Why Is Our Culture So Obsessed With Individual Experience?

March 28, 2024 5:46 AM

"If you stand before a Van Gogh painting, its meaning is not self-evident; maybe the shoes on the floor are the point, maybe the angle of perspective is the point, maybe something about the market for yellow pigment is the point, and so we have to process what is before us. If you stand in a yoga pose at the Immersive Van Gogh Morning Class, contemplation isn’t the goal; total sensory fusion is. This shift from contemplation to intense experience is sold as liberating, but it parallels other social and economic shifts that aren’t so great." A Jacobin interview with Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism.
posted by mittens (31 comments total)

mmmm. I like this. Thanks for sharing, mittens. It is slightly beyond my areas/intellect, making it a compelling read.
posted by vitabellosi at 6:10 AM on March 28

"First-person narration has become the dominant literary style of our age of immediacy."

"novels in English in the twenty-first century are majority first person. "

Is this true? Seems empirically verifiable.

"Nonetheless, the book absolutely tries to indicate that the style of immediacy governs the tactical (and ideological) preferences for horizontalism, localism, anarcho-spontaneity, anti-unionism, and the lack of disciplined organization on the Left."

There's anti-unionism among the left? Among centrist liberals yes, but not the left, and certainly not the capital L Left!

What does "style of immediacy governs" means here? What how does a style govern?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:19 AM on March 28 [7 favorites]

I stopped reading after: "cutting out the middleman is part of the model of big business in twenty-first century industry, from car-shares to e-brokerage. Profits come less from making and more from exchanging." Middlemen exchange rather than make, implying to me that profits now come more from making and less from exchanging. (The first statement is also not necessarily true. There are more direct-to-consumer businesses, but there are also new middlemen, notably Amazon.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:36 AM on March 28 [6 favorites]

There's anti-unionism among the left? Among centrist liberals yes, but not the left, and certainly not the capital L Left!

You're joking, right? The left (and yes, even the Left) is happy to find their inner unionbuster when it means keeping control - Nathan Robinson and Cenk Uygur being just two notible examples of such.

(And to head it off, arguing that their pivot into unionbusting just showed they weren't leftists is a textbook example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The left (and the Left) have their own flaws, and the only way to deal with them is to actually acknowledge that they exist.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:53 AM on March 28 [5 favorites]

Those are people who own businesses. Two people. Is there declining support for unions among the left?

If that’s the claim it essentially boils down to “leftists who own media organizations engage in union busting when it threatens their bottom line, here’s what that says about art”.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:58 AM on March 28 [5 favorites]

Support for unions is highest it’s been in two decades among dems.

But why let data get in the way of an anecdote.

This took two seconds of googling. Why didn’t Kornbluth do this?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:08 AM on March 28 [11 favorites]

Those are people who own businesses. Two people. Is there declining support for unions among the left?

First, Josh Marshall happily put his money where his mouth was and a) accepted the card check and b) signed a CBA with the Talking Points Memo union, so the "but they're owners" argument doesn't actually fly. Left oriented business owners are quite capable of standing for their ostensible beliefs, so when they don't, that stands out. And it's not just "two people" - the left happily wraps its unionbusting in "X is a calling" bullshit.

Second, while the left "supports unions" in the theoretical sense, the problem is that (and this is something that labor historian and political pundit Erik Loomis has discussed quite a bit) is that the left tends to balk at the reality that actual unions are complicated organizations that work for the interests of their members - even when those interests run counter to the left. As with a great deal of things in life, the actual relationship between the left (and the Left) and unions is a complicated and messy thing that polls elide much of the detail about away.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:27 AM on March 28 [9 favorites]

So there’s a rise in anti unionism, but for some untheorized or empirically unsupported reason, it’s actually manifesting itself as public support for unionism.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:31 AM on March 28 [6 favorites]

Keep in mind that the claim that “there is a rise in antii unionism among the left” makes no claims about the absolute level of anti unionism among the left, at all, only that it is higher than it was before. Can Kornbluth or anyone else provide evidence for this relative change? If not, why listen at all?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:33 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]

(re the first-vs-third person POV, the CONLIT dataset suggests that just under 50% of sampled novels published after 2000 are first-person. While datasets of older literature exist, I can't spot an analysis of how many were first- or third-person.)
posted by mittens at 7:34 AM on March 28 [4 favorites]

> There's anti-unionism among the left? Among centrist liberals yes, but not the left, and certainly not the capital L Left!

