BOOK REVIEWS

Mark Greif’s Against Everything

21 June 2024

“Greif is a man willing to raise questions and challenges about our obsessions and fetishes, many of them truly (and rightly) diagnosing some deeper malaise that is worth our while to reflect upon.”

It’s hard to be incisive about popular culture, and it’s harder to do and stay relevant years later. Greif is challenged here at both levels (hence his n+1 publication which tries to keep up with the trends). As a white man explaining culture in academic prose to contemporary readers living it, he also paints a fairly large target on himself, a position he seems either oblivious to or doesn’t care about–either way, a bit problematic.

So I didn’t go into this anthology expecting the hip approaches of a Klosterman or the academic rigor of a [insert your favorite sociology PhD here]. Instead, I recommend reading Greif as a man willing to raise questions and challenges about our obsessions and fetishes, many of them truly (and rightly) diagnosing some deeper malaise that is worth our while to reflect upon.

Yes, the Radiohead and Kardashian essays don’t play well, and the hip-hop claims have some powerful regions of deafness. But his discussions of our performative natures around exercise, about the clean parallels between our current military and Classical Age hero narratives, or–for me most powerfully–his redefinition of experience and its consequences for a more fulfilling life purpose, all resonate disturbingly for those willing to overlook the earlier issues.

And how may we discover ourselves unless we–all of us, whoever we are–aren’t willing to ask the questions? The alternative seems to be an oblivious purchase into a culture sold to us by tradition and trend, by popular acclaim and appropriating profiteers. For those who blithely reject Greif out of hand, excuse me, your, um, obsession is showing . . . .

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