“I don’t want to get sober from writing.”

– Michelle Tea, “Against Memoir” (2018)

 

“Drain the clock, not the cock.”

– Ramona Vega, Hustlers (2019)

 

🕺

 

“Making it look easy,” one might think, is the privilege of the managerial class. But what is the “ease” that appears when labor is sublimed into pure ideology? The question fringes much of the mainstream culture of neoliberal accelerationism. In the work of Aaron Sorkin, for example, the bureaucrat’s office figures as a place of absolute political efficacy, where the mind of the male genius works as a shred of platinum to transform sweat into history. Sam Seaborn makes it look easy; Josh Lyman makes it look fun. That The West Wing’s fantasies of political efficacy had entirely swallowed and reconstituted the “political” ideological state apparatus was obvious as early as 2006, when the UK Conservative Party copied the plot of an episode in order to defeat the first reading of the government’s “Racial and Religious Hatred Act.”[1]  They had good hustle! Ease as the whiteness of, for example, the collar.

This feels a long way from the question of autobiographical criticism, no doubt. Yet perhaps academia’s oft-remarked method-manifesto fatigue would look a little easier if we understood it as Aaron Sorkin might, as a set of disagreements about how managerial-class workers should approach the question of professionalism. In the heyday of de Manian deconstruction, John Guillory described such theory (and its signature strategy, “rhetorical reading”) as an essentially managerial metadiscourse whose purpose was to subordinate the social field, in which literature and criticism might have otherwise had a stake, to its own unreal form of political analysis, whose phantasmatic causality follows from the claim that, in Guillory’s words, “political questions are derivative of linguistic ones.”[2] Although the most spectacularly visible effect of that subordination was the election (and promotion, etc.) of a new class of suited-and-booted meta-managers, its most significant effect was the sublimation of the object, in this case “literature,” into a merely discursive object wheeled out to confirm the emerging class’s necessity. Whether or not Guillory was right about deconstruction (I’m not sure), it seems notable that the age of metadata, which figures both markets and labor forces as micro-bundled identity segments, has so far overlapped entirely with the age in which “the way we read now” has somehow appeared a salient topic of conversation, despite the erosion of the “we,” the multiplicity of “ways,” and the world-ending obliteration of the “now.” Do we debate “the way we read now” to persuade ourselves that, even if nobody else does, we (still) read (now), much as Elaine Stritch, or whomever, reassures herself that “I’m Still Here”?

If “calling bullshit” were enough to end this parade of vanities, or if merely noting that these debates are pointless denuded them of their capacity to titillate and reproduce, we wouldn’t have gotten into this problem in the first place.[3] And of course “this is bullshit” is one of the methods by which contemporary pseudo-problems manifest(o) themselves. So rather than say that autobiographical criticism is good (a meaningless statement) or bad (equally); that it is new (potentially meaningful, but not true) or old (self-evident and politically ambiguous); that it is “reactionary” or “radical”; “politicizing” or “dehistoricizing”; let me say instead that none of these pairs is remotely contradictory, any more than “depth” contradicts “surface,” “form” contradicts “history,” or “distant” contradicts “close.” Difference is not the same as contradiction. This point is vital if we are to understand the ways in which methodological metadiscourse serves to obscure the conditions of alienated labor under the neoliberal phase of capitalist relations, which is not “subjective” or “objective” but irreducibly both.

Irony seems too futile a word to append to what the New York Times called “the case of Paul de Man” (christened “Paul Deman”), as Oedipalized an Oedipus as has been yielded by the Complex and its decedents.[4] It was de Man, writing in 1979, who argued that the will to narrate governs the choices one makes, such that “the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life.”[5] He illustrates the point by reference to Gérard Genette’s reading of the closet scene in Proust, “of which it is impossible to say whether it is fact or fiction.”[6] Conventionally, we fudge this problem with the bland phrase “semi-autobiographical,” to designate a partial fictionalization delivered in such a manner as to leave partly exposed the author’s life, or let’s say, as Barthes does, her “thing.”[7] But de Man was right to observe that autobiography isn’t a matter of degree—a titillating “semi”—but a matter of quantum ontology, where the autographical signature is either effaced or exposed. So the phenomenon called “autobiography” is neither real nor unreal, but a way of thinking about the signature, that may appear or disappear at any given moment depending on the angle of one’s approach.

