The newest issue of M/C, the Journal of Media and Culture, is out, and it’s focused on a topic near and dear to my heart: the Obsolete. There’s an excellent cluster of articles there, and the editors invite active discussion, as they have a larger series of projects focused on obsolescence in the works.

While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats they allegedly pose to literature may reflect fears about larger societal changes, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that critiques of technology always function as covert attacks against identity politics. (Enns)

When I first read Anthony Enns’ extremely long review of my book, published early in March on electronic book review, my initial thought was that he just hadn’t read it very closely, and therefore mistook carefully qualified claims for gross generalizations. But gradually it began to dawn on me: his review may be less a misreading than an enactment of precisely the anxious response that I outline in the book. It’s the best explanation I can come up with for the many conflations, reductions, and misinterpretations in the review: I think I touched a nerve.

The review is filled with such oddities in its reading, but I’ll start with the quotation above, drawn from the review’s final paragraph. I would certainly never have suggested any such conclusion; after all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes cigars bear embarrassingly obvious phallic associations. Cigars can be fetish objects, standing in as a partial approximation of the repressed object of desire, or they can be tools of power, stinking out the ladies so that the men can chat amongst themselves. So with many other objects and representations.

In case you haven’t read it (yet!), the central argument of The Anxiety of Obsolescence is this: claims made by certain postmodern novelists, as well as certain literary critics, that the novel is being shoved out of cultural centrality by television and other forms of electronic media are not simply greatly exaggerated, but are in fact motivated by a desire to protect the novel from its apparently imminent demise by creating a cultural wildlife preserve of sorts, a protected space on the margins of society within which the novel can reclaim its prestige. This invocation of the novel’s contemporary marginality, however, when coupled with the desire to recapture its formerly elite status, might be seen to suggest another repressed source of these anxieties about the novel’s future, such that technological change comes to stand in as a more palatable substitute for certain kinds of social change, and particularly the kind of change that seeks to give voice to women and people of color who have historically been relegated to the margins of U.S. culture.

Enns’s enactment of the anxiety of obsolescence surfaces in his tendency to reduce a complex and hedged argument to a blanket generality about covert racist and sexist impulses attributed to particular authors or critics. Arguing that such impulses exist would be an all but fruitless exercise, doomed to failure not least because of its flirtation with the intentional fallacy: how on earth could I know what the authors I read think? Anything in the book that suggests that I’m claiming such knowledge should certainly have been revised out of existence, in favor of claims such as the following, which I present in the course of making the parallel argument that the dominant thread of postmodernist theory bears the same relationship to contemporary critical discourse as does the novel of obsolescence to the contemporary literary scene:

This does not mean that postmodernist critiques, whether theoretical, critical, or fictional, bear no import for the writers I describe as social postmodernists; as bell hooks suggests, such critiques can “open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency” (par. 10). However, where such critiques are used to undermine the notion of agency, and where they appropriate the language of marginalization, these critiques have the (perhaps unintentional) effect of closing down the possibilities for radical liberation on the part of previously disenfranchised subjects…. Pynchon and DeLillo deploy the discourses of cultural postmodernism with the effect not simply of appropriating the experience of marginality to the writer’s cultural position, and not simply of obscuring the specific sociopolitical import of social marginality, but with the further effect of camouflaging an at times troubling set of sociopolitical concerns. (50)

The difference between what Enns says I said and what I actually said is the difference between intent and effect, between an understanding of racism and sexism as contained within and put into practice by the individual and an understanding of these ideologies as fundamentally systemic, institutional, and as such part of the individual’s unconscious interpellation into the dominant social order. It’s also a difference between always and sometimes, and to misconstrue my claims that sometimes critiques of new technologies are underwritten by ideologies that are less than progressive by saying, as does Enns, that I am “dismissing critiques of technology as inherently sexist or racist” is to refuse ideological critique altogether.

