Excellent article. Thank you. I am interested in many topics here but I think that DFW’s participation in postmodernism writ large is a much bigger factor in his struggle to participate in the sincerity movement. The personal struggle would be true of anyone. Risk is constitutive of being vulnerable. I think his early postmodernist struggle with language, that we can say anything at all, underlies his remaining skepticism about sincerity. His philosophical position was that irony has no logical advantage over sincerity. Thus, sincerity is every bit as valid as irony. Nonetheless, all of language is beset with a lack of certainty.
If you’re interested, I published an essay, “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle With Solipsism,” on this topic in a collection, titled, GESTURING TOWARDS REALITY: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AND PHILOSOPHY. The personal issue of sincerity is addressed in that same collection in an essay by Robert Bolger, titled, “A Less “Bullshitty” Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace.”
Thanks Patrick, I have that book and have some memory of reading your essay, but I will come back to it. I agree that Wallace's engagement with postmodernism played a part in how hard it was for him to fully inhabit sincerity as a writer. But I think for him the personal risk also went beyond the risk of being vulnerable. I'm speculating to some extent, but I think he recognized in himself an extremely moralistic tendency that he was, to some extent justifiably, suspicious of. And he worried about what would happen if this part of himself was given free reign, i.e. liberated from any undercutting irony or self-reflexivity.
Thank you, Jon. Personal risk is a hard thing to get at when it is someone else’s and that person is no longer around to talk with about. I find it just as plausible that Wallace would think that inhabiting sincerity includes a strong dose of humility about one’s own moral positions. Thus he may have been more thoroughly inhabiting sincerity through self censorship, which of course, is a paradoxical position to stake, though no less feasible to live.
As I claim in the article I referenced, Wallace’s hesitations about taking strong moral positions seem directly linked to the observations that many postmodernists make about the metaphysical state of language. Namely, language doesn’t have the metaphysical backing that many philosophers have assumed and have argued that it does have. The irony is that after deconstructing these assumptions, revealing their emptiness, postmodernists, including Wallace, now treated them as something we do need in order to make strong moral claims, including the moral claim that someone is being a moralist. All claims are now subject to skepticism, which obviously makes a mess of our morality. The sincerity movement seems to me an attempt, in part, to recover from this mess, to be able to claim with certainty that causing the innocent to suffer is immoral or to claim with certainty that moralism is immoral. I think we can and do make these strong claims by virtue of the life and language we share. In that case, morality has never needed metaphysics for its certainty.
Thank you, again, for your article and your response. I look forward to reading the series.
Obviously you're talking about a much larger story, but I think some of this is directly related to platforms and social media. In the past 10 years, writing has become another form of "content" that people consume primarily through social media platforms, where it competes with other content that is more visual and almost all highly personalized. Writers are trying to reach readers directly, not going through mediums with established audiences.
Personalization is perhaps the best way to break through the noise, which I think you see both in the rise of the personal essay in the 2010s and the shift of even legacy media (I'm thinking of the NYT op-ed page) to headlines like: "I'm an X. Here's Why I Think Y." It's easier for a drive-by reader to connect quickly with a person or personality than to figure out a less-personal frame (where is this coming from, what is its perspective, etc.) The war for attention also contributes to a simplicity and directness of style, i.e. what is easiest to read and least like to lose people.
I don't know how much that explains, but I think it certainly explains a lot of what is on Substack.
That makes sense, social media platforms are definitely a big part of this story, although it's interesting to me that they don't all privilege or reward exactly the same rhetorical moves. There is certainly some sincerity on Twitter (there is everything on Twitter), and maybe in the pre-Trump years there was more of it, but if I had to say what the dominant style of the medium was, especially in intellectual and artistic circles, I'm not sure I would say it was ever sincerity. Irony, sarcasm, and cynicism always played very well on that medium in a way that I don't think they play well on Substack, at least based on my relatively brief time here. And then there's also the fact that, I think, the "I'm an X, here's why I think Y" move got so overplayed that it started to strike people as deeply insincere, at some point. One thing I hope to track is how what *counts* as being sincere changes over time, because it has to. Whatever really resonates at a particular time ends up getting commodified and then becomes a cliche... as happened with the Eggers / McSweeneys stuff in the 90s, and arguably is part of the story with autofiction, too.
Very much looking forward to this series. In a happy coincidence I picked up Felski's "The Limits of Critique" from the library just a few hours before reading this post, and I'm going to be reading it in a book club of two with my dad - how's that for sincerity?
