essays against everything

Against Everything: Essays

The essays in  Against Everything  are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

About the Author

Mark Greif’s scholarly work looks at the connections of literature to intellectual and cultural history, the popular arts, aesthetics and everyday ethics. He taught at the New School and Brown before coming to Stanford. He is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton, 2015), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Prize for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. His book Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism. His current book concerns the history and aesthetics of pornography from the eighteenth century to the internet age. In 2003, Greif was a founder of the journal n+1, and has been a principal member of the organization since. His books as co-editor and co-author have included The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street (n+1/FSG, 2012), Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011), and What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1/HarperCollins, 2010). His books and articles have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. He has been a Marshall Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Greif has written for publications including the London Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde, and his essays have been selected for Best American Essays and the Norton Anthology. He remains interested in the relationships between high scholarship, literary and arts journalism, low culture, and small magazines.

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By Daphne Merkin

• Aug. 26, 2016

AGAINST EVERYTHING Essays By Mark Greif 304 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.95.

We live in singularly unsubtle times, when presidential candidates shout invective instead of delivering talking points and Twitter posts privilege catchiness over nuance. Then again, ours has never been a culture to value the reflective life — unlike in France, say, where public intellectuals hold political positions, or England, where Oxbridge dons form an aristocracy of the mind. Except for a brief period during the last century, from the 1930s through the 1960s or so, when an active intelligentsia (even the word sounds dated) loosely known as the New York Intellectuals formed around a clutch of publications including Partisan Review, The Nation and Commentary, and critics like Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy had a say on matters literary and political, we tend to give short shrift to intellection for its own sake, regarding it as something best corralled off in the academy.

And indeed, for the last 20 years, instead of thinkers, we have seen the rise of pundits, those ubiquitous opiners on the news of the day who take the short view of necessity. This trend has been bucked by a handful of serious-minded magazines with a spectacularly small readership and by the occasional erudite voice in newspapers like this one. Sensing a gap in the discourse, a group of young, mostly ­Harvard-educated writers started a publication called n+1 in 2004, which attempted to fill the void where Partisan Review and the like had once engaged in “the life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling put it. Which brings us, happily, to the occasion of “Against Everything,” a new collection of essays by Mark Greif, an editor at n+1 (where most of these pieces first appeared) and a frequent contributor since its inception on widely disparate themes.

“Against Everything” is a portrait of the egghead as a youngish man (Greif was born in 1975), trying the culture on for size, deeming it too saggy in some places and too constricting in others. Greif, who has a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale and is an associate professor at the New School, seems to have read everybody on everything: His writing is studded with references from Diogenes and William James to Stanley Cavell and Baudrillard to Anatole Broyard and Foreign Affairs. Unlike his earlier book, “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” which set out to trace American humanism and was unavailingly (sometimes ponderously) academic, this collection decodes subjects both Hi and Lo, from the meaning of life and the philosophy of contemporary warfare to the implications of rap and reality television. In a short preface, Greif (who grew up near Walden Pond) credits Thoreau with inspiring his approach to experience: “I taught myself to overturn, undo, deflate, rearrange, unthink and rethink.” His method of inquiry combines a kind of scholarly purism — what would our approach to x (nutrition, sex, exercise, punk rock, the police) be like if it didn’t come wadded with expectations and a codified system of mores? — and an endearing modesty. His sensibility wavers between the hopeful and the elegiac. “To wish to be against everything,” he observes, “is to want the world to be bigger than all of it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, while an ocean of possibility rolls around us.”

“Against Exercise,” the book’s opening salvo, shows Greif at his contrarian, learned best, invoking the ancient Greeks and Hannah Arendt while questioning the distinction between private and public ­spaces. “Our gym . . . is the atomized space in which one does formerly private things, before others’ eyes, with the lonely solitude of a body acting as if it were still in private,” he writes. As will prove his wont, Greif tends to employ economic terms — “the desperate materialist gratifications of a hedonic society,” “fund of capital” — to make humanistic points. There is more than a whiff of the student Marxist in him, but instead of narrowing his view, this slightly censorious impulse lets him see things most of us prefer to overlook, including the anorexic delusion behind the pursuit of fitness: “The doctrine of thinness introduces a radical fantasy of exercise down to the bone. It admits the dream of a body unencumbered by any excess of corporeality.”

