Comrades,
I hope this finds you well and the new year beckons, in spite of it all. Despite it being the week between Christmas and New Year, I’m going to decline the opportunity to pontificate on the last year, and speculate on the next. I trust you will get enough of that, and anyway, we shall come to know.
New Platform.
Welcome to my substack, hereby launched. For some time you have been receiving occasional emails from me, announcing and distributing new work. I have (finally) acknowledged that this amounts to a newsletter, and my faculty account was becoming unwieldy. Moreover, I recently was humorously reminded that my institution might not like everything I have to say: a podcast conversation between Jack Schlegel and me was edited into a podcast. The sundry profanities — all Jack — were bleeped out, to protect the tender sensibilities of social critics, legal theorists, and historians everywhere. In a conversation in which the young guy is on the steep backslope of middle age, it is hilarious. The Adventure of Thinking, Law School, CLS, History, Life, etc.
And family, friends and students have long urged me to devote more energy to the distribution of my more idiosyncratic work, as opposed to waiting to being discovered by influencers with arcane tastes, or something. (But the vanity of authors is just why we need a bonfire of the “vanities,” books, I protest.) For all these reasons and bottom line, I’m giving substack a try. You may, of course, opt out at any time.
“Intermittent Signal” is free, both of charge and in more profound senses, I hope. One of the hallmarks of the contemporary internet is the monetization, overt or covert, of pretty much all contacts. I like money as much as the next guy, and baby always needs shoes. That said, at least for now, I really am not trying to make money here. The books still cost money, should you choose to buy one. Also at least for now, some of the essays are on Medium, which pays me pennies (literally) based on member reading time. But my basic desire is to share work that I find worth doing for its own sake.
I am not going to do much to build a specific brand. I’m not going to hold forth on an easily defined set of topics, though I’m fond of the populist education that the internet affords. I leave that to colleagues. Nor do I foresee being a particularly reliable broadcaster. This is an intermittent signal, patchy, coming in from my wilds, not your regularly scheduled programming. Apart from my laziness, neither imagination nor life guarantee anything like the regular production of good ideas or handsome, even beautiful, expression. As Orson Welles gorgeously intoned, often while inebriated, we will sell no wine before its time. Well, maybe a little beforehand.
Such slapdash practices will, no doubt, cost me audience. The horror. Most of the internet is built on attention, under the banner of celebrity. Consider how Google works. As with money and greed, I’m not without vanity, but these projects sail under the flags of truth, and less often, beauty. So the work will be done as it is done, if it is done. Much of it will be difficult in one way or another. I did not make the rules. This may not work.
New media, maybe.
Speaking of things which may not work: I’m gradually coming around to a position repeatedly urged by family, friends, colleagues and students: audio text is a thing. It turns out that lots of people, everyone but me it appears, is listening to books, essays, serious conversations. Another transformation.
People who know me have pointed out that I write anyway, because that’s one of my problems, and hence these intermittent email blasts, and a huge correspondence, and a lot of things left obscure, maybe ripening in the dark. Such folks go on to point out that the world has changed. Nobody has time for books, much less the sort of sustained attention my books often require. Besides, the commercial books — and even the stuff in “little magazines” — are hard to find and wickedly expensive. If I want my work to reach people; podcasts, audiobooks, and the like are how people are reached. Or do I think I’m Emily Dickenson? If not, I need to work with sound, and kiss the ring of the internet. You’re not a total Luddite, they say more or less directly, but why don’t you do ______, use ______, have a _________ account? I understand the advice, and have been dealing with it, and occasionally obeying, for years, loosely tracking the development of internet culture.
But making is in tension with selling, has always been. What do you have in mind, your Eminence? TBH (!), ceaseless self-promotion and the raw Hegelian nervous system of internet personality raise all sorts of psychological issues for me. I worry about my own ego. Am I getting enough likes or whatever? High school is never that far away. (FOMO!) More importantly, is this just fundamentally a distraction? Will I look back and think I’ve been wasting my time and talents, such as they are? Will I even know?
Relevant points on the other side, maybe convincing to me: (1) Lots of people learn better, or just differently, through the ears than the eyes. (2) Reading requires time/solitude that most people don’t have. But they all have headphones. I read (!) this first in an interview with Jordan Peterson at Aspen, of all places. In effect he was saying I was an haute bourgeois dinosaur. Stung. (3) Evidently audiobooks drive, as opposed to cannibalize, print sales.
Books, I’ve learned, should be converted to sound. The commerciallyunpublishable but well-liked and just odd Welcome to New Country: Music for Today's America, and the hallucinatory but probably unpublishable Smith Lake need to be audio books, whether or not they find conventional publication. Even my scholarship has perhaps naively been addressed to the mythical well educated general reader, notably Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern, with Mark Maguire. My buddy John Symmons calls this the [hope for a] philosophical middle class; I think of it as Lionel Trilling’s readership, in the glory days of Partisan Review. But perhaps such people do in fact exist, but listen rather than read. And in that hope, I will try to record some books. And I plan on doing some podcasts, alone and with friends, but I need to learn the rudiments of sound editing and the like. Watch this space.
New Essays.
Afghanistan, 'We Hardly Knew Ye': Why the Lessons of Vietnam Were Not Learned TELOS: CRITICAL THEORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY 197 (Winter 2021) 2021:147-156. After decades of thinking about how the US projects force, this felt like a breakthrough. I am on the editorial board of Telos, and seeking to make the journal more open access, but times are tough. If you want to read, If you or your university have a subscription, please use. Otherwise give me a shout.
A Note on Intellectual Solidarity, Technology, and Someday Rethinking "Left" Plus surrealism, the house style of both finance and digital technology. Should be, anyway. Insofar as we care about solidarity, or even charity (and we may not, not really), it may be that this political moment, and the march of our technology, calls for a sort of Marxian conservatism.
Ultranegative: Security, Anxiety, and the Production of Violent Policy. This is a talk, based on my work with Mark Maguire, given (via Zoom) at this year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. It is about the strange uncertainties and senses of time at work in counterterrorism and other forms of kinetic security. It is also sort of a marker put down between our last book, Getting Through Security, and our next book. Insh’allah.
* * *
So please enjoy this substack, and please do pass along to other people who might enjoy some of my work. I vacillate between playing AI games ( please clap, repost, like, comment, etc.) and wanting to piss on such games. So when opportunity arises, do what you think best, and I’ll understand.
Happy New Year!
David