Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)


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Reconstructing The Public Sphere: from The Paris Review to Intelligent Life / Andrew Calcutt

 

Abstract: Delivered in an approximation of the feature-writing style that it critiques, the essay charts the specific strategy of using magazines as the basis for the rejuvenation of the public sphere. The writerly norms established through the Paris Review and the Modern Review express changing social conditions and their impact upon intellectual strategies derived from print media.

 

<1> This essay is a brief comparison of The Paris Review with The Modern Review of the 1990s and a spate of new magazines which seek to review modern times from the vantage point of a new, cosmopolitan citizenry. I have chosen these particular publications because in their various ways and at different times they seem indicative of the expectations associated with publishing, that is, the entry of writing and criticism into the public domain; which is also to say that they themselves say something about the changing character of the public sphere at specific moments in its development.

<2> What follows, then, is an attempt to hear what is being said about the public sphere by some of the more highbrow or upmarket magazines which have figured in its continuous re-configuration during the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st.

<3> The Paris Review (TPR) was first published in 1953. Its American editors established it in the eponymous city where expatriate Americans had already become an established part of the arts world. They sought to distinguish their review from other literary magazines by deprioritizing criticism and emphasizing good writing. Another, related aim was to avoid self-interested position-mongering and promote imaginative writing for its own sake.

<4> Though now based largely in New York, TPR is still very much with us today. The list of writers discovered by TPR during the past half-century is extensive and illustrious, including Samuel Beckett and Jonathan Franzen. But the magazine is perhaps best known for Writers At Work, its long-running series of extended interviews with writers about their work and how they do it.

<5> The first of three collections of these interviews was issued in 2007 by Canongate, with an introduction by current TPR editor Philip Gourevitch. Those featured in volume one include Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, James M. Cain, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway - already an impressive list and this is just a third of the way through the alphabet. All of those interviewed in this first collection were born either in the nineteenth century or in the first half of the twentieth: its interviewees represent the first and second generations of TPR's Writers at Work.

<6> The format and the process behind the original interviews - detailed questions and even more detailed answers, typically the outcome of more than one meeting and a series of reciprocal revisions - is the kind of collaborative endeavor that some people like to pretend is only as old as the internet. It is hardly surprising that this organic procedure yielded some piercingly sharp insights into the labor-of-love process of individual writers. Given the time and effort involved in the composition of these interviews, it would be unfortunate if they had not done so. Perhaps even more revealing, however, are the insights gained from reading between the lines of the interviews, with an eye for what these writers, unlike many of their successors, do not feel the need to talk about.

<7> No one here admits to suffering from the postmodern condition, whereby writers and all other artists are condemned to shuffle between artifice and 'reality' in an endless and infinitely unsatisfactory dance of self-awareness. Instead of feeling walled in by it, for these generations the space between technique and experience is the wall upon which writers work; covering it is what they do.

<8> Neither hand-wringing nor nervously applauding the ping-pong between art and reality, these writers display a deep-seated conviction that writing is a kind of transformation, in which the writer uses technique as the means to get beyond not only the superficiality of transitory appearance but also the banality of everyday experience. By writing, by working up appearance and reality into an artificial, artistic substance which takes the recognizable form of poem, novel or short story, appearance and reality are fused, and in their con-fusion they are clarified, transformed into something more illuminating than either appearance or reality alone. The fact that these two opposites are never entirely separate but exist only as a constant coupling, need not be a cause for concern.

<9> Those who shared some of these expectations of writing range across the spectrum from James M. Cain to T.S. Eliot. For both of them, as for many others interviewed here, writing was a compressed re-rendering of a world that human beings had themselves rendered: it was humanity squared. Hence when compared to matters of life and death, like football it might well be described as 'more important than that'; and its working methods certainly merited the kind of detailed description pioneered in the TPR series, Writers At Work.

<10> But writing is a social being. To achieve the significance thus accorded to it, the writer's work had to be distributed and disseminated as well as produced. Drawing upon human experience as it did, being a representation of some part of humanity, there had to come a moment when the written formulation of human experience, the latter having presented itself to writers who represented it in artistic form, was re-presented to the world upon which it drew and of which it was a drawing. To achieve the kind of existence that these writers expected of their work, writing had to come out into the open; it should enter into the public domain. To qualify as such, writers must be published (and not just for financial reasons).

<11> By taking a long way round to the relatively short word, "publication", I am trying to avoid the shortcut whereby publishing appears either as mere technicality or simple, commercial transaction; attempting instead to establish the dynamic underlying what was taken to be "writing for its own sake". A moment in this movement has already been described; but there is another, complementary episode. For just as the process of writing meant the transformation of both appearance and experience into something different from either, so each written work launched into the world was expected to add to the sum total of representations of it, and therefore, at least in some small way to transform - make different - the world of written representation.

