Swot Core

On Becca Rothfeld’s 'All Things Are Too Small' and the agonies of the Liberal Critic

‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymous Bosch

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty perceptively noted that Vladimir Nabokov hated Sigmund Freud

in the same obsessive and intense way that Heidegger resented Nietzsche. In both cases, it was resentment of the precursor who may already have written all one’s best lines.

At first glance, Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection All Things Are Too Small (2024) seems free of this specific type of resentment, partly because she seems oblivious to the possibility that anyone else could have already written her lines. She’s unaware, too, that the grand philosophical and aesthetic problems she haphazardly attempts to address in her work were written about more substantively (and elegantly) by Rorty himself in 1989, and again almost a decade ago by the literary scholar Amanda Anderson in Bleak Liberalism (2016). Yet despite her grand ambitions, perhaps these aren’t the type of ideas she wishes to be in dialogue with. Indeed, as is evident in this book and elsewhere, the actual obsessive targets of her antipathy (other writers of similar background and temperament) reveal a great deal about her real motivations.

We may defer the more erudite matter of intellectual pedigree for the moment since it isn't entirely clear whether this is a serious philosophical or critical work on a par with Rorty or Anderson, whether it’s intended to be pop criticism (most of its material relates to TV and cinema), or indeed personal memoir. The most memorable feature is an uncomfortable degree of abject detail concerning the author’s personal life and trauma. This ‘trauma’ is, of course, very much in keeping with the current moment. Nevertheless, one would expect a book with such grandiloquent stated ambitions to resist the urge to deploy what is by now a shopworn tactic, namely, the use of emotional deflection (qua blackmail) to obscure a certain flimsiness of ideas. If we can attempt to summon the declared purpose of this amorphous, rambling and over-long collection (All Things, All the Time may have been a more apt title), it is that Rothfeld is a believer in liberalism’s promise of public equality, whilst also in favour of a hierarchy of artistic talent and aesthetic quality characterised by her own peculiar interpretations of ‘maximalism’ and ‘excess.’ Clearly, she also believes that she ought to be somewhere near the top of any such hierarchy. Needless to say: this belief is somewhat unwarranted.

Indeed, what is given to be a hierarchy is rather a trite and unthinking insistence upon those bourgeois stratifications of ‘good taste’ most succinctly described by Pierre Bourdieu in La Distinction (1979). As a result, even the most potentially transgressive episodes of this work have the quality of safely recuperated opinions that bear the imprimatur of middling bien-pensant thinking. These opinions, conveyed in a diligently inane and prolix style, struggle to set themselves apart from her too-easy targets of lowbrow (and middlebrow) cultural output. The book, in general, is laden with almost textbook examples of the type of pseudo-profundity Nabokov had in mind with his own definition of Poshlost¹. I’m practising a lot of restraint by not enumerating them in detail (I didn’t want to be too ‘mean’), because it’s always merciful to resist the urge to be ‘maximalist’ when engaging in stringent criticism.

Nonetheless, Elle se croit…as it were. Arrogance and weaponized vulnerability are a confusing and disarming combination of traits in a writer, not least because they render any attempt at serious criticism socially perilous. When a writer intentionally intertwines the substance of their dubious intellectual project with the uncomfortable and awkward minutiae of their personal life, they have, in my view, rather cynically created a cordon sanitaire around the former, one which threatens to erase the distinction between criticism as an intellectual activity, and criticism as mere personal invective.

The above strategy seems to have been gleaned from two strands of historically feminist discourse that have until recent years enjoyed an uneasy co-existence. The first is écriture féminin’s insistence upon personal, often abject, female vulnerability as a legitimate means of symbolic expression. The second is the now thoroughly compromised persuasion of 2000s Lean In corporate feminist culture; the one which enjoined women to adopt preening, somewhat aggressive personas - to become unapologetic in their self-belief to advance their career interests in a male-dominated world. In retrospect, this latter ideology was exemplified by a popular tote bag and t-shirt slogan from the 2010s: ‘Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre White Man.’

