At an event celebrating his new novel, a writer confessed that, despite not wanting to put out yet another book about his parents’ suffering, he “had no choice,” as the topic had been imposed upon him before his birth. “Right,” said his interviewer, “because this novel is really about inherited trauma” — which unjustly restricts, she said, what the marginalized individual “can and cannot write about.” Immediately, it felt as though the conversation about the writer’s novel and the words he’d placed on the page had left the room, replaced by what people call “the discourse.” Which is to say, a conversation about literature suddenly had the overwhelming whiff of bullshit.
These are sensitive times, which is probably why this sudden shift in values felt like such a punch in the chest. What was supposed to bring the truth, or a kind of recognition, had become another form of language meant to abstract — a received gibberish of clichés that doesn’t relate so much as alienate. It reminded me of the previous decade, when queer books were reduced to an algebra of representation, but only if their characters were transgression free; or when novelists like Rachel Cusk gave interview after interview about the “inauthenticity” of making up characters or plots. These are only two examples of many, but both — to take them in good faith — make the claim that writing outside one’s experience is somehow fraudulent; both — taken in bad faith — are a solipsistic fetishization of powerlessness. How can there be political agency when we can’t even assert our books into the world? Attending this event, I thought, Here’s one more thing I trusted that’s lost its credibility. It felt like hearing Chuck Schumer talk about resisting Trump’s agenda, or like reading about Israel’s “right to defend itself” in the paper of record. At the same time, it felt as banal as logging into LinkedIn and reading about the kind of skills and qualifications I should consider cultivating if I want to be an espresso machine operator or hamburger technician. Like most of what comprises the discourse, it had all the sincerity of “Your call is important to us.” It felt, in short, simply like trying to be alive in a terminally consumerist society.
I don’t blame these writers. It’s easier to talk about bullshit than it is about fiction (and easier, from the publisher’s perspective, to market them as bullshit than as books). And as anyone who’s interviewed for a job in the last ten years can tell you, it’s easier to speak gibberish than it is to tell the truth. You can’t open social media without seeing an ad that’s lying to you, nor watch even ten seconds of most televised interviews — especially the serious ones — without immediately sensing this pervasive bullshit. But nothing quite tops electoral copy and political press releases — writing so awful you could call it analog slop. And everyone knows it.1 Just a few days ago,
(not that one) posed a casual question on this platform: “Do people who work in political comms think their language is effective? ‘Minister is committed to… priority areas… leading an ambitious plan… wider sector consultation…’. Not being snide, I am genuinely curious.” My answer is that this language is effective if you reconsider its goal, which is not to invite political participation but to dissociate constituents from politics, to reduce their involvement to a vote every two to four years. Encountering this particular dialect of bullshit, we’re meant to lose faith in the possibility of politics altogether.
Culture is reiterative. This is what Edward Said gets at in Culture and Imperialism, that empire is not so much established as continuously reestablished; and resistance to empire must be just as continuous. Speaking of the ideological confrontation between Kurtz and Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he points out that Marlow, in showing how London is as “dark” as Africa,
unsettles the reader’s sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of something more basic, reality itself. For if Conrad can show that all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention, the same is true of empire, of venerating the idea, and so forth. With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time. What appears stable and secure — the policeman at the corner, for instance — is only slightly more secure than the white men in the jungle, and requires the same continuous (but precarious) triumph over an all-pervading darkness.
Of course, Said goes on, “Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a non-European ‘darkness’ was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence.” Marlow and Kurtz, like their creator, cannot imagine a social arrangement that does not rely on imperial centralization and exploitation; like neoliberal theorists today, there is “no story” outside of empire.
Part of Said’s definition of culture includes “all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure.” Part of pleasure is admiring and, in some cases, questioning the aesthetic choices made in specific forms of communication, even in everyday language. Said’s thesis — that culture and imperialism operate contrapuntally, and that resistance to imperialism also operates contrapuntally, allowing, even, for the decolonized nation’s tentative embrace of certain aspects of the former imperialist or colonialist culture — is one of the most unorthodox conclusions in postcolonial criticism.2 Tracing the history of postcolonial nations and the oligarchic bourgeoisie that often seized power in the collapsing empire’s vacuum, he cites Fanon as “the first major theorist of anti-imperialism to realize that orthodox nationalism followed along the same track hewn out by imperialism… To tell a simple national story therefore is to repeat, extend, and also to engender new forms of imperialism.” Orthodoxy, after all, is just another lexicon of clichés, and the disenfranchised recognize in its drone another version of the same bullshit. There is no pleasure in this kind of language, and it offers no questions.
