Why I’m Not A Radical
There are individual exceptions; but so far as a man sees the need for converting himself as well as the World, he is approximating to the religious point of view. But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects.
-T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society”
There is a great deal that annoys me about Thomas Stearns Eliot. It is impossible to read his prose without a painful awareness of the ideological constriction and suffocated certitude through which he apologized for his own high-walled life. I have no real sympathy for his conversion to Catholicism, or for his pale vision of a “Christian society” that would repress without being repressive, and that would look a lot like Plato’s Republic while somehow remaining loyal to the sacrifice on the Cross.
Still, from my own secular point of view, this quote from his essay is timely. Looking back on the history of my own life, it seems as though the greatest mistakes I have made, I have made out of a commitment to what I thought of as radicalism.
The concept of the “radical” has a vulgar application, meaning anything provocative and highly different from the norm; that is not what I mean here. By “radical,” I mean those ideas and persons who commit themselves to something like a total break with the normal practices and politics of our contemporary life. There are assorted versions of this; sometimes, the notion of radicalism attaches itself to some other ideology, such as feminism, deconstruction, or Marxism.
It should be obvious that the term “radical” is now in trouble. The small cluster of blogs, including K-Punk and Antigram, that are most involved with Slavoj Zizek’s “radical” thought (more so, even, than Larval Subjects or Adam Kotsko) have been responding with intelligence and disappointment to Zizek’s review of the film 300, which he thought was a great example of discipline (the good guys) battling hedonism (the bad guys). Of course, Zizek could have done himself a favor by simply not publishing the review, but there is a larger problem here — in the face of a market-driven overload of meaningful pop culture, Zizek has begun to revert to an ideological stance that is exactly that of Vladimir Lenin circa What Is To Be Done?, and thus has made himself politically irrelevant despite his semblance of up-to-the-moment cultural engagement.
Variations on the same theme — the feeling that the question “What is to be done?” is being answered inadequately — are showing up all over the place. In fact, intellectually allied ideas travel so quickly around the blogosphere that all of the following posts are from the last two weeks. Forgive me for citing them all; frankly, I find such honesty as is being displayed here very exciting. Clearly, the combined pressure of 9/11, the Bush presidency, and the Iraq War have brought the conversation about theory to a boil. At I Cite, Jodi Dean wrote a terrific post (“Everything and Nothing“) in which she mourned the feeling of political disenfranchisement that the right-wing has done so much to encourage. She writes,
The question, then, is analyzing what is behind the feeling, the sense of inability and futility. And the sense isn’t one of the depoliticization but of the efficacy of a specific combination of right-wing politics. Consumerism adds to the problem: people want quick results.
The question of futility, of speaking but not being able to act, leads to the unfortunate problem of hypocrisy, noted by LarvalSubjects here:
It seems to me that theory as it is often practiced today is split between a surface theory that is published and a shadow theory that the theorist genuinely advocates. For instance, a theorist might publicly claim that all is signifiers and then go to the doctor to get checked for cancer. There seems to be a disadequation between what the theorist proclaims and what he really advocates.
Swifty, over at Long Sunday, just published a post about the possibility that Heideggerian studies are inadequate to the situation in Iraq:
The first line of [Heidegger’s essay] is “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” Under what circumstances is a question like that going to arise? Shall we assume that the checkpoint scene described by Escobar [he witnesses a random shooting on an Iraq road] is one where such a question not only would not be asked, but would be regarded as perverse? Heidegger worries a lot about the claim that philosophy, in general, is useless, and that his philosophizing, in particular, exaggerates and intensifies this uselessness.
N. Pepperell, at Rough Theory, has been writing about the disillusionment of the Frankfurt School with conventional Marxism:
Such positive theories have suffered over the course of the 20th century for many reasons – not least of which is the historical disappointment that set in, as it was recognised that the targets of early Marxist theory could be overcome, without the result being emancipatory – that the institutions of private property and the market could be superceded by conscious planning, without greater freedom resulting as the intrinsic and inevitable counterpart of this transformation.
