Update, 1/21/2023
The authorship-as-ownership essay is no longer a major priority. I still want to write it, but I’m waiting for the issue to become relevant somehow. Given existing trends in English-language cultural discourse, I’m sure someone will come out with a hot take about authorship some time in the next couple of months.
I recently unpublished “A Brief History of Cursed Vibes,” my attempt at engaging with Christopher Lasch’s Minimal Self. I wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out, especially its stylistic inconsistency. (I particularly disliked how it alternated between breezy and somber; I’m not a good enough writer to pull that off.) In any case, I’m going to start working on a revised version pretty soon, though I’m waiting until Christian Lorentzen’s recent essay on Lasch in Jacobin gets un-paywalled. I generally like his work and I want to see what he has to say. A revised version was published on January 12, 2023, and I am much more satisfied with it.
My agenda for the next few posts is as follows. I’m writing it here to hold myself accountable. I can’t guarantee a timeline, but I hope to have all of these out by May of 2023.
“The Replacement-Level Novel,” which is basically finished; I just need to look it over one more time. (Update: this has now been published.)
A few words on Pierre Macherey. (Update: this has now been published.) Longtime readers may remember my discussion of Macherey in the “Reading Politically” series, which I took down earlier this year out of fear that it would be misread. (More on this below.) I initially intended to rewrite it as an introduction to Macherey for the general public, but then Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser put out a book called Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production whose introduction does basically what I wanted to do, only better. I might write a review of their book if I have the time to read it. No guarantees—I’m only guaranteeing that I’ll say a few words about Macherey.
A revised version of the Christopher Lasch essay (update: this has now been published).
An essay on the idea of authorship as ownership.
I also want to set a long-term goal of getting over my fear of being misread. Fundamentally, this fear is rooted in two basic facts and one strong personal belief. Fact #1: no form of communication, not even spoken language, gives direct and unmediated access to a person’s thoughts. A full explanation and defense of why I believe this would take us wildly off-track, though I think it should be self-evident to anyone who has has more than two or three conversations in their life.1
Fact #2: the personal and professional consequences of being misread can be quite high. This is not a coded reference to cancel culture; most of the discourse surrounding it is fatuous, tiresome, or both, and I’m not interested in participating. No: ever since the rise of copyright laws a few centuries ago, authorship has implied ownership. Ownership implies responsibility; it implies that I can be held to answer for any potentially objectionable statements that appear in my work.2
I don’t mean to suggest that a 17th-century prosecution for blasphemy is in any way comparable to potential consequences that I could experience from something I wrote here. However, in a few months, I will enter a professional field whose members’ words have always been highly scrutinized, especially in the last two-ish years. In the interest of privacy, that’s all I will say about that.
Finally, the strong personal belief: 99.9% of writers, with the exception of a handful of geniuses (who have no need for writing advice anyway) have a basic duty to write clearly. In other words, they must be nice to the reader, as David Graeber once put it. One way I try to ensure this is to foreground the experience of the reader during the revision process.3 I ask myself questions like, Could this potentially confuse the reader? or What would the reader want to know more about? or Would the reader think this transition is too abrupt?
On the other hand, when I obsess too much over avoiding potential confusion, my work starts to sound a lot like the Summa Theologiae. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but since I’m not a medieval monk writing in Latin, it’s a little off-putting. And it won’t do anything about the impossibility of direct and unmediated thought-expression.
A recent Twitter thread by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò sums up the kind of attitude I’m trying to aspire to:
More straightforwardness; less anxious hedging. With the exception of the following disclaimer.
Legal disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
For a difficult but rewarding treatment of this subject, see: Jacques Derrida, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revised ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 6-26.
See: Michel Foucault, “What Is An Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–138. (I particularly like pp. 124–131.)
See Footnote 1 in “Quick Fixes for Academic (and Other Formal) Writing” for my credentials in this area.