Frequency and Noise

I changed the semicolon to a period. Then I changed it back. The sentence in question was on page 312 of my manuscript, a passage about how the Situationist International’s concept of détournement had been absorbed into advertising by the mid-1980s, and the semicolon created a pause that I had, at various points over the past six years, considered essential, then superfluous, then essential again. The period implied that the two clauses were independent thoughts. The semicolon argued they were aspects of a single thought, two faces of one coin, and I had come to believe — though this belief was recent, perhaps three weeks old — that the relationship between corporate co-optation and avant-garde strategy was not one of sequence but of simultaneity. They happened together. They were the same gesture viewed from different positions. Hence the semicolon.

It was 6:40 in the morning. The hallway outside my office was dark, the overhead fluorescents still off because the department secretary wouldn’t arrive until eight and the motion sensor only covered the stretch from the elevator to the faculty lounge. My office smelled the way it always smelled: of paper, of the staleness that accumulates in rooms where the windows have been painted shut for decades, and beneath that, faintly, of the coffee I had spilled on the carpet in 2014 and never fully cleaned, a brownish ghost I had covered with a stack of back issues of New Literary History. The radiator ticked. Outside, a maintenance worker drove a small vehicle across the parking lot, scattering salt. The granules caught the light from the sodium lamp at the lot’s edge and for a moment looked like something scattered in ritual before they were just salt again, dissolving into ice.

I should say who I am, or who I was, since the person I’m describing already feels like someone I once knew rather than someone I continue to be. Anders Lindqvist, associate professor of comparative literature, Grinnell College, Iowa. I arrived in 1996 as a visiting lecturer and never left, which is a sentence that could describe either love or paralysis and in my case described both. I published eleven journal articles across thirty years, the most recent in 2019, each one narrower than the last, a progressive boring-down through layers of specificity until I had reached a stratum so deep and so airless that only four or five people on earth could follow the argument, and of those, three had stopped reading academic journals and the other two were, I suspected, dead. I had been writing a book for twenty-two years. It was called Structures of Refusal: Contrarianism and the Limits of Cultural Opposition. It was 1,400 pages long. I had never shown it to anyone.

The structure was self-maintaining. That was the problem, or at least the problem I was willing to name.

Every section generated questions that required new sections, and every new section revealed insufficiencies in the existing ones, so that the manuscript grew not toward completion but toward a more comprehensive form of incompleteness. I had come to think of it as a system rather than a text — a feedback loop that processed its own output as input, each revision producing the conditions for the next revision, a perpetual motion machine of qualification and refinement that would run until I died or until the concept of contrarianism became so thoroughly absorbed into the cultural mainstream that there was no longer a subject to study. Both possibilities seemed equally likely.

My computer made the sound it makes when an email arrives — a soft, almost apologetic chime, as though the machine were embarrassed to interrupt. The sender was Nikolai Proskurin. The subject line: You’ll want to see this before it comes out.

I had taught Nikolai in 2009, a spring seminar on counter-cultural aesthetics that drew eleven students, six of whom stopped coming after the midterm. Nikolai was one of the five who stayed, and of those five he was the only one who argued with me. He was twenty then, tall, with the kind of angular face that photographs well and a habit of raising his hand before I had finished my sentence, as though the act of listening and the act of responding were, for him, concurrent rather than sequential. He wrote his term paper on the recuperation of punk by the fashion industry, and it was uneven and overconfident and alive in a way that I recognized, because I had once written papers like that, before I learned to qualify every claim until the claim itself vanished beneath its own conditions.

He went on to graduate school at Columbia, then to a postdoc at the New School, then to a position at NYU that included a column in n+1 and regular appearances on podcasts with names like Late Capitalism and Chill. His face was, at the time of his email, on the cover of The Atlantic. The attached PDF was his forthcoming book: Against Everything: How Dissent Became Content. Three hundred and twelve pages. I opened the acknowledgments first, which is a habit of mine that I have never been able to justify intellectually but which I have also never been able to stop, this need to see who is thanked before I see what is said, as though the network of gratitude and obligation surrounding a text were more revealing than the text itself.

The acknowledgments were two pages long. My name appeared in the third paragraph:

This book began as a conversation with Anders Lindqvist, whose unpublished work on contrarianism first taught me that opposition could be a subject, not just a posture. Any errors of boldness are mine.

I read the sentence four times. Then I closed the PDF and looked at the salt on the parking lot, which had already begun to disappear, absorbed into the meltwater, indistinguishable from the pavement it was meant to protect.