(emphasis mine)
So, the effort that philosophy (and even, one might say, speculative thinking in general) makes to be adequate and relevant to lived experience faces a series of problems:
1. The political experience of futility;
2. The risk of a comfortable hypocrisy;
3. The regression, however honest, to a useless earlier formulation (Zizek’s Leninism);
4. The perverse preference for theoretical speculation over a confrontation with real traumas;
5. The possibility that even realizing theoretical goals will not lead to freedom.
Which leads us finally to petitpoussin, who puts the question with her typical, startling directness:
Right now I’m in the midst of plans for a Big Move, which brings to mind all the opportunities and potential disasters that big changes can bring. How can I use relocation as a chance to move my life more in line with my beliefs? How can I turn my own ‘radical’ self into my daily self? Very importantly, what resources can I find to move beyond what I can do and start working for an ‘us’? You know, the question all progressives ask about being a part of real change: Where to begin?
***
I attended a high school that departed in major ways from convention. There were sixty students, and most of the classes were structured as independent studies. The school was Wiccan/shamanistic in orientation; although it was a public school, it was explicitly religious. Each morning, we participated in group meditation, followed by all kinds of activities ranging from political discussion to group therapies. We had celebrations for the solstice, and spent five days each year together in the woods, acting out a series of ceremonies. The ceremonies were, to the best of my knowledge, cobbled together from pop psychology, Carlos Castaneda, Wicca, and assorted other hippie sources.
To the extent that the school functioned as a hothouse for independent learning, it was remarkably successful. A lot of students went to good colleges; a lot of the rest went immediately into music, or web design, or massage therapy, or followed other passions. However, to the extent that the school was a massive experiment in religiously-oriented group psychology, it was an irresponsible and coercive mess. Students were occasionally traumatized by the ceremonies — for example, during one where they were instructed to criticize each other. We were immersed in New Age ideology, and discouraged from asking questions.
When the school worked, it worked according to a student-centric model with an immense tradition behind it; where it failed, it failed because it relied on sociological and psychological theories invented out of thin air, such as the admitted fictions of Castaneda’s shamanism.
This is, I think, where we have to begin: by studying the ways that we can use history to our advantage. I have been struck, in considering the spread of vegetarianism and veganism, by the way that people who don’t eat meat make use of all sorts of other traditional foods: tofu, seitan, a variety of grains, curry, falafel, and so on. It’s one form of personal radicalization (one I have yet to adopt, as it happens), and it works by bricolage.
It seems to me that the most important changes have roots that go deep into history, on the level of mass action and within the lives of individuals. The new indie movement in pop music, which was fueled by music piracy and Internet distribution, has encouraged a return to older, scaled-down models of performance. Many of the turns taken by blogging have predecessors in the pamphlets and occasional writing of the 18th Century. Collective, non-hierarchical resistance has a history. Gender subversion has a history.
Radicalism, with its dramatic gestures of alienation, has become a model for the entertainment industry. Its promises are deformed by advertisements that sell us the image of transformed lives, and by the escapist strain in Hollywood. Radicalism is the watchword for pushing the envelope, and forcing the moment to its crisis. The universal desire that something “different” or “miraculous” happen is radical to the core, as is the belief in destiny. In the academy, radicalism has produced an untenable extremity of critique. In political movements, it has led to divisiveness and a hysterical contempt for other people’s personal decisions and limits.
Our lives are already striated by real, irreversible, involuntary change. Calling something like the Internet “radical” is pointless, because the word is actually inadequate. Radicalism is finally the rhetoric of defeat; ultimately, the entities that want the most change, the fastest, are corporations. I’ve seen a corporation turn an entire forest into a field of pampas grass in the space of a month; I’ve seen a handful of them re-form the whole business district of a town in a year. Corporations uproot populations and “create jobs” to take the place of native economies. They introduce new products, new technologies, new additives, new fertilizers, new markets, new kinds of international politics. An excess of history makes a corporation suffer. It can’t afford old employees, outmoded practices, waterlogged bureaucracies, or obsolete equipment.