One thing you mention that I'm particularly interested in is the connection between sincerity and autofiction. I've always felt autofiction, and in particular Knausgaard, uses the appearance of sincerity to deceive readers; for example, readers who would conflate Knausgaard the author with Karl Ove the character. As you point out there's a dialectical relationship with sincerity and irony, something I think Knausgaard exploits as he becomes a sort of unreliable narrator.
But are Knausgaard's readers really "deceived" or does he manage to convey sincerity in a convincing way? One of Wallace's big questions was how a writer could achieve "true sincerity" in an intellectual culture that's learned to be so suspicious / skeptical of all forms of artifice. I will definitely talk about Knausgaard in this series though I suspect I may have a more positive view of his project that you do!
Oh, I have a very positive view of Knausgaard's project! I guess I would need to expand beyond a comment to clarify my meaning, but my point is really about critics of autofiction who, in my opinion, misinterpret it as a thinly veiled diary or autobiography, whereas in my view it's a way for the author to play with the reader's expectations that what they're reading is "true." Perhaps this is a sort of "true sincerity" as a synthesis of sincerity and irony, because ultimately I think Knausgaard's goal is to get at a deeper truth that transcends the fictions inherent in narrativizing experience. I haven't completely thought this through, part of why I'm looking forward to what you have to say about Knausgaard.
Thanks for this, Jon, and excited for the series. I also really appreciated the analysis of young men at the end. As a gay guy privy to countless (and often rightful) complaints about straight men, I sometimes get a sense that we’ve actually grown uncomfortable letting men be anything other than exactly what we expect of them. I think this relates to the gravitation toward Peterson, etc. Anyway, excited to read more.
Jon, I don't know you personally, but I am a longtime subscriber of The Point and it appears we have a mutual friend in David Sessions (we used to edit an online mag together). I love that you're launching this project and I'll be following closely.
I'm with you in the sense that this (new, new?) sincerity is related to but different from what was happening back then and even earlier (I was a teen in the 90s too!). It has to be, given incredible changes in media and culture over the past decade. I often joke with my students that generations have collapsed -- they used to be 25 years, but given how fast things are going, they're now more like 5.
Anyway, all this to say, I'll be following along with special attention to how how Moi (I'm thinking/writing about OLP a lot these days) and Felski meet the moment.
Really glad you're doing this, Jon! One thing that comes to mind, especially when thinking about devotees of Peterson, is the idea of shame and the question of where a morally expedient, ethical masculinity is to be found outside the clichéd trappings of old-school manhood. It has become a well-intended liberal piety for men to acknowledge how merited categorical criticisms of men are, but an apology is no substitute for an ethos. From what I've observed, many men still seem to be casting around for a path out of the dichotomy between the now-overused label "toxic masculinity" and self-reflexive misandry: Is it attending a Peterson sermon? Drinking Joe Rogan's nootropic CBD smoothie? Though I've definitely rolled my eyes at instances of chauvinism from both Bernie and Wallace bros (it didn't help that I was usually the only female Wallace superfan in the room, irritating the boys by getting all Talmudic about certain sections of IJ), I think your points about an attraction to sincerity as a way of searching for something to believe in and not shaming anyone -- including men -- for what they like are really crucial ones. Just as we ought to not shame young women for seeing their experiences reflected in Taylor Swift's lyrics, we ought to not shame young men for having the same reaction to art and ideas. Perhaps some of the sifting to be done here is through what counts as art and expansion versus manipulation and ideological indoctrination?
In that DFW essay where he sketches out a bit of what a new literary 'rebellion' would look like, earnest despite how easy the critiques would be from a cooler, ironic set, it's interesting thinking about the current analogs to the fiction of Mark Leyner, which DFW had identified back then in contradiction to this new type of sincerity.
If I remember it Leyner's fiction was summarized to embody this kind of television-adjacent, everyone in on the joke project, where all types of high/low cultural products were folded into the very pleasurable and very entertaining books that, ultimately, were just extensions of the high-fructose entertainment they critiqued. I'm not sure this would be as applicable to the fiction of today as it would be a lot of the other media (podcasts, particularly video pods, and social platforms, where hosts or avatars w/ para-social relationships to the audience create narratives that never end by folding in all of the news and internet clips of the day), and which resemble some of the mechanics and effects on end users that DFW identified in Leyner-type fiction.