I could quibble with any number of Enns’s readings of my readings, but I don’t want this response to degenerate into that kind of hairsplitting, as there are a couple of larger issues that I’d like to address. For instance, I want to acknowledge Enns’s concern about the absence of “a certain historical and technological specificity” to my argument. Perhaps I could have done more to delineate the specific media formations that the argument encounters. But there are key moments throughout the text when I do focus on the differences in treatment that media forms from photography forward receive in the novels I explore, moments that seem to have gone missing in his reading. And, as I point out in the first chapter, the book treats representations of television as metonymic, standing in for a broader range of ideas about “electronic media.” This is not to suggest that television, the actually existing technology, becomes the apotheosis of such forms of mediation, but rather that the idea of television is used in numerous representations as a stand-in for media-in-general by serving as a nexus for the three key assumptions about media technologies that the book explores: that the mechanicity of the media has dehumanizing effects on its audience; that the spectacle conveyed by the media distracts the audience from the “real”; and that the networks through which media communicate undermine individualism, resulting in a passive, shapeless, deluded mass.

Enns, however, also takes issue with my choice to focus on television as the exemplar of the “new electronic media” threatening the novel’s displacement, given his sense that “contemporary discussion of the novel’s obsolescence more often focus on new information technologies like the computer.” Absolutely true — but in the period I’m focused on, the period between the early 1960s and the mid-1990s when the majority of the novels I explore were published, television was far more culturally central than the computer. There are hints of computers-to-come in some of those texts, but they’re largely television-obsessed; so why wouldn’t I explore what those representations in particular can tell us about the period?

Perhaps this choice, I’ll note with no small irritation, would have seemed a little less belated had the book actually made its way into print with anything like timeliness. Instead, as I’ve written and spoken about elsewhere, its publication got held up by the post-dot-com-bust collapse in academic publishing; the press that held the manuscript under review for ten months during 2003 dropped it when the editor was overruled on the editorial board by the marketing guys, who argued that the book posed “too much financial risk to pursue in the current economy.” Afterward, I found many other academic presses in the same boat, drastically cutting their lines in the humanities due to financial exigency. The paradox implied in having difficulty publishing a book that makes the argument that the book isn’t a dying form led me, as I noted in my talk at this year’s MLA, to begin contemplating the possibility that my argument was a bit off the mark, that perhaps even if the book isn’t an obsolete form, one specific kind of book — the scholarly book, or perhaps even more specifically the first scholarly book — might be in the process of becoming obsolete, not technologically but institutionally speaking. This is one of the primary concerns behind the MediaCommons project — attempting to find a viable future for book-length scholarly publishing.

Because of that, the odd jumps in logic that lead Enns to suggest that my recent electronic work “embraces the same obsolescence that postmodern novelists like Pynchon and DeLillo seem to fear,” and that the extension of my argument into electronic publishing would imply “that this technology promotes identity politics more than print, and any resistance to electronic publishing would have to be interpreted as a form of white male paranoia” — well, this just baffles me. If electronic publishing were written about in the same ways that, historically, television has been written about — as producing a degeneration in public discourse to the lowest common denominator, as reducing its users to passive, stupefied boobs unable to comprehend much less enjoy the more sophisticated delights of high literary culture — then yes, I might be prone to interpret such representations as related to the anxieties of a waning cultural elite, and to suggest that the overwhelming but not exclusive whiteness and maleness of that elite might not be incidental to the anxieties, given the potential diversity of voices that electronic publishing could present. But typically, if anything, the internet has been over-praised for its democratizing potentials, and (until relatively recent work by folks like David Silver and Lisa Nakamura, at least) under-critiqued for the ways that a white male technocratic elite has often been able to control the boundaries and formations of acceptable discourse thereon.

Which leaves me, finally, with the curious fact that though Enns’s review was posted on ebr early last month, I only found out about it when Google alerted me to its existence last week. If electronic publishing offers us any truly utopian potential, it lies in the possibility of dialogue, of multi-directional critical conversations. It’s hard not to feel that ebr missed an opportunity here, precisely by failing to open the lines of communication.