And, in the name of resisting all of this, we have saddled ourselves with the wretched belief that our efforts are inadequate, and our goals unknowable. It is a fundamental mistake. All resistance should be aimed at protecting those processes of development and change that are slow enough to have a past; resistance derives its strength from the slow time of human life, including the continual grief of repressed cultural or personal identity, and the protracted agonies of living under oppression. Each step forward should be so fully comprehended, and massively parallel, that it endures.
It is the only possible approach for someone devoted to literature. Works of art help change to ripen, measuring its costs carefully, and calling it by old names.
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I have quite a lot to say about this topic, but I’m not sure whether it will be helpful or not. I suspect that I’m biased because I chose to change life-paths around this area; I passed my qualifier, had my thesis proposal accepted, and a month or so later decided to leave grad school for political work — not because one was better than the other, but because working for years for a Ph.D. would have been wasted effort given what I’d decided to do anyway.
But here’s a summary of possible responses around your excellent list, from my perspective:
“1. The political experience of futility;”
If this is intended to characterize the global situation, I think it’s a misreading. The period of reaction has, I’d say, about run its course in the U.S., and will change with the next Presidential election. Meanwhile it’s discredited conservatism everywhere. The experience of futility is deeper if you’re committed to Marxism, but really, Marxism is mostly an exercise in nostalgia at this point. It needs to be replaced by a new leftist political economy that can stop defending old failures.
“2. The risk of a comfortable hypocrisy;”
You can’t help but be comfortable and somewhat disengaged as a successful academic. Since academic work is valuable, the problem is mostly one of self-perception; too many people want a leftist, cooperative politics but retain the idea that they personally have to be a superhero. In actual political work, no one does anything as a detached individual.
“3. The regression, however honest, to a useless earlier formulation (Zizek’s Leninism);”
Nostalgia is besetting problem of the left at this time, I’d say. Zizek looks back to Lenin and Paul — two worse examples could hardly be imagined. But the looking back is in itself the main problem.
“4. The perverse preference for theoretical speculation over a confrontation with real traumas;”
As academics, you can’t help but prefer theoretical speculation. It is, after all, your job. No one really wants to confront real traumas if they have a choice about it; the people suffering from them certainly don’t. But I’m sure that you meant this in a different sense.
“5. The possibility that even realizing theoretical goals will not lead to freedom.”
People don’t even really know what their goals are at this point. For example, Marxists always resist the reducation of political economy to economics, but economics is certainly part of what is needed. What is the current economics that the left would suggest? In terms that would tempt people to replace the somewhat still workeable system we have now?
And the “theoretical goals” that the people in the particular left that you seem to be talking about have are, sadly, uneducated — they don’t seem to address environmental economics and sustainability much at all, and those are the issues that in my opinion are really going to change economics. But those require a confrontation with a fact-based way of looking at the world. Literary interpretation really isn’t of much help.
Joe – Exceptionally beautiful, resonant of Benjamin in ways that I like a great deal… This may be the best one-line vision I’ve ever seen of the function of critique:
I hope I can come back to this more adequately soon…
Joseph,
More or less on board with you here. It’s awfully tough to get past the gesture of “good bye to all that” and figure out what next, for you and for all of us, but you’re definitely edging towards it – no easy task.
Rich,
If this is intended to characterize the global situation, I think it’s a misreading. The period of reaction has, I’d say, about run its course in the U.S., and will change with the next Presidential election. Meanwhile it’s discredited conservatism everywhere.
Really? First of all, let’s see what happens in the next election before we start building our monuments to Sanity Returned. And have you been watching the French election? It really does depend on how you view the relationship between neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism, or, if you don’t like those terms, between laissez-faire economics and what Bush has done.
People don’t even really know what their goals are at this point. For example, Marxists always resist the reducation of political economy to economics, but economics is certainly part of what is needed. What is the current economics that the left would suggest? In terms that would tempt people to replace the somewhat still workeable system we have now?
And the “theoretical goals” that the people in the particular left that you seem to be talking about have are, sadly, uneducated — they don’t seem to address environmental economics and sustainability much at all, and those are the issues that in my opinion are really going to change economics. But those require a confrontation with a fact-based way of looking at the world. Literary interpretation really isn’t of much help.