I definitely plan to pursue this question, and it's also something that Sam Kriss touches on in an essay about "alt-lit" (though not with reference to Wallace) in the next issue of The Point. Re-reading the television essay recently, it was interesting to think about how much of it would apply to our digital present. But I think that move he makes in the essay that you are alluding to, asking how the supposedly avant-garde fiction of the moment relates to its dominant form of entertainment (although that doesn't even feel like the right word anymore), and whether it doesn't actually just reproduce some of its most pervasive features, remains a really fruitful way of approaching the topic today.
Some independent online platforms and productions are extremely sincere, to their credit, and they play out like kinds of endless novels, minus some classic types of structures and various fictive elements. More basically they are personalized contemporary chronicles.
It may be possible to serialize a type of endless novel - as I'm doing, of a sort, with "Most Revolutionary" on Substack. It's topical to the minute but far more novel than chronicle. It's divided into books, with Book One slated to wrap up in the next few months or so at about 250,000 words: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/most-revolutionary-chapter-one
The next book "Ultra Revolutionary" could be viewed as the sequel to "Most Revolutionary" or as its continuation - with continuation being far more accurate, as with the several books that make up the novel Les Miserables. MR is similar to the personalized contemporary chronicle shows and platforms in that I can't see any reason to necessarily end the novel. I might, I might not, but right now I view MR as an endless novel. Is this a new feature of culture? I haven't looked into it enough to say. I'm not aware that it has been done before, but maybe it has.
Sincerity, variously defined, is not the only attitude or philosophy of "Most Revolutionary." Why should it be? since many works transcend basic classifications. Sincerity is far from its only aesthetic, far from its only norm. But it is one of a number of dominant features in an epic that is meant to be revolutionary and anti-empire, liberatory and thoroughly novelistic, both of its time and timeless. And like many novels it at times transcends the novelistic, again, per Les Miserables, not least - one of the pre-eminent crime novels, political and intellectual novels, cultural and romantic, realistic and literary novels - transcending genres.
MR is part of my own "literary rebellion," so to speak, in some ways similar to what DFW meant, and in more ways entirely different, which I've written about at length in "Fiction Gutted."
David Sessions, per his comment above, accurately notes that "personalization" of "content" helps "break through the noise" creating more intimate and more diverse human appeal between writers and readers. Note this is what legacy media has largely attempted to edit, filter, and ideologically banish from its traditional productions - largely for reasons of ideology and control (not infrequently fraudulent) though claimed to be for reasons of objectivity and clarity.
The best of social media and more-or-less independent media - the people's media - as can be found on some of Substack and many other places online, helps writers and readers get away from much of the heavy hand of the establishment.
Are the results more-or-less "sincere"? Maybe. I prefer to consider whether or not the writing is more or less liberatory, anti-Empire, and revolutionary, among other vital norms.
The "Bernie Bro" smear was an identity politics smear by the Clinton campaign designed to undercut the Bernie campaign and its popular emphasis on class politics. As a consequence, this Clintonite smear campaign helped drive many low income and class conscious voters away - then and for years to come - into the arms of Trump with his pseudo populism, away from Bernie and the Squad's progressive populism, and away from establishment Democrats' embrace of the status quo, of the corporate-state and rich donors.
This top-down defeat of progressive populism in the Democratic primaries also helped drive Joe Rogan away from Bernie's progressive populism to Trump's pseudo populism, and more likely than not helps fuel chaotic populists like Luigi Mangione.
Are David Foster Wallace's writings considered to be populist and liberatory - in a multicultural world that suffers from extreme state violence and top-down class warfare? If not, any "ambitious" writing with a claim to cultural saliency makes for a ripe target in a deeply angry and populist culture going back, not only decades but throughout the entirety of American and in fact continental history, including back to the earliest colonial conquests.
Whether one chooses to be "sincere" or "ironic" (mutually exclusive?) about the consequent human condition seems a matter of personal choice, doesn't it? An attitude, a philosophy, an approach, an aesthetic. Variously viable understandings of all that we experience, live, and know.
Excellent article. Thank you. I am interested in many topics here but I think that DFW’s participation in postmodernism writ large is a much bigger factor in his struggle to participate in the sincerity movement. The personal struggle would be true of anyone. Risk is constitutive of being vulnerable. I think his early postmodernist struggle with language, that we can say anything at all, underlies his remaining skepticism about sincerity. His philosophical position was that irony has no logical advantage over sincerity. Thus, sincerity is every bit as valid as irony. Nonetheless, all of language is beset with a lack of certainty.
