Twenty years ago this year, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his influential book On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter, a well-known social menace, is an individual who, unlike the liar, holds forth with complete indifference as to whether he is speaking truly or falsely. He just speaks: in a manner recklessly detached from the facts. As other philosophers quickly noticed, however, bullshit is a diverse category, one with many prototypes. In his own contribution to the blossoming field of bullshit studies, the Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested that much 20th-century French critical theory should be thought of as a different species of bullshit in virtue of its “unclarifiable unclarity”. David Graeber famously speculated that, within the modern economy, entire professions and activities constituted a kind of “bullshit”. If these manifestations of bullshit have anything in common it is perhaps that in each some clearly functional ideal — truthful communication, clear writing, meaningful employment — is flagrantly undermined, while the appearance that it isn’t is deceptively sustained.
Today, one distinctive kind of bullshit is generated when a leading literary luminary (usually a novelist) is commissioned by a high-minded magazine (usually American) to pontificate at length on a political issue, or worse, cultural “moment”. The genre showcases the novelistic treatment of contemporary politics. And though the sentences are usually syntactically clear, and the articles, at first sight, apparently thesis-driven, the reader quickly remembers that appearances can be deceptive. The characteristic sleight-of-hand of this brand of bullshit is, under the pretence of heading toward a sophisticated conclusion, to assert virtually nothing at all. If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights, usually by burying them under a heap of diversionary material.
“If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights.”
Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, exemplifies the genre to a tee. It is a well-packed flower press of literary bull pats. Though better known as the award-winning writer of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith has found a new groove — or rut, depending on your point of view — in churning out think pieces for high-minded longform publications, on everything from the Middle East, to the 2024 presidential election, the immigration crisis, Stormzy, Tár, and the wayward political influence of Silicon Valley. Reading them is enough to make me wonder whether English students should not be educated in the style of firearms officers: provided with the basic skills of the trade only under the heavy proviso that they will hopefully never have to make use of them outside the classroom.
Dead and Alive? Even the title is faintly annoying. But Smith’s passing over the more naturally disjunctive “dead or alive” in preference for a title that needlessly flirts with inconsistency is wholly in keeping with the spirit of her essays. These, she admits, “tend to employ a lengthy and sometimes oblique way of thinking”. Smith is by her own admission suspicious of the kind of “clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences” she associates dismissively with social media, certain styles of politics and journalism, and academic writing. She admires prose that is “serpentine, hard to parse”.
Of course to the uninitiated reader the effort to valorise unclarity and circumlocution might look like just that: the attempt to present as a stylistic virtue what is in fact a literary defect. And it’s an approach that’s got Smith into trouble before, most notoriously in March last year, when a New Yorker essay of hers, “Shibboleths” (re-collected here), seemed to many to draw several shaky moral equivalences between the norms appropriate to warfare and those appropriate to campus politics.
But that essay is a much more confused object than that parsing of it suggests, and quite representative of the collection in that respect. To her, Columbia University’s anti-Israeli protestors were both “heroic” and in the grip of motivations that were “cynical and unworthy”. In one critical posture, Smith finds the arguments of both sides vapid and politically impotent: “All of that was just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.” Then, taking up another diametrically opposed stance within the space of a few paragraphs, she grandiosely reminds her reader that, in this political arena, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”. What, then, the reader is left thinking, does Smith think words are? “Unreal” and “meaningless”, or WMDs? They can’t be both, surely? Most likely, they are neither.
Smith is in fact a talented draughtsman of tendentious moral equivalences and assorted analogical relations of doubtful standing. Aren’t the “parallels between twenty-first-century climate denialism and nineteenth-century rationalizations of plantation slavery” vivid? Isn’t Elon Musk’s twitter algorithm a bit like Nazi propaganda, only more effective? Participating in the celebrations of England fans at the World Cup, Smith is reminded of “Nazi delirium” yet again. Uncontrolled immigration may seem to be a political problem, but aren’t “all human social arrangements… inherently problematic”? Almost always, these wild inter-connections serve to obstruct, rather than clear the way for, a developing line of thought. In fact, Smith is disarmingly upfront about her lack of argumentative ambition in Dead and Alive. “All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like”: that kind presumably being vaguely paranoid, flighty, and easily morally distracted.