I would place my work – if it, eventually, does what I hope it will do – smack in-between the first line of the first paragraph and the last line of the last paragraph. We’ve had this discussion before, but economics by itself is truly, truly bad at helping us understand what it is that we want to do and why it is that we want to do it. (This is part of the problem today, no? The economism of the times, the incessant sense that despite all this wonderful progress and efficiency, unfortunately we’re going to have to give back most of what we have and consign ourselves to never asking for anything new. “Sorry! It’s structural! I understand about the beachhouses in the Hamptons, but they’re structural too! Nothing to do but plunge forward!” And the thing is – the equations are right, they do tell us that this is the case, that belt-tightening is the order of the day! I’m not entirely sure you can fix the equations from within that field, or at least understand why they need to be fixed… And thus, us… I hope…)
Or… let me put it one other way Rich:
Your own actions – on here and in life – don’t make a hell of a lot of sense, speaking ex ratio. You’re a smart guy – go make some cash and save your own skin. Enjoy life, for chrissakes. If there’s not much room for “literary interpretation” in the reorganization of the world, I’m afraid there’s not much room for the likes of you either, who is clearly motivated by something, well, a bit more than the sum of its parts.
But you do it anyway, right? There’s something unreasonable about this, unpragmatic in a deep sense. (And the proof is in your frustrated fascination with literary scholars: we’re not going to fix anything, and you’re right to keep telling us this, but on the other had your very persistence suggests – nay, proves – that you on some level hold out some hope for us… If our work was once and for all times as futile as you sometimes say it is, you would have left us alone a long, long time ago. I think, in other words, that you have hope that we might actually figure our shit out and doing something right for a change… As your actions definitely speak louder than your words…)
I’m definitely not talking mysticism or straight scientific rejectionism. I’m talking about tying the knot as tightly as it can be tied and then looking around for some room to work with. Know what I mean?
Joe: Great post; honestly, some of this is just what I’ve been thinking, and some of it is what I’ve been thinking without knowing it.
Rich, am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying that literary interpretation has no bearing on “a fact-based way of looking at the world”? Don’t get me wrong–I do lit crit for a living, and even I don’t believe that there’s a direct correlation between teaching people good reading skills and helping them understand the threat of global-warming. At the same time, to teach literary interpretation is to teach a world-view, and encouraging students and fellow scholars to be rational, empirical, and historically and culturally aware is the most important thing we in the humanities can do.
I believe that by “real traumas,” Joe didn’t mean asking students “Who here has lost someone to cancer?” but rather examples of real traumas, some of which are most effectively modeled in literature. I have to agree with CR: if literary analysis are very nice but irrelevant, (again, assuming I’m not badly misunderstanding you), why are you logging so many hours here and at the Valve?
Er, obviously that should be “if literary analysis is very nice etc.”
That’s a lot of questions. I should clarify that I’m not at all into martyrdom — I’ve managed to set things up so that I make enough money, I enjoy what I do (in the main), etc.
The world that I’m working towards is not some back-to-nature rural primitivism; it’s a world in which everyone gets to be an intellectual, or an artist, or an activist or something else other than their immediate job. So why shouldn’t I like hanging around on literary blogs? I also visit artist’s studios a lot, even though I’m not a potter or painter or collageist.
That out of the way, the question of how helpful literary theory/interpretation could be in politics is complicated. First, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s actually “helping us understand what it is that we want to do and why it is that we want to do it.” If someone asks what I’m working towards, I can bash out a couple of paragraphs. But contemporary literary theory is above all a device for complicating interpretation, it seems to me, and it’s not clear that people who work with literary theory do really have an idea of what their political goal is. Wasn’t that part of Joseph’s comment?
Second, I’m not sure that people really do need elaborate help with understanding what they want to do and why. If people could be assured that an alternative, more leftist economics was workable, I think they’d jump at it, without the need for an advanced explanation about why it was desirable. If you have to explain why late capitalism is bad in great detail, then maybe it isn’t really that bad. But I don’t think that the majority of people really are committed to it except as, like democracy, the worst system except for all the others.
