Essays Vol.1
I've read novels, journals, and newsletters; fiction and non-fiction, short-form musings and long-form articles, but one thing I haven't read more of is essays. This is a three part series to mitigate just that. It is not a definitive list, this is just me attending to my recs. folder backlog. Reading old, academic works is annoying but necessary work; like training a muscle. You get better as you do it more and more. Anyway, straight to the specifics:
On Photography – Susan Sontag (1977)
As someone who adores photography, this was a really fun and validating read. Sontag compares the act of photographing to a slew of things: sometimes they are a handy form of note taking and other times they are an incontrovertible proof that something happened. Sometimes they are an accomplice in surveillance and other times they are a better interpretation of reality than paintings or drawings could ever be.
How sweet it is that we live in a world where we have powerful cameras at our disposal that could memorialize time spent with our family, friends and lovers; places visited, and milestones reached without any hassle?
Dysfunctional Narratives (from Burning Down The House) – Charles Baxter (1997)
This was a really fun and useful read. Baxter's thesis is that Nixon era introduced the art of non-acknowledgement in American political discourse: things happen but no one is responsible for them. Mistakes were made but using that as a syntactic structure absolves everyone entirely of agency and accountability.
Baxter argues that the same phenomenon seeped into fiction as well, the passivity leads to an incoherent narrative which contributes to sorrow, depression and rage among the public. His essay, although critical, is so much more livelier than some of the others I've read and he ultimately outlines that since the 70s and 80s, the favored narrative mood in contemporary America is that of disavowal, passivity and a protagonist that is disarmed and helpless. There are bars after bars after bars in this one and for that alone, I think it's worthy of your time.
Capitalist Realism – Mark Fisher (2009)
This was my intro to #CriticalTheory101 and though this is not strictly speaking an essay (it's about 90 pages long), it sucked me right in. Fisher writes about things that are heavy; capitalism and its discontents, how capitalism smothers creativity, neutralizes resistance and leads to a culture-in-stagnation, how mental health crises including depression and suicidal ideation are a direct consequence of it, and how late capitalism perpetuates cynicism aka learned helplessness to name a few.
Fisher's analyses is perceptive and despite the subject matter, he doesn't comes across as a doomer. The text is quite accessible and I liked his weaving of culture, arts, and media when making a point. I especially loved the part where he called it a "mistake of rushing to impose an individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects" on issues like climate crisis. I'd say read it if you're trying to dip your toes into Critical Theory though don't expect clear solutions for the problems he outlines since this isn't that kind of essay. I should hunt for a contra essay as well. I think it's only fair.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin (1986)
We love Le Guin around here!! Her essay starts with a fun observation: mankind's first tool wasn't a weapon or a spear but a basket for carrying food. She takes this idea and applies it to storytelling: that the predominant model is a spear shaped one where the hero's journey is conflict > kill > triumph. Everything leads to a single point. She proposes an alternate model: enter the carrier bag theory.
This model of fiction is Le Guin's way of saying that not everything in a story has to progress in a spear-like fashion but it can sometimes zig and zag. It reminded me of two examples from recent movies: Official Secrets (2019) and The Worst Person In The World (2022). The first one revolves around a whistleblower and has a good plot but flows in a linear fashion with an anticlimactic ending and no buildup of suspense whereas the second one is more about the chapters of one person's life. The protagonist in the latter doesn't have a destination, she has a life and the movie is a faithful example to Le Guin's theory.
The Face of Seung-Hui Cho – Wesley Yang (2008)
Yang’s essay has remarkable flow and almost feels David-Foster-Wallace-esque. He is asking you to forgive, or at least understand, a young man who killed 33 people. He writes so beautifully about Cho's invisibility that you almost forget to ask him if he is absolving Cho of his agency. Almost as if, like some diaspora people, he is using identity-as-a-cudgel where they have a vested interest in the grievances of their in-group never resolving.
Does this mean Asian-American experiences in America aren’t valid? No. But it makes one wonder, why is it that it is almost always men (of any race or ethnicity for that matter) who seek to avenge themselves through acts of violence when rejected and not women? The essay doesn’t really answer that.
Industrial Society and Its Future – Ted Kaczynski (1995)
I was with him until the first page because the opening sentence is a bar but then I read and I read and the further I read the more dissenting notes I took. The writing is very lucid. He was clearly a sharp guy but that is no guarantee for not going off your rocker later in life. A few things that jumped out during the reading of this manifesto:
(1) He has no game plan for what a post industrialist society should look like; no model, no vision. Interestingly, this is something many wanna-be edge lords and pseudo-revolutionaries have in common: everyone wants to burn the system down but no one knows how to build a better one in its place.
(2) He is repeatedly dismissive of the history of minorities, indigenous and vulnerable groups.
(3) His judgement is clouded by his disdain for leftists. Since he regards leftists as weak and over-socialized, any display of solidarity from leftists towards their own demographic or other socio-political-economic group is deemed as a sign of weakness and virtue signaling by him.
(4) He is obsessed with "power process" and any pursuit of creative/technical/athletic pursuits that are not tied to biological ones are viewed by him as surrogate activities; things people do to escape boredom or unfulfillment.
(5) He confidently claims that primitive societies and rural communities have less problems than urban ones. But he seems to ignore that smaller communities in rural areas, either now or in old times, had their fair share of mental health, substance abuse and estrangement problems. Magically uprooting yourself from a megacity and migrating to a village will not eliminate your woes.
(6) He is increasingly hostile to any technological progress, views said progress as stifling individual freedom and asserts that it is easier to topple such a system via revolution than reform (since the latter is slower and takes a long time/has a high chance of failure). His solution for this is to increase social stress and instability so that the system fails.