Given which, it would appear at best foolish, and at worst dishonest, to take an ethical position on autobiography as such. To claim, for example, that the autobiographical impulse of a given strand of critical writing closes itself off from public engagement by locating its field of evidence solely within the critic’s sensorium, would be no more than to enclose one’s own solipsism with an isomorphic, but merely different, truism. What we are really talking about is power. Or more specifically, about brand. Everyone knows which critics have brands, and that it isn’t just those whose work avows the quantum autobiography. It would be interesting, though perhaps a little unkind, to name a couple of blue-chip scholarly brands and unfurl a theory of marketing; we could argue, along the lines Sharon Marcus recently laid out, that the celebrity scholar’s brand results from more or less conscious labor, albeit labor exchanged for only a fraction of its value under exploitative conditions.[8] (Although, is a brand also a form of capital? Value compounded from the value earned on unearned value…) There may be, indeed there self-evidently are, academic brands whose character derives from an apparent negation of branding. Consider the following image:

Easy enough, of course, to notice the neatly self-annihilating visual logic of the page: the brand derives not so much from the logo-that-is-no-logo, but from the pleasing self-distancing effect that the cover enables, flattering the viewer into the position of the one who can see both a logo and no logo, and move between the two positions at will.[9] Yet the stranger part is the incursion of negation into the author’s own signature: the red NO that becomes N[a]O[mi]. We can read that migration as a diminishment (it gets smaller); as a viral contamination; as a descent down the page; perhaps as a mutation, of quantum logo (or logos) into quantum author-function. We clearly cannot read it as merely the absence of a logo!

In the vocabulary of the moment, brand implies hustle, just as in another register “autobiography” implies “fabrication.” If brand is the ethically dubious sign of labor, then hustle is its nobler complement: indiscriminately sexualized, racialized, and retro, the hustle can be done (“do the hustle!”); can be American; can take place at midnight; can be kung-fu; can be, in some way, the social strategy of queens, divas, sex workers, and all those who can “use their sexuality,” as the phrase goes.[10] The hustle, like the grift (with which it is, in any case, intimately connected in online patter), may entail its own quantum autobiography: it may involve telling a story about oneself, creating and maintaining a persona with the right mixture of thrilling indomitability and seductive vulnerability. Such seduction, it hardly bears saying, depends upon an audience’s capacity to understand that the vulnerability is bogus, and that the stooge tripping over his dick for it is doing the opposite of “using his sexuality.”

The true hustler is the one whose physical endowments should exclude her from the heterosexualizing markets to which she petitions for access: Anne Hathaway stands behind Rebel Wilson.[11] To the true hustler, pretty privilege is cheating: she presents also as trade, also as trap, as both hook and hooker.[12] The displacement of the entity called “the economy” into the sector called “service” culminates with the ontologization of the hustle as the organizing condition of embodied labor. The erotic contours of such service, its rules and entitlements, remain a matter of profound uncertainty. Indeed, it isn’t always clear who is servicing whom.
 

“Look, there’s nothing I can really say to make sense of what went down. But everybody’s hustling. Fuck, this whole country is a strip club.”
—Ramona Vega, Hustlers

 

