Reductio Ad Absurdum
I’m back into Society of the Spectacle. If you haven’t read it, you should know that it is composed of numbered paragraphs separated by blank space on the page, each functioning with relative independence despite its clearly deliberate placement within the sequence as a whole. Many of these little sections end in a pretty little turn of phrase, a kicker of sorts, that serves as both summary and punchline for the paragraph it concludes. “By accumulating capital it accumulates a proletariat and thus creates its own negation in a country where it did not yet exist” (113). “Only there is the spectacular negation of life negated in its turn” (117). “Historical consciousness … can now recognize this reality, no longer at the periphery of what is ebbing, but at the center of what is rising” (118). “In order to remain human, men must remain the same” (130). “In Greece historical time became conscious, but not yet conscious of itself” (134). And so on.
Now usually such pleasing wit would have me weak in the knees, but this is irritating me. Not only is it as arrogant as Joyce and as formally unvaried as a nursery rhyme—so too are many great works of thought and art—but what really bothers me is that it places the oversimplifications at endings rather than at beginnings.
I once had a professor who, at the end of every complex discussion, would exhort us to “boil it down” to a “gold nugget” of an idea that we could carry out the door with us. I know what she was trying to do, but all she inspired in me was a recurrent fantasy of telling her to go boil her head. An oversimplification is properly the beginning of a conversation: a way to establish a shared paradigm, to ensure dialog, and to make sure people know what it is the job of the discussion to complicate. There is no good reason—not even, or especially not, the pressure of turning theory to practice—for talking nuance and subtlety for hours only to end by being reductive about it all.
Straight from the Elephant’s Mouth
A staunch conservative defends John McCain in spite of “his sometimes bizarre heresies from conservatism.”
“Consider the fight against outrageous government spending . . . McCain has proposed the most free-market-oriented health care reforms imaginable from a national party nominee during a contentious campaign. And on taxes, the fact remains that McCain has never, not once, supported an income-tax rate hike. He calls for corporate tax deductions and seems genuinely committed to fighting, really fighting, to make most of President Bush’s tax cuts permanent.
“Finally, nobody can doubt McCain’s love of country, his dedication to a strong defense, his concern for our military personnel, or his bedrock belief in American exceptionalism and commitment to victory for the United States over its many dangerous enemies.
“These conservative virtues of McCain are no mere projections of our own hopes. Instead, McCain has proved his embodiment of these virtues through a lifetime of service.”
Then these conservative vices of McCain are no mere projections of my own rabid liberalism. Good to know.
“The Smog of Academic Consensus”
“That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a professor of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies.” More…
Progressivisms
Portland, Oregon is starting to be a little more suspicious of its own famed progressivism. The article is here.
“’I’ve been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland’s blind spot in its progressivism,’ said Khaela Maricich, a local [white] artist and musician. ‘They think they live in the best city in the country, but it’s all about saving the environment and things like that. It’s not really about social issues. It’s upper-middle-class progressivism, really.’”
You know what bothers me, Khaela? The way that issues are divided into “upper-middle-class progressivism” (the environment, gay rights, feminism when it overlooks or reinforces racism, drinking fair trade coffee) on the one hand and “social issues” (poverty, education, unemployment) on the other, with the latter category of course being more “difficult” and “real” than the former. The dichotomy is a real phenomenon but it’s false. Everyone knows this. If your environmentalism isn’t fighting poverty, it’s probably not progressive. The same goes if your feminism is racist or your antiracism is sexist or your fair trade consumption lulls you into a complacency that allows you to ignore the people you step on every morning on the way to work because you’re busy congratulating yourself on being the savior of poor coffee farmers everywhere. At the same time, of course, this is emphatically not an argument against buying fair trade coffee, which as far as I can tell is a good idea.
The article and its sources take an important first step–recognizing the fissures in progressivism and the futility and hypocrisy they engender within the so-called movement–but I wish it went on to acknowledge that the solution is not to convert oneself from “soft” progressive to “hard” progressive but rather to figure out that you can’t really be one without being the other.
P.S. Best quote of the article, which I think comments both on the people discussed in the article and on the journalistic endeavor itself: “’That’s been our history,’ Norma Trimble, who is Native American, said during the question-and-answer session this month. ‘They take all you’ve got. They take your land. Now they want your stories.’”
Pseudopsychotheoloscience
Maybe all I need is a stroke.
I don’t think I’m terribly left-brained, though. The one time I took an “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” test–admittedly it was in ninth-grade biology–my two hemispheres tied. I kept re-taking the thing hoping that one side or the other would win out, desperate for a positive identity like all adolescents, but the results never changed.
More on the “Culture of Academic Argument”
I’m still thinking about Clueless in Academe, about which I have written before (here, here, and here).
Many students Graff has encountered say “that when they write academic papers they feel as if they ‘disappear’ as people, as if they were ‘mouthing the words of others, allowing sources to speak through them unquestioned, unexamined.’”
As for me, I feel like academic discourse and its formal-argumentative variants have been my strongest, most precise media of personal expression ever since I can remember. I guess that’s what happens when both your parents are academics and you’ve practically been drowning in social capital (if not necessarily economic capital) since before you were born? It’s fascinating and humbling to read an entire book on how to make less foreign to young people something that I cannot ever remember being foreign to me.
“Have the feminists gone too far?” And Other Questions
Here is a rather incoherent article that generated some fascinating comments, including the excerpts below. By the way, I’ve never seen the term “femmunist” before.
“It’s time to offer congratulations to the feminists’ movement of the sixties and their successors. They have successfully accomplished their original goal: reducing men and boys in the US to subservience.”