I’m in no sense suggesting that literary interpretation is *necessarily* futile in terms of politics. But in my opinion it needs some kind of closer connection with fact. The thrust of literary theory in the last couple of decades seems to have been mostly in the direction of undeterminability, lack of limitation, even as economics needs to change from a neoliberal “all inputs are unlimited, growth will solve everything” model to one that needs to recognize certain physical limits. That’s not a problem with literary theory — it’s not supposed to be directly useful in that way.
tomemos, to address your contention more directly, when you write “to teach literary interpretation is to teach a world-view”, I’d agree, but I’d characterize the particular world-view in question as a middle-class one, based around the skills of knowledge work and a certain kind of self-consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with the middle class; at the current historical moment I’d say that there’s more action happening there than anywhere else. But that doesn’t necessarily make teaching people this worldview a “left” action unless the middle class becomes systematically “left”. Insofar as that is happening right now, it’s around issues symbolized by that excellent leftist coinage, the reality-based community.
CR,
It’s awfully tough to get past the gesture of “good bye to all that” and figure out what next, for you and for all of us, but you’re definitely edging towards it – no easy task.
In part, I just didn’t have time to write out everything I wanted to say here. The post went up at five in the morning, for example. What I really like about having the blog is that I can go on to write about theory in a way that feels credible and relevant. This post is a response to theoretical problems, as I understand them, rather than an act of dismissal — dismissing “radicalism” isn’t the same as dismissing Baudrillard, or Derrida, or Heidegger, or even Marx.
Rich, I’m on the same page with you with the need for a closer relationship to fact or the world. I think this is a problem across the board in continentally influenced forms of theory, whether we’re talking about literary theory, political theory, philosophy, and so on. Often I find myself reading texts that are pervaded by some grand vision of revolutionary political transformation and I find myself thinking of my neighbors, my students, family members, existing infrastructure, etc., and I just wonder how such a grand vision can even be enacted concretely in practice. I then find myself suspecting that these political theories are more about ego and being superior, than about enacting any sort of real world change and are more about shoring up one’s academic standing and cred than the world. If theory isn’t working from the concreteness of a situation, then I just don’t see what good it can be. I think Marx was working from the concreteness of his situation. Throughout his work he shows a sensitivity to reigning historical conditions and the potentialities within those historical conditions. Somehow much of that seems to have been lost in many quarters. To make matters worse, we now get macho heroic visions of political engagement vis a vis the likes of Zizek and Badiou, preaching dogmatic commitment hell or highwater, but we’re given little that is concrete as to what is to be done, just platitudes about fidelity. Chances are the reason for this is that, well, details are boring.
With that said, I wonder if your perspective here isn’t a bit myopic. Ideas effect change in the world too. While it’s difficult to directly demonstrate the relationship between transformations in ideas and transformations in political and economic structures, certainly these intellectual transformations produced through writing and teaching play a deeply important role in historical dynamics, no? The work of the Rennaissance humanists and their return to antiquity in the form of the Greeks and the Romans wasn’t directly political (mostly the continued to accept the authority of the church and its twin the monarchy), but the cultivation of this new conception of the human being as a free and reasonable being that cultivates itself is what allowed for the Enlightenment conception of the social and humanity that did yield massive political transformations. And so on with the rise of Marxist thought out of the Enlightenment, etc. In my view, then, the exploration of ideas is part and parcel of the process by which the social field is gradually transformed, allowing for new possibilities to emerge that are not yet present.
Rich,
I second what CR and tomemos have said.
The academy does not represent “middle-class” values; frankly, without the academic traditions of sociology, political science, literature, and history, neither you nor anyone else would have the slightest idea what a phrase like “middle-class values” was supposed to mean. At different times, in different places, the academy has tried to shoulder the perspective of the proletariat, or tried to defend a notion of aristocracy. In fact, Eliot is not particularly middle-class in his calls for a ruling elite.
In other words, the course of academic thought is not determined by particular class interests; instead, class interests structure the debates within the academy even while theorists work to consciously define what those interests are.
Whether or not it makes you uncomfortable to think of academics as disengaged and bourgeois, it certainly makes me uncomfortable to be labeled in that fashion. The implication is that you are more engaged, and broader in the set of interests you represent.
