On Naomi Kanakia’s “The Function of the Little Magazines”

Naomi Kanakia has a fascinating new piece on her Substack where she applies her style of no-bullshit, see-through-the-mythology, count every penny analytical lens to the world of the little magazine (i.e. .N+1, The Point, The Drift, Jacobin, The Baffler, etc. - i.e. all heirs to Partian Review).

It’s great! I love it. But I’m unpersuaded by her overall assessment of the function of the little magazines. She writes:

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these journals … feel like transient entertainment for a certain type of person—an aspiring intellectual—to read on the phone or to browse on their toilet. They are a space for individual circles of writers—scenes—to constitute themselves and to create community around shared ideas. And this community tends to get built most strongly by dismissive polemics where they shower scorn on the out-group: the unsophisticated middlebrow consumer.

The purpose of these journals is really to build and preserve an attitude of mental superiority over these unsophisticated outsiders. This attitude provides many psychological benefits to the intellectuals who hold it—those intellectuals are confirmed in their own specialness, their own superiority over the herd. And, as a side benefit, this attitude produces a style of rhetoric that is powerfully attractive to The New Yorker in particular, which continually finds ways of peddling mass-market versions of this superior attitude to its readership.

I like it when Naomi takes the piss out of these worlds, in no small part because I feel seen (through). I resemble that remark, as as great poet once said. I’m one of the self-regarding douches who goes to sleep at night dreaming of going back in time and trading witty banter with Mary McCarthy at a Partisan Review party on the upper west side. So my beef is not that. I just think she’s missing something important when she reduces their function to the specific type of writing they do best and most influentially (which she calls a “polemic,” though I think it’s a bit broader a category than that).

When a given magazine is having its moment, no doubt it’s partially about the vigor of its polemics, but it’s as much or more about the totality of its vibe—the aura of its editor, the potency of its aesthetic, the larger voice and tone of the magazine, the coolness of its parties. It’s the magazine that ramifies, not just or primarily its constituent parts, and in this sense it’s the editors who matter—the Gessens, Greifs, Kunkels, and Roths; the Baskins and Bergs; the Sunkaras and Shullenbergers—much more than their marquee writers.

In you think about N+1 in its early years, for instance, those impossibly arrogant “Intellectual Situation” columns at the start of every issue were doing something much larger than just what they were saying. They became where certain sectors of the intellectual and cultural elite went not just to have their sense of cultural and intellectual superiority affirmed, but actually to get their cues about what to be thinking about and often how to be thinking about it. It wasn’t about agreement or disagreement but rather the contours of the discourse within which agreement and disagreement might occur.

The columns, in the context not just of the whole magazine but of the whole ecosystem and the magazine’s role within it, imprinted themselves on … the intellectual situation in a way the New Yorker simply couldn’t do, even if it published more excellent writing in a given quarter than N+1, which it almost certainly did.

No one little magazine swings that big a cultural dick these days, but it seems clearly the case to me that a few of them, at least, still matter in this sense. Certainly The Point. Maybe still N+1. Maybe Jacobin. They surface early signals of cultural shifts, allow for tentative airing of new political sensibilities that aren’t yet safe to be aired in the more establishment mags, imprint themselves on the zeitgeist in ways I am honestly hard pressed to articulate but which I can viscerally feel.

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