As hinted yesterday, I spent part of last week working on a response to some reviews of The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Those reviews (five of them!), and my response, are now up at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, where mine is one of three books-of-the-month. (And I’m happy to find that I’m in good company; the other two books under review this month are by Alex Galloway and Lori Kendall, both of whose work I admire greatly.)

Pop by, take a look, and if you have responses, I’d love to hear them!

I had a great IM chat with Stephanie Booth this morning. I met Stephanie at Blogtalk back in October, and she pinged me today to tell me about an article of hers that’s just gone up, on MySpace and online predator paranoia. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned her attempts to find journalists in Switzerland who were interested in covering such issues from angles other than the “my god, won’t somebody think of the children?” tactic that the vast majority of coverage adopts. I linked this to what Bryan Alexander has referred to as the “[Fill in Name of Web 2.0 Phenomenon]: Threat or Menace?” narrative that abounds in most news venues these days — and then realized that the argument I made in The Anxiety of Obsolescence may in fact be more applicable here than it was to the novel’s relationship to television. As traditional, mainstream sources of information — newspapers, radio, television — feel themselves being eclipsed by the newer forms of communication that the digital provides, their characterizations of those new forms reveal far less about the digital itself than they do about old media’s anxieties about its future.

Interestingly, just yesterday I found out about what I believe to be the first review of The Anxiety of Obsolescence, which appeared in the June 2007 issue of Choice. I’ve, erm, quoted rather liberally from the review here. Needless to say, it’s gratifying to have the book be referred to as “essential”…

Poor, poor beleaguered experts. How can one possibly survive the onslaught of the unwashed (and uncredentialed) blogospheric masses?

Thanks to Aunt B. for the reference, and for the citation, as well. It’s no accident that the first chapter of The Anxiety of Obsolescence cites Schickel’s article on the death of film, but I hadn’t realized that we were also facing the imminent death of film reviewing…

Ben has opened a discussion over at if:book about Gore Vidal’s recent BookForum interview, in which, among other things, he laments the death of American readership.  I’ve taken this as an opportunity to rant a bit about the presuppositions of this kind of death-discourse, which I’ve gone on at length about in The Anxiety of Obsolescence.  I feel strongly enough about this comment to republish it here:

Oh, boy. Don’t get me started. I’ve got an entire book’s worth of arguments about this. These sorts of declinist arguments (no one reads anymore, and reading used to be so important; there are no famous novelists anymore, and novelists used to be stars!) nearly always seem to me led by two incorrect premises: a nostalgic over-estimation of the past importance of reading/the novel/the novelist to mainstream US culture, and a pessimistic, overly narrow underestimation of what’s happening in contemporary culture. Yes, reading was very important, and the novel was a key cultural form, and novelists used to hit the talk-show circuit, but all of that was a far more limited phenomenon than it seems. Reading, particularly of fiction, has generally been the province of an educated segment of the population with an adequate supply of leisure time and the desire to fill that leisure time with an imaginative, edifying experience. It’s arguable that in the 1950s economic and social forces combined to make that segment of the population seem both extremely large and central, but it was far from universal. (In a similar vein, one might revisit who the audience for talk shows such as Jack Paar and Johnny Carson was, and how that audience—and thus the nature of the talk show—has shifted in the last fifty years.)

But, on the present: anyone who suggests that there are no famous authors today has a very narrow definition of fame. Making such a statement requires never having shown up at a David Foster Wallace reading, or a similar appearance by any number of other writers. And even writers who don’t appear are famous: Pynchon has been on The Simpsons! Can you imagine the mob scene if he ever decided to show up in public? It’s of course arguable, as I think Vidal is suggesting, that this kind of fame isn’t mainstream, that these audiences are somehow on the fringe of contemporary culture; I’d argue that such readerships have always been more removed from the mainstream than they might have seemed, and that, in fact, the construction of this audience as “marginal” within US culture has been part of a conscious attempt to protect the novel’s audience by creating a sort of cultural wildlife preserve, away from the depredations of more contemporary media forms.