I agree with you that theoretical and metaphysical speculation fills a different niche than direct interventions like lobbying and legal action, but that difference doesn’t make philosophical or even literary thinking apolitical. You might, for example, look at my response to Swifty over at Long Sunday.
First of all, we shouldn’t pretend that mass discourse in the United States is structured in such a way as to encourage anything even faintly resembling serious discussion of economic injustices and potentials.
Second, I see no reason to expect that alternatives to destructive global practices should be lacking in detail. The idea that executive summaries can overcome problems this serious is absurd. Short attention spans, and complacency based on illusions, do not prove that the system is working.
Third, I’m not just talking about economics: that’s part of the point. I care about the environment a great deal, but as Amartya Sen proved, you can produce enough food and still have structurally-produced famines.
I think we fundamentally disagree about the definition of “fact.” Emotions are facts. Religious and secular values are facts, as are cultural inheritances. The ways communities are organized are facts. All of these things intersect with literary theory.
The real irony here is that my post began with a piece of literary theory (Eliot’s essay), which was followed by a series of quotations from theoretically-engaged blogs. The ability to produce self-criticism is part of what theory does, and part of what it should do. Some of what you’re talking about here – including nostalgia and the maddening fallback of “complicating” or “problematizing” readings – are real problems within the humanities, but aren’t an adequate description of the whole field.
LS, that was beautifully stated, and thanks so much for the link.
I should add, while we’re on the subject of “fact,” that the Democratic Party has had the facts on its side for my entire life, and nonetheless lost power at a moment when the consequences were absolutely horrific. They lost power because they were consistently unable to put the facts in a compelling rhetorical frame, and found themselves trapped within discourses of “morality” and “responsibility” invented by reactionary politicians, conservative think-tanks, and other wordsmiths.
Joseph: “The academy does not represent “middle-class” values”
Oh, I agree with that, as a description of the academy as a whole and over time. But tomemos wrote “to teach literary interpretation is to teach a world-view, and encouraging students and fellow scholars to be rational, empirical, and historically and culturally aware is the most important thing we in the humanities can do” — so I think that it’s good to inquire into what actually happens to the people so taught. The rational, empirical, historically and culturally aware worldview, and the process of learning how to do literary interpretation, in practise and at the current time teach someone how to be a knowledge worker. That’s not a bad thing. But capitalism has incorporated the flow of humanities graduates into work without much difficulty. *Someone* needs to be rational, empirical, and aware in order for capitalism to actually work; the people who can afford to be really deluded are in the upper class. My contention is that the academic English department currently forms a kind of tolerated superstructure whose base reason for being funded is that it produces skilled readers and writers that the system needs, including the teachers of the next generation. Of course I believe that work in the humanities is inherently worthwhile in and of itself — but in terms of societal function within the current system, I think it’s a sort of byproduct.
I should clarify that I certainly think of myself as middle-class, so I’m not claiming some kind of bogus proletarian inverse nobility. But it seems to me that in order to take the role of an academic seriously, a certain degree of disengagedness is necessary, isn’t it? Studying and writing seem like inherently somewhat solitary activities, and teaching is limited to whatever the subject is.
With regard to alternatives, the U.S. is not the only place for them to emerge; I expect them to emerge in places where there isn’t entrenched ideological opposition, and spread once they’ve proved themselves. Just as I expect that societally provided health care will finally come to the U.S.; the current inefficient private system can only be propped up for so long against the examples elsewhere.
Amartya Sen is right, obviously, but I’m not claiming that economics are a cure-all. I’m saying that an alternative needs to start with the economic system.
Larvalsubjects, I basically agree with a lot of what you write. In short, I’d rather that people tried to emulate Marx than study Marx. I fully agree that new ideas are capable of sweeping across the current setup and changing everything. It’s just that I don’t think that those new ideas are likely to emerge from literary theory or its associated theories. Berube, in one of his two recent books, had a bit about the strange historical accident that left the humanities full of people who really want to change the world in a leftist direction, but whose situation isn’t really well-suited towards doing so. However, I could of course be wrong, and I’d be happy to be wrong.
