Revisiting the Perez/Hobart controversy, Part 1: Psychodemographic class capture and elite cultural institutions
a psychological theory of why so much literary fiction feels the same
One of the most reliably inflammatory things you can do in life is to tell the truth. If you’re going to make the mistake of telling people the truth, it’s always better to make them laugh first (as Oscar Wilde said), but if we are being accurate, even that is no longer a tenable strategy in the world of publishing. By telling the truth, people are going to act like you are basically just setting things on fire (and in a sense, whenever you nudge the consensus Aesthetic Overton Window in a new direction, that is exactly what you are doing: you are burning a border down).
Because of the intensity of culture war, it’s now necessary completely excise yourself from any mainline cultural institution if you want to venture into truth-telling because every professional network in the arts is merely an instance of a social network, and social networks have been doing cancellations since human beings began living in groups and using language sometime in the early Holocene or earlier.
One of the theories that I have about the culture war writ large is that both sides are right about cancellation: it’s a new phenomenon (in part because of historically novel dynamics around corporate power and our over-reliance on tech platforms) and it’s also a very old one (because exile and ostracization are intrinsic elements of group sociality in general). There is a very interesting left-right synthesis around corporate overreach, precarious employment, and polarization of moral systems.
To me, it’s not a right vs. left phenomenon, it’s a power phenomenon that naturally emerges in any group setting with social norms and we could apply a similar cultural analysis to earlier eras of publishing.
In my view, most of the discourse around cancel culture is an Overton Illusion:
An Overton Illusion is when one group commits an action that is within their Overton Window but transgresses another group’s Overton Window.
In this setting, the person committing the transgression either cannot see or fundamentally disagrees with the other group’s Overton Window.
Crucially, this misperception/disagreement happens within the same society (e.g. the Modern USA) where two alternative Overton Windows exist in simultaneous competition with one another.
As I write about purity politics in literary culture, one thing you’ll note is that I’m not interested in framing this debate in traditional left/right reactionary terms, because (a) I’m not a reactionary, and (b) I think it’s a distraction from the more interesting orthogonal critique of power structures and their relationship to cultural homogenity.
I am a minority male, and I think the institution of literary publishing is broken, but I can assure you, dear reader, that this is not because I want to establish a white ethnostate. The incredibly simple reason for this is that I like reading interesting stories but I am also a huge fan of not being placed into an internment camp (I’ve lived my entire life outside of an ethnic internment camp, and I’m not about to start now). It is my belief that we can solve for the former without simultaneously activating the latter. In any event, this is especially true because of the cultural marginal role of fiction publishing.
Like Perez, I am not the only non-white writer who believes this. There are many of us, and I count some close friends among them.
How psychodemographic class capture works
Here’s my argument, stripped of any reliance on specific models of liberalism or progressivism (which is actually unimportant relative to the power structure itself, IMO):
PREMISE (AKA the orthogonality thesis): The holistic quality of a work of fiction is mostly orthogonal to its implicit (and/or explicit) ideological content and its implicit (and/or explicity) system of morality.
Sub-argument: The form of the novel is mostly about (a) bottling up the interior experience of different varieties of human consciousness (b) because of that interiority, relative to itself, a novel cannot “be wrong” or “transgress” its own internal norms, definitionally.
Evidence: The Western literary canon was written by people, mostly white men, whose ideological beliefs and moral systems would be considered intensely repulsive and reactionary today.
PREMISE: Even accounting for individual variation, a person’s ideological orientation, gender, race, and class, partly determines (a) their positive aesthetic preferences (what they like), (b) their negative aesthetic preferences (what they dislike), and their moral norms (what they consider unacceptably transgressive).
Evidence: This is a natural implication of the mind-projection fallacy, lived-experience, etc.
PREMISE: Aggregating a similar group of individuals who have an identical ideological orientation, gender, race, and class virtually determines (a) the group’s positive aesthetic preferences (what they like), (b) the group’s negative aesthetic preferences (what they dislike), and the group’s moral norms (what they consider unacceptably transgressive). This isn’t exclusively true for white men, but for any imaginable human grouping.
PREMISE: The literary publishing system can be conceived of as a sequence of filters where a random pile of manuscripts from different writers progress through each filter/gatekeeper (e.g. intern reads slush pile → literary agent selects from intern’s selection → editors select from literary agents → publishers preferentially boost certain books from their suite of editorial selections).
PREMISE: Above a certain threshold of over-representation in a non-uniform group composed of mixed members (which contains individuals with different political orientations, genders, etc.), the dominant group’s positive aesthetic preferences, negative aesthetic preferences, and transgression norms will naturally dominate.