<12> In this interpretation of writing, publishing and their social significance, representations of the world and the world of representations are two episodes of transformation which are themselves continually transformed. Taken together they constitute a circuit of transformation.

<13> Such terms are not used by the writers interviewed in TPR, still less by its editors, who defined their role by rejection of theoretically informed criticism. Nonetheless the writers interviewed here share a series of expectations pertaining to the transformative circuit of writing and publishing. They expected writers to be conversant with writing - not only writing of a particular genre or from the point-of-view of specific social groups, but writing as a whole, where the whole encompasses the historical development - transformation - of writing and its various, contemporary manifestations. They also assumed that the development (transformation) of writing has been and will continue to be a sequence of successive explorations whereby writers struggle to find the appropriate form and content in which to encapsulate the times in which they live (so that as bearers of their own work they represent the times which they re-present in writing), and that this struggle takes place intra-personally (writers going up against their own limitations), inter-personally (writers as rivals for the prize of appropriating the moment - getting it right - in their writing), and against earlier forms of writing which should be first recognized as time-pieces (of times past) and then re-formulated in order to establish particular forms pertinent to the specific content of the day.

<14> Set against these expectations of writing, to publish was to make an attempt on a continually moving canon. Not necessarily to destroy it, but in an effort to be the one who moves it on. On the other hand, to be published yet not advance the canon was to be refused entry to it. Only those who made a difference to writing were accorded the status of 'good' writing. Accordingly, if these interviewees judge a piece of writing 'good' - whether they are talking about their own work or someone else's, this means that it passes the test not only of saying something well but also of saying something previously unsaid, and in a new form (or variation thereof) not previously used to say it in. Repetition of either form or content cannot be 'well said', but can only be described as derivative, which in their terms constitutes failure.

<15> Thus they celebrated originality. Yet in another sense all these expectations of writing and publishing, and the work of published writers who attempted to live up to such expectations, were at the same time derivative. They were derived from the existence of the modern public sphere, just as they also helped to produce it.

<16> Positioned between private individuals and the state, the public sphere is best known as the crucible of politics, where private interests are said to be tested in debate and tempered against principles associated with the common good. Here, the banality of self interest (what's good for me) is transformed into what's good for humanity, so long as it can pass muster in the public sphere. Furthermore, whether the state takes certain measures and to what extent private firms pursue their particular interests, is meant to depend on whether the claims made for such measures have measured up to the exacting standards and agreed principles operating in the public sphere.

<17> Of course the operation of the public sphere has never been absolute. A recurring feature of modern history is that might was frequently proved right, regardless of public deliberations. On the other hand, as and when 'the pen is mightier than the sword', it is so because that which is penned enters into the public sphere and shares in its influence. Neither was the influence of the public sphere confined to politics; rather politics, and the public sphere in which political debate occurred, have had a decisive influence on other spheres which thereby came to resemble it.

<18> During the bourgeois revolution (or evolution, as in the UK) when politics emerged as the centre stage of social transformation, a stage for the dramatic and sometimes violent presentation of whether or not society should undergo further transformations and of what kind, transformation also became the core activity of the act of representation known as writing - not only writing such as journalism and pamphleteering which was directly connected to political debate and its prosecution of social transformation, but all kinds of writing from further afield.

 

<19> Writing, the set of practices which in the feudal epoch had been understood as the duplication of God's will, was itself transformed into poetry, drama and fiction which were seen to arise from the human process of transforming appearance and reality into art - a process which like politics operates as a sequence of contests, in this case within and between writers and the forms in which they work.

<20> The irony of The Paris Review is that its editors were seeking to move away from all that. In the 1950s, they did not share the politicized urgency of 'the Thirties'; nor, in a decade which ended with 'the end of ideology', were they attracted by the contentious, literary theorizing to which some aspects of politics had already retreated. Yet for all their non-partisan emphasis on 'good writing', even this, at this time, was related to the essentially political and politically contested possibility of social transformation, and derived from the public sphere in which, along with disputes over the merits and limitations of artists and writers, the possibility of social transformation had been continually scrutinized.

<21> The irony of The Modern Review (TMR) is that it defined itself against the condition of irony, but ended up reproducing it. Formed in 1991 by Toby Young (son of the author of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto) and Cosmo Landesman (American-born son of proto-Beat bohemian Jay Landesman), with financial backing and editorial direction from Julie Burchill, at that time queen of a new court of columnists, TMR was launched the following year with the strap-line 'low culture for highbrows'. Extolling the virtues of boy band Take That as opposed to 'Take Five' or Beethoven's Fifth, TMR polemicized against the disengagement then associated with postmodernism, and itself engaged in a series of wars against New Left academic obscurantism and older forms of elitist exclusion.

