranger. Something we can’t quite seem to give ourselves up to. In Rooney’s work, it’s generally there in her allusions to the Catholicism of her native Ireland, and it buzzes around the boundaries of her work. In Beautiful World, Where are You, it was Alice and Eleanor’s conversations about Jesus, their wonderment at their perfect and pious friend Simon. In Intermezzo it resurfaces: Ivan or Margaret or Peter will think briefly about Jesus, about God, about bigger plans. But they will, like Rooney does, come just shy of admitting that there’s some more transcendent thing at play. This is the predicament of so much mundane fiction today: it insists that we must be concerned with the real world of practical socio-political problems, yet largely exiles the imagination, the capacity of fiction to open up the world for play.

There’s a logical paradox to the Blank Slate, which I’m sure Rooney herself would appreciate. If all we are is what our senses take in, then where does the capacity to compare things come from? How do we choose what to focus on? There must be something innate that can tell one sense from another. But this is a hard thing to accept. Rooney’s best quality is that she wants to take the confusing questions of nature vs. nurture head on. The issue is that she has chosen a very predictable form of fiction, all about the question of whether characters can change or not. Her project is to map out the webs of motives and reasons that drive her characters’ psychologies, but this only ends up reproducing the worst patterns of our contemporary self-absorption.

As in real life, her characters’ psychological revelations are Russian nesting dolls: self-discovery is ultimately as good as repression for continuing to lie to oneself, which is what her characters are continually doing, even as they confess their sins to one another. As a portraitist of our age, Rooney is at least wise enough not to say that this is the end of the story. Her books always wrap up at the moment her characters finally collapse and admit their problems. And this is a fine and ancient project for a book, to take characters from alienation to reconciliation. But in Rooney’s language, in the language of behaviour alone, it ends up looking conspicuously like therapy. And to paraphrase something the great prophet of modern narcissism, Christopher Lasch, once said: a narcissist is someone who can survive infinite therapy.

Yet as even a brief confrontation with the classics of silent cinema will show, certain ideas and “moves” which we now take for granted (e.g. insert shots, cross-cutting, alternation between close-up and wide) were already present then, developing out of a real necessity and a growing sense of the adaptivity of the audience. That is, as silent cinema grew into its great flourishing of the 1910s and Twenties, it was fast becoming a medium unparalleled in its ability to shape the expectations and attentions of its viewers. And among the giant innovators of the era, there remain a small handful of names whose enormous reputations have stayed essentially intact a century later: D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton — and Fritz Lang, whose landmark fantasy epic Die Nibelungen marks its centenary this year. The film (and its director) has ultimately had an inescapable influence on everything that came after — not only in cinema, but in the whole of European and American popular culture.

Born to a converted-Catholic Jewish mother and a Moravian father in Austria, in 1890, Lang’s life conformed remarkably to the trajectory of the early 20th century. The stories of his early career have been told and retold over the years: there was his youthful sojourn to Paris to study painting, his enlistment in the Austrian army during the First World War, then a move to Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Next came his first great period as a director, at the behemoth German UFA studios (then the largest outside of Hollywood), a series of masterpieces spanning the 15 years between his initial films in 1919, and the classic sound pictures M (1931) and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933).

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The Nazis would ban The Testament for being plainly critical of the party, which led Joseph Goebbels himself to reach out to Lang in conciliation, offering him a place in the newly consolidated studios under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Lang never took the offer, eventually fleeing Germany via Paris for Hollywood, where he would remain a successful director for two decades. In the midst of this, he managed to either perfect or outright pioneer entire genres, including film noir (in his earlier Mabuse film of 1922), utopian science fiction (Metropolis, 1927), espionage films (Spies, 1928), serial killer movies (M), and of course, epic fantasy in 1924’s Die Nibelungen.

What makes Die Nibelungen so powerful all these years later? For modern viewers, the first and most obvious thing is surely its sheer scale. Filmed over nine months on gigantic exteriors and in cavernous indoor studios, Lang had almost completely free reign to shoot as much and as long as he liked, against mattes, projections, and sets the size of which few films have managed since. The later French auteur theories of the Cahiers du Cinéma posited any director as primary author of a given film, and Lang was often cited as one of the perfect exemplars of the paradigm. Yet reports from the sets of his great UFA films suggest he might better be referred to as a general: at the head of a small army of technicians and designers, he had more or less total authority over the building, filming, and post-production processes.