EMPIRICAL FACT: Liberal/progressive white women of the upper middle class (combined with a precariously employed, more racially diverse underclass who have a similar ideological orientation and gender) are substantially over-represented in publishing relative to other ideological orientations, genders, and classes. The industry as a whole is tightly internally ideologically aligned.
EMPIRICAL FACT: Given premises 1 to 5, combined with empirical fact 6, means that only a small subset of literary fiction works can pass through the the sequence of filters described in premise 4.
CONCLUSION: Given premises 1 to 5, combined with empirical facts 6 & 7, means that a single psychodemographic class has effectively captured the elite cultural institution of literary publishing.
Capture, in this context, means that the vast majority of the system’s outputs are aligned to the group’s average (a) positive aesthetic tastes, (b) negative aesthetic tastes, and (c) transgression norms.
Capture, in this context, is a form of functional centralization. It doesn’t matter if there are many different literary agents, editors, and publishing houses, if they are psychologically homogenous. Homogenous systems produced homogenized outputs.
Let’s return to my core thesis around contemporary literary fiction culture: it’s a type of purity culture. A purity culture prioritizes avoiding transgression norms at all costs, using second and even third-order associations to suppress the work of anything that is deemed even slightly deviant. It’s also extremely uncomfortable when it encounters something that may not overtly be transgressive but falls within its negative aesthetic tastes (i.e. the kind of stuff it doesn’t like even if it’s not deemed morally problematic).
Recall my fundamental tradeoff from the end of my Verso piece:
I think that there is an inherent tradeoff between the following two things:
(A) Optimizing for moral purity in literary fiction, where moral purity is defined by the emergent consensus achieved by the most powerful literary institutions and figures (result: increased homogeneity).
(B) Optimizing for general openness to aesthetic experience in literary fiction (result: increased diversity).
Imagine a slider scale: that’s how this works.
Right now we are at the tail end of (A), and it’s costing us a lot of interesting stuff from (B).
Before the machine apocalypse, I want literary fiction to capture as much of human consciousness as possible.
Now, you probably don’t agree with my hyperbolic framing of AGI, but you might agree with my argument for reform nonetheless. The thing is, reform is only going to happen if we increase ideological, gender, and class diversity in literary fiction.
So how the fuck are we going to do that?
The system cannot reform itself
Calls for increased diversity within literary publishing are anything but. Ossification creates stability. When people in publishing are calling for increased diversity, what they actually want is increased ideological uniformity coupled with increased racial diversity. Unsurprisingly, this will only perpetuate the system’s constrained ability to output novel and interesting work.
You see this in the statistics around publishing interns, who are substantially more non-white than literary agents but derive their ideological content in much of the same way (i.e. whatever the emergent moral consensus is on Twitter). Here, there are some genuine axes of difference along class and race lines among a group with similar ideological priors, which is where most of the internecine wars in publishing originate. However, these are intra-factional disputes, not schismatic ones. They will eventually replace the higher levels in the system as boomer liberals age out but the power structure’s aesthetic constraints will remain the same, if not worse. PoC writers are subordinated to liberal imperialism abroad and white liberalism at home. That’s one way that the system assimilates and weaponizes immigrants to serve hegemonic power on a planetary basis (note: “weaponized immigrant” is a term coined by Yasha Levine).
If you think anything approaching internal reform in literary publishing is even remotely possible (as the US accelerates toward internal instability, imperial overreach and polycrisis), then you are out of your mind. Any memetic system will be purged even more relentlessly as the system becomes more unstable. Intersectional imperialism is now the casus belli of our interventions abroad; that’s one of the the uniques power of the Anglo-American imperium, it assimilates its own contradictions in the service of militarism abroad.
You might find it curious that alt-lit seems to have been spared. If my theory is correct, why does alt-lit even exist in the first place?
The reason alt-lit in general hasn’t already been purged is:
Almost nobody reads alt-lit books (because almost nobody reads books anymore in general), so its obscurity is politically protective.
(this will change with increased paranoia)It’s costly for Amazon to moderate fiction on the basis of ideological content because they’d need to scale this across all of Kindle Direct Publishing.
(this will change with LLM-based moderation tools)Residual legal protections from the First Amendment and latent aversion to book banning among liberals in general, particularly with regard to fiction.
(this won’t last long)
Bringing it back to Perez
Next post, I’ll circle back to the Perez/Hobart controversy using the conceptual framing I outlined above.
Stay tuned for more!