<22> But these wars turned out to be phoney. TMR agreed with one of the founding statements of the New Left, that 'culture is ordinary.' It railed against the recent incarnation of rootless, footloose and fancy free academia, only to embrace that same methodology in which the battle of ideas hangs on fastest quip, hippest quote and slickest put-down; which is to say that it is not a battle at all but a beauty contest where beauty can only be skin deep.

<23> TMR's timing was close, but no cigar. Billed as quarterly, it could have been the first of a new kind of periodical: sporadically. After seven editions issued in the folded-broadsheet format of early Rolling Stone, TMR folded altogether. Landesman went to the Sunday Times while Young moved temporarily to New York. A couple of years later, Julie Burchill and Charlotte Raven fronted a couple more issues, published in standard magazine format, before the Review went dark once again. By this time New Labour was in office, and TMR's moment had already come and gone.

<24> I was prompted to write for TMR because it seemed to me that Toby Young had a strong point: there was a need for combative writing about culture, a kind of writing about kinds of culture that would be both accessible and intelligent; and combative because in the UK we had just lived through probably the most confrontational decade since the 1930s (not counting the war-torn first half of the forties which were equally remarkable for their domestic consensus against foreign powers). Cultural criticism, one might plausibly have thought, should reflect and engage with the temper of these ill-tempered times; it should occupy a hotly contested debating chamber and serve as a culturally inflected public sphere.

<25> What neither I nor Toby Young had thought through were the wider effects of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As Russell Jacoby was among the first to explain, these events were momentous not only in geo-political terms but also in that they signaled the end of the end of utopia - and with the demise of utopia, the future of the public sphere was also cast into doubt.

<26> Pace Engels and his clear cut distinction between 'utopian' and 'scientific' socialism, the socialist or liberal utopias that were brought to an end at this time, had also been in some sense scientific. That is, the modern good place was constructed in the image of how to really get there; it was taken to be accessible only by means of human-centred social transformation, for which capitalism itself provided the basis, depending on your position, either by its continuation, reformation or revolutionary overthrow. Utopia was thus not only a distant dream but also closely associated with the pressing reality of social transformation, and this was at its most pressing in the public sphere. Conversely, for utopia to have been ended by the ideological and political ramifications of the demise of the Soviet Union, the public sphere must have been heavily curtailed too - at least in its role as the place where political opponents fight for or against the real possibility of social transformation.

<27> But what happens to cultural debate which has tried to position itself as an addition to underlying political conflict and its expression in the public sphere? It transpired that TMR was attempting to float a cultural debate on top of a political confrontation which no longer existed. Hence towards the end of the decade this much-vaunted publication sank with hardly a trace. More importantly, the public sphere went a long way down with it.

<28> This is not to declare the end of politics but its diminution. The big tent of modern politics was framed around a single question: will the bourgeois revolution be the last or the first? The fall of the Berlin Wall had the effect of deconstructing the last remaining non-bourgeois model of social organization - a significant absence even though the Soviet Union model was already badly awry. Where there is no alternative, there can be no question of alternatives, which is to say that social transformation is no longer posed as a political question. Even though the capitalist contradiction between social production and private appropriation continues to present itself, the public sphere is no longer called into existence as the central place where this is represented in the question of politics, and opposing groups of people do not habitually see themselves represented in contested answers to it.

<29> In these circumstances the political world carries on, but instead of being a compressed version of the wider world which was thus represented in it, it has become unhinged from the concerns and aspirations of the majority. The Washington and Westminster Villages are cut off by a rising tide of disengagement, while floods of people have been disenfranchised not by a dictator's dissolution of Parliament (or even the Presidential veto of Congress) but by the dissolution of the key question in politics - transformation? - and the disaggregation of the social forces which previously posed it.

<30> In the absence not of politics but of its erstwhile significance, in certain circles the hope is that systematized signification - an altogether different kind of representation - will acquire sufficient substance to make up for the loss of engagement previously prompted by the political question of social transformation. Hope's corollary is here the fear that unless we promote the potentially socializing effects of this other mode of representation, namely, culture, we will soon be Bowling Alone (Puttnam 2001) in a Nightmare Alley where only the hostility is mutual.

<31> In the terms of this essay, this means transferring much of our psycho-social investment from politics to culture, in the belief that transformations already recognizable in literature and other aspects of the cultural sphere can match the coherence which came about, ironically, as a consequence of political divisions derived from the question of social transformation.

<32> Thus at all levels of government - international, national, regional and local - cultural policy has expanded to take up the slack of depoliticization. Corporations are in on it too, except that their cultural policy is branded as branding. While most cultural policy is oriented from elites to the masses, there are some policy mechanisms which operate between elites and among them. Although they are also commercial entities with advertising sales strategies and subscription targets, Monocle, Portfolio and Intelligent Life, three magazines launched in 2007, are perhaps best viewed in this light.

