One of the best books I have read this year is Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller. To explain the counterintuitive suggestion of its title, Miller romps through the story of how early biologists first came up with their taxonomic categories, showing how seemingly sterile decisions about classification are, in fact, human stories involving deep character flaws that changed language, science, and history. The life of the scientist David Starr Jordan introduces us to how this thing we all think we know exists in the world, “fish,” is really just an abstract philosophical theory — and a bad one. It gets easier to let go of “fish” as a taxonomic category the more you learn about how little each slimy, scaled, swimmer species actually has to do with the others evolutionarily and the historical misassumptions made in the process.
I mention this because it demonstrates just how hard it is to make a compelling abstract metaphysical argument that some apparent thing doesn’t exist. In most cases, if you tell people some ordinary word is secretly meaningless, you’ll fail, and you’ll deserve to. Yet, this didn’t stop the staff of the New Yorker’s union from making an even more counterintuitive argument than Miller’s — declaring that editing itself does not exist. In a letter to the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, the union argued:
“Your position on just cause, which proposes an editorial exception, argues that there is ‘a vast difference between questions of conduct or behavior and questions of editorial work.’ This is not a distinction that survives close scrutiny. As any staffer can attest, editorial work nearly always involves conduct or behavior. It involves time, conversation, interrogation, and spirit. Editorial work is all and everything we do. The exception makes ‘editorial standards’ a justification for summary dismissal, and therefore voids the entire principle of just cause, especially since those standards have yet to be articulated to our members.”
What’s happening here is that the union wishes to have employment contracts akin to journalistic tenure, making it harder for them to be fired. In negotiations, New Yorker management insisted on the exception that staff could be fired for doing a bad job at their editorial work — that is, the work of journalists. If they fail at editorial work, their main charge, then they can be sacked. In response, the union has essentially taken the stance that editorial work doesn’t even exist: Everything is editorial, so nothing is.
This, I’ll remind you, is the magazine whose employees give interviews saying things such as “copyediting for the New Yorker is like playing shortstop for a Major League Baseball team.” The same magazine that gets up in arms over the difference between a diaeresis and an umlaut and insists on adding accents to every single word that could possibly contain one. Such a staff, it seems, can probably tease out what distinguishes matters of editorial judgment.
This is because anyone can discern what their editorial standards are just from reading their issues. Is the union really arguing that they, the New Yorker editorial staff, cannot? Are they arguing that the existence of some ambiguity in the definition of “editorial work” means we are to conclude there is no such thing? That the very invocation of the term “editorial” constitutes some kind of tacit ontological mischief such as Miller proves “fish” does? If the country’s most famously snobbish newsroom staff thinks the distinction that sets apart “editorial work” does not survive close scrutiny, does the New Yorker still exist?