Au contraire, especially among the (unreconstructed) Capital L Left.

Labor unionism, you see, is a dickless half-measure for the amelioration of the problems of Capitalism. Never a solution. It's a thing that obstructs the Capital L Leftist program of social transformation. It's an obstacle to solving the problems of Capitalism.

Which is not to say that back in the Comintern days, Communists were not all about trying to get control of unions in capitalist countries. To keep them from being too satisfied with any deals they might make. Sometimes to keep them from making deals with management at all.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:35 AM on March 28

According to this blog post, 90% of NYtimes bestseller adult fiction books were 3rd person. https://whitneyhemsath.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/pov-first-vs-third-person/
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:39 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]

Support for unions is highest it’s been in two decades among dems.
But why let data get in the way of an anecdote.
This took two seconds of googling. Why didn’t Kornbluth do this?

somethingsomethingmust drive a wedge between unions and dems in an election yearsomethingsomething
posted by Thorzdad at 7:42 AM on March 28 [4 favorites]

So there’s a rise in anti unionism, but for some untheorized or empirically unsupported reason, it’s actually manifesting itself as public support for unionism.

Loomis summed it up nicely on his piece on leftist unionbusting (linked above):

See, here’s the thing about unions. There is no union movement if unions have to have your precise political aims in order to exist. You either support the right to organize and for collective bargaining or you don’t. This doesn’t mean you have to support the actions of a union. It doesn’t mean you can’t fight against a union that has bad politics. It does mean that unionbusting is an unacceptable political position to take. This is why I reject the required gymnastics to say that police unions shouldn’t exist–even if I think police unions are the enemy and that the police itself should be abolished in its present form. We as the public are a bargaining agent that should demand takebacks from those unions under the guise of the public interest. That’s what public sector bargaining is. But this also goes the other way. Not only would an organized Bernie campaign staff not destroy the Bernie campaign (unless the workers are treated so badly that they strike and at that point the campaign deserves it), but the argument itself is farcical. Unions don’t exist to support your politics. They exist to provide workers with a voice on the job. If you don’t think workers should have a voice on the job when that job is supporting your preferred candidate (or in the case of Jacobin, serving as a propaganda rag for said candidate), then you don’t actually support unions at all.

And I'll also point out that your original position was "there is no anti-unionism among the left", a position that was laughably proven false. You've since moved the goalposts to "the left overall supports unions", which while more defensible elides over the fact that the relationship between unions and the left has been a rocky one, especially when the two sides wind up at counter purposes.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:43 AM on March 28 [4 favorites]

And I'll also point out that your original position was "there is no anti-unionism among the left",

Good thing I'm just firing off internet comments on my phone and not making easily debunked claims in my academic work!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:56 AM on March 28 [4 favorites]

Labor unionism, you see, is a dickless half-measure for the amelioration of the problems of Capitalism.

This is a position I have never seen advanced by any of the anarchist or Marxist communities I have interacted with. The same people who made the most passionate arguments about theory and the irredeemable nature of capitalism were the most involved in labor organizing. Because it provides tangible help to people right now. The only opposition to unions I ever saw were in those cases where a union had failed to support workers against the bosses.

They were also trans friendly spaces, so using "dick-less" as a pejorative was right out.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 8:23 AM on March 28 [12 favorites]

@The Manwich Horror yeah after I posted that I thought "showing your age there, 'bootless' would have been better." But 'bootless' does not have the burning contempt of what I did say, and the burning contempt was an important part of what was meant to be communicated.

