My post yesterday evening, The Rise Of The Non-Fictional Aesthetic, generated more personal email then about any other article I can remember writing. Jennifer Nix should have a Right To Respond post up on the topic at some point. Also, I wanted to direct readers to Emptywheel's reaction to the piece. She argues that the shift is not so much in the types of narratives progressives are producing, which was my basic argument, but instead in the institutional location where we were producing them:
I don't so much disagree with what Chris has to say, except to object to his characterization of this aesthetic--non-fiction versus fiction. Human beings construct narratives. All narratives--whether they tell a story about an uppity black man running for President or about a prisoner who exacts the ultimate revenge--involve a great deal of artifice and and linguistic craft... In other words, the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" are really just convenient classifications for stories that helps people sort out library shelves and legal battles. Fundamentally, narratives are still narratives, which are necessary tools for the human creature to make sense of and interact with her world.
So I would describe what has happened somewhat differently than Chris. If the Clinton wars and the Iraq War did anything, they demonstrated that the Right had a sophisticated and effective narrative industry, one that was having a dramatic effect on our governance. While we leftists were all playing with a-utilitarian postmodernism in the academy and fiction workshops, the Right was implementing a philosophy of utilitarian postmodernism--deliberately mobilizing narratives to accrue power into the hands of corporations and those who guard them. So it's not so much our aesthetic that has changed, I think, as our understanding of the battlefield.
I think that is right. The left always was producing reality-creating narratives, but before the last decade we were largely ineffective at challenging the dominant narratives produced in national media on politics and current events. Part of this may simply have been that many of us were focusing our reality-creating and narrative creating-energies, as both I and Jennifer Nix described, more in institutions like academia than in the production of political news.
Perhaps our aesthetic didn't change so much as the target institutions in which we sought to alter narratives changed. Now, we focus more on CNN than, say, the Modern Language Association. It isn't a stylistic shift so much as a shift in institutional focus, and thus a shift in our content focus, that creates the perception of a stylistic shift.
Further, going beyond Emptywheel's criticism, perhaps this shift in institutional focus did not happen because progressives were apathetic in the 1990's, but simply because it was virtually impossible for grassroots activists to play on the national narrative battlefield a decade ago. Without the vastly lowered cost of information and cultural production provided by the self-publishing capable, broadband accessible, network-neutral Internet, entering academia or the literary world was actually a rational and immediate path toward becoming a cultural producer at the time. It has become much, much easier to compete in the production of national political narratives than it was only ten years ago. In fact, it has become easier to participate in politics altogether than it was only ten years ago.
So, not only is the shift perhaps more a change of venue rather than a change in style, but the change in venue took place not because of a new desire for civic engagement, but instead because of new possibilities for civic engagement that did not exist before. Liberals, progressive and lefties were treated with as much, if not more, contempt in the 1990's. I have no doubt that if the broadband accessible, network neutral internet had come into existence ten years earlier, then the progressive netroots would have developed ten years earlier, too. As it is, we came into existence almost immediately after it was possible to do so, considering that MoveOn will celebrate its tenth birthday next month.
Food for thought. I look forward to Jennifer's response. It is frustrating to feel to utterly out of practice in discussions like this, while Emptywheel clearly hasn't lost a step. However, given how much I am enjoying this discussion, perhaps it proves Jennifer's original point, QED: we do need to talk about these things more, and we were missing something by not discussing them.
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