they don’t make em like they used to (because of the passage of time)
and also capitalism ofc
I’ve got to stop reading stuff that annoys me; it’s bad for the digestion. However, stuff that annoys me also irritates me enough to write, so you gotta hear both sides I guess. The side I decided to hear this week was Jason Farago’s piece in the New York Times about the unchanging sameness of 21st century culture, a point I generally agree with but not the way he argued it.1 (Ctrl+F in the article for “capitalism” and “corporate” or even “neoliberalism”—0 results!!!!!) It’s true, I think, that most cultural fields are at a standstill, especially music, fashion, and interior design, or the innovations we see are so minor that they represent passing trends rather than genuinely new ideas. That being said, lots of art is still very good (I’m listening to Bad Bunny’s new album as I write this and it bangs2), it’s just that very little is really new, in the sense of creating new artistic paradigms that are distinctly different from previous forms. Some of this is simply a matter of perspective and frame of reference—it can be hard to follow change in the moment, and it’s impossible to have a meaningful grasp of all of the artistic culture that exists in like, the whole world—but yeah, I think it’s fair to say there’s a general stagnation of culture under U.S-dominated world capitalism, what Sam Miller-MacDonald called “an empire of same.”
Farago decides to name this stagnation an “eternal present,” which is weird because that phrase already has a very specific and outdated meaning in the context of narrative art. Realist novels after WWII were often set in an “eternal present,” in which very little about the modern world was supposed to change—more technological innovation, sure, but not revolutions or major shifts in liberal-capitalist lifeways. People in novels of the eternal present grew up, went to college, got jobs, got married, got divorced, and died. At some point, they also got cell phones.3 But the literary fiction of the last decade or so is notably not set in the eternal present: it’s usually set in specific parts of the recent past (the Covid lockdowns, the 1990s), or it borrows the conventions of science fiction and fantasy (often to the embarrassment of both those conventions and the literary novelists trying to write them.) In fiction, the eternal present is basically over; the eternal present is the past. What we have instead, both in fiction and IRL, is eternal flux and uncertainty, the feeling that anything can happen tomorrow and it will probably be bad. It’s the Age of Anxiety, according to Arcade Fire in an album that also wasn’t exactly a major innovation but was still very good (and once again it’s a shame that their lead singer’s dick exploded in New Orleans and he died.)
Anxiety itself is probably the major artistic innovation of the time, especially when it comes to fiction; if you’re thinking “wow anxiety sucks and is a terrible emotion to pin a meaningful artistic movement to” yeah, well, not all artistic innovations are good. Farago argues that innovation itself may be overrated, and again I sort of agree but I also don’t: artistic innovation is probably something that is always going to occur, unless deliberately squashed by a legal or religious apparatus or some other overarching cultural bureaucracy. Capitalism too has a squashing effect on innovation: it turns out that the material means by which art, music, movies, novels, and fashion can be created and sold strongly affects that which is created and sold. I’ve complained about this before, but a lot of novels I read these days are merely good, when they ought to be great; they aren’t properly edited, and seem to be designed to be marketed more than read. These novels are created and sold, essentially, for social media: for the anxiety of decontextualized fragments being viewed and commented on, for selling the writer’s already-established personal brand. This is also why so many of these novels try to be political or otherwise thematically obvious: they’re ostensibly trying to use art to create social good in anxious and turbulent times, but they’re also trying to receive favorable approval from a commentariat that expects and reacts well to political gestures and thematic obviousness. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche recently observed: “You know, I don’t really find contemporary fiction very interesting … I’m constantly buying books … especially first novels. But I almost never finish them. I remember recently reading this book, and I thought, My God, everybody is good in this book. And that’s a lie. Literature should show us all sides of ourselves. And I read this book, and everyone was ideologically correct. Everyone had all the right opinions.” Writing characters who all have the right opinions makes perfect sense if these books are intended for an audience whose primary form of entertainment is finding and policing the right opinions, i.e., if they’re meant for Twitter and written with a brain full of Twitter. And if most novels don’t sell many copies these days, well, they aren’t meant to: they aren’t meant for the general public. A writer with a big-ish audience on Twitter is meant to sell to Twitter, to a slice of the public familiar with that discourse and that specific set of anxieties about being judged.
The next change in fiction—and I do think there’s a vibe shift coming—will probably be related to Twitter’s demise. We might see writers migrate over to a different social media site with similar dynamics, or the pressures of social media itself may be superseded or supplemented by a different bad thing (I worry about AI, not as something that can really replace writers, but as something that can degrade already degrading working conditions). The one advantage of living in such uncertain and shifting times is that whatever the new stupid thing is, it won’t last forever, or even for a generation. Personally, I hope Instagram tanks next so that we can finally have some interesting interior design again. (I’ve been dreaming of home ownership and scrolling Zillow—it’s just depressing dark grey kitchen after depressing dark grey kitchen. This is due to the common wisdom that houses with dark grey kitchens sell better, in part because they look more like the dark grey kitchens so boringly common on Instagram.4 Call me when there’s some color and lightness, some actual joy in making art and being alive, something other than the anxiety of selling and being sold.)
Credit to BDM for bringing up the Farago essay and changing my plans for this week. I was originally going to write about horror movies!!!! next week I guess
Bad Bunny’s artistic innovation is “what if a guy was sad at a club at 4 am” and while that may not be a revolutionary new art form per se, you gotta admit he nails it.
Cell phones do change plotting considerably. It’s fun to rewatch Buffy and realize just how many episodes would be totally different if the characters could text each other “hey there’s a monster after u”
I read an article about the dark grey kitchen thing but now Google is bad and I can’t find it. That’s another possible lever in a coming cultural shift—the scatterbrained inability to find anything useful online.