The entire project was pitched at a mythic scale. The two halves of the film, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, total close to five hours long — epic by any era’s standards. Woven by Lang’s then-wife Thea von Harbou out of the traditional myth, Richard Wagner’s opera and a 19th-century theatrical version of the story, the two films tell the tale of the great Nordic/Germanic hero and symbol of Teutonic pride, Siegfried. The first recounts his battle against a dragon, his feats on behalf of the Burgundian King Gunther, his marriage to Kriemhild, and his final betrayal. In the second half, the despairing widow Kriemhild uses a strategic marriage to Atilla the Hun to destroy the Burgundians entirely.

Much has been made of the film’s relationship with German Expressionism, which was as defining to the art and culture of the time as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the German cinema dealt intimately with the emerging theories of art the Expressionists were espousing. The great film historian Lotte Eisner lays this out best in her influential book The Haunted Screen (1952), defining the goals of Expressionism as a pure abstraction almost at war with nature. The Expressionists sought — often in those weighty, untranslatable terms of German philosophy — to apocalyptically repudiate everything that had come before, whether it be Impressionism, Naturalism, or Romanticism. In Eisner’s words, what they were ultimately expressing was “that the world has become so ‘permeable’ that, at any one moment, Mind, Spirit, Vision & Ghosts seem to gush forth, exterior facts are continuously being transformed into interior elements & psychic events are exteriorized”. This, Eisner argued, was the same atmosphere evoked in the classic films of the German cinema.

But while Lang’s film delighted in the permeable, it was doing something else as well. Certainly, there was deeply abstract expression in the broad, slow gestures of the actors; in the mist and rocks where Siegfried wanders; in the general eschewal of realism or psychology in favour of pure, solemn archetypes. But instead of the usual warped planes or jagged lines of more normatively Expressionist movies (if such an oxymoron can be said to exist), Lang filled his frames with enormous, heavy symmetries, with rows of impeccably costumed soldiers, and vast diagonals and arches of buildings. In this, he took inspiration from the mythical paintings of German Romantics such as Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich.

The influence of Die Nibelungen is still palpable wherever cinema engages in high fantasy. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, even Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies would be largely impossible without Lang’s accomplishment. Yet Lang’s film is still somehow more genuinely mythic than those films. This may be partially because of its silence, partially because its old-fashioned effects have aged enough to pass from the merely hokey into an elegant unreality. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings may be the lone fantasy to have surpassed its scope — yet Jackson’s sense of coverage and place are far more cluttered than Lang’s distant, detached spaces. Villeneuve’s Dune borrows amply from Lang’s shots of people dwarfed by enormous architecture, yet is still bound to naturalistic acting and contemporary demand for psychological ambiguity.

In fact, it may be this last factor which makes Die Nibelungen more authentically mythic, and more alien to our current sensibilities. Contemporary audiences are more or less trained to search for psychology and realism in their plots, in films and TV shows — they need reasons, causes, effects, and complex motivations for their heroes and antiheroes alike.

Die Nibelungen offers no such cushioning. Instead it offers a world without psychology, a world bound by outsized feelings and tragic destinies (though this is not to say the characters lack emotion or motivation). Perhaps the only contemporary filmmaker capable of summoning up such a world is the young American Robert Eggers, who in his three films The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman has — to varying degrees of success — tried to escape modernity and enter the wilds of older, stranger times. It’s surely no accident that his next film is a remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu, another masterpiece of Twenties German cinema.

But contemporaneity aside, Die Nibelungen is still worth deep attention and study precisely because it stands in such sharp relief to our muddled modernity. Particularly in the first Siegfried section, Lang achieves a clarity of image and architecture that is electric. As Siegfried emerges from the mist, perfectly framed between giant rocks and 100-foot trees, the viewer is confronted with a totalising image which wipes aside history, wipes aside nature, and — like the music of Wagner, its nearest analogue — realises something eternal and wholly symbolic.