The function of a cliché — particularly in “official” speech — is to protect language from critical examination, to excuse it from responsibility. A cliché is bullshit’s permission slip. This is what Hannah Arendt picked up on as Adolf Eichmann testified at his trial in Jerusalem: “Officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” Whatever came out of his mouth, someone else had thought of it first. But Eichmann, crucially,
was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these ‘lofty words’ should completely becloud the reality of his own death.
Eichmann wanted so badly to be liked that he could not imagine life without being told what to do. When Germany was defeated, he said, “I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me.” His repertoire of clichés was his announcement to whoever was listening that he would follow them, obey them, and look up to them. Eichmann’s language laid bare that he had no judgment.
To speak and write (and ultimately to think) in clichés, especially w/r/t how we think about and agree to organize our lives, is to prop up and empower obscenely dis-credible systems and relationships; it reiterates that an illegitimate power is nonetheless who pays the bills, who monopolizes violence, who doles out rewards, and so on. It’s meant to be continuously and demoralizingly provocative, to illustrate that power and violence can be just as arbitrary as words.
It’s impossible to use Arendt’s officialese without thinking of bureaucracy — to which all bullshit or gibberish aspires. To fetishize the idea that a novelist cannot imagine life outside their own experience is bureaucratic. To believe that one “cannot avoid” writing another novel about one’s “inherited trauma” is bureaucratic. There are legitimate criticisms here, primarily about the literary market — which is quite bureaucratic in its logic: Identities are often exploited according to a formula to extract a maximum amount of publicity, sometimes to great psychological expense on behalf of the author. And so too, of course, does the criticism of this market fit neatly into the bureaucratic apparatus: All the men whining about how their novels can’t get published because they’re men, because they’re white, because they’re straight — another cadence of bullshit. Nobody with a shred of sense believes it, just as nobody with a shred of sense believes that it’s fraudulent or “inauthentic,” when writing a work of fiction, to make something up. At some point it feels like everyone is gaslighting you in their own way, and you can’t help but want to believe their lies.
Who cares what writers say about their work? What does it matter if some novelist believes their identity or their trauma is their assigned topic? It’s the function of a bureaucracy to disempower everyone who comes into contact with it, and to repeat its prescriptions only strengthens and expands its influence. These and other countless clichés, which one finds — largely thanks to the homogenizing efforts of Silicon Valley,3 but also to American media more generally — in nearly every aspect of contemporary life, comprise a language that delegitimizes institutions and authority until both are arbitrary; and from arbitrary to superfluous is a short trip. Equally adaptable to fascist pomp, liberal handwringing, white supremacist fantasies, leftist identitarian policing, libertarian power grabs, and everything in between, bullshit is the lingua bianca of the neoliberal subversion of all collective action on this planet, a kind of white language that erases its own footsteps to remain entirely unaccountable to lived reality. To further degrade language until even its most basic function of communication is unreliable is precisely its purpose. As with all neoliberal aesthetics, this lingua bianca seeks to separate you from me, us from them; it precludes relation by reducing language to noise. And most troublingly, like Eichmann’s officialese it offers no sense of judgment because it cannot recognize the human experience.
There has never been a better time to know why you think what you think. This, in a word, is judgment; and without judgment, there is no justice. As Arendt concludes, it’s in “the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy” to turn men into machines, “and thus to dehumanize them.” Bureaucracy, to which totalitarianism aspires, is really “the rule of Nobody… When Hitler said that a day would come in Germany when it would be considered a ‘disgrace’ to be a jurist, he was speaking with utter consistency of his dream of a perfect bureaucracy.”
Thank you for reading! Sorry this is a week late. Thanks for being here and thanks for all your help.
Note: Because I don’t want to start a fight, the facts in the opening example have shifted. Think of it as a knight’s move to another topic and genre.
This is why hatred isn’t the right word for what I feel toward the Democratic Party. With few exceptions, our “opposition party” refuses to grant its voters and donors the dignity of the truth. What’s worse, the tenor of their lies makes supporting them feel like sacrifice or a chore. Meanwhile, the lies Republicans tell are exalting, exciting, easy to understand; through lying, they invite you to participate in something great, whereas Democrats invite you to sit quietly and “respect” the “process.” So no, hatred isn’t the right word. Hatred implies a begrudging respect. For cowards, fools, and losers, contempt is a much better term.
Even if James Baldwin did sort of beat him to it. As he wrote in “Stranger in the Village”: “The cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them.”
The widespread deployment (suffocation isn’t too strong a word) of “generative content,” better known as “A.I. slop,” is a great example of this particular political cohort inventing new ways to flood the world with bullshit and bend language until it breaks.
Yes, and this is all being supercharged by AI and characterized as "good" language. To me this is the main reason to be critical of LLMs, which are, as Leif Weatherby put it, "ideology machines."
Excellent, yes, I too have a visceral response to bullshit language and its deployers, enablers, and apologists