Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

there were the seeds of something interesting there- I think Julian Maclaren-Ross is a figure worthy of examination- and maybe Soho of yore deserves purple prose, but THIS purple?

His first book from the 1990s on missing people was very good, but that was long long ago.

yes it's the essay that led to that missing people book that i'm remembering i think, also -- was it the same piece? -- something on how sociopathic children can be w/o it being abnormal exactly

(also also a little booklet on farming round the time of BOVID SPONGIFORM, which i bought my mum as a present, and did start rereading more recently -- but i don't recall my recent conclusion)

Yes, I read the Soho article. I agree that it was purple, or perhaps just flamboyantly casual. I didn't really buy it.

The one thing I've liked by him was: James & Stevenson.

re gossip, he wants to stress that he is part of the group of gossips, and party to the gossip. He is very keen to emphasise how often he has met Norman Mailer and everyone else.

I didn't mind the Soho article as a piece of uncritical nostalgic fluff. I feel oddly attached to that particular version of the Soho mythos.

Made me think of bullshit like this
https://youtu.be/cjRLhkBi1gI

I read O'Hagan on New Romantics. (He uses a brief para to say the name doesn't matter and means nothing - an unhelpful attitude. He could at least have noted Duran's actual use of it in a song.)

It's mostly not *factually* wrong, as far as I can tell. But it's characteristically obnoxious. This writer almost always comes across as arrogant and as writing too fast and carelessly.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

really enjoyed emily wilson’s piece on three new translations of the oresteia. vivid descriptions of the mechanics of metaphor and politics, and in particular the role of women in the play and the translations.

i have seen the oresteia performed and i admit i struggled despite a vivid presentation. wish i’d had this to guide me at the time and it makes me want to read the trilogy, tho admittedly in greek rather than in translation.

also includes an angry attack on diversity in classics academia and the translations under review themselves.

It also has the problem, first diagnosed on ILM, of A-level cliché. "If you think about it, New Romantics were braver and more outrageous than indie musicians!" would hardly have been a new thought at the start of Tom Ewing's poptimist movement 20 years ago -- it doesn't bear repeating as a new thought now.

What struck me is that this argument, unlike something Ewing would write, didn't actually talk about the music at all - it's the subcultures he's comparing, where indie fans = political scolds and new romantics = more radical because they were messing with sexuality. This is an unconvincing binary, but also the way he sets it up is very old fashioned because today's kid subcultures are clearly a synthesis of these two - both highly politicized and interested in queerness.

Emily Wilson's piece is terrific, the discussion of the politics of translation is really striking better notes. Bet the letters in the next issue will be a laugh.

Emily Wilson: good when she analyses the texts, demonstrating her considerable expertise.

Bad when she attacks others for being 'elderly'.

Maybe one day she'll discover that getting old isn't that much fun. It probably isn't made better by people complaining at you for the sin of having managed not to die yet.

Emily Wilson (49, not old or young) was making a point about the demographics of translators of classical literature. That did not stop her from enjoying the translation by a 77 year old man the most.

Is there anything good on the politics of New Romantics? Couldn't understand it from what O'Hagan was talking about. He made this link with Brexit that seemed the laziest you could do.

I'd like to think someone like Penman would at least re-listen to the records.

simon price wd be my go-to here i think: dave rimmer's "like punk never happened" is very readable and i'm fond of dave -- i stayed in his berlin flat a couple of times in the 80s and he's chums w/biba kpof of all ppl -- but it kind of smash-hitses round the politics tbh

or my adam ant book if i ever get it together lol

xyzzz otm on Wilson, she's not attacking the translators for being elderly any more than she is attacking them for being white or men

49 is young, sorry if this offends

comments? closed!

*types in the box, pressing send to check whether I have been banned (for a week)*

Meanwhile this is what the former editor of the TLS is up to:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/john-murray-reveals-forthcoming-books-podcast-stig-abell-1222179

Looking forward to having David Baddiel tell me about American Classics.