Your Marxist contacts have definitely been of the reconstructed variety. A look at the pre-WWII history of Leftism will make that clear.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:41 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

Anecdotally, I have encountered anti-unionism among the ultra-left. Lenin did consider some "trade unionism" to be a tool of the bourgeoisie, so people are able to find strength for their distaste there.

According to this blog post, 90% of NYtimes bestseller adult fiction books were 3rd person.
I don't think she's talking about published works broadly, as much as a sort of literary fiction. Maybe it's better clarified in the book, which I am curious to read.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:47 AM on March 28

Your Marxist contacts have definitely been of the reconstructed variety. A look at the pre-WWII history of Leftism will make that clear.

They were somewhat self selecting, in that they were Marxists willing to hang around with an anarchist. And they were distinctly Marxists, not Leninists, and dedinitely not "Marxist-Leninists".

Also, I didn't intend at all to imply you were anti-trans. Only that if you were hearing that sort of thing from them, it was likely from those superficial "leftists" that only care about economic issues that impact them personally and are quick to whine about pursuing justice as "identity politics"that drives away the "white working class". Those guys can go jump in a lake.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 8:58 AM on March 28 [3 favorites]

Shifting the discourse… I feel like the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once had the objective of immersing you (via overstimulation in this case) in the experience of the movie. There was just no time to analyze; I could only experience. There was an exhibit at LA modern art museum the Broad that did that for me too and I think about it to this day. It brought me to tears like no other artwork ever did. I was just teleported into experiencing it, not thinking about it.

In some cases this is not new (“they said that irony was the shackles of youth”) but more and more it’s clear we hunger for experiences, and common experiences, like the Barbie movie or Eras tour and its friendship bracelets. What do they call that? Meta modernism or a sort? I’m totally here for it. I suppose in some case life is the ultimate version of that (the real virtual reality) but too long or too stressful or too much thinking to regularly experience it as such, hence art.

I’ll go RTFA now
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:08 AM on March 28 [5 favorites]

> Only that if you were hearing that sort of thing from them

Yeah, no. My understanding of this topic is based on academic readings of the history of Communism, done mostly between 1980 and 1990. Not that history of Communism was my main focus, which was more along the lines of "The Cold War: WTF?"

On reflection, there cannot be so very many unreconstructed Marxists left running around. One occasionally hears of a sighting in a protected environment like a University. So plausibly it is a fair claim that most Leftists now living have given up on that hostility.

> distinctly Marxists, not Leninists

You don't need Lenin as a Marxist to be hostile to unionism. Recall that Marx explicitly rejects Social Democracy and insists that only through violent revolution can Socialism be accomplished. The hostility to labor unionism was a form of heightening the contradictions, or at least closely related to that. Any Leftist who claims to be Marxist but is squishy on violent revolution is not fully informed enough about Marx to claim to be a follower.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:12 AM on March 28

In some cases this is not new (“they said that irony was the shackles of youth”) but more and more it’s clear we hunger for experiences, and common experiences, like the Barbie movie or Eras tour and its friendship bracelets.

Everyone going to see Barbie was nice because it was so rare, it used to be the norm. Can you imagine a show like Game of Thrones dominating monday mornings like it used to? I can but I don't think it'll happen soon.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:22 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

The critique of modern literature reminds me of Brandon Tyler's recent article on moral worldbuilding; previously.
posted by tofu_crouton at 10:28 AM on March 28

The claim that first-person narration is the dominant literary style doesn't pass the smell test. What I have noticed is a rise in second-person narration, especially in literary nonfiction, as a shortcut to a sense of intimacy and immediacy.

The claim that "for most of its three hundred years of existence, the novel was generally written in the third person" implies a lack of familiarity with early English novels, which were mostly written in the first person: Pamela, Tristram Shandy, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, The Vicar of Wakefield, Evelina, etc. The only major novelist of the 18th century I can recall who employed a third-person omniscient narrator was Joseph Andrews. Even Cervantes used first-person narration, though at a remove: "Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived..."

