Partisanship and Little Magazines

A conversation about the history and trajectory of The Point

About a month ago I spoke with

Daniel Oppenheimer

for his podcast

Eminent Americans

, and that conversation is now available here, with Daniel’s introduction. We talked about the origins of The Point, how the magazine navigated the complicated political crosscurrents of the late 2010s, and the way our editors are thinking now about our place in relation to the emergence of Substack and other “anti-institutional” publishing platforms.

As usual when I’m asked to talk about the history of the magazine, I found that I learned some new things myself. One of the most interesting parts of this conversation for me was about The Point’s intellectual inspirations. Quite reasonably, Daniel assumed that the midcentury New York mags, like Partisan Review and Commentary, had been a big part in our genealogy, and it was only during this conversation that I really started thinking about how the fact that the three of us who started the magazine actually knew almost nothing about Partisan Review—or the history of little magazines more generally—was related to some of the notable differences that would emerge between us and the other little magazines in the 2010s.

That’s a slight oversimplification. As I say in the interview, as a young person I was personally influenced by n+1—i.e. the New York intellectuals of my own generation—and their founders were certainly influenced by the legacy of Partisan Review. And writers like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and Susan Sontag, all prominent midcentury New York intellectuals, were among the models we looked to as we thought about how to revive the “philosophical essay” in our time. Still, our ignorance about the history and conventional function of little magazines in America—namely their role as “partisans” endeavoring to articulate and then to popularize a set of political ideals and/or positions—now seems related to me to the confusion we sometimes engendered over the years among those who, knowing that history much better than we did, assumed that any intellectual small magazine would be first and foremost organized around a political project. That we claimed not to be was, for some of those people, quite suspicious; perhaps it even suggested that we were hiding some pernicious underlying agenda. I remember being asked what “our politics” were pointedly several times during our first New York release party, which was for issue 3—an issue that included, ominously for some, a symposium on conservatism.

Claiming not to be partisans for a political agenda, it’s important to note, is not the same as claiming to be nonpartisan in every sense. Although these are not assumptions Daniel makes, it is sometimes alleged that the alternative to having a political project as an intellectual magazine is to have no project at all. (Or, worse, to simply be an avatar of status quo centrism.) But we did and do see ourselves as partisans. We’ve always been partisans for a set of intellectual or philosophical values, many of which we saw convincingly modeled at The Committee on Social Thought, the academic program that the three founders were all part of when we started the magazine in 2009 (and that Daniel and I discuss in the interview). We considered ourselves partisans of these values in the sense that we believed they should occupy a much more prominent place in our cultural and intellectual conversation—including, and perhaps especially, the political aspects of that conversation—than they did, and that the magazine could do something to advance that goal. So for the editors of the magazine, the reason to be wary of answering questions about “our politics” with an affirmative range of positions or ideological touchstones was not that we were uninterested in political questions but that, by doing so, we risked undermining what we took to be the magazine’s primary commitment to a certain orientation toward, and method of engaging in, public thought. We wanted the magazine to host a dialogue about the things that mattered most to us, and it went more or less without saying for us—which probably contributed to the confusion of some readers—that if we announced where the magazine “stood” on such things, it would compromise both the range and the quality of that dialogue.

Anyway, this is all just to say that it’s taken me a long time to fully appreciate where some of the early suspicions we encountered of the magazine’s project—long prior even to the hyperpolitical Trump years—were coming from. And this distinction with regard to Partisan Review, whose legacy played such a central role for so many of the milennial little magazines that we shared writers and event spaces with, and which we resembled in some ways, seems like an important part of it. It also helps explain something that became a sticking point for us in the late 2010s, which was our sense that the intellectuals and writers in our cultural world seemed increasingly unable or unwilling to credit any form of partisanship that was not primarily political.

I hope you enjoy the interview, and thanks to Daniel for having me on. Although it didn’t come up in our discussion, I also encourage you to read Daniel’s great essay for issue 21 about Dave Hickey, entitled “Simple Hearts.” Embarrassingly, it was not until working with Daniel on this piece that I really started to read Hickey—now someone who is in my personal pantheon of 20th century critics.