Excellent set of pieces on a novel that could be read alongside The Oresteia:

‘The unknown woman herself becomes the threshold between spheres and appears to initiate her own erasure.’ Matthew Turner on the architecture of fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel ‘Malina’ https://t.co/SJchAMrUTf pic.twitter.com/3arn3SmfzW

— frieze (@frieze_magazine) September 17, 2019

Merve Emre is good:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/22/ingeborg-bachmann-meticulous-one/

Timely! I literally just read that the Basque translation of Bachmann's 'Simultan' ('Three Paths to the Lake' in English) won best translation prize this year. A collection of five stories I've not read yet. Thanks for that link btw.

np. Three Paths to the Lake is not covered in Emre's piece but it's good not bad.

Vaguely related: I am reading Adam Mars-Jones's new novel(la), BOX HILL, a very funny and engaging story of a frankly monstrous relationship.

T.J. Clark on Pissarro and Cezanne: observant about what's in paintings, often good at finding words to describe them. But also full of pretentious, preening verbiage, and allowed to spin it out for a ludicrous 8 or 9 pages.

Might have been OK if they'd said: You can have one page for this, use it to say what you really want to say.

i was quite enjoying that piece, but had only got one page in before the LRB got dropped behind the bathroom radiator, and i haven't bothered to go online to finish it.

reading James Meek on conspiracy theories in the latest LRB, and it continues an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with Meek, which too a certain extent gloms onto my feelings about Lanchester's LRB writing. overall, what i was left with after reading the piece was that it was as much about Meek's engagement with it as it was the subject itself. Maybe i need to put that differently, the treatment of conspiracy theories felt summary and underdone, treating what is already well known and covered elsewhere, as a major topic of what i've got into the bad habit of calling 'the current conjuncture', and the bits that remain of the piece when you remove that are to do with Meek's struggle to understand people without doubt who believe things that are not true. I don't think that is valueless, btw, and in fact the closing paragraph about the greatest damage that epistemology – without doubt, without curiosity – does, is to the notion of learning, is important.

other things i took from it was Popper's original notion of the 'conspiracy theory,' that is the predilection to conspiracy as a mode of thinking: "Popper's notion of conspiracy theory referred to a personal predisposition that could attach itself to anything, precisely because it was nested in the holder's brain." Meek judges, I think correctly, that the development into 'conspiracy theories' as situations is beneficial to that mode of thinking.

Meek contests the assertion that QAn0n can be considered dangerous, like al-Qaeda, outside of a couple of examples, because of Q's instructions to passivity. Define 'dangerous' maybe (epistemic danger, or the danger that one nut goes and kills someone – which Meek acknowledges), but it did make me wonder what the reaction of QAn0n conspiracy theorists would be to a Trump loss. Whether it results in personally damaging destabilising disbelief, with a world coming crashing down, potentially creating a desire for violence, or, in a more benign possibility, whether Trump himself gets converted into a secular saviour, Barbarossa like, into a figure capable of making a future return, perhaps in another form.

Still, leaving those thoughts aside, the overall impression, as with Lanchester, is of a piece converting contemporary complexity, founded to a degree in frameworks like social media and the internet, paradigmatically different to previous frameworks of social communication, requiring new sets of knowledge, into a sort of LRB housestyle pabulum, easily digestible for an implied readership too superannuated to keep up with new concepts. it feels fuddy-duddy, not up to date with current thinking, old man struggling with the world, sort of writing. I'm being v unfair to meek, he's a lot better than lanchester, but i find meek in some respects to be a weak version failure of the strong lanchester version.

as i say, I may be being unfair. I'm not very knowledgeable on conspiracy theory, but i still may have a much better grounding in it, just by being on twitter, say, and that means I don't see the value of Meek's summary. Still, when I look at the set of thinking he's summarising, it seems a bit of a backdated number.

although they're only one voice, and there's often stuff to disagree with, someone like @Aelkus operates in spaces and with tools - video gaming, memes, infosec (with a military analyst background), and a good awareness of contemporary theory - which make them much more illuminating on the given subject. they feel like the right tools and frameworks with which to be analysing the object in question, in part because they comprise the platform on which the object is operating/feeding/infecting.