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Is Trump a perverted Emersonian?

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If this is beginning to sound even vaguely fascistic, well, the reference to Wagner is clear. Goebbels had, after all, offered that special position to Lang because Die Nibelungen had been such a source of pride for Germany. It was a perennial favourite of Hitler’s, and an immense influence on the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. It told the story of a favourite hero, central to the concept of Aryan heroism and purity, and of course included many grotesque trollish creatures and barbarous Huns—classic figures for racist caricature, of Jews in particular. Like Wagner, Lang’s work was brimming with big Teutonic ideals such as Weltanschauung and Gesamtkunstwerk — a very consciously Romantic questing after essentially totalitarian experiences. It is hard to watch Die Nibelungen and not see the ways in which it could be used to further such a cause.

Yet the reality of Lang’s later films and his rejection of the Nazi party (knowing full well that even his mother’s conversion would not save him from being legally considered an ethnic Jew) redeem him. It’s hard to imagine watching the vision of slave-class revolt in Metropolis and declaring it fascist. Yet as with Wagner, there is still something haunting left in Lang’s epics. A sense, perhaps, that lofty and mythic ideals can very quickly dovetail into destructive projects, always seeming to embark on a mission to “cleanse” impurities in the name of ostensibly building a better society.

Ultimately, Die Nibelungen survives its era in a way that many other films cannot. Its power derives from an extraordinary vision of a great artist, handling a myth which is far older, grander, and stranger than any modern doctrine. To view it now, from the standpoint of this tremulous technocratic century, is to clear one’s mind of psychological dross, to stand in a mist of time out of mind, among those ghostly abstractions of mind and spirit. It is to get a glimpse into one of the greatest secrets of the cinema — that myth is far from gone, that myth is only sleeping, waiting for a mind to take and hold onto, from a light, projected like an eye, on a screen.

— Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, 1841

America — the real, the messy, the absurd America — didn’t really begin in 1776. The real America is not a set of documents, or a people, or a big landmass. Even in decline, America is a maze of dizzying and lethal ideals. An untameable instinct to escape: to escape society, history, other people, ourselves. It’s a never-ending yearning for newness and a primal horror at repetition, which stretched across and conquered a continent, before it doubled back on itself and spilled out like a flood over the world. America is extraordinary; America is terrible. Like everywhere else, it drives its citizens nuts. But the whole world knows Americans are crazy in a uniquely grand, stupid way.

The degree to which I can even write those words has much more to do with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson than with any Founding Father. In rhetoric, in spirit, the one writer who fixed all the most difficult American paradoxes, like guiding stars for centuries after, was Emerson.

Growing up in Middle America, going to public schools, I never had to read Emerson. My first encounter with him was a sparsely-attended state university survey, which I took to satisfy a requirement. In one semester we blitzed through the first “half” of American literature (from John Winthrop’s Puritan speeches to Uncle Tom’s Cabin) landing briefly on Emerson’s one or two most famous essays. I take this as more or less the normative experience: since then, I’ve met only a handful of Americans who’ve read much of Emerson’s work. My more personal encounters with his writings came later, and they came to me when I was alone. I think it tends to be like this. Emerson still doesn’t quite work in the classroom. Like Michel de Montaigne, like Dr Johnson, or Friedrich Nietzsche (who profoundly admired him), he remains resistant to all but the most single-minded, solitary reader, privately seeking out the man called “the Mind of America”.

But there are always intimations of the Emersonian. There are for each American, whether they know it or not. My father, a liberal Presbyterian minister, had something of the Emersonian in him before he retired. In his tempered and essentially universalist preaching, wherein the Bible was an imperfect human document and there was resolutely no Hell: the mind, the heart, Nature itself — everything was radiant and testified to God. And this God was, in the theologian Paul Tillich’s sense, the “ground of being”, a foundation of love and faith.