The most powerful rejoinder to a world dominated by ‘mediocre white men’ would have been one populated by self-evidently brilliant women. However, the actual strategy seems to have been to simply replace men with women, not realizing that the central issue may have been mediocrity itself. The ignoble failure of Kamala Harris – not a white man, but emphatically a mediocrity – should sound a forewarning of the waning powers of this persuasion of liberal identitarian corporatist feminism (a ‘vibe’ shift, as it were). In many ways, Rothfeld’s book and her writerly persona occupy a similar psychic territory. But what exactly is it?

Rorty was one of the most respected figures of post-war American philosophy. Yet Contingency, Irony and Solidarity was a departure, notable for its rejection of the moribund technocratic preoccupations of the analytic philosophical tradition which he had previously worked within. In this book, Rorty makes a bold – if ultimately quixotic - attempt to interrogate the very category of ‘truth’ against the inescapable contingency of historical reality and its myriad forms of symbolic representation. The book was part of a larger project to demonstrate how ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy were complementary rather than antagonistic. To his credit, Rorty understood that no matter how rigorous an analytical philosophical account of aesthetics was, in the end, it would leave the majority of readers indifferent since the writing was invariably boring. Philosophy, if it is to be compelling as philosophy and not merely as material for the exchange of professional shibboleths, ought to aspire to the quality of poetry. Even the most tortured and insane of analytic philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, could scarcely approach the aphoristic and essayistic quality of popular philosophers such as Nietzsche or Sartre, who, in rejecting the stilted technical lexicon of professional philosophy, will perhaps remain the most popular in modern history. Rorty’s motivations were noble and admirable. Like many men of his generation, he was raised as a fervent believer in the American political theology of ‘liberal justice’ and convinced of its inherent virtue. When one reads this later work, however, we’re confronted with a palpable determination not to succumb to despair and disillusionment, perhaps instilled by an awareness of the sordid realities of American imperialism, made most apparent to him in later life by the criminal follies of the Iraq War.

Rorty focused not on the bureaucratic abstractions of liberal thought ordinarily associated with those who he called the ‘public philosophers’, such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls (whom Rothfeld is fond of) - but on the private use of ‘irony’ deployed to unite humanity in a universal opposition to all forms of ‘cruelty.’ Towards the end of his life, Rorty believed rather pessimistically that the liberal progressive cause needed ‘a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.’ His 1989 work was a prelude to this later disillusionment and a clear attempt at a fundamental account of the humanistic roots of the liberal Ideological Aesthetic and its moral underpinnings. In this specific endeavour, he was – in my opinion – somewhat successful. However, if the overall purpose was to be understood as an attempt to reinvigorate Liberalism as a political and aesthetic project, it was an unequivocal failure. The moral fervour he sought to champion simply does not exist in the form he imagined.

The consequences of this failure were readily, if not always explicitly, acknowledged within the American academy, which is characteristically partisan in its overt identification with a liberal centrist ideological tendency, despite its efforts to cast itself as ‘radical’ in its pursuit of various identitarian subjectivities. The tenured American academic, and their aspirants, are fervent liberals in deed if not always in word. This is evident in their practical modes of living which I’ve had occasion to witness first-hand; purposefully isolated, insulated and sometimes deliberately segregated from the material concerns and lifeworld of their fellow citizens, whom they generally hold in contempt for their backwardness and vulgarity. This isolation, entirely self-inflicted, inevitably comes with a myriad of doubts. First among them is a concern about what American liberalism signifies within the aesthetic sphere aside from the ruthlessly enforced monopoly on the realm of ‘taste’, which is invariably hollow and unsatisfactory.