For example, Meek covers the problem of institutional trust, and the idea that conspiracy theories delegitimise those institutions, in what i would consider a fairly straight way - delegitimisation of institutions is bad because it reduces their effectiveness, and because, at base, they deserve legitimacy. He has a paragraph where he struggles with how to convey this message to conspiracy theorists, imaging himself pitied as 'a credulous centrist.' Well, I think for me, he may not be so far from the truth there, and not so far from the problem I find with this piece. As I say, he skates round the issue several times, almost as a matter of personal doubt: ('...which made me think: "That's exactly the way I feel about Boris Johnson right now." But my scepticism doesn't extend to complete cynicism about the institutions themselves.")

To take Adam Elkus on the same subject (get it while you can; he assiduously deletes his tweets), specifically around institutional communication about masks:

For a lot of people I follow and interact with regularly here, the mask fiasco alone burned what little trust they have in the idea of counter-disinfo https://t.co/3zRbaNRozQ

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with the important point

What I get the picture of, increasingly, is the lack of a positive theory of legitimacy. E.g people assume that institutional trust is the default condition rather than something that is difficult to achieve (sometimes for reasons entirely beyond institutional control!)

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

with a subsequent important but perhaps seemingly paradoxical point that people can as a consequence overdetermine on the role of social media and 'technology':

There are real things that happen *offline* that might.....just might.....influence people's orientation towards mainstream institutions and sources of information!

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

this sort of thing leads to a certain age and certain type of commentator creating a 'it was the russians wot did it' explanation and putting in a bucket marked 'social media.'

of the NYT role in legitimating that 'Russian strategy' argument:

its just casually mentioned once, and then dispensed with as "imperfect system self-correction" amid paragraph after paragraph of turgid exposition about the woes of Facebook and such

— idgames://11790 (@Aelkus) October 17, 2020

enjoyed 'Wang Xiuying''s piece on 'China after Covid,' though it was also interesting to read a counterpoint to the view that gongye dang (the 'technocrat/technological/industrial party) view is dominating, in the thread here:

Currently just as many academics and lawyers as there are engineers at the top; dominant position is held by business management, finance, economics, and degrees in socialist theory/party management

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) October 16, 2020

fwiw adam elkus has an archive of essays on his github which i think are often write-ups of his tweet-essays: https://aelkus.github.io

ffs is popper responsible for the present-day salience and flavour of the term "conspiracy theory"? it is 1000 yrs exactly since i last read the open society. there's a piece in GQ by never-say-former ilxor d0rian lynsk3y abt CTs -- i checked to see if it was behind a paywall (no) and googled to see if the names epstein and hofstadter feature in it (no and yes) so i'm guessing it's bad not good but i haven't actually read it yet

jeet heer recently wrote an excellent takedown of "the paranoid style" in the nation -- DL seems just to be treating it as "magisterial in its authority" or w/evs

yeah that github repository is rly good. still, there’s a lot of value in his feed, but it’s SO MUCH ALL THE TIME.

meek says popper is the originator but doesn’t say populariser so not sure. thx for the links - will definitely the read the jeet heer. maybe even the DL if i’m feeling like a benevolent elephant.

New LRB contains Paul Keegan on T.S. Eliot / Emily Hale correspondence. I started leafing through and it went on ... and on. 10 pages?

I happen to be one of the perhaps few actually *interested* in this - I'll read every word of this article - and even I can see that this looks excessive. The material will be covered by any specialist Eliot journal, etc - it hardly requires such massive, intense coverage in a generalist paper.

And what is the issue anyway? Private letters between two people who had a bit of an on-off relationship? It's not like 500pp of Eliot and H.D. debating poetics. Hard to justify.