Throughout the book’s first section, Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith and the occasional sign of progress. “Afternoon of the Sex Children” draws a chilling picture of a culture in which youthfulness is fetishized and the pedophilic impulse of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert has become normalized. Greif traces the evolution of what he calls “the sex child” to “a merging of old prurient fantasies, dating from the Victorians and the Progressives, with the actual sexual liberation of children after midcentury.” He perceptively notes that our equation of sexual desire with juvenescence sets up a form of competition whereby the mandate to remain young is played upon by all the forces of the marketplace — “the professional commentators and product vendors and the needy audiences and ordinary people.” Similarly, our narcissistic view of sex as a “focus on self-discovery” rather than an avenue to “overwhelming romantic love” turns it into a mirror instead of a window: “Self-discovery puts a reflecting wall between the self and attention to the other, so that all energy supposedly exerted in fascination, attraction and love just bounces back, even when it appears to go out as love for the other.”

There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core, even if his prose frequently bristles with abstractions. So his essay “On Food,” although it is filled with clattering facts about “agricultural mechanization” and “technicized food” and threatens to go off on a full-scale critique of capitalism as well as a smaller quarrel with the writer Michael Pollan, contains pertinent ideas about “foodieism” (“a natural hobby for first-world professionals,” Greif says, “ostensibly taking up the world, but referring back to domination and the perfection of the enriched, physical self”) as well as what he terms the “progressive food philosophy” that enjoins us to believe that “unexamined food is not worth eating.”

But perhaps the most surprising essay in this section — in that it’s not what one would expect from someone with the guilt-ridden liberal credentials Greif seems to have — is his piece on Nadya Suleman, the infamous Octomom. Rather than blame Suleman unilaterally for her decision to have six embryos implanted in her womb (two of which she claimed split, adding pairs of twins), in addition to the six children she already had, three of whom were disabled, he proposes that she was simply living out another tale of 21st-­century excess: “She played a version of the drama of our time in the marionette theater of her womb.” He isn’t suggesting she is admirable — “She clearly belongs to the tradition of the great American wrecks,” he notes — but he is suggesting that the media’s anger toward her was displaced from the financial meltdown around the same time, that it was easier to demonize Suleman than to take on the failing banks and fat-cat financiers who created the housing crisis: “Octo­mom was the fat spider at the center of a hanging web. Squash her!”

There are a host of other essays, including one on the allure of Radiohead that didn’t quite grab me, although even here Greif has intriguing insights about the way pop music fuels defiance (as distinct from revolution). Four loosely linked ­pieces on “The Meaning of Life,” with titles like “Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution” and “Anaesthetic Ideology,” attempt nothing less than to define the nature of reality as mediated by a “market culture.” These have a tendency to pile dense idea on dense idea in a way that can be taxing to read — but the final one, “Thoreau Trailer Park,” connects Greif’s formative beliefs with the Occupy movement in a manner that is touchingly personal and ultimately hopeful.

In our dumbed-down, social-media-­driven age, “Against Everything” embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere.

Daphne Merkin’s books include the essay collection “The Fame Lunches” and “This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression,” which will be published in February.

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Against Everything: Essays

Description.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

About the Author

Mark Greif is co-founder of the literary and intellectual journal n+1 . He is also currently an associate professor at The New School in New York.