Sometimes, the intellectual morasses Smith traps herself in concern her own specialism — language itself. Possessed of the writer’s occupational hazard, she overestimates how many political and social problems are fundamentally linguistic in nature. On cultural appropriation, she writes: “What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not ‘cultural appropriation’ but rather ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ or ‘profound other-fascination’ or even ‘cross-epidermal reanimation’? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even furious – but I’m certain they would not be the same.” To give Smith credit where it’s due, a world in which a phrase like “cross-epidermal reanimation” had successfully entered the popular lexicon would indeed be a very different one, perhaps unrecognisable.
When prompted, perhaps by an editor, or her own residual nagging sense that something recognisable as a conclusion is owed to the readers of her meandering think pieces, Smith’s response can be a superior kind of outrage that she should be called upon to affirm anything as vulgar as a settled position. She huffily concludes her Gaza piece: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” With the possible exception of “useful”, the risk is that the reader will take Smith up on her thoughtful invitation, and apply all of these, not exactly mutually exclusive, labels to her in light of her painful, self-regarding style of equivocation.
Smith isn’t even very consistent on the question of whether everything is complicated. You see, some things, according to her, are shockingly simple. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong things. Addressing a crowd of Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered on Tufton Street, London’s home of free-market think tanks, Smith denounces “common sense fiscal conservatives” (to her mind, apparently, anyone who thinks environmental factors should be balanced against economic interests in determining climate change policy) as unequivocally “evil”. Moreover, those “tech” bros who believe climate change should be met with technological innovations are “purely sociopathic and ideological”. The various protestors committing criminal offences under the aegis of Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, are bravely taking on a “level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us”.
Unimaginable, that is, including to Smith. She is quite adept at pulling off selective failures of imagination when the moment calls for them. When invited to commit “an arrestable offence” by her fellow protestors, Smith has, hilariously, to decline. Risking arrest or conviction, you see, would make flying to New York so much trickier, perhaps even “impossible”. In fact, despite declaring that she is “trying to fly less”, scattered clues in Dead and Alive suggest that Smith spends a lot of time in the air, suspended midway across the Atlantic. London, New York, Germany — then off to Austria to collect a literary prize and make some more remarks about the alarming “rightward turn” of politics. The metaphorical richness of this repeated image — the celebrity novelist, entirely ungrounded, resolutely detached from reality — seems not to register with her.
Those cascading frequent flyer points are not the only respect in which Smith fails to live up to her own evaluative ideals, nor in the end the most damning either. As she indicates in an early essay, the simple heuristic by which she is disposed to assess artistic work is the simple question, “Is it interesting?”. Yet, time and again, Smith falls hopelessly short of that standard. Should the reader go to the sometimes considerable effort of extracting her background political positions from the thicket of evasion and complication, virtually nothing beyond the boilerplate, politically preening and utterly unserious is to be discovered. Her incidental political remarks are sub-Guardian-esque.
The Tories “want us to return to a medieval feudal state” and are only interested in “making millionaires billionaires”. Stormzy is what a real “leader looks like”. Smith is bemused to see shoplifters on British high streets: “people seizing their reparations from global capitalism and walking straight out the door.” She lambasts Boris Johnson for “partying” while people’s “relatives died of Covid”. She uses the phrase “differently abled”, apparently without irony. Once or twice, she accurately senses that she is “irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present”. She longs for the “glory days” of the NHS in the late Nineties. She is a sentimental pessimist about AI. She shuns social media — the glow of the iPhone screen is to her a “deathly Palo-Alto-late-capitalist-consciousness-colonizing-sickly-blueish-light”. Perhaps she is also vaguely aware that in the straight-shooting discursive world of online commentary, the wilfully “oblique” takes of literary luminaries might be more easily unmasked as the often irrelevant contributions they are.
As the reader may have come to anticipate, Smith can’t make her mind up on the question of whether artists and writers ought, actually, to be interesting. (One “myth” she suddenly seeks to puncture is that “the great writer is somehow inherently more interesting than other people. He has a unique consciousness, a special way of seeing. We reward him with a book contract. I don’t buy any of that.”) Unfortunately, simply releasing oneself, however contradictorily, from the obligation of being interesting is not a way of becoming so. In fact, it is a way of being quite dull. You can see why magazine editors might see it as an inspired commission to have a prized writer weigh in on current events: the promise that the drab materials of workaday journalism will be elevated under the novelist’s unpredictable, imaginative gaze. Of course, a danger is that the process leaves you with the vices of both genres, and the virtues of neither.
