Title: Sharon Stone and the Fantasy of Female Domination / Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Ted Chiang
Author: Jo Livingstone / Ted Chiang
Publisher: The New Republic / The New York Times
Date: March 30, 2021
Form: Book Review / Podcast
Keywords: Memoir, film, celebrity / Science fiction, technology, capitalism
Last week’s post was a big-picture one, thinking about genre as it manifests across a book. This week I’m zooming in again, with a super-granular close reading at the sentence level. The other difference is that this post is comparative: it’s about two different sentences from two things I read this week.
The first example comes from Jo Livingstone’s review of Sharon Stone’s memoir The Beauty of Living Twice in The New Republic. Here’s the sentence:
Stone is a star from the era when erotic psychodramas rained money, a luxuriant and distant dream today, and therefore recalling her peak means recalling a time when a woman could build her public persona on fictional villainy rather than the relentless nonfiction drip of social media updates.
It’s the part in bold that I’m interested in. That construction—recalling X means recalling Y—is one that felt both effective and familiar. But I didn’t really think about it in detail until I came across a sentence that’s constructed similarly, in a transcript of an interview with the writer Ted Chiang from The Ezra Klein Show:
I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Chiang employs two versions of this sentence, but let’s focus on the second one, which is more detailed and a closer analogy to the sentence from Livingstone’s review. What they have in common in terms of structure could be expressed in the formula AB-AC. What gets repeated—the “A”—is the word “recalling” in Livingstone; in Chiang, it’s the phrase “fears or anxieties about.” In each case, the sentence enacts a substitution, switching from the B to the C. “Her peak” gets subbed out for “a time when a woman could build her public persona on fictional villainy rather than the relentless nonfiction drip of social media updates.” And “technology” gets subbed out for “how capitalism will use technology against us.”
Here’s a diagram:
It’s at this point in the analysis that I realize that what I’m talking about when I talk about these sentences is… sentences that use the construction “what we talk about when we talk about.” Both Livingstone and Chiang, that is, are employing more direct versions of the played-out “what we talk about when we talk about…” formulation. Like instances of that formulation, they’re sentences that put their object (the B) in a wider context (the C).
For Livingstone, when we talk about the early-1990s peak of Sharon Stone’s fame, what we’re talking about is also something else: it’s the particular cultural context (the popularity of the erotic psychodrama, the nonexistence of social media) that made the tenor of her fame possible. For Chiang, when we talk about technology and AI as things to be feared, what we’re really talking about is the political-economic conditions that make technology something to fear—that is, the capitalist drive to use technology to exploit users and workers.
Both Livingstone and Chiang, then, use this construction to move from a surface phenomenon to its broader conditions of possibility. Expressed in the most abstracted terms possible, this move might look something like this:
[perception] [phenomenon] —> [perception] [conditions of possibility]
One final note: I think there’s a helpful difference in tone between the two examples. Chiang is suggesting that fears about technology rest on a fundamental misrecognition. When we talk about technology, we should instead be talking about how capitalism deploys technology. The words “are best understood” convey the instead. Livingstone, on the other hand, isn’t saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Sharon Stone—it’s a both/and thing rather than an either/or thing; Stone’s memoir is interesting both for its specificity and for the larger cultural history it maps.
I will cop to having used the “what we talk about when we talk about…” formulation (and not just four paragraphs ago). It’s really useful! But in 2021, a dozen book titles deep into the well (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Running, Books, Anne Frank, War, God, The Tube…), a moratorium is surely overdue. But you don’t need to reproduce the formulation in order to employ its underlying logic.