And on those contemporary media forms: it’s my sense that people aren’t doing less reading than they used to, but rather that they’re doing far more; it’s just that the scene of reading no longer involves a retreat from the general flow of life into a quiet space with a discrete, printed object. Now the scene of reading is everywhere: public, communal, wired. And the form of reading looks quite different: sometimes it involves the interpretation of visual images and embodied performances rather than simply the processing of text. The book is not alone, and won’t ever be alone again; authors have got to start thinking about the ways that new forms of reading might be used to their advantage, rather than retreating into nostalgia.

After publishing which, I realized what I’d left out:

(I failed to mention the first time out that all of this has echoes of Norma Desmond reverberating in my head: ‘Reading is big. It’s print that got small.’)

Right before I left for Paris and Vienna, I did an email interview with a writer from Media Life magazine who was working on an article about The Anxiety of Obsolescence.  The interview, unsurprisingly, was mostly about the television end of the novel-and-television relationship, but the questions were interesting, and the article turned out pretty well, I think.  (And it may be the first time in the history of ever that a review of an academic book ended with the weekend box office report.)

Given how little of my rambling made it into the article, though, I thought I’d post the entirety of the interview, for my own future reference, if nothing else.

Is TV becoming an intellectually challenging, novel-like literary form?

I would say yes, absolutely.  Contemporary television shows are asking their viewers to do far more work than ever before, both in terms of parsing what is in some cases a very literary style of dialogue—like that of Deadwood, for instance—and in asking viewers to draw connections among characters and narrative events that might be separated by several episodes, if not even longer, in order to draw some often very subtle conclusions about the show’s meaning.  I’d put The Wire into this category, and Lost as well.  These shows don’t simply invite interpretation, they demand it, by requiring viewers to puzzle out the significance of what they see.

Which shows turn to this form of intricate narrative, aside from Deadwood and Lost? Would, say, West Wing fit this description? any others?

I’d argue that several shows fall into each of these categories.  In the former, as I say, Deadwood is the obvious answer, but I’d also say that the various Aaron Sorkin series (Sports Night, West Wing, and now Studio 60) all rely heavily on a style of dialogue that requires viewers to pay close attention to the language used, to unpack a stream of references to other cultural texts, and to uncover the nuances of the interpersonal relationships that drive professional and public life.  I’d also suggest that the Gilmore Girls belongs in this category, given how much work the speed of the dialogue and the denseness of the references requires of the viewer.

In the latter category, there are even more shows, as the enigmatic mystery has become a very popular style of series—the show that can get fans talking, attempting to puzzle out the meanings of subterranean clues.  The X Files was of course the forerunner of this mode of show, but I’d also include Alias and any number of its descendants (some of which, of course, are better than others). But there are also the programs that aren’t mysteries per se, that nonetheless require their viewers to do a lot of interpretive work in order to really appreciate the show’s meaning.  I’d include many of the HBO series in this category (The Sopranos as one of the originators of this style of novelistic television, but also Six Feet Under, Big Love, Deadwood, and of course, The Wire), but also shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars (though the second season of VM wasn’t as successful as the first, so we’ll see how it goes from here)—these are shows that reward careful viewing and attention to detail.

In what ways is the narrative of these shows similar to forms once associated with the novel?

I’d say that these narratives are similar not just to those associated with the novel, but those associated with the Big Novel—Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest—precisely in the work that they require of their readers, in their deep intertextuality (in which one must know quite a lot about the culture that the show is a part of in order to fully appreciate many of its references), their careful construction of complex characters, and their unfolding of a nuanced plot in which no easy answers are provided.

Why do you think this is happening?