The transformation of the university into a consumer experience serves neoliberal capital in two ways. First, it introduces commercial incentives into all aspects of university life and thus monetizes sectors hitherto relatively sheltered from exploitation; second, it obscures (as is consumerism’s primary goal) the productive labor of workers—primarily, of course, that of immiserated service workers whose bodies are displayed as signs of diversity while their labor is criminally undercompensated, working conditions rendered ever more dangerous (especially in the present era of accelerationist biopolitics), and job security gutted. But instructional labor too: as commercial service, teaching can be severed from research support—additionally, and not incidentally, depriving the public university of its sole remaining raison d’être, the quaint notion that students might deserve to be educated by scholars receiving meaningful research support. Scholarship, as a productive force, must be obscured and transformed into mere commercial service, lest capital incur avoidable (albeit minimal) costs associated with reproduction—which in this context might resemble, for example, tolerable research support for all instructors. Meanwhile, doing the hustle entails the transformation of productive labor into style—into “making it look good.” None of which is to deny that the productive forces of the university are not themselves extracted from workers under oppressive conditions, nor that (obviously) such workers would ever be entitled to more than the fractional value of those forces in the form of a wage. But one strategy of neoliberalism is to cause the worker to disappear entirely from the scene of her own labor.

To which end, the phenomenal subject of the humanities poses a problem. It is not difficult to see how the charismatic critic might become, himself, a motive force in the transformation of the discipline into an experience; Franco Moretti, rather unfairly, might serve as an example of both.[13] The captivating scholar becomes a mind-blowing teacher; the mind, once blown, disgorges itself first and most joyfully onto RateMyProfessors and, later, in a more ambivalent key, against a #metoo hashtag on Twitter. “Queer,” if it designates anything in such a setting, would only mean those bodies and teachers scapegoated for the effects of transforming education into entertainment. I write a couple of days after a syllabus of my own, which includes W. H. Auden’s erotic gay poem “The Platonic Blow,” was described by the cloud of unknowing anti-trans agitators who follow me around as “rapey,” “predatory,” “traumatizing,” and “disgusting.”[14] The Avital Ronell case is an interesting outlier, in fact, because the predator’s many defenders labeled her “queer” on the grounds that she was being scapegoated in such a way, despite the demonstrable fact that she was receiving no more criticism than, for example, Moretti or Jay Fliegelman.[15]

But there was a similarity, too: Ronell, Moretti, Fliegelman—these were scholars whose thought pushed hard against the tendency de Man might have called “autobiographical.” These were expert metadiscoursers, and in Ronell’s case especially, power exerted itself not primarily in the mode of present embodiment (although clearly it did that too), but in the fantasy of bodily withdrawal. Ronell falsely claimed to Nimrod Reitman that, on the basis of her academic brand, she could get him a job with a phone call. That abusive fantasy of disembodied omnipotence—a fantasy that might have appealed to the author of The Telephone Book, even—was then, startlingly, affirmed even by those who believed themselves to be criticizing Ronell.[16] The notion that Avital Ronell was merely a worker, deserving equitable treatment by Title IX as such, seemed unthinkable on all sides. “Autobiography,” then: not so much the name of charismatic self-presencing as that which is suppressed or displaced in order that such presencing might be possible.

If, as I’ve been suggesting, “autobiography” is a way of understanding the narrator of criticism, rather than a genre of criticism itself, that split would engender an “allobiography” by which the critic points at a “not me,” and thus paradoxically expands the limits of her remit. Allo and auto are merely the consequences of a psychic splitting engendered by the necessarily catastrophic act of self-narration Freud calls the “reality principle.” So I’m more self-conscious than usual about introducing such a point of distinction in this essay, especially since, conspicuously, there is nothing in this not-me that is not also-me.

But at the risk of allobiographizing the antinomy of such effacement, one might take a moment to observe the trails of disclosure and effacement in a popular recent denunciation of the “subjective” school of literary criticism.[17] Many of Anna Kornbluh’s recent essays have diagnosed our present scene as plagued by a memoiristic tendency, a “methodological subjectivism”—whose practitioners are rarely named but metonymically associated with certain social media platforms, especially Instagram, and perhaps with “Instant Messages,” which phrase is curiously capitalized.[18] Ranged against the dominance of “the sympathy industrial complex,” Kornbluh suggests, is the promise of an “objective” criticism, where the word is taken to mean “a capacity for conceptuality, a faculty for synthesis, which runs perpendicular to, but also parallels, the quantitative or the empirical, the phenomenal and the embodied.”[19] The object-world, then, consists of “capacity” and “faculty,” while the subject-world comprises “elaborations of the author’s intent, of the specific refraction of specific social context, of the unparaphrasable, of the singularity of the literary event, of the resistance to theory, of the right to represent, of negligible sample size,” but also, “reader response, affect theory, the right to recognition, MRIs, the passion of the critic,” and plenty of other forces.[20] The lists seem to produce a parallelism along the following lines:

