In Defense of Against
…and against “in defense of,” with Mark Greif.
In recent times, The “Against [X]” essay format — once so ravishingly savaged by Ivan Kreilkamp — has been supplanted in the click-bait chum-trough by “In Defense of [X].” No longer do we critique things: we insist on them. Sadder still, “In Defense of [X] (On Feminist Grounds)” has become the belle of the essay ball. If you wish to be vapid or vain or cruel to your friends, simply write an “In Defense Of” proclaiming your right to do so. Indeed, it would be antifeminist to against you over it.
Where is against, that blunt critical knife with which we slaughter our darlings? I think Kreilkamp scared us into settling down. (He called Sontag’s Against Interpretation “the mother of all contemporary click-bait intellectual polemics.”) Anyway, into this awful farm of sacred cow cultivation marches Mark Greif with a new book called, satisfyingly, Against Everything. I caught up with Greif to discuss it. Before we go any further, I must clarify that we have a professional relationship: Greif co-founded n+1, where I work as program coordinator, which means that I run their events.
It’s worth clarifying, because this is an n+1 book. It collects the essays Greif wrote in his twenties and thirties. “They were all basically for n+1,” he said, “though some of them I never even handed in.” The magazine was Greif’s imagined audience. “The journal’s existence and its readers were the only assurances that there would be people interested in this kind of thing.”
The essays are about ordinary things like “exercise, eating right, loving right, marriage and family, planning to have kids eventually, sex in the meantime,” and wondering whether one really believes “in the virtues of all these things as they are usually offered up.” Suffice to say, it includes Greif’s classic n+1 essay “Against Exercise.” It also includes “Octomom and the Market in Babies,” in which he takes up against everything you said in 2008. And so on. There’s a great piece about Thoreau, and one I didn’t like much about Radiohead. Zadie Smith called it “skeptical, contrarian” but “never cynical.” The essays are about the present day, or rather the very very very recent past.
The book is scattershot in subject matter but unified by the strong sense that we suffer “an intolerable volume of babbling and lying” in this life, as we try to make decisions about what the right thing might be. “How would it ever be possible to think what was right or desirable,” Greif said, “if people with dubious motives won’t shut up for just one minute?” So, these essays carve out a space of silence, of not listening to others. This is the true principle of “Against [X],” I think: a writer’s faith in critique’s power to create space, a void levered open for new knowledge to rush in and fill.
Each of these essays contains the germ of an entire book, which Greif knows. In “Against Exercise,” Greif had hoped to perhaps begin a grand treatise — Against Exercise: The History of the Gym in Modernity, something like that. Instead, this book is a series of very highly compressed, concentrated versions of books. Greif compared it to “a chain of bouillon cubes.”
About the only thing I hate about this book is its page on the Penguin Random House website. I hate it because Greif’s little bio leads with his summa cum laude degree from Harvard. Although I’m sure it’s just a publicity thing, I hate the insinuation that his fancy degree is what makes Greif worth listening to, makes his against worth more.
And yet we can do nothing about the fact that Greif is an associate professor at the New School, the fact that this job makes him that morbid thing we call a public intellectual. Greif went to Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. He got a PhD with the title “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” which was also the name of a hulking nonfiction book he published in 2014. One cannot doubt, therefore, that he thinks upon serious things. In that book, he addresses a historical question: “Why, when people run out of resources to articulate the most profound questions, do they start relying on sententious statements about ‘the human,’ and what does, or did, that manner of speaking do?”
Greif benefits from a sort of mutually reinforcing flow: highbrow cred from his academic status backs up his toothy essays, and the sharp humor of those essays make him seem like a professor whose work might be worth reading. Perhaps, then, we must redefine the “public intellectual” label to embrace this kind of academic, a writer who is undoubtedly a popular and good essayist and also a professor, for his sins.
Last year, Alice Gregory wrote in the Times that public intellectuals still exist but have become outmoded. Setting “moral and aesthetic standards” from atop credibility silos is old fashioned; making decrees on taste at all has become a little gross. The public intellectual’s true inheritors in the Internet Age, Gregory suggested, are funny people. “A joke,” Gregory points out, “seems uncalculated in its morality; to hear a good one is to feel as though you’re being told the truth.”
Gregory’s theory lets us see why “Against [X]” is the format we need. Critique is always a little funny. Greif’s tactic of standing alone in a room of thought in order to figure out why and how he is thinking the way that he does is also funny. Against Everything is the work of a gadfly essayist, not a windbag: in it, Greif is nasty and fun and also takes us to new and spacious places. Perhaps gadflies alone can survive the long winter of “Against [X].”
Josephine Livingstone is a writer and academic in New York.