Tao Lin and the Literature of Nothing Outside the Self

What happens when postmodernism ceases to be a theory and becomes a personality structure

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

Chance Encounter

I once semi-randomly attended a reading by author Tao Lin at a Brooklyn book fair. We were passing through with two friends to get smoothies or bagels and I saw a poster promoting the event. To the uninitiated, Tao Lin became famous as the man who could write a book about checking his Gmail while eating yogurt. I had been gifted his book “Shoplifting at American Apparel” from an ex-girlfriend, who did, in fact, occasionally shoplift from American Apparel. The reading was predictably flat and monotonous. I forgot the topic. What was funnier was the reaction from my two friends who did not know his work: was this a joke? And more importantly: were we in on the joke or was the joke about us?

I then proceeded to not read Tao Lin and forget about Tao Lin for fourteen years.

Recently I decided to fire up Google to see what he had been up to, and — oh, my. Lin has switched his locale from Brooklyn to Hawaii and his focus from the mundane to wellness.

Tao Lin initially looked like a joke about contemporary literature. Fourteen years later, he looked more interesting to me: the joke hadn’t become profound but he had followed one of contemporary literature’s central assumptions all the way to its dead end.

Which left me wondering: how does a faux raconteur of surface become a born-again Whoop monk?

The path is more direct than you might think. Through my research I encountered two hilariously brutal reviews of Lin’s work: one from Lydia Kiesling and one from David Auerbach.

Two Very Hostile Reviews

Lydia Kiesling’s “Modern Life Is Rubbish: Tao Lin’s Taipei” in The Millions is spectacularly hostile. It begins with her wondering whether she had been “lobotomized in the night” while reading, then asking why Lin seems to “hate” both words and the reader. Her complaint is not just that the prose is ugly; it’s that Lin’s hyper-specific cataloguing of groceries, minor gestures, half-friendships, internet behavior, and drug use feels actively deadening.

The crucial thing about Kiesling’s review is that she sees Taipei as making an aesthetic principle out of triviality. Lin’s characters are not crushed by poverty, war, political catastrophe, or even conventional tragedy. They’re educated young people wandering around Brooklyn, buying organic food, taking drugs, using the internet, going to parties, and feeling bad. The disproportion between the microscopic attention Lin gives this world and its apparent triviality is what enrages her.

And then there’s David Auerbach’s “Tao Lin: the Old Master” at Waggish, which is even more savage, but there’s an important joke behind it. It is presented as a “guest post by Thomas Bernhard,” who died in 1989. Auerbach is ventriloquizing/parodying Bernhard’s famous style of denunciation, applying Bernhardian invective to Tao Lin.

The attack is extraordinary. “Bernhard” calls Lin “an unbearable chatterbox” and describes his writing as possessing an incompetent, slovenly style, permeated by “petit-bourgeois sentimentality” and “petit-bourgeois gaucherie.”

Auerbach’s parody keeps returning to the idea that Lin’s supposed alienation is not profound alienation at all. It is bourgeois malaise converted into literary prestige. He calls Taipei a “petit-bourgeois concoction from Williamsburg” and argues that Lin does not really describe malaise so much as “kitschify” it.

Tao Lin takes the ordinary discomforts of affluent young adulthood, boredom, awkward sex, drugs, social anxiety, internet addiction, vague depression, and monumentalizes them as existential suffering.

Auerbach/Bernhard’s objection is a critique of scale and seriousness. Melville, Dickinson, Poe, etc., confront enormous metaphysical or psychological problems; Lin gives comparable aesthetic seriousness to being high in Brooklyn and feeling weird around acquaintances. The parody explicitly contrasts Lin with Melville on precisely those terms.

And Kiesling arrives at almost exactly the same problem from another direction. Her opening reaction why are you inflicting this on me? comes from the sense that everything receives attention while nothing earns importance. Groceries, a breakup, guacamole, anxiety, drugs, a book tour: Lin’s prose refuses the conventional hierarchy that tells us one thing matters more than another.

Lin turns the exquisitely observed discomforts of the educated bourgeois twenty-something into ontology.

And that is why these two reviews bite so hard. They’re attacking the fundamental wager of Taipei: that the texture of mediated, narcotized, privileged, emotionally stunted modern life is itself worthy of the full seriousness of the novel.

The funny thing is that this also tells you why Taipei has strong defenders. If Lin is right, then the reviewers saying “but nothing important is happening” are almost proving his point.

The Deeper Critique: Terminal Product

The deeper critique is not really of Tao Lin as an isolated writer. It’s that he looks like a terminal product of a particular literary-artistic system.

Once a culture becomes sufficiently self-referential, the old question what is the work about? starts to feel naïve. What matters instead is mediation, voice, framing, surface, posture, genre-awareness, quotation, irony, the relationship between the work and the codes of the art world. “There is nothing outside the text” becomes less a philosophical proposition than an institutional habit.