This was the object of Amanda Anderson’s 2016 study, informed by an ‘acute awareness of the challenges and often bleak prospects’ that confronted liberalism. Anderson does well to illuminate the intellectual impasses faced by the liberal project and acknowledges just how imperilled it is in the present. Anderson is candid about the associations many have with liberalism as an aesthetic and critical doctrine:

…we associate what we call the experience of the aesthetic with the values of incompleteness, complexity, difficulty, excess, aporia. These values shift in emphasis, and they can be mapped in relation to familiar oppositions: beautiful/sublime, liberal/radical, human/inhuman. What is salient for the purposes of this book, however, is that even in their tamer liberal humanist non-sublime forms, these aesthetic values clash with the investments of normative liberal philosophy, democratic proceduralism, and the mundane aspects of participatory and state politics…Against these, the aesthetic temperament values the implicit, the tacit, paradox, and a rich opacity.

(Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism)

This statement hints at the main problem associated with the desirability of a liberal ideological aesthetic to artists and writers, a point which Anderson later makes explicit:

It must be conceded that thinkers within the liberal tradition have contributed to the situation in which liberalism is seen to have a deficient if not antagonistic relation to aesthetic values and modes. Indeed, to the extent that self-identified liberal thinkers have implicitly or explicitly taken up the question of liberalism's relation to the aesthetic, there has been a tendency to refuse or at least evade the development of a liberal aesthetics that encompasses the forms and practices of political liberalism itself.

As Anderson correctly asserts, and as Rorty was loathe to admit, liberalism as an ideological tendency is generally inimical to the aesthetic ambitions of any worthwhile artist. Yet this liberal anxiety about art and aesthetics - such as it exists - derives not from liberalism’s marginalization but from its status as the dominant ideology, as the centre, the uncontested default position of social relations for the bien pensant ( surely an ironic designation). But as Rorty well understood - and as Anderson explicitly attempted to defend against - liberal centrism as an ideology is not generally conducive to artistic genius, which invariably exists on the peripheries or indeed at the extremes.

The Nazi political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (1919) was an acerbic attack on the values of bourgeois liberal democracy as it existed in his time, a thesis which depicted the disappearance of God and its replacement with a certain ‘species’ of occasionalism as the roots of aesthetic Romanticism. According to this occasionalism, which Schmitt posited underpins the liberal bourgeois political project, the individual assumes the role once occupied by God as the arbiter of truth, justice, beauty, good, and evil:

…only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. But not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality.

This gives some account of political liberalism’s potential origins, but Schmitt would ultimately argue that being a ‘Political Romantic’ is in no way tethered to liberal political positions, but rather to aesthetic ones. It was in this observation - made long before his opportunistic involvement in Fascist politics - that Schmitt theorised how the basic premises of liberal subjectivity are the most fertile ground, and logical waypoint, for the development of Fascism, which was (and is) simultaneously an ideological and an aesthetic phenomenon. However, it was on the left and right of the liberal centre that the figure of the political romantic flourished. On the left, we have the origins of the radical positions inspired by the fiery aesthetic Romanticism of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hölderlin et al.- which would, in turn, inspire political revolutionary figures such as the Decembrist Kondraty Ryleev among others, and movements that would later assume the exhortations toward ‘divine’ violence. On the right, we have an equally substantial aesthetic tradition that lays claim to perennial truths about human nature and boasts work that was the product of faith, constancy and devotion. This conservative tendency was, to my mind, best summed up by the Russian émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich, a beloved contemporary of Nabokov (who was, after all, a conservative writer), as those who aspire to be keepers of the flame instead of fire extinguishers.

In marked contrast, the ‘reasonable’ and ‘moderate’ expectations of liberal ideologues do not tend to be inspiring to artists of merit and ambition, who invariably operate on a level of elevated intensity which, in all times and all places, is vehemently opposed to the staid solidity and complacent mediocrity of the bourgeois establishment, and its paltry mercantile calculations. What Rothfeld fails to understand is that aesthetic excess is not the realm of Liberalism. It never has been and it never can be. It is possible that liberal criticism can admire such excess, as it often has, but only at a safe remove, only in spectacular ways, or (as in her case) once it has been safely recuperated. In my view, the primary reason – never acknowledged by those who tend to describe themselves as ‘liberals’ – is that the nature of Liberalism’s self-belief, its self-designation, is manifestly disingenuous.