A calm, scholarly kind of Protestantism, in other words — hardly the charismatic or enthusiastic Evangelism I saw in other churches. Places where you’d find a very American Christ: a demigod Jesus, with whom the faithful spoke daily, whose powers were the sole arbiter of safety or success in a world largely governed by demons. But I recognise, now, that even these separable styles were intertwined at base, with the same sense of very personal religious revelation: what the critic Harold Bloom once called the American Religion. He meant a religious and political style in which morality came down to individual souls in direct communication with God, not community or society. European Protestantism had become something stranger on the American continent, something intimately wrapped up in the colonisation of the land, the search for a wilderness Eden, the sacrosanctity of individual rights inscribed in the laws. And who was it Bloom identified the American Religion with most? Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville…but, above all, Emerson.

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For those new to Emerson’s writings, the easiest starting points are his first published essay, “Nature” (1836), and the great addresses at Cambridge (“The American Scholar”, 1837) and the Harvard Divinity School (1838). Emerson as a lecturer was a product of the liberal literature of Boston and Concord, and of his own father’s Unitarianism — his Transcendentalism coming out of a collision of Kant, Berkleyan idealism, Coleridge, some pilfered Hinduism. He made his name as a public speaker and co-founder of The Dial (he would later help found The Atlantic in 1857), advocating a radical break from Europe, from past philosophies, even from traditional Christianity. But it was the first Essays, published in 1841, refined from his lectures, which laid out his own paradoxical philosophy.

If you can call it a philosophy, that is. Emerson was a philosopher without a system, and after reading him long enough, I think clearly by design. He is as formless, as disturbingly innocent, as America is — he is as fervently contradictory. When Walt Whitman came to his own apothegm — “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” — he was, after all, reappropriating the Emerson of “Self-Reliance”: “Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?…A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Whitman’s poetry became the great vehicle of the Emersonian spirit into the broader world. But what was that spirit?

It helps to start with a sense of the freshness of his moment, as Emerson found it. In his classic American Renaissance, F.O. Matthiessen grounded Emerson’s appearance in two historical zeitgeists. First, the genuine “novel idea given birth”, the esprit which Alexis de Tocqueville had observed in postrevolutionary America. Second, the post-Kantian expansion of rhetorical concepts in the early Romantic era. For Matthiessen, this last was typified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who as a coiner of critical terms has no real rival in modern English. Matthiessen writes with awe of the many new Coleridgean terms: “…all of which are so familiar to us that it is hard to conceive how anyone ever discussed literature without them…aesthetic, intuitive, idealize, intellectualize, organic, organization, and self-conscious.” Coleridge had even been the first to use the term psychological, in describing Shakespeare’s characters. And this aspect of Shakespeare was deeply important to Emerson, who often read the Bard as a manifestation of the world-soul itself, in literature.

Emerson, the American Coleridge, may very well have been suffering some anxiety of influence when he struck out so plainly at Old World art. Still, Emerson does not coin terms: he rushes to capitalise, to abstract things into expressive monoliths — like Nature, Truth, Time, Love. The first Essays are all so many enormous nouns: “History”, “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation”, “Spiritual Laws”, “Love”, “Friendship”, “Prudence”, “Heroism”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “Intellect”, “Art”. There are, in between, almost shades of the Keatsian “negative capability”, a slippery anonymity with which that poet described Shakespeare’s genius. The negative capability reflects in Emerson, who is much the opposite: he is all positive: he finds everything in himself.

This is best represented in the most famous of the Essays: “History” and “Self-Reliance”. Of these it’s almost easiest to just hurl quotes. From the first: “All history becomes subjective: in other words, there is properly no history; only biography”; “Every mind must know the whole history for itself.” From the second: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members”; “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist”. In “Nature”, Emerson had concocted the image of himself as an all-seeing, transparent eyeball — here that eyeball is trained on the world, and in the world he finds an immense, constant affirmation of his subjectivity: a total sympathy of all things, leading back to a primal unity, the God within, what he called the Over-Soul.