Fizzles: your own thoughts about Meek and conspiracy appear to be more subtle and substantial than the tweets you then posted from somebody else.

on the eliot letters i must admit doing the same pf. i think the status of the letters are a lot to do with eliot and the eliot estate having a symbolic power in lit politics disproportionate to their actual cultural importance. basically they had to cover it and boy have they covered it.

on adam elkus - i think he’s a v good guide and illuminator of modern media and technology spaces. possibly i would suggest that individual tweets do not do justice to more sustained engagement but possibly he may not be congenial!

From your theorist: 'The mask fiasco'?

... when you go out, most people carry and / or wear masks, at least when they're in shops. (I expect this includes you, like me.)

It's presumably because they've heard this is advisable / necessary / mandatory.

Some people, regrettably, don't comply.

Not really much of a fiasco.

he’s referring to the consistent advice at the beginning of the pandemic that masks did not help prevent the spread of covid and might even do harm. this despite a number of vocal commentators (zeynep tufekci the most prominent) showing strong evidence that it was known that at worst they were a cheap risk avoidance method and at best would help spread the prevention of covid.)

advice was then switched to masks being mandatory on the basis of changing scientific evidence without much actually changing at all other than masks being more available. the UK was even further behind than the states in this respect.

that’s the fiasco to which he’s referring.

his point being is that it’s hard to convince people that institutions aren’t responsible for top down disinformation in scenarios like that.

and that such doubt contributes (in his view “wrongly but nevertheless”) to conspiracy theorising.

I think the current UK government is the most evil and mendacious in my lifetime. I hate the current UK PM more than any politician ever. But on the particular issue you cite, I think they were simply (another of their great flaws) stupid, hapless and incompetent.

That's bad, but not really conspiracy theory material.

i think elkus is discussing the situation in the US

My comments on Fizzles' thinker (whom I don't know) led away from the real topic, on which Fizzles was interesting: Is Meek's article good or bad?

I read it last thing last night and I can somewhat now see what Fizzles meant.

Reading the article I mostly felt: this is OK. No real problems with it.

But it leaves doubts. As far as I recall, Meek never defines what he means by conspiracy theory. Which means that we can never really tell whether someone has a conspiracy theory, or a bad theory, or just a theory.

Meek also implies a kind of pathology - that conspiracy theorising is a sort of condition / illness that you get into or out of - but doesn't explain the mechanism by which you get into or out of it.

A corollary of all this is: Meek doesn't really admit that there might be a continuum of thought, from 'mad conspiracy theories' to what many of us could consider 'sensible critical thinking', and a lot of contested mixture in between.

The figures in the poll he quotes at the start are worth looking into. They look very high. Is this, then, that poll that attributed 'conspiracy' thought to people holding what actually sounded sensible views? There was a lot of criticism of that at the time.

xposts and apologies for re-de-railing.

i've taken the odd step in this post of just indicating for each para what specific area that para applies to, to avoid crossing the streams here.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] yep - US. though i think the general points he's making, about epistemic health – from where do we get information and what is the quality of that information – holds more widely true. the general application here is that it's not necessarily about the masks specifically, but the fact that this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising.

[abstract argument about epistemic health] riffing beyond what he says slightly, institutional silence and institutional lying are obviously not unknown historically, perhaps what is different here is the easy shift from one message to another without evidence change and with a fair bit of institutional 'you must do this' and 'don't you see', which is why i call it gaslighting above, perhaps slightly dangerously.

[meek lrb article]the general reason to bring it up here is that Adam Elkus is like a monkey in the rigging on this sort of stuff. plenty to disagree with and chew on, yes, but meek looks like a bit of a landlubber in comparison. you might allow it if his article were full of links and further reading (again, something elkus is good at), but there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos.

[specific thing about masks] just finally on masks specifically, rather than as one example of a more abstract argument, i actually find the UK example even more 'fiasco' like than the US. One thing that was notable in the US was from very early on a very noisy cohort of people writing about how we should be definitely wearing masks to help reduce the likelihood of transmission. The most obvious figures were the slightly silly but still quite powerful Nicholas Nassim Taleb (of The Black Swan), and the very good Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic. It produced a sizeable social media group of people actively pushing masks, and attacking the CDC and other institutions for not doing the same. Those institutions responded robustly on masks and then later equally robustly said people should be wearing them.