Rich, I’ve gotten well sick of having my values described as “middle class,” and you’re going to bear the brunt of that. (I actually feel like I recall you saying something similar some other time, but obviously I don’t have command of the facts so I won’t try to make that stick.) In addition to what Joe said above, I’ll note that this label depends on the broadest possible definition of the term: you casually attribute “a certain kind of self-consciousness” to the middle class, but you must know that this is hardly what the middle class is known for in the West.
Obviously academia is a middle-class profession, so is “union lawyer,” but that is different from saying that its values are middle-class. Ideally I’d want the whole world to have (or at least have access to) the sort of education and self-consciousness you describe as “middle-class.”
And I never said that the world-view of literary analysis was necessarily left-wing; I described it as “encouraging students and fellow scholars to be rational, empirical, and historically and culturally aware,” which seems pretty close to that “reality-based community” you describe. Of course, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone who adopts this world-view also is or becomes left-wing, so I’d argue that if one of our goals is for the middle class to “become systematically ‘left,'” the question of how literary criticism can imbue itself and its adherents with these values becomes an important one. I’m honestly not over-valuing the role that academia plays—I understand that it’s limited—but your stance seems to be that it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, which seems unserious to me.
(Incidentally “reality-based community” was not coined by leftists; it was used derisively by a Bush administration official quoted in the New York Times to describe the forces of traditional empiricism which the administration was working against, and was then adopted by leftists. But that’s neither here nor there.)
But capitalism has incorporated the flow of humanities graduates into work without much difficulty. *Someone* needs to be rational, empirical, and aware in order for capitalism to actually work.”
First, this is essentially another entry in the “why bother” mode of socio-economic discussion. Academia can’t help, because all we’re doing is teaching a certain part of the workforce essential empiricism. Art is there either to re-glorify the status quo and pacify the masses or to entertain the bourgeois and make them feel edgy. Criminals, revolutionaries? Got ’em covered (provide a villain, fund the prison industry). “Every time I try to get out…”
Second, as someone who’s getting closer to the academic job market, let me say that from my perspective, the market has certainly not incorporated the output of academia “without much difficulty.” There are very, very few jobs, partly because the univerities can’t afford us and partly because the publishing industry, even academic publishing, can’t afford to publish our monographs. The strongest adherents of free-market capitalism would like to see funding for education go down, down, down. We’re accused of being fifth columnists every time we turn around. I know it must look like a well-oiled machine from outside, but trust me…
tomemos: “you casually attribute “a certain kind of self-consciousness” to the middle class, but you must know that this is hardly what the middle class is known for in the West.”
It isn’t? Well, people with this kind of self-consciousness generally seem to me to emerge from the kind of education that prepares them for a middle-class job and middle-class habits of thought. This is probably diverting the thread too much, but one of the relics of cultural Marxism that I’d like to toss in the dustbin is the strange idea that middle-class values are bad. If we do progress towards a classless society, more and more people are going to be something more like a middle class than a class of poorly educated people working to make ends meet.
(I do know that “reality-based community” was originally a slur. But you take good phrases where you can get them.)
tomemos: “as someone who’s getting closer to the academic job market, let me say that from my perspective, the market has certainly not incorporated the output of academia “without much difficulty.””
Your difficulty is society’s lack of difficulty, tomemos. If there were enough academic jobs to incorporate everyone who wanted to be an academic, the system wouldn’t work. But you’ll certainly get *some* job.
I’m not suggesting despair of the “Every time I try to get out…” variety. Everyone can do something, and in general I think that people growing up now are most likely in the last generation of people to live under this system. I’m just saying that education, while inherently a good thing, is not really an inherently politically functional thing.
Pardon the haphazard way I wrote this; it’s not a common way I write. Heh, it looks more like freeverse gone wild… But I enjoyed this piece, JK.
i want to mention something about differences in interpreting “radical”
because i think radical is less a phenomenon of spontaneous change and more one of spontaneous order stemming from bricolage, as you put it
sometimes i think radical and progressive are polar opposites
because of the scope and pacing of the change
and it may just be because “progressive” has that root — “progress” — which is most associated with spontaneous quick change in little spurts
and that’s not how most radical movements work
Rich,
I agree with this to an extent; a lot of the pressures that English teachers experience come in the form, “Why can’t you just teach them to write?,” as though anything else is a pointless waste of time.
