Best way to kill a blog 2: publish a too-long review of a book you're certain no one you know has read.
Here goes anyway:
David Denby, one of two film critics for the New Yorker, recently published a book called Snark. I saw him on C-SPAN discussing his tract and was immediately delighted: someone was taking on the anti-everything aspects of popular intellectual culture. So I bought his book, read it, and was left somewhat upset. I should have expected it from a typical New Yorker writer -- an extremely intelligent, well polished analysis of something just un-mainstream enough to make me feel like I was being a cultured badass, with attacks on the American neo- and theo-cons ranging from peripheral to vociferous, but with no real attack at what's at the heart of the matter. I made my way through his at times exasperating and at times spot-on book, and I don't think that he's entirely correct in his ideas about why and how we talk to (or more importantly, about) each other in this vast internet realm of links and tagging and occasionally text.
The book's main focus should immediately piqued our interest, since the nature of what's increasingly discussed on television, in print, on the internet, on the radio, etc. (and, alas, by all of us amongst ourselves) indicates that we are turning into an idea-less culture. Our society now implicitly and aggressively discourages discourse. For every televised hour of PBS-level coverage of reality (bread-and-butter journalism, news magazines, round-table discussions), there are 100 hours of schlock, of hype, of divertimenti that are overtly hostile to reality. This to me is the biggest plague on our collective public attention. But snarkiness, as Denby defines it, seems merely like a symptom of this disease.
Still, I think the book is provocative in its conclusions -- that the public discourse is increasingly void of civility, conviction and cool-headed information -- and it should be taken very seriously.
What is snark? Commentary -- largely web-centered commentary -- that goes straight below the belt without much or any intellectual rigor. Vitriol. Except it's a different flavor of vitriol, for it stems from the educated classes -- from those of whom it was once culturally expected to traffic in niceties, formalities, and to endorse a certain civil template for all public discourse. When William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal throw punches each others' way after sparring vigorously but politely, that's a gentleman's agreement. When Cheney tells Patrick Leahy, on the Senate floor, to go fuck himself, that's a kind of snark.
And when Wonkette the political blog, or Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, e.g., sit in the back row of the class and says snide things about all the candidates in the classroom, attacking any social vulnerability instead of discussing facts and merit, that is the worst snark of all. Snark might have tipped the scales against John Edwards, whose candidacy in the primaries had the best hope of encoding at least a whiff of real progressiveness into the Democratic platform (I still view Obama as a center-right politician).
Snark is largely about the trivialest of priorities: appearing cool. Cool people don't wear their convictions on their sleeves. Cool people make you-know-what-I-mean jokes that require one to skip the subject matter and go straight to derision. Snark is anti-sincere -- the climax, perhaps, of 8 years of Bush dominance. Remember when mocking Bush was passé, when it was uncool to decry the president because everyone already hated him? I've encountered many too-cool-for-school mumblecore types who reacted to an anti-Bush comment with an ambivalent 'Duh.' I suppose being vocally anti-Bush went out of fashion sometime around 2005.
Maybe it's impossible to broach this subject and keep your scale manageable and your pronouncements modest, as Denby appears bent on doing. But the issues raised are so intricately linked with the state and nature of culture -- and all the baggage and hand-wringing that the term 'culture' term engenders -- that the book's 120 pages begin to appear thin and flimsy. It's thus strange that the author has no qualms framing snark into a legacy of Juvenal and other ancient poets (one is instantly delighted that at least someone is still affording the Classics the occasional modicum of attention and reflection, even if Denby's links sound stretched in the end), but isn't willing to look our own society squarely in the face, not even in the midst of his criticisms, which range from humble to finger-wagging in a single breath. One of Denby's other books is an important, deeply thoughtful look at the origins, nature and content of our literary canon, a knotty and huge topic indeed. Why can't Snark be similarly grand in scope?
What do I mean when I say that Snark isn't getting to the heart of the matter of what's wrong with the emerging American discourse in the internet age? Well, here's a story.
There's something David Foster Wallace observed about youthful supporters of then-centrist John McCain as he covered the 2000 Republican primary race between McCain and Bush, and I'll never forget it. Anyone remember the McCain of the 2000 race, and how young people felt about him? I don't mean to slight Obama and the significance of his youth support, but plenty of 20-somethings were just as excited about McCain as their 2008 counterparts were about Obama, and, as we easily forget, for many of the same reasons: a "post-partisan" politician, one who inspires us to conceive of our nation as a shared project in which we all have a stake and responsibility. The reason we've forgotten that version of McCain is that he never existed; his maverick status has been discredited; he tried to sell us Sarah Palin, the war in Iraq, and government-by-corporations. Suddenly the Keating 5 is back on the narrative of his career, not just fighter-piloting and pragmatic America-loving.