In the UK i didn't notice any particularly noisy pro-mask people, although the government and crucially the government medical advisor message was that there was no evidence they made any difference and may indeed do harm. so i think if there wasn't perceived to be a 'fiasco' in the UK, it's only because all media was fairly quiet on it.

i felt i noticed this in particular because i had a bit of a bee in my bonnet whenever travelling through east Asian countries about how many people were wearing masks and what i perceived to be overzealous health cordons at international borders. well, obviously it was the experience with SARS and almost immediately Covid hit the UK i was thinking why aren't they recommending wearing masks? (I did not myself wear a mask). needless to say i feel very fucking silly now.

pinefox i think the questions in your post are interesting, and - you're right - meek sort of raises but doesn't address them.

i think my general recent experience of meek is a bit cruder, which is i tend to say 'and?' or 'so?' at the end of his articles. or a feel he's described the situation, but not usefully gone into either underlying mechanics of it (insight), or what might be done.

i also thought the figures were high. I wondered if this was an approach that took many examples of conspiracy thinking and saw how many people believed in (rather like that excellent report into UK anti-semitism, which found that although the number of people who were anti-semitic was very low, the number of people who held at least one example of anti-semitic thinking was high).

just answer whether i think the piece is good or not, i think my answer would be... not really? if i were a teacher marking an a level essay i would say “C+ covers the subject well but doesn’t attempt any higher
level analysis. doing this will help you get a B, doing it well will help you get an A”

The more I think about Meek's article, the more I agree with Fizzles on it.

"this sort of institutional gaslighting creates the conditions for conspiracy theorising."

This seems accurate. But then - you and I both agree that there has been such gaslighting, and yet we don't believe we have fallen into conspiracy theorising.

Conspiracy theorising is always someone else's problem. This is one of the most obviously suspicious things about it.

"there's Popper and one recent book on conspiracy theory (which may be v good), and the rest is Meek in the park arguing with randos."

Yes, this is part of the problem here. Meek's other articles have been much longer and much fuller. He writes about farming, and talks to lots of farmers, and learns about farming. Here, he ... randomly meets someone in a park. And randomly meets someone at a demo. That's it.

re: the study I mentioned that inflated conspiracy numbers: here is a link:
https://leftfootforward.org/2018/11/guardian-and-academics-under-fire-for-indirectly-branding-entire-british-left-conspiracy-theorists/

The survey stated:
“The most widespread conspiracy belief in the UK, shared by 44% of people, was that ‘even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway'”.

Lefists, including Owen Jones as I recall, stated that this was not a conspiracy theory but a reasonable observation.

This is simply an example of the possibly fluid or contested border between 'conspiracy theory' and 'sensible critical approach to society'.

I do think that there must be a distinction between mad conspiracy theories and sensible critical views. But Meek doesn't properly theorise what it is, even though it's what his whole article relies on.

Here is another example of a problem that Meek does not even mention:

When RLB was fired this year - one of the most significant stories certainly in the UK Opposition in 2020, and one with big effect on the politics and even membership of the Labour Party - the official reason given was that she had endorsed an 'anti-semitic conspiracy theory'.

She hadn't. To say that she had was a slur - practically libellous. But this was the official reason given by LOTO, not just by a Daily Express gloss on the event. So 'conspiracy theory' is a term that can be easily used, very officially, by extremely mainstream people, to delegitimise statements that they find inconvenient. This suggests that a critical and cautious approach to the term may be appropriate.

I think ultimately what Fizzles has helped me to notice is that this was a peculiarly poor instance of Meek's work - short by his standards (which can seem a blessing), half-baked, under-researched, failing really to carry through its thought or define its terms, relying on shared starting terms of reference rather than being prepared to question them.

Andrew O'Hagan, Short Cuts on fresh air in Berlin: rambling, random, yet much more readable than usual, and less offensive.