Then Austen came along, and most novelists followed her lead for the next hundred years. But certainly not everyone: Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are all first-person narratives. That's a good chunk of the 19th-century canon. Then in the 20th century you have Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, The Great Gatsby, The Left Hand of Darkness, and on and on and on.

I suspect the claim is more about the recent fad for first-person autofiction, but that's a tiny portion of published novels. Claiming a small slice of capital-L Literary Fiction is the dominant mode is ridiculous. The top-selling books of the 21st century are all by Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, and they use third-person omniscient narrators.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 10:46 AM on March 28 [6 favorites]

I'm getting faint echoes of the "People's Judean Front"/"Judeans People's Front" in this thread.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:48 AM on March 28 [6 favorites]

(Disclaimer: I'm connected to Kornbluh via social media, though we've never met.)

I am a little puzzled about the literary-historical narrative, because as Just the One Swan, Actually says, the history of the British novel tilts very strongly in the direction of first person and sometimes, in the case of the epistolary novel, multiple first persons. (This includes first-person narrators who aren't characters as such, as in Thackeray, Eliot, and Trollope.) Kornbluh is actually a Victorianist by training, so I'm not sure what's happening here.

The popularity of millennial movements suggests that there are other ways of thinking about the impending end to futurity that well predate the environmental crisis, no? (Obviously, in Christianity, it depends on whether your vision is of the "thousand years of improvement, Christ appears" or the "Christ appears, unpleasant stuff happens" variety.)

The quest for "immediacy" strikes me as a thing that, historiographically speaking, is always rising, much like the middle class. The turn to sola scriptura in Protestantism, for example, is partly about cutting out the middleman! See also the Methodists and the subsequent spread of evangelicalism.
posted by thomas j wise at 1:45 PM on March 28

If you don’t think workers should have a voice on the job when that job is supporting your preferred candidate (or in the case of Jacobin, serving as a propaganda rag for said candidate), then you don’t actually support unions at all.

I mean, this is logically false. It just means somebody who doesn't support unionization in the context of running an U.S. based two party political campaign and somehow magically making that work. If it were workable, then of course candidates would try it, it gives them that much more credibility, like someone who grows their own organic vegetables. I don't get why American online political discourse is constantly reliant on "logic" that any CBT therapist would say is all-or-nothing cognitive distortion. Oh wait, I do.
posted by polymodus at 10:53 PM on March 28

You can support workplace democracy without reflexively supporting one side no matter what. It seems to me the accusation of "anti-unionism" tries to confuse that distinction.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:12 PM on March 28

I mean, this is logically false. It just means somebody who doesn't support unionization in the context of running an U.S. based two party political campaign and somehow magically making that work.

First off, given that a number of campaigns (such as the Warren campaign) were able to make it work, the position itself doesn't actually hold up (which was part of the genesis of that particular piece.)

But more importantly, your argument ignores Loomis' thesis, which he states at the very top of the paragraph you took that line from:

See, here’s the thing about unions. There is no union movement if unions have to have your precise political aims in order to exist. You either support the right to organize and for collective bargaining or you don’t.

In short, his position about unionism is that support is all or nothing - either you believe that workers have the right to organize period, or you don't. The moment you start making arguments that "actually, these workers shouldn't organize for reason X" - the moment you start putting limits on when workers can align their interests based on your own - is the moment you stop actually supporting their right to organize. Given that Loomis is a labor historian who has actual experience in the union trenches - I'm inclined to listen to him on matters like this.

Which comes back to the earlier discussion about leftist anti-unionism - for the most part, the left doesn't directly oppose unionization. Instead, the issue is that the left thinks that unions should be political adjuncts to their movement, ignoring when that would conflict with supporting their membership.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:17 AM on March 29 [4 favorites]

union support != workers have the right to organize period
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:22 AM on March 29 [1 favorite]

I get that you were using "dickless" in character, but it's still unpleasant to come across here. Ironic misogyny is still misogyny.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:09 PM on March 29 [3 favorites]