Praise for Against Everything: Essays

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine  •  San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • Nylon • Literary Hub • Frieze   National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay “Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything... Against Everything  is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or read a column about such a book—in short, yourself—might right now be living. It’s meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think...Greif’s argument—and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times—is that what’s killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It’s not the gym that’s the problem. It’s the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something. Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it’s not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against . . . everything." ⎻⎻    Louis Menand,   New Yorker “Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand . . . . There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core . . . intriguing . . . embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere.” ⎻⎻ Daphne Merkin,  The New York Times Book Review “His prose is limpid and plainspoken…. [H]e helps defamiliarize our present moment and points us toward alternate ways of living.…  [Greif] wields the forgotten past like a scalpel, cutting away diseased growths to find still-living flesh. In his essays, he seems to ask: Can we find ways of recovering dissent by looking in the least likely places? Can we uncover a buried past of critical opposition?” ⎻⎻   Nicholas Dames, Nation   “Greif aligns himself with one of the more neglected traditions of the essay: the highbrow polemic, a vanishing art in an era in which the personal often eclipses the philosophical…. But there’s an untrammeled optimism in being against everything—which, for Greif, entails being for something better than what already exists…. It’s a mark of the thrilling force of Greif’s reasoning, and of his writing’s palpable sincerity, that I, for one, felt justly implicated, absorbed from the start.” ⎻⎻   Nora Caplan-Bricker, Slate   “It is difficult to do justice to the subtlety and wit of Greif’s arguments, which in synopsis tend to sound bombastic…. [H]is method … draws the reader, through observation and analogy, from the particular to the general…. The reader is asked to join the dialogue…. The essay – like the debating hall, the forum, or indeed the literary magazine – is a space in which we take sides to practice democracy.” ⎻⎻   Ben Eastham, Times Literary Supplement   “The essays of Brooklyn literary magazine n+1 co-founder Mark Greif have been questioning our conventional wisdom for years. . . . Collected in Against Everything , they provide a refreshing approach to intellectual dissent, if not its validation for our day and age.” ⎻⎻ Best Books of the Year, National Post (Canada)   “Mark Greif’s essay on the Kafkaesque nature of the modern gym, ‘Against Exercise,’ is already a classic; and his new book, Against Everything , tells us it’s not just the gym, it’s also our music, our culture, our political life – everything about us.” ⎻⎻    Aravind Adiga, Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year "Mark Greif's Against Everything— as its title suggests—matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life—hipsters, foodies, gym-goers—so that we might see these characters in ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness, more interest." ⎻⎻ Kate Womersley, The Spectator (UK) Best Books of the Year “Isn't it elitist to talk about punk as if it were a text? To juxtapose Rousseau with a dating show? To say an intense workout is reminiscent of Kafka? … Against Everything, a new essay collection by Mark Greif … approaches populist topics like exercise, food, and pop culture from a decidedly not-populist perspective in order to deconstruct them, see how they work, and understand what they really mean to us. While the collection's title is delightfully antagonistic…the contents are not necessarily so. Greif's point is not to tell you how to live, but to encourage you to really think about how you're living.” ⎻⎻   Lauren Oyler , VICE "Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness,” writes n+1 co-founder Mark Greif...Greif isn’t a doomsayer, but a smart man, soused in decency and fellow feeling. He would like to know the meaning of life...Civil disobedience is a lived way to counter plutocracy. Consider Occupy Wall Street, an action in which Greif participated. “Fight the Power.” That’s to live." ⎻⎻   Peter Lewis ,  San Francisco Chronicle “Dark, wonderful essays on contemporary derangement . . . academically current but free of jargon; discontented but free of resignation; gladiatorial but free of truculence; sincere but free of gentility. . . . [T]o a reader of my generation, [they] have taken on the finish of classics.”  ⎻⎻   Gideon Lewis-Kraus ,  Bookforum “These smart and bracingly negative essays will break you out of your Facebook-induced stupor.” ⎻⎻  Esquire “Greif’s essays … ask ‘What is this phenomenon really about?,’ ‘What does it mean?,’ ‘What does it say about us?’ … Greif doesn’t lack for nerve and, whatever the object of discussion, his procedure is to ‘look steadily at it, and think.’ … I was impressed above all by the resourcefulness of his prose, the concentrated intelligence of the exercise.… Although he can make us feel the strength and rigidity of the iron cage of capitalist rationalism in a manner reminiscent of the European masters of sociological pessimism, he also treasures the capacity of the self-reliant individual to re-create himself.”  ⎻⎻   Stefan Collini,  London Review of Books "Greif, as we come to know him in these essays, is a deeply hopeful thinker, full of visions of a better, even perfect, world. His disciplined, thoughtful critiques of all manner of cultural phenomena—from YouTube videos to the mania for exercise—rest on an intuition that the world we have been given is not good enough...To argue this point with  Against Everything  is not to dismiss Greif’s achievement, but the reverse. An intellectual’s job is to provoke thought and argument, and this Greif does as well as anyone writing today."  ⎻⎻ Adam Kirsch,  Tablet “This wonderful collection of essays about contemporary American life is not only thought-provoking but also a pedigree version of that rarest beast, ‘the public understanding of the humanities.’