Mark Greif is a founding editor of the New York-based literary magazine n+1, and is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School, New York. He is author of Against Everything: On Dishonest Times,  a wide-ranging collection of essays on themes as apparently disparate  as the philosophy of popular music, the cultural and intellectual  significance of hipsterism, and our strange and shifting modern  attitudes to diet and nutrition. Though each essay is individual, the  book is unified by a larger inquiry, one which makes up the backbone of  the Against Everything and around which three of the essays centre: ‘The Meaning of Life’. King’s Review  editors Johannes Lenhard and Chris Townsend met with Greif during his  2016 visit to the U.K., and asked him what it might mean to live both  critically and well.

Johannes Lenhard:

Let’s start by talking about the title. What does it mean to be ‘against everything’?

Mark Greif:

I imagined it as a principle of method. I  don’t think it’s a particularly surprising or new method in the long  tradition of scepticism for the sake of truth and self-knowledge. But I  imagined it quite physically. You know this figure of the gold  prospector who must bite into the nugget that he finds to see whether  it’s really gold or fool’s gold? There certainly is a great deal of  fool’s gold in circulation at the moment. But you couldn’t call the book  ‘Bite Everything’. I imagined the principle would be in some way to  press up against the things people depend upon, to see if they really  hold your weight. To see whether the things that everyone seems to  admire are actually worthy of admiration, and whether the things that  everyone vilifies are genuinely villainous. There was some degree of  wishing to tweak the nose, too, of a particular kind of book which gets  written now. There seems to have been an acceleration of purely  attitudinising or opinionating books — ‘against this’, ‘against that’ —  so I figured that someone ought to just take this to its end point, and  declare ‘against everything’.

Chris Townsend:

Across the essays in your book, this  mode of sceptical critique, of being ‘against everything’, is rooted in  the particularity of experiences, and in lived experience. It seems  like more than just a theoretical position.

MG:

I think that’s right. For someone like me, an  overly polite person, inclined to sympathise first and only recover the  capacity to judge later, what does it take to remind yourself to stop,  before falling into enthusiasms? And see if it’s possible to think  things down to the root.


CT:

How, then, does scepticism in this form relate to the ‘good life’ as it is sketched across several of the book’s essays?



MG:

I think we live in a moment when the sheer  volume of noisy demands, and commercial utterances offered in the  imperative voice, may be greater than at other times in the history of  civilisation. It becomes very hard in that din to stop oneself from  believing, or even offering a certain degree of assent to, things one  doesn’t like. “Well I know I hate it, but it certainly seems as if  everyone else is enjoying . . . their cellphones” [laughs]. Over the  course of the essays, there is a quite practical dimension of trying to  see what it would take, not to halt experience, but somehow to open a  space within it, in order to allow judgment, evaluation,  self-questioning, self-critique.

JL:

You talk about the avoidance of pain in place of  the pursuit of pleasure, be that in sex, intoxication, or another form.  We are always searching for highs, you feel, and therefore we are  always overall trapped in a more enduring low. But you offer two  alternatives to this situation: aestheticism and perfectionism.

MG:

Yes, yes. There’s a way in which that essay, on  aestheticism and perfectionism [‘The Concept of Experience (The Meaning  of Life, Part I)’], is the most . . . optimistic essay of the book. I  argue that there are practical strategies, and I offer a recipe or list  for them. How do you live a life of aestheticism? Well, you treat the  things you encounter and the things that you meet as capable of offering  you the pleasures which, characteristically, we think of as coming from  art, movies, paintings. Or you somehow stylize your life, so that it  looks like a work of art with consistency and harmony. But this is not  an invention of my own. One of the things I like best about that essay  is the discovery, if it is one, that this mode of preservation of  experience — the improvement of experience, the transformation of life  aesthetically — has a history or genealogy that seems to go back  strongly to the 1850s. That’s why Flaubert appears in the essay in the  way that he does. Yet it’s a stylization of experience that really does  underlie people’s accounts of how they go about living in the present  moment.

All of that said, aestheticism may work, but it may come out quite  badly too, and I think that if that’s an optimistic essay, it must be  twinned with the pessimistic one later in the book on ‘aesthetic  illness’. I suppose, in the way that we talk day to day, we also belong  to a world of depression, and of a depression that seems  characteristically induced by the ecstatic possibilities of our modern  collection of experience and fantasy of living successfully all the  time. The flip-side of these enterprises, even to improve and purify  life, might well be a darkened vision in which one discovered that one  was fundamentally incapable of such a heroic enterprise. You wind up in  bed wishing that you had not had all those words shouted at you, and  that you had not seen all those things—the Kardashians, and ISIS  executions, as well as all of the things that a responsible citizen of  the world should see.