At that point, content gets progressively demoted. The interesting thing is no longer the world but the way a culturally literate consciousness processes the world. Eventually even that shrinks. You get the way a culturally literate consciousness processes its own processing: awkwardness about awkwardness, boredom observed as boredom, alienation described from within a vocabulary already saturated with representations of alienation.

Lin is almost a perfect endpoint because he strips away a lot of the decorative machinery. There is barely even the old modernist claim that beneath banality lies transcendence. The banality is the material. Eating kale, checking Gmail, taking MDMA, worrying about how you appeared in an interaction. And the stylistic flatness prevents the novelist from imposing a hierarchy that would tell you which of those things ought to matter.

This is the terminal ironic mode in art. Irony originally has destructive power because it punctures false seriousness. But it depends on there still being some background seriousness to puncture. Once irony becomes the default cultural stance, it begins feeding on itself.

You can almost describe the progression:

Representation → critique of representation → critique of the critique → self-conscious performance of critique → ironic performance of self-consciousness → pure circulation of signs and attitudes.

Eventually the work’s main content is its awareness that it is a work.

That’s why so much late/post-postmodern art can feel simultaneously hyper-intelligent and strangely empty. Every naive position has already been anticipated and neutralized. Beauty is suspect because you know beauty is constructed. Sincerity is suspect because you know sincerity is performative. Political commitment is suspect because you know political commitment can become branding. Transgression is suspect because transgression has become a market category. Even detachment is suspect, so you perform detachment while signaling that you understand the inadequacy of detachment.

There’s nowhere left to stand.

And then Tao Lin does something interesting: he stops pretending there is somewhere to stand.

That may explain both why Taipei can look important and why the hostile reviews feel intuitively right. He is not simply writing about trivial people. He is depicting a cultural subject who has lost the equipment for distinguishing the trivial from the significant.

That’s a much more serious pathology.

The person knows how to notice everything but no longer knows what anything means.

The literary system has trained extraordinary sensitivity to language, representation, affect, micro-social interaction, identity, positionality, irony, and aesthetic codes while progressively distrusting the kinds of claims that once allowed literature to organize those perceptions into a world: metaphysics, morality, religion, historical purpose, human nature, beauty, tragedy, even stable psychological categories.

So perception gets finer while judgment gets weaker.

That’s very close to what the Taipei critics are reacting against without always quite naming it. Their objection sounds like: Why should I care about these people eating organic food and doing drugs?

But the more interesting answer is:

Because this is what consciousness looks like after culture has become extremely sophisticated about mediation and extremely uncertain about value.

The middle-class setting matters enormously here. Material necessity used to force hierarchy onto experience. Hunger matters more than aesthetic discomfort. War matters more than awkwardness. Death matters more than Twitter. But Lin’s characters inhabit an environment in which most immediate existential constraints have receded. They possess enough cultural and economic capital that interpretation itself becomes one of their principal experiences.

Then you get what could be called aestheticized minor suffering.

The tiniest emotional disturbances receive immense representational attention precisely because there is no larger structure capable of ranking them.

And this links Tao Lin to a much broader history of contemporary art. Warhol already sees the direction: eliminate the distinction between significant and insignificant images. Pop collapses high and low. Conceptualism says the idea and institutional frame may matter more than the object. Postmodernism exposes authorship and originality as unstable categories. Appropriation art makes quotation itself the work. Contemporary internet culture then accelerates the process until reference, remix, stance and meta-commentary become almost instantaneous.

The endpoint isn’t nihilism in the dramatic sense.

It’s much duller.

Nothing quite matters enough to be tragic.

Which is why boredom becomes such a central affect.

And that gives Taipei a peculiar historical significance. The flatness that reviewers treat as aesthetic failure may be a fairly precise formal representation of a world in which hierarchies of significance have collapsed.

Everything becomes equally recordable.

Nothing becomes fully meaningful.

Tao Lin is what happens when postmodernism ceases to be a theory and becomes a personality structure.

The individual has internalized the critique. He no longer needs Barthes or Derrida telling him that meanings are mediated. He experiences mediation automatically. He watches himself having experiences while having them. He anticipates how his actions will appear. He converts life into potential text almost instantly.

That’s why the internet is indispensable to Lin. It completes something literary culture had been moving toward for decades: life itself becomes textualized in real time.

And from there the apparent triviality of Taipei isn’t accidental at all.

It may be the perfect subject matter.

The final object left for a culture that has deconstructed almost everything outside representation is the endlessly annotated experience of being a person who consumes representations.

The Dead End: Bodily Inventory

The dead end is that once looking itself becomes the object, the project needs some compensating source of pressure: a world, a conflict, a metaphysical stake, a social structure, even a genuinely strange consciousness. Without that, radical attention can collapse into inventory.