… Underneath a fox-like curiosity in the seeming ephemera of popular culture is a hedgehog concern with how we experience all these and what that experience means. … [T]his is how academics and intellectuals ought to write for the (mythical) general reader.” ⎻⎻   Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education Supplement “[M]aybe you’ve missed cofounder Mark Greif’s years of essayistic genius for [ n+1 ]. This book is a one stop shop to fix that. In thoughtful, deeply informed, nuanced works of criticism, Greif makes the case “Against Exercise,” questions “What Was the Hipster?” and delves into “Octomom and the Market in Babies.” . . . [F]ans of in-depth cultural criticism will have the perfect companion in this compendium.” ⎻⎻   Claire Fallon, Huffington Post   “[A] prodigy in that class of gifted and talented writers responsible for bringing us  n+1 , the magazine that effectively remade the intellectual scene in New York City[,]… Greif showed everyone how it could and should be done….  Against Everything , a collection that features many of Greif’s best essays, offers a good occasion to consider what it was that made his early work so singularly powerful.”  ⎻⎻ Timothy Aubry,   Los Angeles Review of Books “These essays carve out a space of silence . . . a void levered open for new knowledge to rush in and fill. . . .  Against Everything  is the work of a gadfly essayist, not a windbag: in it, Greif is nasty and fun and also takes us to new and spacious places.” ⎻⎻  Josephine Livingstone, The Awl   “Greif has outdone himself (and this is saying something, because his work has consistently blown us away) with this collection of critical essays . . . Everything is brilliantly disseminated, clearly argued, and will leave you wanting to host (or at least attend) dinner parties where you can show off your newfound knowledge.” ⎻⎻    Kristin Iversen, Nylon   “The best essays … read as if the Roland Barthes of Mythologies , or the LA-exiled Theodor Adorno of Minima Moralia , were deposited amid post-millennial American culture. . . . The argumentative spine of Against Everything is a series of more or less explicit reflections on the category of experience, and whether it is ethical to want to opt out of experience, given the debased forms of it given us today.” ⎻⎻    Brian Dillon, 4Columns   “The best claim to be his generation’s finest essayist comes in the concluding essay on Thoreau, the Occupy movement and his own generation. Taken as a whole the book is a powerful injunction to look, listen and reflect, our surest means of defiance against the encroaching dimness.” ⎻⎻   Richard Godwin, Evening Standard (UK)   "Greif is a critic of the modern American condition...a dazzling intellectual, and like all the best philosophers, he thinks we all can and should live our lives like philosophers. To read Against Everything is a good start on that path." ⎻⎻ Christian Lorentzen, NY1 “Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility of change.” ⎻⎻ Zadie Smith   “The ideas and images I discover in Mark Greif’s essays stay with me for years, and become part of the way I experience and understand the world. I couldn’t be happier that this book is being published so I can read them all over again.” ⎻⎻ Sheila Heti   “Mark Greif's essays can cut, they can connect, and they can soar. Greif inhabits the center of all his subjects, from Nietzsche to Nas, but there is no display or cynicism here, only a powerful mind thinking hard about our culture and our politics. ‘The instant for philosophy is always now,’ he writes, because it can take forever. Now is Mark Greif's time.” ⎻⎻ Sean Wilentz   “Mark Greif is one of the most consistently interesting American writers of the last decade, and this book proves it. I read him for the pleasure of never knowing where his brain's going next. Here's the first sentence of his essay on cops: ‘A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you.’ That's the kind of weird and accurate observation I want from an essayist. Get down with a writer who's dogged in his attempt to understand us better, and wise in knowing it's hopeless.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan   “Anyone who hasn't discovered Mark Greif's unforgettable essays yet in the pages of n+1 —the country's most powerful literary mag, which he cofounded—will thank me for demanding you rush out to buy his grasp-you-by-the-throat collection Against Everything. Like James Wood or Susan Sontag, George  Orwell or Randall Jarrell, Greif defines our age yet writes with such wit and grace, he'll last forever. A must-read collection by one of our preeminent thinkers.” — Mary Karr   “I love Mark Greif. No living essayist effects the destruction of everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant touch. An unmitigated delight.” — Elif Batuman “Mark Greif’s book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the present─at a moment in which the present is slipping by so fast that anything we dare call that is already signed, sealed and delivered to the past. Hip hop, food shows, current events like war and the police, hipsters, exercises, the youth culture─ this list omits the deliberate and attractive heterogeneity of Greif’s notes on the everyday, his attempt to capture its random contents before they are incorporated into some official academic field or trivialized into familiar themes and slogans by an omnivorous public sphere. It isn’t a novel, it isn’t a journal either (which you could ‘dip into’), it’s probably not a blog, it is deliberately unfinished (in the sense of ‘to be continued’, but maybe by all or each of us); but it is certainly wonderful reading which cuts into the present before the latter disappears.” — Fredric Jameson   “Mark Greif makes a case for so much: for curiosity and precision, for second glances, for reconsidering, for paying attention to the world and not being satisfied by what it’s become, or ever been. I found the crackle of rigor in these essays, but also so much tenderness and awe.” — Leslie Jamison   “Mark Greif is the best essayist of my generation. No one is more modern or more classical – or more stylish. This has its alarming effects. When you read Against Everything, you will vow to change your life.” ⎻⎻ Adam Thirlwell

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• Paperback (August 8th, 2017): $18.00

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Against everything: essays (paperback).

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About the author, praise for….

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• Social Science / Essays
• Literary Criticism / Modern
• Kobo eBook (September 5th, 2016): $6.99
• Hardcover (September 6th, 2016): $28.95

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