The fundamental principle of Liberalism is not fairness, or equity - nor justice. It is hypocrisy². We are here firmly on the ground of the Platonic Noble Lie, of myths propagated by a self-appointed elite to curb the masses’ propensity for violence. The vaunted ideals of Liberalism are merely sleights of hand that obscure true, invariably economic and rapacious, motivations. This is borne out by the fact that many of the most morally bankrupt atrocities over the past 200 years, right up to the present, have resulted from liberal political and economic calculations; from chattel slavery, colonialism, the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations, non-intervention in conditions of famine, the privileging of corporate power over human lives at every level - to the current impunity and material support offered by the ‘West’ to a supposedly ‘Modern Liberal Democratic’ ethnostate conducting a revenge campaign of mass murder on women and children, in defiance of all ‘liberal’ legal norms and standards. Liberalism has no compelling aesthetic because it is ultimately deceitful and calculating, and underhanded dishonesty never makes for sublime art.

The worldview one can infer from Rothfeld’s work is very much adjacent to the previously described tendency of the American academic, even if we allow that it exists on the distinctly middle-brow plane of popular journalistic criticism, and is thus aimed at that mythical (near-extinct) figure of the ‘General Reader.’ The overarching argument of Rothfeld’s book is a truism: that compelling art derives not from superficial and facile ‘goodness’, but rather from ambivalence. It’s an argument that does not need to be made. Nonetheless, she attempts to make this argument more tendentious (in favour of liberalism) than is necessary. Ultimately, this requires a Sisyphean intellectual task clearly beyond her capabilities and knowledge, as it was beyond the far more substantial intellects of both Rorty and Anderson. The task is to champion a specifically liberal, and worthwhile, aesthetic mode that ought to be the blueprint for the future. She approaches it in a rather odd way, by hinting at this amorphous account of a liberal aesthetics of ‘excess’, in contradistinction to both Rorty and Anderson who grudgingly accepted that it was humanist moderation and subtle irony where the minor art of liberalism might hope to prevail.

The material she considers is also odd. For Rothfeld, there is much to disdain about the infantile tastes and predilections of ordinary people – and these provide most of the easy targets for her critique. Of course this disdain is often couched in the diffident pose of the American liberal ‘Socialist’ of 2016 vintage, who in retrospect was a reconfiguration of the Fabian socialist patrician of the 19^th and early 20th Centuries. This figure already seems to be a relic of a bygone era - one brilliantly captured in all of his tedious, flabby and frivolous glory in Matthew Gasda’s forthcoming novel The Sleepers – but there is a certain value in Rothfeld’s explicit statement of that turgid ideological project:

My book does not argue against egalitarianism in every incarnation, much less against redistributive efforts in the economic domain. Rather, it is an argument in favor of a careful interrogation of the proper limits of the egalitarian project – limits that keep attitudes proper to the political sphere from crossing over into the emotional and aesthetic realms. Economic justice would surely improve the quality of art, for all of the reasons Marx and Schiller identified. Talented people would be less frequently stymied and have more opportunities to hone their gifts. Aesthetic culture as a whole would improve if audiences had the time and the education to cultivate their tastes. But if democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture, the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way towards improving politics. It has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.

Rothfeld is, throughout this book and elsewhere, obsessed with ‘dues’ and ‘entitlements.’ Aside from amply demonstrating the rather peculiar intellectual dilettantism and tortuously ‘correct’ texture of Rothfeld’s expository writing style, the above excerpt is revealing in many other ways. We cannot fail to notice a distinct whiff of patronizing complacency in this statement, which becomes an overpowering stench as the book progresses. ‘Education’, as Ideological State Apparatus par excellence, has often been the clarion call of the upstart bourgeois intellectual, the aspirant to ‘elite’ spaces who understands that the acquisition of qualifications, accolades and credentials is the only sure-fire way to ascend to a realm populated by one’s social betters, where one may be permitted to lead lives of ‘cultivated’ taste. They still believe fervently in the efficacy of education as a means of social advancement, and as a result, they abhor those they deem too stupid to make use of such cynical stratagems. Thus educational credentials are another of her peculiar fixations in this book; those with whom she sympathises are honoured with their ‘due’ - such as ‘Oxford Professor Amia Srinavasian’, and others with whom she doesn’t derisively become only ‘Freelance polemicist Louise Perry.’ This is an easy observation. There is another, perhaps somewhat more alembicated, to be found in the facile conflation of the ‘emotional’ and ‘aesthetic’ realms.