I read Nikolai’s book over the weekend. I read it in two sittings — Saturday morning through Saturday evening, then Sunday morning through early afternoon — in the brown armchair in my living room that I had bought at an estate sale in 2003, the fabric worn smooth on the armrests, the left side sagging where the springs had given out. I drank coffee from the same mug I always used, a white ceramic thing with the Grinnell logo that I had gotten at a faculty orientation seventeen years ago, the handle chipped in a way that caught my thumb every time I lifted it to my mouth, a small snag of imperfection that I noticed and did not notice, the way you notice a crack in a wall you pass every day — it registers somewhere below conscious attention but above pure invisibility, occupying a middle frequency of awareness that I had, in chapter eleven of my manuscript, attempted to theorize as the zone where most cultural objects actually operate: perceived but not attended to, present but not processed, received but not decoded.

The book was good. That was the first thing I understood, and it landed in my chest like something physical, a tightness behind the sternum that I associated with grief but that was not exactly grief, because grief implies loss and I had not lost anything. Or I had, but what I had lost was something I had never possessed — the version of the argument that existed only as potential, the book I might have written if I had been capable of the compression and commitment that Nikolai brought to every page.

He had taken the core insight — that contrarianism in late capitalism was not a stance opposed to the dominant culture but a mechanism through which the dominant culture renewed itself, absorbing dissent as content, metabolizing refusal as brand — and he had delivered it with a clarity that felt, to me, like violence. Not because it was wrong. Because it was sufficient. He had drawn a line around an idea and said, this is what I mean, and the line held. My own version of the argument had no lines. It had only qualifications, amendments, digressions, parenthetical expansions that themselves required parenthetical expansions, a manuscript that refused to be bounded because I could not bring myself to decide where the idea ended and the world began.

I annotated furiously. In the margins of the PDF I wrote things like this is reductive and you’re conflating Debord and Baudrillard and the Frankfurt School analysis is more nuanced than this allows, and these were legitimate criticisms, I believe, real weaknesses in his argument. His chapter on punk was the one that stung most — he cited a passage from my 2004 article, quoted it accurately, and then did something with it I had never managed: he connected it to the next idea. He drew the line I had spent nineteen pages refusing to draw, and the line was clean and it held and it made the argument visible in a way my own version never had, because my version was not an argument but an environment, a climate of thought you had to inhabit to understand, and nobody inhabits a climate voluntarily when they can read a weather report instead. But somewhere around page 180, my annotations changed. I wrote: This is not what I meant. Then, ten pages later: This is what I would have said if I had been brave enough to stop qualifying. Then I closed the PDF and sat in my brown armchair and listened to the house, which made the sounds that houses make when they are old and empty and have been occupied by a single person for so long that the building itself seems to have adapted to solitude — the tick of the baseboard heater, the creak of the floor joists adjusting to the cold, the silence of rooms where no one is expected.

Three weeks later I was at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Minneapolis, sitting in a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency that smelled of carpet cleaner and institutional coffee, watching Nikolai deliver his keynote. He was good at this — the speaking, the performing, the translation of ideas into something a room full of people could receive simultaneously. He stood at the podium with his sleeves rolled up, which I recognized as a calculated gesture of informality, and he spoke without notes, which I recognized as either genuine mastery or very good preparation, and the audience listened with the attentiveness that people bring to speakers they have already decided to admire. I sat in the back row. No one recognized me. Recognition implies prior registration in someone’s awareness, and I had not been registered in anyone’s awareness for years, not in any way that counted.

Nikolai saw me. He was mid-sentence — something about the paradox of oppositional branding — and his eyes swept the back row and landed on me and his rhythm broke. Just for a beat. A fraction of a second where the signal stuttered, the carrier wave dipping before it recovered. He finished the talk. The audience applauded. I waited.

We met in the hotel bar, which occupied a corner of the lobby where the lighting was dim enough to flatter and the music was loud enough to require leaning in. Nikolai ordered a glass of wine that arrived in a glass too large for the amount it contained, a wide bowl with a shallow pool of red at the bottom, and I ordered the same because the act of choosing something different felt like it would introduce a variable I didn’t want to manage. We sat at a small table with a candle in a glass holder, the kind of candle that hotels use because it suggests intimacy without actually producing it.

“You got my email,” he said.

“I got your email.”

“And?”

“And the book is good. The argument is clear. The writing is—” I paused. The word I wanted was accessible, but I knew how that would sound, the faint condescension that clings to that word when academics use it, as though clarity were a compromise rather than an achievement. “Effective,” I said.

He smiled. He had the grace not to push. We drank our wine — which was thin and acidic, the kind of wine that conferences serve because it costs eleven dollars a bottle and the markup at hotel prices makes it profitable at any volume — and we talked about the ideas. The ideas themselves. The mechanism by which dissent is metabolized. The question of whether there is a form of opposition that resists absorption, or whether resistance is itself a category error, a misunderstanding of how cultural systems operate.