Taken together, his critique does not come off as the work of a visionary but more like a weenie baby with personal grievances against the system. He is no hero because he is not sincere, his ideas do not care for or even account for different ethnic or socio-economic groups that would be affected if such a revolution were to happen. Some of his criticisms may be valid but that doesn't change the fact that he was a domestic terrorist. At most, his manifesto reads like a bastardized version of eco-fascist/ primitivist text.
Total Mobilization – Ernst Jünger (1930)
With apologies to Jünger, this was a very dry read. It agues that war and technological innovation are expressions of the same modernizing force. That after WW1, war was no longer fought by armies alone but necessitated the involvement of all of nation's resources: labor, technology and will. He saw this as inevitable, even necessary, even if it meant death of the romanticized version of a soldier serving on the front lines. In his view, when both the worker in a factory and the soldier on the front line are dedicating their time, energy and faculties towards war, their total mobilization is the ushering in of modern society.
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility – Walter Benjamin (1935)
I was very excited to read this one but alas, this was also a dry read. His idea is that before the advent of technological reproduction, a work of art had aura depending on where it was created and finished. But as technology allowed perfect or near-perfect copies of the original work to be created, it lost that elusive aura.
He warns that when art loses its aura or ritual purpose, it could be easily aestheticized for political motives. The theme that jumped out to me was the rueful way with which he describes the liberation of art, almost as if mourning that mass production of art steers it away from who it was originally intended for.
Benjamin wrote this essay 91 yrs ago. So he could be forgiven for failing to account for unintended consequences of technological advances: how instead of mass reproduction decimating the aura, it could allow it to migrate or even flourish in new ways. For example, people see Mona Lisa on the web or at a local art gallery all the time and get inspired to visit the original. Is that reproduction killing aura? Or is that creating new audiences who may never have set foot in a museum otherwise and who care just as much as any pedigreed critic?
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (from Essays in Persuasion) – John Maynard Keynes (1930)
Keynes writes well but this essay, touted as some form of groundbreaking work, seemed like a stretch to me. I suppose the background of when he wrote this matters; he penned this during the Great Depression era trying to make people see the bigger picture. His point being that in a few years, this time won't matter and the long arc of humanity is that of abundance. But there's things in our time that weren't there or posed as much of a problem then: inequality, the status of "work" as a social and identity marker rather than just serving economic function, the hedonic treadmill, obsession with productivity culture, just to name a few.
On The Shortness of Life – Lucius Seneca (49 A.D)
This was quite an engrossing read. Seneca has one premise and one premise only: life is not short, you just waste too much of it. He spends the rest of the time hammering that premise from various angles. Every paragraph is doing work; this isn't set like Keynes leisurely style of writing. It has an aggressive pace and keeps the momentum throughout. Part of what makes it feel like less of a moralizing monologue is because Seneca is honest and implicates himself in the argument of wasting time as well. That gives the essay a more honest feel and relevant to anyone who picks it up.
Here are some more essays I read but with less passionately detailed notes:
- Learning to Work – Virginia Valian (1977): This was really good, albeit a tad verbose. Valian is talking to all the people who start off a project but can never seem to finish it or seem to view work as a tyranny. She talks candidly about herself as an example and how she tried to overcome this mindset. Quite accessible and non-judgmental.
- Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841): I felt like I stumbled across a cornerstone work of American Individualism while reading this one. It focuses on the usual: (1) trust in yourself, (2) do not conform to a society that is trying to make you corrupt and (3) better to be alone than in bad company. Wish the prose were less archaic though.
- Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught – Gian-Carlo Rota (1996): I really enjoyed this one which is based on a talk that the late Applied Math and Philosophy professor gave at MIT. But probably best for people who are still at grad school or in the final throes of writing their thesis for undergrad.
- Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror – Dan Wang (2017): I read it but it wasn't anything new since I had picked up the main idea from another long form article a few yrs ago. Girard's theory is useful and explains some of the workplace and student life status games but it doesn't explain everything. Frankly, it feels like a stretch when people try to explain everything through a Girardian lens.
- How One Becomes What One Is – Alexander Nehamas (1983): This one was more of a dutiful finish than something that sparked new questions. Nehamas comments on Nietzsche's idea of self, how self is not a latent trait waiting to be uncovered but is developed retroactively through actions. You become what you are when you actualize your capacities. That involves becoming courageous enough to abandon all cowardly acts of the past and living life such that if you could relive it again, you'd want to repeat the same things you did now. Interesting idea, dry delivery.
- Death of A Pig – E.B. White (1948): I know, I know! Everyone loves E.B. White, but I wasn’t feeling him on this one. White's protagonist is grieving a farm animal he was about to eat before he found out the poor beast was sick and about to die. Forgive me, but there's something self-serving about that sadness. And honestly, how can we expect the feelings of remorse to be anything but transient?
- Of Friendship – Michel de Montaigne (1580): I read the Charles Cotton translation of this essay which, admittedly, isn't a great place to start. Montaigne is bemoaning the death of his friend, Étienne de La Boétie, who died young and uses philosophy to rationalize the loss of his friendship. Not exactly in the friends-are-great vein but more about how the demise of a friend that knows you best also means the loss of an interior world that only they knew well. If you can find the Donald Frame translations, I would start there. This one was a bit too pompous for me.
Reminder that criticizing a work should not be conflated with attacking the person. The whole point of engaging with creative work is that you are giving it your time. It passes through you and you respond. It’s more like, "Yeah, I entertained your ideas for a bit. Whether or not I allow them to take root is another question."
The person who has nothing critical to say after reading or watching or listening to anything (emphasis on any, not everything) may well be too preoccupied with managing their social risk. Praising something renowned or old costs nothing; disagreeing with it thoughtfully requires taking a stand. Most people would rather not.