If you’re interested, I published an essay, “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle With Solipsism,” on this topic in a collection, titled, GESTURING TOWARDS REALITY: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AND PHILOSOPHY. The personal issue of sincerity is addressed in that same collection in an essay by Robert Bolger, titled, “A Less “Bullshitty” Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace.”
Thanks Patrick, I have that book and have some memory of reading your essay, but I will come back to it. I agree that Wallace's engagement with postmodernism played a part in how hard it was for him to fully inhabit sincerity as a writer. But I think for him the personal risk also went beyond the risk of being vulnerable. I'm speculating to some extent, but I think he recognized in himself an extremely moralistic tendency that he was, to some extent justifiably, suspicious of. And he worried about what would happen if this part of himself was given free reign, i.e. liberated from any undercutting irony or self-reflexivity.
Thank you, Jon. Personal risk is a hard thing to get at when it is someone else’s and that person is no longer around to talk with about. I find it just as plausible that Wallace would think that inhabiting sincerity includes a strong dose of humility about one’s own moral positions. Thus he may have been more thoroughly inhabiting sincerity through self censorship, which of course, is a paradoxical position to stake, though no less feasible to live.
As I claim in the article I referenced, Wallace’s hesitations about taking strong moral positions seem directly linked to the observations that many postmodernists make about the metaphysical state of language. Namely, language doesn’t have the metaphysical backing that many philosophers have assumed and have argued that it does have. The irony is that after deconstructing these assumptions, revealing their emptiness, postmodernists, including Wallace, now treated them as something we do need in order to make strong moral claims, including the moral claim that someone is being a moralist. All claims are now subject to skepticism, which obviously makes a mess of our morality. The sincerity movement seems to me an attempt, in part, to recover from this mess, to be able to claim with certainty that causing the innocent to suffer is immoral or to claim with certainty that moralism is immoral. I think we can and do make these strong claims by virtue of the life and language we share. In that case, morality has never needed metaphysics for its certainty.
Thank you, again, for your article and your response. I look forward to reading the series.
Obviously you're talking about a much larger story, but I think some of this is directly related to platforms and social media. In the past 10 years, writing has become another form of "content" that people consume primarily through social media platforms, where it competes with other content that is more visual and almost all highly personalized. Writers are trying to reach readers directly, not going through mediums with established audiences.
Personalization is perhaps the best way to break through the noise, which I think you see both in the rise of the personal essay in the 2010s and the shift of even legacy media (I'm thinking of the NYT op-ed page) to headlines like: "I'm an X. Here's Why I Think Y." It's easier for a drive-by reader to connect quickly with a person or personality than to figure out a less-personal frame (where is this coming from, what is its perspective, etc.) The war for attention also contributes to a simplicity and directness of style, i.e. what is easiest to read and least like to lose people.
I don't know how much that explains, but I think it certainly explains a lot of what is on Substack.
That makes sense, social media platforms are definitely a big part of this story, although it's interesting to me that they don't all privilege or reward exactly the same rhetorical moves. There is certainly some sincerity on Twitter (there is everything on Twitter), and maybe in the pre-Trump years there was more of it, but if I had to say what the dominant style of the medium was, especially in intellectual and artistic circles, I'm not sure I would say it was ever sincerity. Irony, sarcasm, and cynicism always played very well on that medium in a way that I don't think they play well on Substack, at least based on my relatively brief time here. And then there's also the fact that, I think, the "I'm an X, here's why I think Y" move got so overplayed that it started to strike people as deeply insincere, at some point. One thing I hope to track is how what *counts* as being sincere changes over time, because it has to. Whatever really resonates at a particular time ends up getting commodified and then becomes a cliche... as happened with the Eggers / McSweeneys stuff in the 90s, and arguably is part of the story with autofiction, too.
Very much looking forward to this series. In a happy coincidence I picked up Felski's "The Limits of Critique" from the library just a few hours before reading this post, and I'm going to be reading it in a book club of two with my dad - how's that for sincerity?
One thing you mention that I'm particularly interested in is the connection between sincerity and autofiction. I've always felt autofiction, and in particular Knausgaard, uses the appearance of sincerity to deceive readers; for example, readers who would conflate Knausgaard the author with Karl Ove the character. As you point out there's a dialectical relationship with sincerity and irony, something I think Knausgaard exploits as he becomes a sort of unreliable narrator.
