Is the end of Book World the end of criticism?
Who knows what to think?
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the place of criticism in modern culture after the Washington Post closed its Book World. I have no personal interest in this discourse and wish well all those who are now working on Substack, or, indeed, elsewhere.
What I find surprising, as always, is how un-literary, how un-liberal was the response to the news that the Post closed Book World. For a group of people who prize independent thought, I saw an awful lot of people who believed the same thing everyone else believed, and for the same ideological reasons.
Can we not regret the way (and the fact) that individuals lost their jobs but retain a disinterested view about the overall effect of the decision?1 Can we see it as part of the long decline of an industry insufficiently adapted to the modern world? I am wondering why there isn’t more negative capability in the way people think about these issues.
I don’t know if what happened at the Post is good, bad, or null effect as far as the overall position of literature and criticism goes. I find other people’s certainty about it (literally) unbelievable.
This is because I think about markets very differently. The essence of the Hayekian view of the market is that it is a process of discovery, always in a state of disequilibrium. This is not an unknown way of thinking, or ought not to be, to the literary mind.
My politics are not the politics of this discussion: maybe the wrong decisions were taken, and maybe that was detrimental to the book section—or maybe the large amounts of money Bezos spent subsidizing the entire paper for several years still weren’t enough to save it.
The overall situation, though, is hardly amenable to the (well-expressed) idea that literature is important and that we still need critics. One former member of the Washington Post Book Review has acquired tens of thousands of subscribers on here, thousands of them paying. The market has shifted a little. In the long death of newspapers, this is a small funeral.
My classical liberalism means I am interested in the readers and the decentralised system they create. Every click, every purchase, every book blogged about, every enthusiastic tweet, is a twitch on the thread that draws us to the new future. We don’t know yet how things will turn out: we do know that the institutional writers are often in competition with the internet in ways that make it harder for them to prosper.
One of the best critics at the Post, Becca Rothfeld, wrote in the New Yorker, that
The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits… A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.
Maybe newspapers did that, once upon a time. But human action has moved on. I can tell you from a decade working in advertising that the people in charge of “hyperspecialization and personalized marketing” are constantly frustrated with just how impersonal marketing remains. You are followed by the toaster advert because they are unable to target you any more specifically than that. The difficulty of knowing how to spend your advertising dollars is still very real, which is why advertising proliferates and you ignore most of what you (don’t) see.
As for the algorithm problem, I have people reading my literary blog The Common Reader who work in Silicon Valley, just as Naomi Kanakia has many readers in the rationalist community. These are two groups who are suspected of being “unliterary”, but who seem to be benefitting from the ability of the internet to find new recruits. The whole internet is your newspaper now!
Shortly before this news, Becca Rothfeld wrote in the Point, (which is also on Substack) about the problems of modern liberalism—the paucity of the abundance movement and the associated “Parks and Rec” aesthetic.
The sort of art and argument that could make its audience want to be liberal would have to begin by regarding its audience as agents. It would have to enlist them as equals instead of demoting them to the role of pupils; it would have to demonstrate just what form—or, more appropriately to the liberal sensibility, forms—the beautiful abrasions of communal self-determination might take.
So then why must we talk about “cultural production” and be ideologically aligned about the problem of billionaires? Why does the unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity always lead the literati to have the same left-liberal suspicions of capitalism? At what point do we have to ask not about the lack of aesthetics of our politics but the insistent politics of our aesthetics?
If the abundance bros are claimed to have the same disinterested Obama-era Parks and Rec aesthetics, then perhaps we can admit there is something bien pensant about the political vision of many critics. Maybe I am heartless because I do not know the people who lost their jobs, but the question of criticism’s place in our culture is not the same as the question of who works for the Washington Post.
Human action is as ceaseless as the tide, as everlasting as the wind. We all make decisions, and in those decisions some information is revealed that becomes part of how a price is formed. In every choice we make—the coffee not the scone, the organic fruit, no alcohol this month, more Substack subscriptions, a different sort of car—we are part of the everlasting fluctuation of human activity that creates an economy. From these decisions, prices emerge, incentives are set, and people make further decisions.
This is not to diminish the role of human agency—everything is human action! But it is to note that whatever decisions were badly made in the recent shuttering of Book World, those decisions were responsive to all those other choices that were also being made by a lot of other people, many of them the readers on whose behalf critics are making their laments.
Competing with other newspapers is a different task to competing with the whole internet. But ought we not to be at least neutral about the ability of literary (and liberal) criticism to be part of this new era of common reading just as the journals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries once were? After all, the internet brings us small poetry presses too. And the existence of The Point itself—a successful online literary journal—makes the argument in the best way of all.
The world is moving on and it is of very little use to ask it to stop.
(N.B. disinterested, not uninterested…)
Yes I have to admit—I didn’t read the Washington Post book section myself. If I didn’t value it, then who am I to say other people should have.
Thanks, Henry. I welcome the corrective to those of us who cried foul immediately, without having acknowledged the broader confluence of factors at play, and how more than the Post’s managers are implicated.
Yet, since you refer to negative capability, let me say that part of the lament had to do with what Keats calls “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.” At its very best, Book World earned these elegies from readers for the pleasure of simply chancing on an article discussing issues of literary merit among pages made sordid by the gross ephemera of the day (“What’s a nice novel like you doing in a place like this?” I’d often ask.)
There is also the reader’s rapport with the personae of certain reviewers, and the welcome (but let’s not say Parks & Rec) predictability of encountering them in one’s town paper. For instance, nothing of Ron Charles’ self-deprecating style at BW became him like the leaving of it:
“How a major national newspaper will carry on without someone on staff to summarize the plots of midlist literary novels is beyond me.”