CT:

The internet does make it easy to feel like  we’ve just sacrificed a small part of ourselves in the pursuit of an  experience. And the experience of violence, or of graphic pornography,  might be a sort of awful modern sublime. Is it therefore helpful to  think about your work in relation to Romanticism?



MG:

The position of Romanticism in the  intellectual history of this modern emphasis upon experience is actually  quite puzzling. The rise of modern individualism, a strong sense of  authenticity, combined with the sense for intellectuals that they, too,  must recover sentiments more deeply interfused with the natural world  and the world of common people (rather than only fellow university  scholars) – all this might be traced back to English Romanticism, on one  side, and German or continental Romanticism, on the other. And yet, as I  move back toward antecedents of that 1850s moment, which has Flaubert  on one side, Thoreau on the other, Kierkegaard a decade earlier –  towards people like Wordsworth – there does seem to be some gap or  difference that yawns open.

I do find myself spending a lot of time with Wordsworth, trying to  figure out the discontinuity between the kind of contemporary experience  which it seems to me we do still strongly have in common with Flaubert,  Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, but which we don’t, or I don’t, with  Wordsworth. One thing that amazes me in Wordsworth is that he’ll say at  different points in The Prelude and elsewhere: I sat down in  the morning, I was looking out on the valley, I thought for a bit, and  then I got up, and the sun was setting. And I realise suddenly: what, he  just sat there for eight hours?! It seems to me there is a kind of time  availability within Romantic experience that has been lost to us –  therefore a key dimension of Wordsworthian ‘experience’ that transpired  across forms of duration and physical rootedness has ceased to be  possible. To that degree, I actually see Romanticism — rather than  belonging to a strict continuity of modern experience-stylization —as  embodying something like the unapproachable ‘beyond’ to be recovered.  

The sublime may be another kind of picture of, or way of getting at,  whatever breach occurred, between our experience of ‘experience,’ and  theirs. It does seem to be true, with accounts of the sublime in  eighteenth-century terms — whether in Burke, or Kant — that they point  to sublimity unlike ours. Facing the sheer multiplicity of images on the  internet, whatever they may be, and the extremity of the images in our  image cycle — atrocity, genocide, sexual violence, or just commodified  sexuality, and all the rest —people identify these things, not  unreasonably, as belonging to the experience of the sublime somehow, and  people speak of a ‘post-modern’ sublime. And yet there does seem to be a  crucial mismatch between these things and the most violent things that  Burke or Kant describe. If we could put our finger on what that  difference was, then we would really accomplish something towards the  successful description of the present moment – or even towards a  successful way to live with or cope with this moment.

CT:

One possible distinction you could draw is that  the sublime in eighteenth-century aesthetics is always at least  implicitly about God or religion. When you see something extremely  graphic on the internet, it’s always man against man, or a human  production. This might be something like a ‘secular sublime’.


MG:

I guess the way in which I would translate that  question is to think about the historic emergence of a world of pure  immanence, of entirely material nature. It would match those anecdotes  of young Flaubert, watching people be cut apart in his father’s surgical  theatre, and learning there is nothing transcendent to human beings —  ‘Ah, that’s what people are! They’re meat!’ Such materialism does seem  to have lasted from his moment to ours. I find myself wondering too  about the features of presence or tele-presence now, in that, with the  sublime experiences of the eighteenth century, there might have been an  ultimate transcendent reference, but also an immediate and present  physical threat often presented as crucial to the experience. This would  be the eighteenth-century sublime of looking out and seeing mariners in  peril, in a boat roiled by the sea which is not affecting you – or the  mighty crag that uprears above you physically but at this moment is not  going to harm you. Nowadays the risk of many of the things we consider  sublime is really notional, virtual, occurring only through the screen,  and that becomes somehow central to the updated experience.

On the other hand, the moment I find myself recalling again and again  when wondering what this contemporary sublime might be is in Burke, and  his statement about the hypothetical destruction of London [Part I,  Chapter 15, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry]. He says: If  all of London fell into a hole tomorrow, I wouldn’t be happy about it, I  wouldn’t want it to happen, but let’s admit it – I, and you, and  everyone, we would go and look. When I first read that, it felt to me  un-anachronistic, curiously seamless with the present.