But are Knausgaard's readers really "deceived" or does he manage to convey sincerity in a convincing way? One of Wallace's big questions was how a writer could achieve "true sincerity" in an intellectual culture that's learned to be so suspicious / skeptical of all forms of artifice. I will definitely talk about Knausgaard in this series though I suspect I may have a more positive view of his project that you do!
Oh, I have a very positive view of Knausgaard's project! I guess I would need to expand beyond a comment to clarify my meaning, but my point is really about critics of autofiction who, in my opinion, misinterpret it as a thinly veiled diary or autobiography, whereas in my view it's a way for the author to play with the reader's expectations that what they're reading is "true." Perhaps this is a sort of "true sincerity" as a synthesis of sincerity and irony, because ultimately I think Knausgaard's goal is to get at a deeper truth that transcends the fictions inherent in narrativizing experience. I haven't completely thought this through, part of why I'm looking forward to what you have to say about Knausgaard.
Yes, this issue is right in the sweet spot for this series! There will be a lot to say about Knausgaard / Heti.
Thanks for this, Jon, and excited for the series. I also really appreciated the analysis of young men at the end. As a gay guy privy to countless (and often rightful) complaints about straight men, I sometimes get a sense that we’ve actually grown uncomfortable letting men be anything other than exactly what we expect of them. I think this relates to the gravitation toward Peterson, etc. Anyway, excited to read more.
Jon, I don't know you personally, but I am a longtime subscriber of The Point and it appears we have a mutual friend in David Sessions (we used to edit an online mag together). I love that you're launching this project and I'll be following closely.
In the late aughts, early 2010s, I did quite a bit of thinking and writing about The New Sincerity, including in an article in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/sincerity-not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/) and in my first book "Not Your Mother's Morals," which ended up being something between a long essay and a short book (https://jonathandfitzgerald.com/how-the-news-feels/).
I'm with you in the sense that this (new, new?) sincerity is related to but different from what was happening back then and even earlier (I was a teen in the 90s too!). It has to be, given incredible changes in media and culture over the past decade. I often joke with my students that generations have collapsed -- they used to be 25 years, but given how fast things are going, they're now more like 5.
Anyway, all this to say, I'll be following along with special attention to how how Moi (I'm thinking/writing about OLP a lot these days) and Felski meet the moment.
This is very good! A lot to chew over.
Really glad you're doing this, Jon! One thing that comes to mind, especially when thinking about devotees of Peterson, is the idea of shame and the question of where a morally expedient, ethical masculinity is to be found outside the clichéd trappings of old-school manhood. It has become a well-intended liberal piety for men to acknowledge how merited categorical criticisms of men are, but an apology is no substitute for an ethos. From what I've observed, many men still seem to be casting around for a path out of the dichotomy between the now-overused label "toxic masculinity" and self-reflexive misandry: Is it attending a Peterson sermon? Drinking Joe Rogan's nootropic CBD smoothie? Though I've definitely rolled my eyes at instances of chauvinism from both Bernie and Wallace bros (it didn't help that I was usually the only female Wallace superfan in the room, irritating the boys by getting all Talmudic about certain sections of IJ), I think your points about an attraction to sincerity as a way of searching for something to believe in and not shaming anyone -- including men -- for what they like are really crucial ones. Just as we ought to not shame young women for seeing their experiences reflected in Taylor Swift's lyrics, we ought to not shame young men for having the same reaction to art and ideas. Perhaps some of the sifting to be done here is through what counts as art and expansion versus manipulation and ideological indoctrination?
In that DFW essay where he sketches out a bit of what a new literary 'rebellion' would look like, earnest despite how easy the critiques would be from a cooler, ironic set, it's interesting thinking about the current analogs to the fiction of Mark Leyner, which DFW had identified back then in contradiction to this new type of sincerity.
If I remember it Leyner's fiction was summarized to embody this kind of television-adjacent, everyone in on the joke project, where all types of high/low cultural products were folded into the very pleasurable and very entertaining books that, ultimately, were just extensions of the high-fructose entertainment they critiqued. I'm not sure this would be as applicable to the fiction of today as it would be a lot of the other media (podcasts, particularly video pods, and social platforms, where hosts or avatars w/ para-social relationships to the audience create narratives that never end by folding in all of the news and internet clips of the day), and which resemble some of the mechanics and effects on end users that DFW identified in Leyner-type fiction.