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Have I failed to give a picture of the man’s ideas? That may be inevitable. How many people have read “Self-Reliance” and taken from it very different pictures of what an American should be? “Self-Reliance” is — I’m not exaggerating — the real founding American document. Just as all history for Emerson was a litany of texts leading us back to ourselves, to our judgments — so each person is, in his or herself, the sole subjective judge and creator of the cosmos. Each is to listen to their own self, and to their own self alone. There is no salvation in society. Only in solitude are we finally equal to others. “Self-Reliance” on its own gives us the whole tradition of American arts; uncreatively read, it gives us Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, who posted quotes from Emerson in his factories (right next to copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Get at that wild doubling, and you’ll start to get at the magnetically messed-up heart of Emerson’s America.

But read a little deeper: the picture grows bigger. In “Compensation”, Emerson insists that existence rests on the drawing up of cosmic, karmic tables, a reminder that America is founded on a deep sense of injustice (the one thing all Americans may have most in common is the sense that they have been wronged). In “The Over-Soul”, he complicates his own picture, asserting that to be authentically self-reliant is actually to renounce your will, to give yourself up to the universal mind. That when we’re most ourselves, we’re actually in paradoxical sympathy with our most impersonal aspects. Or take the neglected “Friendship”, the rare piece in which the positive Emerson becomes disturbed, ambivalent. He knew very well that a nation of pure individuals would be, essentially, a nation of millions of competing personal religions: as much as the Emersonian listens inwardly for truth, he or she still goes out afterwards, to mingle with a world of strangers doing the same.

Taken together, you can find in the first Essays all the same animating forces which are still churning on in American life today. Every great American is an Emersonian; every terrible American is a perverted, halfway, one. For each extraordinary American quality he helped originate, there are, as Matthiessen wrote, sentiments which, “…working on temperaments less unworldly than their author’s, have provided a vicious reinforcement to the most ruthless elements in our economic life.” He put such a fine point on our individualism, our aspirations and the anti-social character of our freedoms — like Sigmund Freud’s expression of the unconscious, or Nietzsche’s nihilism, his writing is at once the diagnosis and the disease. Who knows anymore who we were before them?

Our rural libertarians are half-Emersonians, and so are our terrified conservatives, guarding their house doors like castles and seething at wokescolds, NGOs and kids who call themselves communists (all of them perverted Emersonians, too). Our environmentalists pervert him when their rhetoric swerves from connection or beauty and grows addicted to self-flagellation, to metaphors of human cancers. Consider that Donald Trump himself is a perverted Emersonian: a man who listens only to himself but still has no self-reliance. How desperately he needs public adulation. That icon-like photo of the assassination attempt testifies to an Emersonian, American fact. The man who totally exemplifies his moment, no matter how shallow or disgusting, will get everything he wants, and he will misunderstand it at every turn.

Because for Emerson, the world may be social, yet a person should never prefer a social truth to the spiritual facts he or she holds at heart. As a political doctrine this seems plainly impossible. At its worst, it leads to something like America today: millions of asocial individuals in constant conflict over millions of grievances. Emerson’s ambivalence still haunts us. We feel, deep down, that individual freedom is simply incompatible with society and social responsibility. Emerson’s belief that a great society might be made up entirely of free-thinking individuals reads now as disturbingly naive.

But reading Emerson always brings me to a freeing realisation: that America may not really matter. Sure, America may slowly die of its paradoxes. It just doesn’t matter — only people matter. The simple truth is that most Americans work hard and care about those around them. I’ve seen it first-hand, in families, even in churches. I’ve seen it nurtured by teachers in some of the most segregated schools in America. They are on their way to being genuine Emersonians: they don’t work from a need for approval or salvation, or for the sake of some bigger political picture. The good they do is out of a personal sense — a common sense — that it is right.

Late in “Circles”, in what may be the subtle best of the Essays, Emerson writes: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker; with no Past at my back.” That, to me, is so clearly the voice of America, that when I see it, I am myself unsettled. It is beautiful; it is terrifying. This vision of America is equally free, and unmoored. A place without history may be either a hell or a haven: America has always been both. It can always be more of either. We live in a time of isolation and of exhaustive obsession over identity, always selling us on new ways to perform ourselves. But there’s a difference between isolation and solitude, and a difference between selfishness and self-reliance. Even if he cannot help us save modern society, Emerson can at least still teach us how to listen to ourselves in genuine solitude. And that might just be enough.