The Sincerity Files (original) (raw)

“The task of the modern man is… to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something he can mean. And he may not at all.” —Stanley Cavell

As I’ve been clicking around Substack in recent months—a new experience for me, starting a little before we officially created one for the magazine—I’ve noticed that much of the writing shares a quality that I’ll call, for now, “sincerity.” I know that much else besides this kind of writing is published here. But at least in my corner of the platform, a lot of the most popular Substacks tend to read something like chapters of an autofictional novel. By which I mean not only that they often depend on gestures of personal or intellectual self-exposure, but also that they mimic the best autofiction in their stylistic emphasis on directness, intimacy, and unfiltered honesty (including self-honesty). Whether this is qualitatively different from what existed on “pre-Trump Twitter,” or on Tumblr and other earlier social media platforms, or during the boom period of the “personal essay,” I am not sure. Perhaps what I am calling sincerity is a quality that is endemic to the “outsider” writing and art of our time–or to whatever in contemporary culture strikes us as most serious and alive.

Part of the goal of the project I am introducing here, which I plan to continue as a series of posts in this space throughout this year, will be to better understand the current explosion of this style and its popularity with readers–myself included. Is it right to call it sincerity at all? To what extent is it new, and how much does it draw from older sources? And how does it respond to the technological and social dynamics that have shaped our experience, culture, and politics in recent years?

The series is meant to contribute to a larger project that is unfolding across certain segments of Substack–though not only here. This is an attempt to find a name for–and in some cases to encourage–an emerging sensibility or zeitgeist, which is supposed to stand in opposition to the prevailing winds of algorithmic predictability, technocracy, and hyper politicization. One of the earliest places I saw this effort being undertaken was in

’s “Notes Toward a New Romanticism,” from 2023, which was then amplified in a column in the Guardian by

, entitled “The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms.” Gioia theorized that, just as technical advancements following from the Enlightenment in the 18th century had triggered a counter or “dark” enlightenment, led largely by artists and poets, so our current mania for “algorithmic and mechanistic thinking” will lead to a revolt against the rule of technology and the technocratic (and utilitarian) philosophies that justify it. This romantic framework for thinking about the new zeitgeist has spread widely, but other terms for related cultural shifts are also floating around.

, adapting a term from Brett Easton Ellis, speaks of us having entered a “post-Empire” age,” which is marked by “a free play of rhetoric and symbolism that, rather than mourn the loss of prestige and the slackening of global power, mocks those things while celebrating the individual.”

, in a post inspired by discussions of a recent alt-lit novel, presents notes on a new cultural attitude that she calls “post-irony,” “Post-irony is a certain mode of aestheticism,” she writes, “Its central device is to employ a form of calculated ambiguity, intentionally making it difficult for the audience to tell whether its user is ironic or sincere.” To round out the “post” mood, we might include, though it began years earlier than the rest of these, the “post-critique” movement, led by literary critics like Rita Felski and Toril Moi, which presents as a corrective to an overreliance on skeptical and paranoid modes of interpretation–and an under-emphasis on emotion and aesthetics–within the academic humanities.

Each of these movements or analyses has its own shape, sources, and targets; and in later posts I will try to show where I think they intersect and diverge. For now I mention them simply to suggest the breadth and felt urgency of this attempt to describe a new movement or project in arts and culture. (Another nonspecific name for this, and one that precedes all the others, is “vibe shift.”) This attempt feels familiar to me. In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, a similar call came, from various quarters and sometimes under different monikers, for a new kind of art and cultural sensibility. The term “sincerity” comes to me now in part because, at that time, the shift that the artists and writers were calling for was most often collected under the umbrella of “The New Sincerity.” There are good reasons that those endorsing a new sensibility today do not emphasize their sincerity; one of those reasons is that, in some cases, the target is a cultural sensibility that is perceived as being too sincere. At the same time, I think there are also connections between what was being called for at that time, and what seems to be in demand today, almost as if the original order was filled, but with the wrong items.