So how did McCain come close in 2000? Wallace wrote that young people today are so inculcated with the insufferable efforts of people trying to sell them something that they have come to take it for granted, that instead of fighting against the ubiquity of talk-to-your-doctor-about-whether-Lipitor-is-right-for-you, a fight that would require infinite energy and some radicalism, we merely incorporate it, live around it, buy into it and ignore it as we see fit. And when a huckster politician comes around, the immediate instinct is to tune the motherfucker out just as one tunes out "Dude, you're gettin’ a Dell!" and the blandly attractive hoodlum around our age who is trying to get us to eat another 1000 calories at Taco Bell at one in the morning by parroting some generic version of the words that we use and the way that we dress.
As likely as not you will end up eating the Taco Bell, but you don't really believe in it, of course, somehow it’s something of a joke that you’re there, and if it’s not a joke you have to swallow a bit of your dignity before you can proceed to the food; if somebody sincerely asked you whether you enjoyed that Grilled Stuft Burrito, whether it was well prepared and whether the ingredients tasted fresh and blended together well, you would stare at him as if he were from Mars, wonder if he was channeling Samuel L. Jackson’s “tasty burger” speech from Pulp Fiction before he murdered you. (The incongruity between the circus-clown brand culture we constantly endorse, and our affectations of cool, is put on the table like never before in that scene, and it's one of Tarantino's best.) Is it any wonder, then, that, if you even vote to begin with, you support a candidate who inevitably promises “leadership,” paired with “courage,” promising to “fight for your values,” but that you don't dare discuss any platforms at any length, platforms about which you’ve been presented with less than ten minutes of sober information?
And, of course, any utterance in culture that seems to penetrate this surreal vacuity wins immediate credibility and appeal, whether deserving or not – a phenomenon like South Park prefers to proffer in turn its own surreal vacuity instead of any alternative rooted in any belief bigger than oneself – but calling everyone a douchebag in snickering self-defense is hardly a healthy way of living. The dadaists would be delighted: everything is a joke now, sincerity is scorned. News is palatable only in comedy form, the nutritional value of our mass media’s offerings has reached a junk-food nadir. Our music taste is for the naughtily absurd. We wear t-shirts that serve to present our identities, but the statements on them declare nothing but jest. Irony and sarcasm are no longer distinguishable. Surface, it's the new substance!
From the beginning of the book, you can tell Denby is trying to cement the coining of his pet term for something nearly as vast as a zeitgeist (snarkiness, as he would have it, though the word is oddly narrow and grating, especially when libel, calumny, character assassination, and childishness would serve equally well), and his insistence on such a silly word seems ill-fated. But it has sparked some discussion, and to the extent that this discussion can reflect on Denby's claims thoughtfully, adopting the appealing ones and abandoning what's most tenuous about the book, it has proved so far a successful and important endeavor. Snark is not at all a bad book.
Hostility to earnest conviction and discussion has permeated all classes; Proust's society elite may have been proto-Snarks (in Du côté du chez Swann, Swann says all his heady words with jesting protestations, lest anyone get the impression that he was actually arguing a point), but nothing matches the insipidness of twenty-something liberal hipsters who while working towards $100,000 diplomas use their status updates as a forum for mocking Michelle Obama's election night dress. Nor is the case of the class that historically would have revolted any less revolting; how can someone focus on his abysmal hourly wages when VH1 snags his thoughts instead with jokes about jokes about people who are jokes? David Foster Wallace asked in 2000 whether McCain might be an antidote to this snarling, shoulder-shrugging helplessness in the face of Important Issues, but by the end of his article appeared doubtful and melancholy. (This is the part where I make a clever joke about his having killed himself due to others' snarkiness.)
Denby's book has Obama as a backdrop, with a dose of optimism that Obama may have been 2008's antidote: perhaps his civility and directness will stem our (often justifiable) cynicism about politics and foster an understanding of the importance of a thriving, thoughtful public sphere. And the book's reflections about the role of the internet in exacerbating the scope of dangerous ad hominem attacks are very timely, very smart, and very important. If Denby doesn't use his narrow book to try grandly to update the diagnosis of society as a spectacle, if he doesn't excoriate the fraudulence of ditty-driven materialism while referencing academic anti-capitalist debates, one has to say "oh well" and read the book for what it's worth, which is still a great deal.
I'd enjoy discussing snark, to whatever extent you think such a phenomenon truly exists, and what instances of popular/intellectual culture are snarky.
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