“You should have published years ago,” Nikolai said. He said it simply, without accusation, the way you might tell someone that a door they have been pushing was meant to be pulled.

“If I had, it wouldn’t have been the book.”

“There is no book, Anders.” He said this looking at his wine, not at me. “There’s a process you’ve confused for a product.”

The sentence entered me the way certain sentences do — not through the intellect but through the body, a sensation like the floor tilting two degrees, not enough to make you fall but enough to make you aware of how much of your stability depends on the floor being level. I wanted to argue. I had arguments. Twenty-two years of arguments, 1,400 pages of arguments, arguments so refined and so hedged and so elaborately qualified that they could withstand any objection because they had already anticipated every objection and incorporated it into their structure, which was, I understood in that moment with a clarity I did not want, precisely the problem.

“The footnote was generous,” I said.

“The footnote was accurate.”

There was a pause. A woman at the bar laughed at something on her phone, the sound bright and unrelated to us, belonging to a different evening happening in the same room. I wanted to ask him whether he had felt it — the moment in the writing when the argument clicks and you know you’ve arrived somewhere, when the sentence you’ve been building toward finally appears and it is better than you expected, better than you deserved, and for an instant the gap between the idea and the expression of the idea closes to nothing. I wanted to ask whether he had felt that. I didn’t ask. Some questions are confessions disguised as curiosity, and I had confessed enough for one evening.

We finished our wine. We talked about other things — his teaching, my teaching, the state of the field, a mutual acquaintance who had left academia to write for television. The conversation had the texture of something that mattered enormously to both of us and would leave no trace in the world, like a radio transmission between two stations that no one else was tuned to receive.

In April, Eloise Duvall published her monograph. Eloise was a colleague in archaeology, a small woman with gray hair cut close to her skull and a habit of wearing the same blue cardigan regardless of season, and her book was about the Saint-Uze pottery tradition — a Neolithic ceramic style from the Rhone basin, roughly 4400 to 4000 BC, that had existed alongside the dominant Chasséen culture for four centuries before disappearing without catastrophe, without conflict, without any of the dramatic endings that make for publishable narratives. I read the book in a single evening, sitting at my kitchen table with a plate of crackers and cheese that I ate without tasting, turning pages with fingers that left small grease marks in the margins.

The Saint-Uze potters had made their ceramics in their own way — distinct glazing techniques, different firing methods, vessel shapes that served the same functions as the Chasséen forms but looked nothing like them. They were not a resistance movement. They had no manifesto. They lived in their valley and made their pots and passed their methods from one generation to the next, and then, around 4000 BC, they stopped. Not because anyone forced them to stop. Not because the Chasséen tradition overwhelmed them. The knowledge simply wasn’t transmitted. One generation knew how to make the pots, and the next generation didn’t, and that was the end of a four-hundred-year tradition.

At a faculty lunch a week later — bad cafeteria coffee, a sandwich made with bread that had the texture of something manufactured rather than baked — Eloise talked about her research with the enthusiasm of someone who has spent years on something almost no one cares about, which I recognized because I share it.

“They weren’t opposing anything,” she said, pulling apart a packet of sugar and pouring it into her coffee with a precision that seemed archaeological. “They just did what they did. And then they didn’t.”

I ate my sandwich. The cafeteria was emptying out. I thought about the Saint-Uze potters making their vessels in a valley where nobody else made vessels that way, not as a statement, not as a position, just as a practice, a set of movements passed from hands to hands until the chain broke and all that remained were shards in the soil, evidence of a difference that had meant nothing to anyone except the people who did it.

In June, a journal editor called. The Journal of Cultural Critique, which I had published in twice, in 1998 and 2004. He had heard about my response to Nikolai’s book — I had written a letter, which had grown to forty pages, which had grown to something that was no longer a letter but was also not an article and not a chapter and not a book, another object that refused to be categorized, another piece of writing that existed in the space between forms.

“Even five thousand words would be significant,” the editor said. His voice had the quality of someone speaking to a person they believe to be important but cannot quite remember why. “People want to hear from you.”

I sat with the manuscript, all 1,400 pages of it, printed and bound in four three-ring binders that occupied an entire shelf of my office bookcase, and I sat with the forty-page letter, and I tried to extract five thousand words from either. Five thousand words. A bounded thing. A shape with edges. The manuscript resisted — I pulled a thread and the fabric unraveled, every passage depending on every other passage, every argument qualified by a later argument that was itself qualified by a still later one, the whole structure so intricately self-referential that removing any section was like pulling a card from the bottom of a house of cards. It wasn’t that the sections were all necessary. It was that the connections between them were, and the connections between the connections, and the meta-connections between those, an architecture of dependency that I had built, over twenty-two years, into something that could not be excerpted because excerpting would imply that some parts mattered more than others, and the whole point — the thing I had spent my life trying to articulate — was that in a system of total interconnection, hierarchy is an illusion.