According to Wikipedia, the term “new sincerity” first emerged “as a collective name for a loose group of alternative rock bands, centered in Austin, Texas, in the years from about 1985 to 1990, who were perceived as reacting to the ironic and cynical outlook of then-prominent music movements like punk rock and new wave.” One of these bands was called the Reivers (originally called “Zeitgeist”). “Other important ‘new sincerity’ bands include Doctors Mob, Wild Seeds, and Glass Eye. Another significant ‘new sincerity’ figure was the eccentric, critically acclaimed songwriter Daniel Johnston.” I admit I have never heard of any of these bands, which is probably why this reads to me more like a _pre_history of the new sincerity I actually remember. The main artists who I associated with the movement almost all came later in the 90s, when I was a teenager. In music, this included Devendra Banhart, Arcade Fire, and Surfjan Stevens. In literature, which I paid more attention to, those were the years of Dave Eggers and his McSweeneys crew. In film, it was directors like Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Gus Van Sant, and (in his second act) Terrence Malick.

Another reason I think of the new sincerity as having launched mainly in the late 90s is that it was then that I began to read David Foster Wallace. I read Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest for the first time in the summer of 2001, right before 9/11, which was described by many commentators as marking “the end of the age of irony.” I was 20 at the time, too young and / or uninformed to fully grasp what statements like that might mean. But I did grasp that 9/11 was a major historical event that had occurred in my lifetime—one of the first. And this had to mean something for culture. In the ensuing years, as I read more of Wallace’s books, I only grew more convinced that they held the key to what would come next, and that this had to do first and foremost with the theme of sincerity that showed up in so many of them, almost always as a counter to the “hip irony and cynicism” that defined our postmodern present. (I first wrote about Wallace in the first issue of The Point, in 2009, and went on to write a dissertation and book about him.)

The biographical backdrop to this conviction is not irrelevant. I had grown up in a leafy neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. My parents were secular Jews and politically involved Democrats who sent me to a very “progressive”—and affluent—private school, the kind of place where it felt as if the long-sought-after liberal utopia was just around the corner, if it had not already arrived. The great mythology of my childhood was that of the 1960s, an era of action, art, and political commitment (as well as disappointment) that had paved the way, so the story went, for our multicultural present—though, of course, the work was unfinished. Unfinished, but on the other hand the time for dramatic moral stands and movements had passed. One label for our cultural situation that I do remember from my childhood was “belated.” As early as middle school, we were regularly told that the enemies of our generation were apathy and alienation. We mostly agreed. But this did not make us want to participate in politics, because politics was for nerds and pedants, like Reese Witherspoon’s character in Election, or the annoying strivers who ran for student government in my school. And anyway it was the Clinton years, and there were no great political struggles to take part in. The place where commitment seemed to be called for, rather, was in art. It was artists who were our secular priests; at my school, the painters and poets vied with the soccer stars to be the coolest kids. They were the ones who would lead us toward the value we all held most highly: self-realization or, in its high form, authenticity.

I will be more precise about these terms—sincerity, authenticity, commitment—in what follows, though part of what I want to explore is the way their meaning has changed or evolved during my lifetime. As cultural phenomena and styles, they are so large, and so amorphous, that it will be important to approach them through specific touchpoints. So I intend to discuss Lionel Trilling, and Radiohead, and Barack Obama, and Occupy Wall Street, and Sheila Heti, and The Real Housewives of Orange County. And Trump, of course. And I’ll continue to track and comment on today’s discussions of new romanticism, post-irony, etc. But the hunch I am going to start with is that Wallace is a key figure for understanding the way that these terms have developed over the past 35 years—perhaps that he is the key figure.

This is not only because he was among the earliest to articulate the case for sincerity, and against irony, in the 1990s, but also because he wrote most insightfully about the complications and challenges of being a “sincere” writer (and person) in the present. It was not just a switch you could flip, or a matter of personal will. Wallace himself arguably never lived up to the ideal of sincerity that he recommended. This was not because he was a hypocrite, as some critics charged, or because he was too steeped in the postmodern ethos he had imbibed as a young writer, although that may have been a factor. The main reason Wallace never became a fully “sincere” writer by his own definition was because he recognized many of the risks of sincerity alongside its potential advantages, and, at times, could not figure out how to neutralize those risks. I say “many of” because I do not think he recognized all of the risks, especially politically (another future post). He did recognize one risk that was to become very important, which was the risk that sincerity could ossify into dogmatism and moralism, a tendency that at the time he associated mostly with conservatives. Wallace thought the artists of his moment had a responsibility to take such risks, but that did not mean they were not risks. Or that he himself was always ready to take them.

