Zadie Smith, Facebook, and the Game Layer
In the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has written an interesting review of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network that doubles as a critique of Facebook. Smith rhetorically positions herself as a sort of luddite or dinosaur, a defender of what she calls "Person 1.0" against the debasements wrought upon -- and by -- a generation of "People 2.0." Drawing on the arguments of Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, Smith suggests that Facebook entraps us "in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore":
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX
When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?
Initially, I felt that Smith's argument bordered on alarmism -- a sort of critical low-hanging fruit for the Smart Set. Who, after all, really thinks that the existence of a memorial means the person so memorialized continues "in some sense" to live? Doesn't Facebook merely supplement our personhood, not replace it, giving us new channels through which to express or constitute whatever greater totality we are? Didn't advertisers think of us as little more than our capacity to buy well before Facebook ever came into the world?
After a bit of thought, though, I recalled recently seeing this video on the construction of a "game layer" over reality, which speaks very much to Smith's concerns--
--and I came to think Smith may have a point, though I also offer this video as a way of reformulating or restating Smith's argument. In the terms of this reformulation, the issue isn't so much that we become 2.0 folk when we enmesh ourselves in electronic systems such as Facebook. Instead, the question is one that is relevant in all areas of political, economic, and social significance: Who designs the systems we are embedded within? Who gets to build -- and who has the technical expertise to build -- the frameworks or, as Priebatsch puts it in this video, the "game dynamics" that incentivize certain behaviors and suppress others? In an era increasingly obsessed with behavioral economics and its myriad "nudges," who is nudging you -- and how?
Zadie Smith on Joseph O’Neill
(Cross-posted at Plasma Pool.)
After reading Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland, I took a look at Zadie Smith’s fascinating take-down — “Two Paths for the Novel” in the NYRB — of O’Neill as a representative of what she calls “lyrical Realism,” a review which might be characterized as an indirect attack on the brand of Realism most commonly associated with James Wood — lyrical, (apparently) apolitical, overly committed to models of deep subjectivity as the marker of the Real. The problem with O’Neill, for Smith, is perhaps that he writes too well; he is a too-perfect embodiment of what we want from what we sometimes take to calling Realism. Every time a political question comes up, he artfully diverts his narrator’s attention to the beauty of cantilevered clouds or some such aesthetic thing.
I am of two minds regarding this review. One mind is satisfied that Smith conducts a relatively sharp reading of the many ways O’Neill defers his novel’s — potentially hackneyed — theme and materials through various forms of mediating irony and self-aware qualification. Rather than have Hans, his narrator, come out and say that he wants to use cricket as an allegory of assimilation into the U.S. (we all learn the rules of the game! rah rah democracy!), he places such choice declarations into the mouth of the character of the self-consciously “post-colonial” (to use James Wood’s term, though he is perhaps better described as merely cheerfully colonial) Chuck Ramkissoon. Smith is, additionally, very smart when describing the ways political material gets startlingly excised from the realm of the Real. Hans wonders: “Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction that posed a real threat? I had no idea; and to be truthful, and to touch on my real difficulty, I had little interest. I didn’t really care.” Worried about the Iraq war? Well, let’s take a moment to reflect on the beauty of clouds… Was there something about a war you were discussing? Though Smith doesn’t say so, the novel also fails — more grievously in my view — to build a compelling narrative justification for Hans’ interest in Chuck by its end, and so — I think — fails even on its own highly aestheticized terms. There are plenty of pretty sentences, though. Hundreds of pages’ worth. Overall, I actually really liked the novel, though my opinion of the book is not my subject here.
Says my other mind, Smith’s attack on this mythical beast, capital-R Realism — and her celebration of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as one of its most promising anti-types — remains underdeveloped (though I do come away from her article very eager to read McCarthy’s novel). What, in Smith’s view, prevents a thriving Realism from coexisting happily with forms of anti-Realism? The answer is, as Smith has to acknowledge, nothing: “In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.” What’s the real problem with Realism, then? I’d argue that Smith is not really attacking “lyrical Realism” as a theoretical approach to getting at what’s real — deep subjectivities or infinitely nuanced personalities or whatever the real happens to be constituted by this week — but rather is expressing her frustration with a set of established literary-critical institutions — publishers, reviewers, readers, (some) scholars — that lavish too much prestige upon it (Realism) at the expense of more experimental modes, institutions that moreover assign authenticity to certain identities at the expense of others. The literary pie is small, she seems to be saying, and we’re all scrounging around for whatever crumbs we can find.
But, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the term Realism uncomfortably conflates an epistemology with a genre. Genres have histories — they rise, they fall, sometimes they rise again — but epistemologies, though historically constrained, must by necessity claim to have an objective, if still contingent, character. Smith’s claim against lyrical Realism is based on an assessment of the failure of the literary marketplace to sustain multiple roads, but the particulars of her attack grow out of an assessment of the particular epistemic failures of focusing on deep subjectivity and hypercomplex personalities as the expense of the political, the existential, and other dimensions of the Real.
And yet by admitting that in fatter times we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, Smith admits in essence that there is no theoretical reason why O’Neill can’t write a Realist novel today, lyrical or otherwise. Indeed, individuals are free to write pretty much anything they want whenever they want, from whatever epistemic vantage point they prefer. There are only institutional barriers to his doing so, and a system of publishing — and power — that values what he does a certain way. Ditto for McCarthy’s anti-Realism. Smith’s failure to distinguish clearly — or rather her rapid oscillation — between epistemic and literary-institutional definitions of Realism and her assertion (without evidence) that literary publishing is in straights very dire indeed seem to me to be the biggest weaknesses in an otherwise good overview of some pressing representational choices facing writer folk today.
I’m not quite sure what we’re left with once we’ve made that distinction. A call to reform the publishing industry? A reeducation of the reader? An expansion of minds of critics? All of these would be worthy goals, but would have little to do with Realism as such and everything to do with the structures (political, economic, social, etc.) that value it. And: What reforms? What reeducation? What precise sort of mind-expansion?
On Zadie Smith’s "On Beauty"
I finished reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty this morning for a reading group that I'm helping to run. I have a sort of mixed reaction to the book. On the one hand, it's perfect for the argument that I am making in the introduction to my dissertation, which begins with a careful reading of a pair of essays that Smith recently wrote for The Guardian ("Fail Better" and "Read Better"). On the other hand, I sort of feel that the book is mediocre in a lot of ways. Its first part is well-developed and promising--and the correlations with Howards End seem initially interesting--but the characters and situations of the first part dissolve into a sea uninteresting episodes which Smith tries unsuccessfully to bring together again at the end of the novel.
Very little of consequence happens to these characters by the end of the novel. They do not quite suffer in believably human ways. Moreover, Smith has stripped her language of some of the more energetic syntactical pyrotechnics of White Teeth--not that I necessarily loved that novel either, but one got the sense that there was a raging ambition and energy to the writer of those sentences. On Beauty has all the marks of a rush job--a novel derived from its themes backwards--and not a novel where (a) the particular interiorities of its characters and historical moment and (b) the general thematic concerns that motivate its structure get generated at the same time, in dialogue with one another.
This is all to say that I am in the position of having to write about a novel I don't love. What to do? My plan is to write about On Beauty--perhaps a bit less than I would otherwise have, but still, it's relevant to my argument. Which is a sign to me that I have become, over the last couple years, transformed from someone who was quite happy writing impressionistic literary-critical essays to someone who has become strangely (for me) dedicated to following pretty strictly the logic of my own argument even at the expense of my personal aesthetic judgements. More generally, I have to admit that I often find myself in this position when talking about the postironists. While I recognize that their emerging aesthetic constitutes one of the most interesting and significant present-day attempts to articulate a new form of literary community and culture, I'm not always the biggest fan of all their books. Of the authors I'm writing about, only David Foster Wallace and William Gibson (who is not, strictly speaking, in the coterie of postironists) consistently live up to my expectations. Even Ellison and Pynchon I find to be choppy sometimes.