For Jim Longenbach On or about November 9, 2016, human nature changed. All human speech shifted, and when human speech shifts there is at the same time a shift in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. The word equality — so long associated with liberalism — left the left; they erected the house of complicity in its footprint, behind its aging facade. It was a haunted house. All who dared enter shadow-boxed with a series of specters. These were battles of life or death organized around minor abrogations of language (from “homeless” to “unhoused,” from lowercase to uppercase first letters in racial designations, and so on). I am not a liberal, but one of the left coalition that can scarcely win a primary, so I am inured to my powerlessness. But in the final years of that decade, I learned that I was limitlessly powerful. Indeed, hadn’t we Bernie bros — I preferred “Berning Men” — opened the gaps through which Trump crawled? And weren’t we therefore obligated to kneel first during public rituals of self-cleansing? And wasn’t each person not simply an agent of their own notions, but a resister to or collaborator with public feeling? Of late, a beloved friend whose politics are far more virtuous than mine has chastised me for voting with too little enthusiasm. My shrug, you see, is complicit with “the other side.” It enables them. And I think: surely it must rankle human dignity to be radicalized for so moderate a force as the Democratic party. Everywhere in the Complicity Era, we were compelled to exercise our power through illocutionary speech acts — denouncing and endorsing on cue. This included accolades for “Nazi-punching” far from our front doors, declamations against election interference by Russia (who, long ago, perfected the art of Nazi-punching), and odes to civil unrest authored by the people most likely to turn tail at the sight of a fire in their own neighborhoods. Certain events elicited public statements from people with no public profile; Verdict Days for killer cops demanded an evening litany on Twitter. The event need not be macropolitical. You might denounce former comrades who had been insufficiently pious, or who continued to “follow” Louis CK’s social media accounts. You could issue these dicta on the same platform that sold you weighted blankets and over-priced rompers that costumed adults as children. For the last two decades, I had joked (after Baudrillard) that the Cold War did not take place. In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, the reunification of Germany means little more to its protagonist — a retired academic — than a slightly closer transit stop to his apartment in Berlin. So much memory had been scrubbed with the dismantling of the political and intellectual apparatus that sustained “war” — which of course was less a war than a wrestling match. Like many Americans my age, I grew up burning whole weekends with the board game Risk, which perfectly inverted the truth of war. The longer the game went on, the more resources the strongest fighter accumulated. The deepest resource, of course, is a population’s decentralized paranoia, with no top-down instruction required. In the Complicity Era, we have found other uses for the paranoid style, the resource that paradoxically shaped and emerged from the Cold War. Paranoia migrated, resurged, and renewed. In early 2022, a poll found that more than forty percent of Americans believed Russia was Communist; if your first instinct is to hope that this forty percent is on the “other side,” then the complicity critique of these years has cost you dearly. Perhaps it was not the “paranoid style” of the political right, but the “hermeneutic of suspicion” practiced by the academic left, that seized American tongues. The desire to flush out the enemy of concealed meaning generates martial language in scholarly writing; there, the writer does not argue, he intervenes. He does not analyze; he interrogates. Concepts steadily creeped from colleges and universities to the broader world: think of the heights to which intersectionality and performativity climbed in these dishonest decades. For those of us trained in the humanities, the language traveled with all the precision one could expect after a student pulls an all-nighter before an essay exam. Most of the people who coined or refined the concepts that creep to the public square are still alive — young Boomers or old Gen Xers — so one wonders what they do when they wake in the middle of the night, feeling like both Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. “Performativity” came to mean the self-conscious exhibition of one’s political virtues, though it in fact referred to one’s almost unconscious habituation to identity roles, subject to subversion with subsequent repetition. There is the agonizing loss of “emotional labor” — formerly the management of feeling required by low-wage service workers, the term now serves as an excuse to refuse evidence, renege on debate, and resist counter-argument, especially if your opponent has been unpersoned, thanks to their own infelicities of language or allegiance. Then, it is no longer your “job” to educate them; it is onerous emotional labor to even continue the conversation. “Intersectionality” became a signpost that one was aspiring to treat identity categories as mutually constitutive, but it clearly chose the heft of some identities (race, not class; gender, not citizenship) over others. The rote uses of these terms, the reflexive self-descriptions and deceptions that attend them, are so utterly empty and imitable that they can be written by bot; indeed, perhaps they are, in public apologies and mission statements. Novels such as Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This nonetheless wring some eloquence out of the fallen discourse. But who reads novels? One might find the withering term “reductionist” affixed to their politics should they tarry too long with an identity that has not attained totemic value at the Pop Intersections. The going euphemism — “unhoused” — is one I have heard spoken aloud precisely twice, both at academic
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence