Does Adam Kirsch Get It?

November 20, 2008

[photo by midorionna]

I can’t decide if Adam Kirsch really, really gets it or if he’s so wrong that he’s almost bent back around to righzt, wormhole fashion. The whole essay on writer’s aspiration, fame, and the age of blogs and the Internet is worth a read, but here’s a taste that made me think:

The Internet has democratized the means of self-expression, but it has not democratized the rewards of self-expression. Now everyone can assert a claim to recognition—in a blog, tumblr, Facebook status update. But the amount of recognition available in the world is inexorably shrinking, since each passing generation leaves behind more writers with a claim on our memory. That is why the fight for recognition is so fierce and so personal.

Yet the bloggers who were so indignant at Gessen’s attempt to engross more than his share of recognition did not direct their indignation at literature itself. They did not want to dismantle the prestige of “being a writer,” but to claim it for themselves; they did not want to end the economy of scarcity but to move individually from the camp of the have-nots to the camp of the haves. In this they are like the snobbish narrator in Proust, whose fascination with aristocratic titles reached its height at just the historical moment when titles became completely meaningless. They are not revolutionaries but social climbers.

If that is the case, then the best strategy for writers in the age of the Internet may be to ignore the Internet and look down on it. If print is a luxury, make it a rare and exclusive one; if literature is antidemocratic, revel in its injustice. Make sure that the reward of recognition goes to the most beautiful and difficult writing, not to the loudest and neediest. Above all, do not start a blog, for the non-writers who wish they were writers will only despise you for choosing to meet them on their own ground. As one of the commenters on Gessen’s blog put it: “get off the Internet as soon as you possibly can. Every second you stay online…another 18-28 year old (that coveted demographic!) loses all respect for you.”

Kirsch definitely needs to read Here Comes Everybody which would provide further– and more insightful perspective– in the idea of celebrity and ego in the era of social media and networks. There’s both irony and revelation in the fact that Kirsch’s piece is fully available online, certainly managed by some kind of content management system… how is it different from a blog again (outside of a very narrow conception of blogging and an unseemly devotion to technological determinism)? Perhaps only really in expectation and execution– Kirsch himself clearly has a readership in mind that he feels bound to and, judging from this article, no plans to respond to even the keenest comments whose tenor and substance themselves belie his assertions.

That being said, the question of why we write and who we write for is never far from my mind, as is our place at the controls of the great participatory machine. I’m both suspicious of those who maintain that desire for recognition– or even readership– doesn’t play into the nature of their creation and cognizant that new intellectual and social currency is being coined for a multitude of new realms. I largely agree with Henry Gould, a fine poet, who asks in the comments:

… but is the desire for recognition really the essential motivation underlying art and poetry?

Major writers have certainly pointed in that direction. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes). “Fame is the spur…” (Milton). But my guess is that even these exalted figures were voicing their views, not while at the pitch of creative composition, but in a moment of analytical distance & fatalism.

And then goes on to answer himself:

No one will deny that fame & fortune (along with anonymity & failure) are fickle, illusory, and at the same time pervasive social factors; but this state of affairs does not mean one must accept Fame’s (& Adam Kirsch’s) seductive argument, that Fame is the actual SOURCE of artistic making.

My primary quibble being the repeated insinuation that there is “a” (single or essential) motivation or source for artistic making. Where Kirsch sees bloggers as hungering for recognition, it seems as likely to me that many publish their without any real hope or thought of gaining readers precisely because the field is so large that they expect to be swallowed up. But as I believe all writers recognize, there is something important about writing “out” that differs from private journaling and letters tucked away unsent… even if there is no expected or desired reader at all.

Generalization is always dangerous, but rarely more intensely so than in talking about a group as diverse and widespread as “blogs” and “bloggers.” Perhaps writers do and don’t want recognition, do and don’t think of their readers… and maybe this is true of all writers, bloggers included. But at the same time, while I believe we are (or should be) in control of the technology, it undeniably takes effort and creates an interactive context that places deep and different demands on the finite resource of our creative concentration. Given this, perhaps those who posit less engagement for better writing are correct, just for the wrong reasons.

Kirsch’s final paragraph tickled me, veering off as it does into prose poetry:

So too with the virtual mind of the inconceivable future. When it looks for traces of us, it will not turn to novels or poems, but to e-mails, blogs, and Facebook pages. Mind will treasure these evidences of its own past, and devote all its infinite resources to interpreting them. And because it is infinite, it will have more than enough attention to give to each of our lives. Even the least articulate of us will become the focus of a kind of ancestor cult, subject to the devoted meditation of innumerable intelligences. The first will be made last, and the last first. At last, the scarcity of recognition will give way to the plenitude that has always been the mark of the messianic age. If only we could be certain that this was the future we had in store, no poet would ever have to write another line.

Tags: blogging, celebrity, participation, social networks, Writing