Nein. a Manifesto by Eric Jarosinski

Author:Eric Jarosinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802190833
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-14T14:00:00+00:00

Afterword

This little book is the result of a rather spectacular failure. While struggling to write an academic tome, one I hoped might help me get tenure at an Ivy League research university, I discovered Twitter. In large measure this would prove to be the end of not only the project I had been working on for so long, but of my academic career as a whole. It was also the start of a strange new occupation as what I’ve termed an Internet aphorist, though I still have difficulty defining exactly what the job entails.

Having never been one for blogs or social media, I was singularly unimpressed with Twitter when first introduced. Yet I soon found its 140-character limit, relative anonymity, and the escape it seemed to offer from the isolation of academic life extremely liberating. I invented a fictitious journal—Nein. Quarterly: A Compendium of Utopian Negation—and began developing an online persona based on Theodor W. Adorno, one of the philosophers I’d been struggling to write about in my book. For better or worse, from that point on my days were spent ignoring the ticking of the tenure clock while writing jokes and aphorisms about philosophy, art, language, and literature.

What’s emerged in the few years that have followed, apart from unemployment, is a perspective that is misanthropic yet romantic, authoritative yet absurd, principled yet darkly nihilistic. In short, I found a voice that is both invented yet somehow more authentic than that hiding behind the tortured qualifiers and anxious hedging of my academic work. And to my surprise, it spoke to others as well, gradually finding real resonance and a highly diverse global audience.

My accomplishments to date have been modest, yet they might well mean more to me than my abandoned book project ever could have: some people are learning German, reading Kafka, or studying philosophy who might not have otherwise; in my work online and in European newspapers I’ve been able to represent a somewhat alternative, self-critical American perspective abroad; and I’d like to think that a depressing joke about cultural pessimism and despair has occasionally managed to brighten someone’s day.

It is no exaggeration to say that I owe thousands of people thanks, both online and off, for the kindness that has made this venture possible. Despite the apparent bleakness of my work, I’d like to think that some sense of that spirit of generosity has managed to survive within it. Kafka is quoted as having said that there is always hope—just not for us. In its own little way, this book seeks to second that.

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