I’ve written previously about the most important, and often forgotten, facet of Jean Baudrillard’s famed essay Simulacra and Simulation is his description of the ‘liberating claim of subjecthood’, which we can understand as a form of bribery customarily accepted by those who aspire to move within the PMC media and intellectual class. This ‘bribe’ is, as I have observed, predicated upon the acceptance of a certain ‘hyperreality’ vis-a-vis news narratives and assumptions. Baudrillard outlined well the recompense offered to the compliant bourgeois journalist/artist/critic in accepting a certain compromise:

…constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game – a form of blackmail an ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood.

The veracity of Baudrillard’s claim of subjecthood seems to be expressive of an unacknowledged tension which I believe in evidence through literary and art history from the late 19th century to the present - and is, I contend, a corollary to Jonathan Crary’s thesis in Suspensions of Perception (1999). The emergence and evolution of a literary subjectivity according to the requisite temporal and attentive demands of Capitalist production, has been experienced as a liberation for certain classes - whilst simultaneously a foreclosure of the potential of revolutionary action. It is, in my view, most evident within the realm of ‘liberal’ cultural production, and Rothfeld’s collection is in this sense a very interesting document of its coordinates. Aside from the name-dropping of liberal thinkers and critics such as John Rawls and Lionel Trilling, there are other subtle hints such as the casual allusion to a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition (an imperial ideology rather than a theological concept). These shibboleths signal her allegiance to the regime of Liberal subjecthood.

Slightly more difficult to discern is how the aggressively emotional affect of these essays signals the above intent in a far more sophisticated manner than any mere overt lip service. I briefly had a girlfriend who was obsessed in the early 2010s with reading the often sordid and salacious personal essays on websites such as Thought Catalogue and XOJane. I sometimes read them myself on her prompting, but could never quite shake the sense that they were obscene humiliation rituals that made the reader complicit in a form of gratuitous voyeurism. That specific genre of over-sharing personal essay is best considered alongside the American discourse on ‘therapy’ insomuch as they both serve the function of a liberal, secular confessional. However, the point of this culture of over-sharing is not to unburden oneself to better serve the cause of collective or universal salvation, but rather to comply with the liberal injunction to serve only oneself and one’s needs first and foremost. Perhaps the origins of this tendency are found within the ecriture feminin tradition we previously touched upon, yet clearly it has gone far beyond these initial confines. I sense that Rothfeld’s collection is more akin to this ‘literary’ tradition than it is to the probing examinations of liberal aesthetics by the likes of Rorty, Trilling, Anderson etc.

---

In A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Pierre Machery offered an important insight into the essential difference between the writer and the critic:

What can be said of the work can never be confused with what the work itself is saying, because two distinct kinds of discourse which differ in both form and content are being superimposed. Thus, between the writer and the critic, an irreducible difference must be posited right from the beginning: not the difference between two points of view on the same object, but the exclusion separating two forms of discourse that have nothing in common.

To be clear, I have absolutely no claims upon the title of ‘critic’, or any title whatsoever. I have a day job as a scholar, but only by virtue of being over-educated and having acquired an accent, a certain convincing pose, and some measure of knowledge about literary history. It is for me nothing more than a job, and any notion of career advancement has always been a matter of supreme indifference. That Becca Rothfeld insists on the title of ‘literary critic’ is interesting beyond it being a quaint and anachronistic description, and the transparent strategy to position herself as the inheritor of Susan Sontag or Elizabeth Hardwick.