<33> Monocle's worldview is summarized by founder and editor-in-chief Tyler Brule, the man behind Wallpaper magazine until he sold out to AOL Time Warner. On the last editorial page of the first issue of Monocle (March 2007), Brule divulges the principles by which he foresaw what is now behind us, i.e. 241pp of the premier edition. These include "focus on global affairs, business, culture, design and the best products/services on the market; be an oasis from celebrities and low production values."

<34> Announcing Monocle as a deserter from celebrity culture is, though of course not in so many words, a way of saying that the magazine is not for 'low' people whose most tangible connection with the wider world is through the iconic individuals - celebrities - which millions of others also identify with. Instead Monocle is aimed at Globos, the globe-trotting version of the bourgeois bohemians (Bobos) identified in the late 1990s by David Brooks. These are people in elevated positions where they can make a difference, but the difference they can make is here couched in terms of discernment and aesthetic judgment. Thus developments in 'global affairs' and 'business' are presented not in autonomous terms but are framed as an extension of culture, so that discerning, highly placed individuals can scrutinize them, making judgments and endorsements almost as if they were paintings or even wallpaper.

<35> This amounts to an aestheticization of everyday life, but without the deracinated irony often associated with this term during the late 1980s and 1990s (the period of TMR). Instead, Monocle looks towards the creation of a cultural public sphere, where not only consumption but also citizenship is couched in cultural terms.

<36> The same goes for Economist offshoot Intelligent Life. Strictly speaking this is not a new launch, but the re-launch of an ex-annual which is now a quarterly magazine. More than the timescale has changed: the re-launch edition (Autumn 2007) no longer imitates the size, shape or paper of The Economist, as its predecessor did; instead it breaks new ground in the extravagant use of white space. Editor Edward Carr, pictured in business suit and white shirt minus tie, declares 'we are lifestyle with substance.'

<37> The image, surely, is of lifestyle so well constructed as to be substantial - the kind of substance that Globo-readers can collectively recognize themselves in, and by dint of self-recognition go on to constitute themselves not only as a readership but also as a quasi-class apart. Ditto Portfolio. Launched in May 2007 and published by Conde Nast, Portfolio is more clearly rooted in business journalism: editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman is ex-Wall Street Journal and her inaugural editor's letter is a paean to business and the power inherent in it. Yet the magazine is also addressed to powerful, business people who seek to behave with civility and a sense of civics, and Portfolio invites them to identify themselves by entering into a consideration of what this means in today's conditions. From writer and publisher to reader, the appeal is to pitch oneself into a sphere of description and deliberation in which social transformation is indescribable and non-debatable, but plenty of other progressive circuits remain open.

<38> It is too early to tell whether these magazines will thrive, or if any of them is going to succeed in constituting disparate readers into a recognizable social group, as The Face famously did in Britain during the 1980s. A more important question than the life or death of these individual titles, however, is whether a culturally-inflected quasi-public sphere can come into existence without the tangible presence of social transformation, given that this presence was a precondition for both the historical development of the bourgeois public sphere and its wider influence on art and culture.

<39> However, this recent crop of upmarket magazines already shows that there are big bucks and powerful backers for the idea of a cultural public sphere, and for its putative roles as class signifier and social sealant. But when there is no substantial debate about alternative ways of organising society (the debate upon which the public sphere was founded), it is highly debatable whether the kind of cultural discussion on offer will provide the credible, cohering consequences which its lobbyists ascribe to it.

 

<40> TPR, unlike its near-namesake The Partisan Review, was not closely associated with the role of the public intellectual. The priorities of this transatlantic publication - good writing and the personal methods for achieving it - were more oriented to the private realm, towards individual writers and their direct address to the reader, each of them in rooms of their own. Yet at the time of its inception, such was the strength of the public sphere that TPR and its subject matter could not but be related to it. Even in the privacy of a room of one's own, the essentially political question of transformation made its presence felt.

<41> In the early 1990s TMR was largely unsuccessful in transferring the intensity of recent political conflict onto the cultural terrain. Its culture wars turned out to be phony, not least because by that time the open question of social transformation - posed so starkly only a decade or so previously - had already been closed by the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the public sphere collapsed along with it.

<42> Fast forward a further 15 years and there are a number of attempts to rebuild the public sphere, not least through the publication of transatlantic, culture-oriented magazines. Whether without its core question politics can be renewed and sustained in this cultural mode, is open to question.

 

Works Cited

Jacoby, Russell (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Basic Books Inc.

Putnam, Robert (2001) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster.

 

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