Yet, over time I’ve come to think that a relevant feature of his  imagination is that he would go and look; that is to say, he would  physically stand at the edge of the precipice and witness the thing,  right in front of him. And still, now, to experience violence in front  of you, as it happens in real life, does retain a very, very different  character to mediated violence. It’s really immediate, really wrenching.  One way of drawing a conclusion from that is to say we haven’t changed  as human beings; we, in the face of physical reality, still respond the  same way. But another way to think of it, though, is to recognise how  much of the stuff that works our thoughts, our emotions, whatever, is  virtual, does not have that same feeling of presence anymore.

JL:

Coming out of the narratives of modern  individualism and consumerism is your interest in the figure of the  hipster, a figure which you read negatively in one of the book’s essays.  You discuss the ‘hipster primitive’ as the possibility of a potentially  ethical form of high consumerism, though even this doesn’t fully  satisfy you.

MG:

It may seem retrograde or fuddy-duddy, but I  retain a real hostility to consumerism! [laughs] I suppose that’s like  saying I really dislike shit. Or I really dislike mean people. But in  all of my hipster analysis, if you feel some measure of distaste, even  for the most innocuous of hipster figures, it has to do with witnessing,  under the guise of subculture — something I value — the opportunity for  the creation of “rebel consumers.” I feel great repugnance for people  who will discover their authentic selves in resistance to an imagined,  non-existent Establishment who want to keep them from buying an  expensive steak, an expensive hatchet, an expensive coat….[laughs].

CT:

A problem with something like the ‘hipster  primitive’ or ethical hipster is that it limits ethics to the consumer  realm. You say something similar about punk at one point in the book,  and about punk as a form of commodification. Are hipsters better or  worse than punks?

MG:

Oh… worse!

CT:

Okay, but with reference to the word ‘dishonesty’ in your book’s subtitle… are hipsters at least more honest?


MG:

That’s an interesting question. I take the  question to be: ‘Which would you prefer, the subculture called punk,  which elaborates itself around motifs of genuine resistance, powerful  nihilism, total rejection, and fails them, in fact is secretly working  out the same sales and self promotion schemes as everyone else? Or the  nakedly enjoying, fine distinction-producing, project developing,  marketing culture of the hipster, where hypocrisy cannot be charged,  because the decline is already built in?’.

I used to have an argument with my wife about the concept of ‘selling  out’. She would occasionally accuse pop music figures of having sold  out. I’d say, you can’t say that, that kind of stardom never promises  anything more to begin with. They were always only for sale, they can’t  ever ‘sell out’. I have to say, I strongly prefer the person who tries  and fails, through weakness or temptation, to the consistent cynic. When  we talk about these things, punk or hipster, of course, it’s crucial to  say we’re talking about huge gatherings of people, brought together  from entirely different social circumstances, on a common basis of  negotiation, rather than unanimity and purpose. It is better to have a  culture of genuine primary commitments, which a certain number of people  may fall short of. There will be a set of people who will be able to  live a life of aspiration and effort, and not always buying and selling,  getting and spending.

JL:

You are opposed to consumerism as it exists and  capitalism as we are living in it, and that’s why you make the proposal,  in the second ‘good life’ essay, of an unconditional income for  everyone.


MG:

The proffered solutions in that essay,  universal basic income and 100% tax on income over a certain level,  aren’t entirely offered as solutions to the global perils of capitalism.  I don’t think of myself as in any sense simply against capitalism.  Capitalism, what is it? What would it mean to live outside it at this  stage of developed civilization? Not very much. You must come down to  specifics, to practices and institutions. Anyway. I do think of that  particular essay as mostly a restatement of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Soul of Man  Under Socialism’. Politically, it reaches a part of the thinking of the  Right that does belong, and I think should belong, to thinkers on the  Left, or to all of us, about such topics as individualism, excellence,  thumos or spiritedness, and the desire for competition, and why those  goals point to different institutions that the ones we currently  entertain. In that range of emotions, and that range of the  satisfactions of life, too, there are good reasons to try to set people  up with a minimum. If there’s no super-poverty, you can in a way avoid  treading on others while genuinely pursuing your ‘robber baron’-ish  competitive existence. By the same token, there are very good reasons to  want to wipe out monopoly, and concentrations of wealth, and  inheritance, for the sake of, again, true competition, and the true  possibility of creating yourself, exalting yourself, even as an  entrepreneur.

JL:

That was my understanding of your essay — that  you have this universal basic income and then people are going to be  creative, and to create themselves to their potential.

MG:

It would certainly be a start. In a sense — and  this very much follows Wilde — the enterprise of that essay is to shift  people’s thinking, about what we would think of as ‘ethical  obligations’, out of the realm of pity, out of the realm of charity,  because such thinking always creates a kind of grey world of  condescension, towards something like greater satisfaction in a moral  frame. I think of that essay as quite different from the much more  global questions of how one would live a good life. We’re talking about  some minimum measures to modify the features of capitalism that are  ugliest now, not only ugliest for the homeless person in the street but  for homeowners too, for people foreclosed upon, and for financiers, too –  they just don’t know it.