Such an insistence occurs at a time which seems stubbornly intent on bridging Machery’s ‘irreducible difference’ - an era dominated by the ubiquitous journalist/novelist/critic, where little distinguishes those formerly separate categories. In this regard, perhaps Rothfeld’s critical writing may be motivated by a need to produce the conditions conducive to the appreciation of her version of an ideal novelist, which in all likelihood will turn out to be her future self. Perhaps she seeks, to paraphrase Roman Jakobsen, to transform herself from a Professor of Zoology into an elephant. Indeed, this disparate collection begins to cohere when we see Rothfeld less as a literary critic and more as a peculiarly contemporary type of ‘influencer’ – a ‘maximalist’ cultural factotum; a content creator, who aspires to be all things to everyone, and thus inspiring no one.

While we patiently await her auto-fictional debut, it’s worth noting that, although Rothfeld is oblivious to the scholarly antecedents of her critical project, she is not without her obsessive targets of envy and resentment. Her choices are revealing much in the manner of Nabokov’s reflexive abhorrence of Freud. Her most prominent bête noires, in a rather disappointing betrayal of the Sisterhood™, seem to be two more successful women writers; Sally Rooney and Lauren Oyler. This hapless, seemingly territorial, antipathy suggests some interesting points of commonality. All of them seem to have attended elite universities, but more interestingly all of them were involved in the high school debate club circuit. In the case of Sally Rooney, she got her break after a literary agent read her essay about being the ‘top competitive debater in Europe’; Lauren Oyler spoke in an interview about her use of the debate club as a way to fluff her CV for Ivy League applications. Rothfeld herself writes a particularly uncomfortable essay about her experience of the debating world, which paints it as a completely pointless exercise in hollowed-out bureaucratic thinking, appealing only to the pathologically maladroit. But much like Oyler and Rooney, the practice of debate ultimately comes across less as an odd eccentric passion and more as simply another box to tick while climbing the greasy pole of liberal subjecthood.

“I have found quite a universal rule which in this matter seems to me valid above all other, and in all human affairs whether in word or deed: and that is to avoid affectation in every way possible…to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” - Castiglione

I must admit to a certain temperamental aversion to this type of ‘try-hard’ thinking, particularly within the artistic, literary and intellectual spheres. I seem to have a visceral disdain for conspicuous effort, much preferring those who convey the eternally admirable principle of Sprezzatura made famous by Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528). I speak also as someone whose own undergraduate university career consisted of assiduously calculating the minimum number of seminars one could attend to still get an attendance grade, and somehow still missing those - when not turning up extremely hungover or on a massive comedown (often both). I’ve always been instinctively suspicious of overt effort and striving. This was something that was the domain of what me, and my idiot mates, customarily referred to as ‘Swots’, an excellent and percussive British English word which has no worthy competitor.

A picture of former British Prime Minister: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Although impenitent toffs such as the anthropomorphic Toby Jug (and former Prime Minister) Boris Johnson have disparagingly used the term ‘Girly Swot’, the term has no distinguishable gender: a Swot can be male or female. I’m unsure what the American equivalent may be - ‘hall monitor’ seems the most descriptive analogue, but doesn’t quite get there. If you liked school, you’ll love work is the operational mentality. Whatever else they may be; their debate club pedigree, their conspicuous and obsessive fixation with their perceived status, their box-ticking approach to writing, criticism, intellectual, emotional, and libidinal activity should alert us to the fact that Becca Rothfeld, Lauren Oyler and Sally Rooney may indeed be some variation of the Swot archetype. I suspect that their prominence within the current moment speaks to the fact the media and political class also seem, these days, to be mostly composed of people like them. Most are spiritual technocrats who seem incapable of transcending their petty infantile grievances, often in embarrassingly candid ways apparent in their writing. They are seemingly incapable of getting over a view of the world as High School cafeteria.