 

Could we admit that, seeing these lists arranged so, it is difficult to be sure of the exact nature of the structural distinction being asserted? Take, for example, the fate of “singularity.” Leaving aside the thorny question of whether, as Kornbluh appears to wish, “singularity” might be completely innocent of quantification, it seems fairly clear that “methodological subjectivism” romances the literary absolute, or at least “the singularity of the literary event.” But in the very next paragraph, we learn that methodological subjectivism denies not merely the singularity of literature, but its existence entire: “methodological subjectivism entails of course the frequent thesis that literature itself does not exist.”[21]

Is this the harmonization of Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Foucault?[22] Perhaps not, because as the premises of methodological subjectivism stack up, the ironic position of the critic becomes increasingly difficult to locate. Since the question at stake is whether criticism conceals or exposes the subject who writes, thinks, reads, or conceptualizes, let us try to locate such a subject in the following paragraph:

Often literary critics connect this emphatic sense of the subjective and the singular to ethical and political positions. Following the lead of our objects, we understand our own knowledge as situated, constructed, and ephemeral. We understand the force of our cumulative knowledge as nuancing, qualifying, hybridizing, and de-reifying, moving against broader socioeconomic forces of abstraction and reification and broader epistemic tendencies of generalization and quantification. The task of the critic, we so frequently argue, is to linger with the fleeting, to cow before the sublime, to host an encounter, to resound imitations. Aesthetic judgment has long ago been forsworn as elitist, so our expertise should not culminate in it. We even undermine the hard-won authority of our own interpretations with constant declarations that literature is inexhaustible and will always court new alternative elaborations.[23]

Let me—subject that I am—acknowledge, then, that I agree with much of this diagnosis; that I have heard some of these words leaving my mouth; that I have heard colleagues I generally like (or at least want to appease) saying these things, and acquiesced to them in passing. I suspect that you—subject that you are—may accept this diagnosis too. The question is how to position the “we” that speaks. It is a curious and lovable pronoun, the “we,” since it indicates the speaker and others but technically leaves open the question of whether the addressee is included.

The subject of “we” is in that sense itself a quantum allobiography. Here, the we substitutes, fittingly enough, for an objective designation—“literary critics”—whose displacement by the pronoun “our” in the following sentence feels, perhaps, a touch unorthodox but hardly outrageous: “We understand the force of our cumulative knowledge as nuancing, etc..” Whereas hitherto the reader has encountered literary critics merely in the course of their daily rounds, following their objects, now, a hortative tone begins to predominate, almost like a celebrant articulating a collective grief or grievance. The we gains an ethical character by association, like that of “we’re here, we’re queer,” or “yes we can.” By the time the sentence has finished, however, that we has become purely ironic: the phrase “we so frequently argue” cannot, of course, refer to us, readers, and presumably does not refer to the author either, since the purpose of this essay was to try to cajole us out of this position into which we have somnambulated. So who exactly “so frequently” argues that the point of criticism is “to cow before the sublime,” who exactly has “forsworn” judgment? Only the hustler that is not one.