CT:

I recall that one of Wilde’s key examples of a  successful individual was Byron, who seems to exist at a crucial point  in the forming of modern individualism; he’s somewhere between the ideal  that you describe in your essay and the ‘rise of the individual’  narrative of U.S. economics. The latter seems like a terrible misstep in  that narrative.

MG:

Yes. You have to think about the displaced but  not entirely misplaced Romanticism of the heroic capitalist, the  creative destructionist, the entrepreneur, and so forth. It does  represent a terrible misstep. But only to the extent that it sets itself  up as the only route, the ‘one God’. One thing I do find myself tending  toward, which I don’t quite know how to defend but which I would like  to, is a kind of plural vision of human liberation, in which you would  want to make room for the people whose highest good is really evil or  amoral. Not that Byron quite achieves that, but in a sense a truly human  society would be one in which the flourishing of the satanist, and the  byronic folks, and indeed the gambler financiers was also fulfilled.  What would a slightly better moral and political world than this one  look like? Probably one in which people were able to do the things they  were best at or most creative in, but without their position being  settled in everyone else’s enterprise as a consequence of it. But  there’s a problem. For the financier, the lone realm of excellence of  judging and guessing market prices and values by the mechanism of money  also turns into getting the best seat at the opera, getting first say  with the politician about what you would like policy to be like,  etcetera. Whereas a world in which people were able to achieve their  characteristic excellences without either dominating others or being  entirely subordinate would be much better, I think. At least much  fairer.

JL:

The problem you’re describing is a fundamental  inequality of capitalism, and money as a form of mediation — where we  can buy anything and everything, including power.

MG:

It may have to do with the power of money to  introduce a kind of single metric or single instrumentality which causes  all kinds of, as it were, misjudgment, misallocation, and incorrect  ranking in other spheres.

JL:

So what we should want is what Bourdieu [in Distinction]  talks about as separate forms of capital, and they should be kept  separate? But at the moment there is only one dominating form.

MG:

You’ve put your finger on it. If I think of a  very precisely defined picture of utopia in this way, it would be  Bourdieu’s differentiation of fields, but with with greater autonomy. So  that the person who accumulates extraordinary capital in one domain,  the arts, or in another, finance, possesses it only in that domain, but  everywhere else he’s kind of a regular citizen.



JL:

And that takes us back to consumerism, because  we all have to take part in that form of capitalism. Even if we are  artists, we have to make sure we get enough money.



MG:

I think, a little differently, it takes you  back to democracy, as the idea we have the most possession of already as  a kind of ideal, which could most serve the purpose of this  equalization where it matters, and excellence where it matters. It’s a  very old idea, but the figure of the person who, while a star basketball  player on his NBA team, or a star investor in his investment bank,  still has to stand in line, or queue up for the bus, with everyone else,  and is truly no better than the man in the street — because he himself  is the man on the street, or woman on the street – that really is, I  think, a superior democratic vision to try to recover. And this is where  consumerism itself often feels like the wrong thing to ignore. I find  myself becoming angry at these structures of flying on airlines, where  suddenly we’re divided into ranks of who gets to board first, or second,  based on who has bought which ticket. Consumerism undoes the best parts  of a democratic civilization that makes sure people are equal in public  spaces.

CT:

Orderly queues strike me as very socialist  structures, where we recognise the rights of others as much as our own.  It comes back to something of the implications of Against Everything,  as a title, and as a theory or practice. It’s a politics of politeness —  living the politics you want, or performing the society you want to  live in.



MG:

I think that’s right. But also it’s funny,  that this context, a context of politeness, or of ‘the citizen rules’,  ‘the man on the street rules’, will also produce the forms of necessary  social antagonism, or dissent, that are most effective. This is the  greatness of Thoreau’s gesture to insist on sitting in the town jail for  a day for not paying his taxes for the Mexican war. On one side, it  furnishes the most direct and intimate and local effect for others to  review: Why is Henry sitting in the jail? Should I be sitting in the  jail too? But on the other side, in Thoreau’s account of it, there is an  account of experience and growth, on the side of the individual,  sitting in the middle of his hometown, and seeing it in a different  light: ‘I didn’t know the perspective on my own town from jail’. I  suppose a politics of equality and politeness means knowing the society  as it is experienced from all perspectives—as boss and subordinate,  policeman and jailer—to make you want to preserve freedom and justice  for everyone and for yourself.