n+1 Issue 11: Dual Power

by n+1, Kent Russell, Luc Boltanski

Dual Power, Spring 2011: A brother in Afghanistan, obscure English poetry in Cambridge, crisis in the humanities. Are the Necronauts an avant-garde? (Nope.) Too Much Information, the end of silence. On photographs by Terry Richardson and Charles Graner. “making reality impossible.” Plus debut fiction by Yelena Akhtiorskaya.

202 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

n+1 is a print journal of politics, literature, and culture, published originally twice a year and now three times a year.

Reviews

[David Sasaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first discovered n+1 thanks to César. I skimmed through a couple issues while staying at his place in Austin, and it was enough to persuade me to pick up the latest issue last week in New York. I have mixed feelings about the journal, and they probably reflect the mixed feelings I have about myself. Like any good curation of content, you turn back the cover and you seem to enter a clandestine club of the chosen ones: clever contributing authors who set out from East Coast liberal arts and Ivy League schools to study Arabic in Cairo, poetry in Beijing, economic history in Argentina. ("So young and well educated but dressed like grandmothers from Palm Beach, even the men, with satin windbreakers and creative knitwear; thin, beautifully pale women in black tights and giant hair bows and men in snowflake sweaters and colorful socks," writes Emily Witt in That Room in Cambridge.) The continued tradition of intellectual colonialism: the mass migration of privileged 20- and 30-somethings traveling to far off lands to pen authoritative accounts of reality. I always saw Global Voices as an attempted antidote, yet I'm not so steeped in self-denial to pretend that I'm somehow an exception. I realize that I too have more time, more resources to travel, read, and reflect than any one person deserves. This is what I think as I read through n+1, sipping on my Mexico City macchiato.

n+1 positions itself as a middle path between the isolated, ivory tower elitism of the academy (see Revolt of the Elites ) and the complete, unfiltered accessibility of the Internet, where any mere mortal can publish without the validation of editors and advertisements. It wants to move the avant-garde out of the MFA, but it's also quick to defend the humanities as both an idea and noble profession.

I enjoyed Benjamin Kunkel's political-economic history of Argentina, an excellent primer for anyone trying to understand Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's current popularity and the 200 years of tension between the urban center of political power and the rural control of economic power. I was caught off guard by how much I enjoyed Emily Witt's account of her year at Cambridge as a poetry-illiterate Yankee surrounded by artsy Brits who obsess over Moby Dick and J.H. Prynne. Andrew Jacobs' history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — and the evolution of its interpretation as the web moved from 1.0 to 2.0 — is both thorough and thoughtful. And I took great pleasure in Gemma Sieff's juxtaposition of the photography of Terry Richardson (Vice Magazine & porno-marketing) and Charles Graner (Abu Ghraib). Sieff makes a convincing case that the imagery of Abu Ghraib is subtly influencing Manhattan marketing. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the advertisements of, say, Belvedere Vodka and the photographs of Abu Ghraib each speak to a deeper, collective American psychosis as 13-year-olds grow up watching triple anal penetration as if it ain't no thang.

I was less impressed by Luc Boltanski's account of publishing a new journal of sociology with Pierre Bourdieu, which struck me as rooted in insecurity and hero worship. Nor could I get into the only contribution penned by someone outside of the Ivy League elite, the young Yelena Akhtiorskaya from Odessa, Ukraine. Her personal narrative fiction was too staccato to pull me in.

But I picked up the issue for the two lead essays, both of which speak to issues that have been circling in my head over the past few months: the recent fetishization of data over narrative and the deadening omnipresence of music everywhere we turn, a manifesto for the celebration of silence:

What if we tried to listen to nothing? Silence is the feature of our buzzing sound-world we enjoy least, whose very existence we threaten to pave over track by track. Silence is the most endangered musical experience in our time. Turning it up, we might figure out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear.

[Dan DiPiero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid issue. My favorite pieces included "Wall of Sound" (on musical aesthetics), "That Room in Cambridge" (on obscure British poetry and life as a student of it), and "Egypt Notebook" (obvious). The fiction was lacking in this issue, but as with the previous issue it was the combination of different types of content, with the common denominator of quality writing, that kept me carefully reading on.