The Swot has a talent for diligence rather than intelligence or creativity, and there are few writers or artists of genius that belong to such a category. The type of genius worthy of respect is more often than not completely at odds with the structures and hierarchies that the Swot thrives within. In writing, the Swot requires the comforting bureaucratic logic of the editorial relationship - which has replaced that of the teacher, their erstwhile saviour and benefactor. Critics in the same vein that Rothfeld desperately wishes to be considered alongside - Susan Sontag for example - were very far from being Swots, because they took pains not to appear so obviously and meticulously calculating, and were in possession of a belligerent and unconventional intelligence that sometimes made them personally abrasive and unpleasant. I’m unsure whether the same can be said of Rothfeld, who I assume to be pleasant enough - if her ‘approachable’ public persona is any indication. She is in general a competent writer but very far from a stylist in the manner of Sontag, and far too easily swayed by the prosaic instincts of the litigious grammarian. In short, she is the type of writer who may talk loudly and fondly about the finer points of the Oxford comma, or similar inanities, to convince others of their commitment to the ‘craft.’ But there is a distinction between literariness and studied bookishness. The former speaks to certain intangible qualities, and the latter merely signifies an individual who is overfamiliar with a popular taxonomy of ‘types’, and performs accordingly.

The zombie-like persistence of contemporary letters and publishing in the past decade seems to be aided by the fact there is no ‘literary’ reading public to speak of anymore. It is no oversight that the tools of real-time analysis of sales, such as Nielsen Bookscan – exist behind prohibitively expensive membership fees, jealously guarded and beyond the means of ordinary people. I happen to have access to this service, and I therefore know how many copies this book – and others such as Lauren Oyler’s recent offering – have sold. Needless to say, the numbers do not warrant the type of confected attention and dutiful reviews lavished on them across the media. This attention is merely evidence of a specific type of top-down solidarity, a quid pro quo – not necessarily one of ‘class’ (or not only) but of those who perhaps find common cause with their fellow Swots. Many of the readers of these books - and I suspect the vast majority of Rothfeld’s fans - are writers in waiting, motivated by the same delusions of acceptance, validation, escape from precarity and ressentiment. They are aspirants to the sham world order of the Swot – one which attempts to force respect and intellectual integrity by bureaucratic fiat.

Rothfeld is then - undoubtedly much to her chagrin - less a celebrity literary critic of the Sontag type than she is an Influencer in the current mode, and in the current moment. In this sense – perhaps as a small comfort - she does sit near the top of a certain hierarchy. This is a tendency which at its more vulgar echelons has given us things such as ‘Booktok’ and ‘Dark Academia’…that is to say, confused accretions, byproducts of a thoroughly comprised hyperreality, underpinned by the minor liberal ideological aesthetic and bound by its bribe of subjecthood. Something, in short, that merely approximates the appearance of intellectual activity rather than practices it. We are here very much on the familiar path of parasocial relations and ‘Mimetic Desire.’ But as I have mentioned before, such theories are incomplete if we fail to acknowledge that mimetic desire is in the current iteration of culture a negative dialectic, an Interpassive relation where subjects delegate to others not only to perform actions but also to feel and suffer all manner of negative effects and emotions, on their behalf.

Thus Rothfeld’s successes, failures, thoughts, feelings, suffering and ‘trauma’ now belong not only to her - but also to her readers. In this sense, she is ultimately deserving of sympathy. She seems to have outsourced the task of self-actualization to the Bourgeois Big Other in various ways; through the confessional of the mandatory personal essay style, through the bribe of liberal subjecthood and the hypocritical acceptance of the political status-quo, through an unwavering belief in the regime of ‘education’, credentials, institutional accolades, and achievements that are supposed to ameliorate what is clearly a meagre sense of self. But anonymous approbation, and cold professional regard, are poor substitutes for self-respect.

1. “Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

2. An excellent account of the form of this hypocrisy was given by Alexander Zevin’s Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (2019), a history of The Economist magazine, which traces the origins of its rapacious ideology and philosophy; its remarkably consistent pro-capitalist fundamentalism, and inherently anti-democratic nature.