I had built a machine for the production of its own unfinishability.

That night I drove to campus. The office was dark, the hallway dark, the motion sensor clicking the fluorescents on as I walked from the elevator to my door, the light humming with that particular institutional frequency, 60 hertz, the frequency of American electrical infrastructure, a vibration so constant and so ubiquitous that it registers as silence. I sat at my desk and opened the NGC catalog on my computer. I had written about NGC 399 in an undergraduate paper — my first publication, a three-page essay in the university’s student journal about the aesthetics of scientific minimalism. NGC 399: a barred spiral galaxy in Pisces, first observed in 1874, described by Dreyer in the New General Catalogue as “very faint, small, round.”

Three adjectives. The sum total of what the nineteenth century had to say about an entire galaxy.

I had argued, at twenty-one, that Dreyer’s descriptions constituted inadvertent poetry — that the compression of a galaxy into three words produced a sublime minimalism, an aesthetic of the catalog entry that was more powerful than any lyric because it was more honest, because it admitted the impossibility of adequate description by refusing to attempt it. I read that paper now. It was embarrassing, mostly. The confidence. The willingness to make a claim and leave it standing there without scaffolding. But the galaxy was still there. Very faint, small, round. It had been there for billions of years, emitting light that took millions of years to reach any instrument capable of detecting it, and Dreyer had looked at that light and written three words and moved on to the next entry.

I typed a single sentence into the journal submission form: The problem with contrarianism is that it requires a position, and a position requires a boundary, and a boundary is the first concession to the system you claim to oppose.

Then I deleted it. Then I typed it again.

Then I deleted it and closed the browser.

I submitted nothing. The journal editor called once more, left a message I did not return, and moved on to other contributors. I wrote Nikolai a short email:

The footnote was generous. The book is good. I’m not sure I agree with any of it, but I’m not sure I disagree either, and I’ve come to think that uncertainty maintained long enough becomes its own position, though that may be the most elaborate form of cowardice I’ve yet devised. I’ll keep working.

He replied three days later: I know.

I went back to the manuscript. I changed a period to a semicolon. I changed it back. I changed it again. The clause in question was about the relationship between repetition and difference in Kierkegaard, and the semicolon created a pause that suggested the two concepts were continuous, aspects of the same movement, while the period insisted they were separate, that you had to stop and start again, that the difference between repetition and difference was itself a kind of punctuation, a gap you could not bridge but only mark.

I left my office at five o’clock, which was, for me, leaving early. The hallway was still lit, other doors still open, voices still coming from the seminar room at the end of the corridor where someone was teaching an evening section. I walked through the lobby and pushed open the door and the air was warm, June warm, the kind of warmth that arrives in Iowa after months of cold and feels less like a season than like permission. The parking lot was empty except for my car and two others. The pavement was dry. The salt from winter had long since dissolved, absorbed into the asphalt, into the soil beneath the asphalt, into the groundwater that moved in slow, invisible currents beneath the campus, beneath the town, beneath the fields that stretched in every direction to a horizon so flat and so far that the curvature of the earth was not a theory but a visible fact.

I drove home. I pulled into the driveway of the house I had bought in 1998 for less than most people’s cars cost, a small white house with a porch that faced west, and instead of going inside I sat on the porch. The sky was going from blue to gold to a deep, bruised orange, the light thickening the way it does when there is nothing between you and the horizon, no buildings, no mountains, just air and distance and the slow rotation of the planet away from its star.

I sat there. I did not think about the book. I did not think about Nikolai or Eloise or the Saint-Uze potters or NGC 399 or the semicolon on page 312 or the editor’s voicemail or the forty-page letter. I sat on the porch and watched the sky go dark and felt the air cool against my arms and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood — a lawn mower somewhere, a screen door, a dog.

This lasted eleven minutes. I know because when I finally stood up, I looked at my watch, and it was 6:23, and I had sat down at 6:12. Eleven minutes. I went inside. I opened the manuscript. I changed a semicolon on page 47 to a period, then changed it back.

The radiator in the study ticked the way the radiator in my office ticked, the same rhythm, the same interval, a sound I had heard ten thousand times and would hear ten thousand more, and I did not know whether the book would ever be finished, and I did not know whether it should be, and the not-knowing had become so familiar that I could no longer tell whether it was a problem or a practice, and I did not try to decide.