My point, of course, is not that there are not good reasons to prefer descriptions of objects to disclosures of subjects. And indeed one might understandably feel ticked off with Instagram, or with noodle-minded rhapsodies in Marxism, or whatever happens to be the nearest available scapegoat for “methodological subjectivism.” My point is simply that these kinds of conversations are unphilosophical and depoliticizing. Unphilosophical, because the categories at issue simply are not rigorously separable. At the risk of throwing down a gauntlet too rashly, it would be impossible to describe a criticism that was not both subjectivist and objectivist—the former because the cognitive apparatus of the critic is nothing more than what philosophers since Kant have tended to mean by “subject,” and the latter because to designate an act of writing as criticism is to claim that it refers to some object in the world. To force some choice between the subjective and the objective, or the autobiographical and the alienated, is like inviting scholars to choose between the letters a and i. But more importantly, by disguising clout as productivity, and thereby offloading onto the embodied other the character of the hustler, the gesture depoliticizes the hustle by scapegoating the other as the (only) hustler. The very same could be said in the other direction: that the consummate stylist, the conspicuous memoirist-critic—oh let’s just say D. A. Miller—is effacing the signs of embodied labor, relinquishing productive force as though merely giving up the spirit. But then there is the dance itself: evanescent, perhaps, but no less real for that.
 
 
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Notes:

[1] James Sturcke, “How the West Wing helped outsmart Labour whips,” The Guardian, February 2, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/feb/02/wrap.jamessturcke.

[2] John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 236

[3] See David Kurnick on “calling bullshit” in “A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas,” ELH 87, no. 2 (2020): 349–374.

[4] James Atlas, “The Case of Paul De Man,” New York Times, August 28, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/28/magazine/the-case-of-paul-de-man.html.

[5] Paul De Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69.

[6] Gérard Genette, Figures: Essais, V. 1-3: Collection Tel Quel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 50.

[7] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 11.

[8] Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

[9] Naomi Klein, No Logo : Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000).

[10] See, for example, American Hustle, directed by David O. Russell (2013; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures); Kung Fu Hustle, directed by Stephen Chow (2004; Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia/ Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International).

[11] The Hustle, directed by Chris Addison (2019; Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Universal Pictures Home Entertainment), DVD.

[12] “Trap” both as transsexual and as sex worker: see Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017). See also “trap” in the film Zola, e.g.—but the “trap” is the same whether or not the woman in question is transsexual. Zola, directed by Janicza Bravo (2020; New York City, NY: Killer Films/ A24).

[13] Fangzhou Liu and Hannah Knowles, “Harassment, Assault Allegations against Moretti Span Three Campuses,” The Stanford Daily, November 16, 2017, https://www.stanforddaily.com/2017/11/16/harassment-assault-allegations-against-moretti-span-three-campuses/. Franco Moretti pioneered a depersonalized empirical mode of literary criticism adapted from corpus linguistics that he calls “distant reading.” Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013).

[14] W. H. Auden, “The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral,” Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 5, no. 8 (March 1965): n.p.; “Grace Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery (Joseph Lavery & Mallory Ortberg)—‘Straight with extra steps’ couple trooning out to avoid ‘dwindling into mere heterosexuality,’” Kiwi Farms, October 6, 2020, accessed September 5, 2021, https://kiwifarms.net/threads/grace-lavery-daniel-m-lavery-joseph-lavery-mallory-ortberg.77242/page-95.

[15] Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?,” New York Times, August 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment-nyu-female-professor.html; Colleen Flaherty “Harassment and Power” Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2018, accessed September 5, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/20/some-say-particulars-ronell-harassment-case-are-moot-it-all-comes-down-power; Seo-Young Chu, “WOVEN: A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” November 3, 2017, accessed September 5, 2021, https://entropymag.org/a-refuge-for-jae-in-doe-fugues-in-the-key-of-english-major/.

[16] Avital Ronell, Michael Jensen and Richard Eckersley, The Telephone Book: Technology–Schizophrenia–Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

[17] See Melanie Klein on splitting and D. W. Winnicott on the reality principle.

[18] Anna Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity: Literary Thinking in How the Dead Dream,” in Anirudh Sridhar, Mir Ali Hosseini, and Derek Attridge, eds., The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9: 261-276.

[19] Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity,” 266, 263.

[20] Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity,” 266.

[21] Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity,” 266.

[22] Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

[23] Kornbluh, “Ecocide and Objectivity,” 267.