Lin’s early work at least had a formal problem to solve: what does digitally mediated, emotionally flattened, hyper-self-conscious life feel like from the inside? Taipei can plausibly claim that its monotony is mimetic. The sameness is doing representational work.

But that defense gets weaker in the later writing because the procedure becomes predictable. The basic unit is often something like: I ingested X, experienced Y sensation, read Z theory, noticed my body/mind behaving in some unusual way, then recorded it with maximal literalness. The promise is that sufficiently exact introspection will disclose something underneath conventional categories. Yet very often what it discloses is simply… an unusual drug experience.

And that creates several failures at once.

First, phenomenology without an object becomes solipsism. Great phenomenological writing normally uses extreme attention to recover something about the world: Proust’s memory, Woolf’s social perception, Beckett’s consciousness under ontological pressure. The perception is interesting because something resists it. In Lin, increasingly, consciousness can become a closed loop examining its own state changes.

Second, specificity stops producing universality. There’s a common artistic wager that if you describe your experience precisely enough, the idiosyncratic becomes universal. Sometimes it does. But precision alone doesn’t guarantee this. “I took five substances and experienced these thirty-seven bodily sensations” may be intensely specific while remaining almost completely private. It lacks the bridge from my nervous system to your life.

That is why later Tao Lin can feel like your high school stoner classmate endlessly bragging about how high they were, in book form. The drugs are supposed to serve as instruments of epistemology. But if they repeatedly produce material whose chief significance is that the author experienced it, the instrument becomes the subject.

Third, Lin’s anti-interpretive stance starts undermining him. The refusal to impose conventional meaning initially feels refreshing: don’t sentimentalize, don’t psychologize, don’t tell us what to think. But interpretation is also one of the things writers do. If you continuously refuse to move from description toward judgment, causation, hierarchy, or synthesis, eventually the reader has to ask:

Why am I being shown this?

“Because it happened” is a viable artistic answer only for so long.

And there’s a deeper irony here. Lin’s project depends on escaping cultural mediation through ever more literal attention: strip away cliché, inherited narrative, socially imposed categories, psychiatric language, conventional morality. Get closer to raw experience.

But there is no raw experience waiting underneath.

So every attempt to eliminate interpretation simply generates another interpretive vocabulary: supplements, serotonin, toxins, dreams, bodily processes, alternative medicine, psychedelic insight, nutritional theories. He escapes one symbolic system and ends up inside another.

When the text no longer supplies reality, Lin turns to the body. But the body becomes another text.

That’s where the project becomes especially revealing. The person who believes he has escaped ideology because he distrusts literary convention can become extraordinarily credulous toward a different set of explanatory systems.

So the trajectory might be:

irony → flatness → literalism → radical subjectivity → self-observation → attempts at purification → private cosmology.

And the movement that initially looked like radical openness actually becomes narrower and narrower.

There’s also a structural problem with novelty. Taipei had historical specificity. The fusion of smartphones, social media, drugs, awkwardness and continuous self-observation genuinely captured something emerging around 2010–13. But once that condition becomes ordinary, merely continuing to document it isn’t sufficient. The form needs to discover a new contradiction.

Instead, Lin sometimes seems to intensify the same move: more exact recording, more substances, more dietary experimentation, more unusual mental states.

Which produces diminishing returns.

At the beginning:

Look how strange ordinary consciousness becomes under digital mediation.

Later:

Look how strange my consciousness became yesterday.

Those aren’t equivalent artistic propositions.

Terminal irony eventually produces terminal sincerity, but a very peculiar kind: not return to shared meaning, but obsessive authenticity about private experience.

After decades of suspicion toward grand narratives, moral authority, representation, universality and convention, the one thing you can still claim unquestionable authority over is:

this is what I experienced.

Nobody can deconstruct the fact that I felt this sensation.

So subjectivity becomes the final refuge from skepticism.

But then culture runs into the opposite problem: subjectivity isn’t automatically interesting.

That’s perhaps the fundamental dead end.

Modernism could say: I will descend into consciousness and discover the human.

The later postmodern subject says: I will descend into consciousness and discover mediation.

Lin’s later subject can end up saying: I descended into consciousness and discovered myself.

And unless the self opens back onto history, society, other people, metaphysics, nature, tragedy, or some other resistant object, there’s nowhere further to go.

The project becomes almost centripetal: every attempt at liberation leads further inward.

The failure of Tao Lin’s project is not that he went too far into subjectivity. It is that contemporary culture had already emptied subjectivity of everything except subjectivity itself.

He reaches the supposedly final source of authenticity and discovers that the self, without a world, isn’t deep enough to sustain an art form indefinitely.

So we return to the question: Are we in on the joke, or is the joke about us?