That’s a really good question.  I think part of it is that at least a subset of television viewers have simply become more demanding.  It’s particularly interesting that the rise of these extremely sophisticated narrative programs has happened at exactly the same time as the rise of reality programming, which by and large avoids any such nuance and complexity.  I think that the demandingness of contemporary audiences has been increased by the internet, which fosters the kind of discussion of texts that results in viewers wielding a more powerful mode of judgment and discernment when it comes to their viewing practices.  They’re not simply watching passively; they’re also writing about what they watch, and conveying to the producers of these shows just how seriously they take their narratives.  (Thus it’s interesting to watch the ways that Joss Whedon, for instance, interacted with fan groups by taking their comments and suggestions seriously in the production of Buffy and Angel, as well as the ways that Rob Thomas took fan complaints about the problems in season 2 of Veronica Mars seriously.)

Beyond that, though, I’m at kind of a loss to explain it.  We’ve been in the midst of a kind of “golden age” for television for the last eight years or so, at the same time the lowest common denominator on the tube keeps getting lowered.  It’s fascinating.

What impact does it have on the TV watching society? Does it make us more creative? Does it inspire people to write fiction, be it scripts or novels?

I’d say yes, absolutely—more people are writing more than ever.  But lots of that writing is happening in forms that we might not notice, or might not consider “serious”—fan fiction, for instance, or other forms of fan writing on message boards and forums like Television Without Pity.  And then there’s blogging; I think it’s no accident that blogging has spread like wildfire in the last five years, as many people have come to insist on a less passive position with respect to their media consumption.

Does it make us, in effect, a more literary society?

Again, I’d say yes, though not, perhaps, in the ways people expect.  Perhaps we’re not reading and writing in book form in the same way that we used to (though, as I argue in the book, I still insist that the suggestions of cultural critics that there’s been some kind of “decline” of the literary, that we once were a reading-oriented culture and now we’re not, is both utopian and revisionist; literary reading has always been the province of an elite, and thus the kinds of reading and writing that we are seeing now, bringing together multiple contemporary media forms—watching television, writing on blogs and fan forums, posting videos on YouTube—are vastly democratized over older communicative models).  Again, perhaps the book isn’t focal anymore, but more people are being more creative in a way that one might describe as “literary” than ever before.

Is Hollywood draining off folks that would have been novelists in a previous time?

I don’t know that I’d say “draining off.” There have always been these anxieties that all the good writers who wanted to make a buck were going to Hollywood—first to film, and much more recently to television—but I’m not quite convinced that this is so; people write in the form they want to write.  That said, I would argue that some of the best writing being done in American culture in the last decade has been done for television.  No doubt that will change, too.

Can we, in effect, begin to defend TV as a literary form?

I hope all of my answers above suggest that I’d say yes, absolutely.  Not across the board—there will always be the pulp novels and porn magazines of television, too, but there are clearly some programs that are making a lasting impact on American culture in a way that must beg the question of what the literary is.

What does all this say about the novel?

The novel, I believe, will continue to be the novel.  There will continue to be serious, important writers whose work best fits that format.  And there will continue to be important novels that affect our culture in deep and lasting ways as well.  But there are other forms that now exist alongside the novel that are making such contributions as well.  It’s not a zero-sum game; they can co-exist peacefully.  The culture will only grow richer if we continue fostering new forms of the literary as they crop up.

Hey, this is cool:  the Amazon page for The Anxiety of Obsolescence now has “Search Inside” capability.  So now, in addition to the bits of text I put up over here, you can also search the rest of the text over there.

If you live in a market that carries Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, you may be able to catch me flogging The Anxiety of Obsolescence in the coming days.  The show should also be available online starting Monday.

I’m going to be a little nervous about listening to it, myself; I have never much liked my recorded voice, for one thing, and for another, I honestly don’t remember what I said in the interview.  But there it is…

So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of every subsequent chapter, and the bibliography and index) and the ability to comment on them. I mentioned this to one of the guys here in NYC yesterday, saying that traffic had been pretty modest and that I’d only gotten one comment so far. He asked me how I’d publicized the launching of the site.

I said that I’d written about it on my blog.

He suggested, perhaps, you know, posting information about it to a listserv? Such as, isn’t there a Pynchon listserv?

Posted to both pynchon-l and wallace-l a couple of hours ago. As of this very minute, here’s what my statcounter looks like:

Oh. Yeah.