I once wanted to write a book about the new sincerity and its influence on art, culture and politics in the 2010s, but for various reasons I did not manage to do so. As I mentioned at the top, it was reading around Substack in recent months that gave me the itch, not to write that book, but to discuss this topic again. I can’t make firm promises about how that discussion will unfold, or how often these posts will show up in the coming year. That said, here are a few of the questions and topics I intendto explore:

** One note in closing here about the Wallace / Sanders / Rogan connection, which seems worth sharing now for discourse reasons but can also serve as a kind of preview of what’s coming. There has been a discussion since the election about young men, and what they are attracted to culturally and (therefore?) politically. There was the thing about how the left needs a Joe Rogan and then the response that the left had Joe Rogan, who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2019. As is well documented, the response from many quarters of the left at that time was to attack Rogan and his followers, and to say Sanders should not accept his endorsement. But it is worth remembering, as Ross Barkan has done, that segments of the Democratic Party (and the left, I would add) also attacked young men for being too passionately attached to Bernie Sanders in 2020. This was the genesis of the “Bernie Bro” taunt, which it is easy to connect now to the exodus of young men from the party in the years since.

The taunt, of course, was not just about men supporting Sanders; it was about them doing so with such sincerity. Often with some level of evangelism, too. They wanted to convince you to support Sanders with the same fervor they did. The shape of this charge was familiar to Wallace readers. The “Wallace Bro” was a label that gained cultural currency, mostly in a series of articles in the years following Wallace’s death, about the kind of men who couldn’t stop talking about Wallace, or recommending his books to their girlfriends. Men, in other words, who felt so passionately about Wallace that they wanted others to like him as much as they did. But as these kinds of criticisms always do (as the criticism of the Bernie Bro was always also a criticism of Bernie), it didn’t stop with the bad boyfriends; the implication was always that there was something about Wallace, and the way his writing addressed these men, that was to blame.

I was never deeply stung by this; Wallace’s writing was either good enough that it would survive this kind of shallow cultural backlash, or it wasn’t, in which case it didn’t matter anyway. I think it was and is good enough, which is why I am still writing about him today. (In addition I had always admired bros and could never quite adjust to the idea that the term was an insult.) But I also know, from having appeared on Wallace panels at bookstores during those years, as well as from many casual conversations, that a lot of men who loved his writing were made to feel shame for that. Many of them stopped talking about him in public altogether, and certainly they avoided ever (God forbid!) recommending his writing to a woman. A few expressed surprise that I was going ahead with the dissertation and book, given “the environment.”

I do not say this to elicit pity for these men. I bring it up because, in view of this recent discussion, the dynamics seem so strikingly relevant. Behind the idea of trying to engineer a “liberal Joe Rogan” is the implication that something could fulfill all the requirements of the liberal-progressive cultural consensus, and still gain the passionate attachment of millions of young men. Rogan, this theory goes, is too into MMA and too much of a conspiracy theorist and now too right-wing–but remember, in 2019, he was so right-wing that he endorsed Bernie. And what was the problem with Bernie? Well, he was a “class reductionist” and once said in a private meeting that a woman might not be able to beat Trump–which was all somehow connected to how annoying his followers were to argue with on Twitter. But as you go a few years further back and see how these same kinds of attacks were leveled at Wallace—a writer of 1000 page novels about addiction and loneliness and long, serious essays about contemporary life and literature—and his readers, you start to get the idea that actually, maybe, in the 2010s, simply the fact that a lot of young men liked a thing was enough to launch a backlash against that thing in progressive intellectual spaces.1 That is to say, whatever young men felt really passionately about in the 2010s became, by definition, an object of suspicion. Progressives calling for a “liberal Joe Rogan” are, then, not just confused; they are ignorant of the fact that they themselves have contributed to the public marginalization of every liberal Joe Rogan who has presented himself in recent memory.

That many young men today are expressing sincere attachment, not to nominally progressive figures like Wallace or Sanders, but to figures like Trump, (and Rogan, and Jordan Peterson), will perhaps open some to the argument that we ought to be more careful about shaming people for their passions, no matter how imperfectly directed we consider them to be. But a further point about Wallace is worth making. Wallace was not just someone who argued for new sincerity; or created art that exemplified it. He became, at least briefly, a kind of icon of his cultural and artistic moment. The ultimate irony was that the culture of sincerity that prevailed in the following decade required the deposition of just such icons.

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