“Don’t blame feminism (Hoff Summers is a very poor example sir of good scholarship on the subject by the way) for the mess we men created. As several social scientists have dubbed it, the “masculine paradox” theory posits that the beloved tenets of revered masculinity (risk taking, emotional illeteracy, aversion to intimacy, and so on) are the very same conditions that make the individual man feel constantly inept, afraid of any behavior or thought coded feminine, and always striving to live the life of optimal masculinity. When many men, because of class, race, or sexual orientation, cannot live that life, they are marginalized by the normativity of the masculine regime. Not only are men marginalized because of social identities, but because the conditions for masculinity are drawn so narrow by men/for men, then most men feel like perpetual failures. Thus, what brings men their collective social, economic, and political power are also the factors that create individual male pain and can influence issues like schooling, especially among groups of men who experience or have experienced a long history of marginalization.
“The issue is not that feminism has gone too far, but that feminist critique of traditional expectations of men has not gone far enough to benefit and liberate men as well.”
“That we have men falling through the cracks in our educational system is indeed a problem that needs serious attention and thoughtful remedies. But the causes of disparity are vastly different than those that caused the lack of participation by women and minority groups in a prior era, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that these differential participation rates will respond to the same remedies. Women were ready and prepared to attend college, but they were not allowed to. Men falling through the cracks are not prepared to attend college — that is the problem that needs fixing.”
“Can you possibly ditch the “raced” and “classed” jargon? Real social scientists don’t talk that way.”
“When women were the ones outnumbered at colleges, we blamed the schools and passed Title IX. When boys are getting screwed, we blame the boys and largely ignore the problem.”
“Boys are getting metaphorically raped by an education system.”
“What has happened is that women’s organizations, in an attempt to mitigate any call for the fair distribution of resources, have played the race card and said, “Oh, don’t worry white middle America, your sons aren’t doing that much worse that white girls, its only the blacks and Latinos who are woefully behind — no problem here.”
“As the political (femmunist) groups and the appeasing (Dems & Republicans) political groups continue to pander to the lowest common denominators in our population, Arlington National Cemetery will probably need to be 50% womyn before femmunists can finally rest in their struggle.”
I would ask if there isn’t another, far less ominous explanation: since 1970, the U.S. has become a more entrepreneurial society. Greater access to technology and finance, especially in the past 10 years or so, has made it possible for more people to have a business. Many are not ‘intellectual businesses’ so they do not require academic credentials to start or run.
“Isn’t it at least possible that many young men are finding that they can earn just as much by having their own businesses, without spending four increasingly expensive years in college (and perhaps seeing their white-collar jobs offshored), and doing just that? Whereas women may find that they still have to be more qualified than men to succeed in life, so they’re still going to college. Even when it comes to providing finance, it seems to me that investors are more willing to take a chance on a ‘male vision’ while for women they demand a ‘track record.’ Not to get too far off-topic here, but we can even see this in the Democratic nomination.”
“Men in this country live no great lives of privilege. Look around you man, it’s the women who live the lives of privilege. These privileges are found in all spheres of life and are enshrined in many facets of the law and societal custom. I could go on at some length listing examples but if it isn’t already obvious to you it would be a waste.”
Comfy?
“I understood finally what perfect human health was when I realized that for her the present was a tangible truth within which one could curl up and be warm.” -Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realisation.” -John Banville, The Sea
Conclusion: to be both healthy and alive, wrestle unflaggingly for cozy blankets with your bedmate.
This was said in 1935.
“I am not a member of any organized party—I am a Democrat.” –Will Rogers
Orwell said the only “ism” that had justified itself was pessimism…
“The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” – Robert Nozick
Man, I love still being young enough (22) to be utterly blindsided by the most obvious of notions.
Also, Joan Robinson said that “any government which had both the power and the will to remedy the major defects of the capitalist system would have the will and the power to abolish it altogether, while governments which have the power to retain the system lack the will to remedy its defects.”
Quite true—of all sorts of governments, no? Not to mention institutions (cough education system cough) in general. An argument for revolutions? I wish I were back in the Yale bubble where I could just perform a purely formal analysis (or something that pretended to be such) of how the author’s decision to vary the order of the words “power” and “will” not only enhances dramatically the rhetorical value of her argument but also alludes to a famous speech on government and power by some ancient Roman orator. (Now I’m in the penumbra of that bubble, the blogosphere, where I have to worry about the defects of capitalism but don’t yet need to do anything about it.)
Universal, Eternal, and Unfree?
“The subject is to the painter what the rails are to the locomotive. He cannot do without it. In fact, when he refuses to seek or accept a subject his own plastic methods and his own aesthetic theories become his subject instead. And even if he escapes them, he himself becomes the subject of his work. He becomes nothing but an illustrator of his own state of mind, and in trying to liberate himself he falls into the worst sort of slavery.” -Diego Rivera
This is a useful antidote to my old fantasy of art uncorrupted by any situational particularity of space or time. Purity becomes slavery, just as Said said (ha) about aestheticism in literature. Or am I wrongly conflating the notion of art for art’s sake with that of decontextualization? For me at least they are the same.
On the Possibility of Humanitarianism by Force in Myanmar/Burma
It is one of a dying breed: an article that I would venture to say is interesting whether you agree with it 100%, 50%, or 0%.
* Edit: “dying breed” implies way too much nostalgia for the (or an imaginary) past. I should have known not to use a cliché–the damned things always make one say what one doesn’t mean, not to mention sound stupid while doing so. How about simply “rare” instead?
* Edit the second: I do have a problem, in case you’re wondering, with the fact that I’m sitting here evaluating the purely aesthetic interestingness of such articles instead of taking them as ethical imperatives of any sort. Big enough problem to write about, not big enough to fix. I hate blogging.