I definitely plan to pursue this question, and it's also something that Sam Kriss touches on in an essay about "alt-lit" (though not with reference to Wallace) in the next issue of The Point. Re-reading the television essay recently, it was interesting to think about how much of it would apply to our digital present. But I think that move he makes in the essay that you are alluding to, asking how the supposedly avant-garde fiction of the moment relates to its dominant form of entertainment (although that doesn't even feel like the right word anymore), and whether it doesn't actually just reproduce some of its most pervasive features, remains a really fruitful way of approaching the topic today.
Some independent online platforms and productions are extremely sincere, to their credit, and they play out like kinds of endless novels, minus some classic types of structures and various fictive elements. More basically they are personalized contemporary chronicles.
It may be possible to serialize a type of endless novel - as I'm doing, of a sort, with "Most Revolutionary" on Substack. It's topical to the minute but far more novel than chronicle. It's divided into books, with Book One slated to wrap up in the next few months or so at about 250,000 words: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/most-revolutionary-chapter-one
The next book "Ultra Revolutionary" could be viewed as the sequel to "Most Revolutionary" or as its continuation - with continuation being far more accurate, as with the several books that make up the novel Les Miserables. MR is similar to the personalized contemporary chronicle shows and platforms in that I can't see any reason to necessarily end the novel. I might, I might not, but right now I view MR as an endless novel. Is this a new feature of culture? I haven't looked into it enough to say. I'm not aware that it has been done before, but maybe it has.
Sincerity, variously defined, is not the only attitude or philosophy of "Most Revolutionary." Why should it be? since many works transcend basic classifications. Sincerity is far from its only aesthetic, far from its only norm. But it is one of a number of dominant features in an epic that is meant to be revolutionary and anti-empire, liberatory and thoroughly novelistic, both of its time and timeless. And like many novels it at times transcends the novelistic, again, per Les Miserables, not least - one of the pre-eminent crime novels, political and intellectual novels, cultural and romantic, realistic and literary novels - transcending genres.
MR is part of my own "literary rebellion," so to speak, in some ways similar to what DFW meant, and in more ways entirely different, which I've written about at length in "Fiction Gutted."
David Sessions, per his comment above, accurately notes that "personalization" of "content" helps "break through the noise" creating more intimate and more diverse human appeal between writers and readers. Note this is what legacy media has largely attempted to edit, filter, and ideologically banish from its traditional productions - largely for reasons of ideology and control (not infrequently fraudulent) though claimed to be for reasons of objectivity and clarity.
The best of social media and more-or-less independent media - the people's media - as can be found on some of Substack and many other places online, helps writers and readers get away from much of the heavy hand of the establishment.
Are the results more-or-less "sincere"? Maybe. I prefer to consider whether or not the writing is more or less liberatory, anti-Empire, and revolutionary, among other vital norms.
The "Bernie Bro" smear was an identity politics smear by the Clinton campaign designed to undercut the Bernie campaign and its popular emphasis on class politics. As a consequence, this Clintonite smear campaign helped drive many low income and class conscious voters away - then and for years to come - into the arms of Trump with his pseudo populism, away from Bernie and the Squad's progressive populism, and away from establishment Democrats' embrace of the status quo, of the corporate-state and rich donors.
This top-down defeat of progressive populism in the Democratic primaries also helped drive Joe Rogan away from Bernie's progressive populism to Trump's pseudo populism, and more likely than not helps fuel chaotic populists like Luigi Mangione.
Are David Foster Wallace's writings considered to be populist and liberatory - in a multicultural world that suffers from extreme state violence and top-down class warfare? If not, any "ambitious" writing with a claim to cultural saliency makes for a ripe target in a deeply angry and populist culture going back, not only decades but throughout the entirety of American and in fact continental history, including back to the earliest colonial conquests.
Whether one chooses to be "sincere" or "ironic" (mutually exclusive?) about the consequent human condition seems a matter of personal choice, doesn't it? An attitude, a philosophy, an approach, an aesthetic. Variously viable understandings of all that we experience, live, and know.
Revenge of the poets:
With the compliments of:
William Wordsworth,
WB Yeats,
J. Milton,
R. Descartes,
Dante.
Earth is sick, and Heaven is weary with the hollow words, which states
and kingdoms utter when they talk of truth and justice.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the
falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world.
So yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, for what can war but endless war
still breed till truth and right from violence be freed, and publick
faith clear'd from the shameful brand of publick fraud.
Throw out all your beliefs and start over!
For as I turned, there greeted mine likewise, what all behold who
contemplate aright, that's Heaven's revolution through the skies.
https://www.lavitanuova.org.uk
incredibly excited for this, Jon.