At the same time, this is a mechanical picture of a human process. Teachers try to pass on to their students a love of reading and writing, and both students and other community members have a humanistic respect for the pleasures and lessons of the arts. If this weren’t the case, local libraries would not merely be beleagured; they would just disappear. Communities do invest in the arts, and even the most far gone reactionaries tend to have a set of literary works they prize. The reality is bad enough without us exaggerating the devaluation of culture.
It depends on the academic. Some academics exaggerate their solitude into an Olympian detachment. Others, particularly those who take pleasure in being teachers, are notoriously engaged with the hundreds of students they encounter every year. I mean “notoriously engaged” as a compliment; nowadays, it is hard for teachers of this sort to escape controversy. Bérubé strikes me as this sort of teacher.
A scientist, working alone in his lab on a cure for cancer, is never stigmatized as disengaged. The matter is no different in the humanities.
It’s just that I don’t think that those new ideas are likely to emerge from literary theory or its associated theories.
OK; from my perspective, with reference to CR’s comment, I will say that I don’t think the fields of economics, environmental science, or political science have been particularly effective at producing change either. As urgent and riveting as Gore’s movie was, it differed very little from the best scientific thinking of ten years ago. Probably the best thing that can happen is dialogue across these disciplines.
Still, returning to the spirit of my post, “new ideas [that] are capable of sweeping across the current setup and changing everything” is a rhetoric that can easily become a sort of superstitious belief in the salvatory idea to come. The developments to which LarvalSubjects refers, such as Renaissance humanism, took hundreds of years and were formulated in many different ways across all the disciplines of learning, as they were distinguished then.
middle-class habits of thought
I wouldn’t know how to populate this phrase with content.
Your difficulty is society’s lack of difficulty, tomemos. If there were enough academic jobs to incorporate everyone who wanted to be an academic, the system wouldn’t work. But you’ll certainly get *some* job.
While this may be true, it’s irrelevant. Tomemos wants a job that will enable him to teach literature with integrity and some independence. He would also like to be able to perform literary research. So would I, for that matter – the fact that I’m sufficiently skilled to get various jobs doesn’t resolve the question of political efficacy one way or the other.
I’m just saying that education, while inherently a good thing, is not really an inherently politically functional thing.
Just because a given institution isn’t a madrasa, or a state school in the People’s Republic of China, doesn’t mean that it isn’t politically functional, or that it doesn’t serve the interests of a state. But the existence of schools that are politically functional, albeit in disturbing ways, settles the question.
Sylvia,
Thanks for your comment!
I think I would need to know more about how you’re defining radical here to understand the kind of distinctions you’re making.
If your argument is that being “radical” is different from being “progressive,” I agree with you up to a point. There is an ideological distinction, certainly. That said, I’m not sure I see anything useful happening within radical movements right now. Many of the people I like best, some of whom consider themselves radical, are really working for change in ways that could easily be called “progressive.” For example, over at petitpoussin’s site, there was a recent call for donations to save a woman’s shelter. A good cause, to be sure; not a total break with American practices and institutions. Just progress, and that is worth a great deal.
Rich:
Second, I’m not sure that people really do need elaborate help with understanding what they want to do and why. If people could be assured that an alternative, more leftist economics was workable, I think they’d jump at it, without the need for an advanced explanation about why it was desirable.
Come on! This totally isn’t true. For chrissakes, here in the states, we have the European example, which trudges a bit but hasn’t collapsed during the 50 some years that it’s been working. But we can’t even do the welfare state over here any more. People do need help to figure out what they want and why they want it. I’m a little frightened to do this, but I’ll even offer an axiom: desire is made, it is not “natural.” The ad-men know this, right? Lots of needs, but relatively few desires until pricked.
There is a giant, absolutely giant ad factory out there called “culture” that keeps the desires tuned and tweaked and running in the direction of laissez-faire capitalism. Summer homes are sexy; public schools are not. Fancy cars are sexy; chugging buses are not. (This, by the way, is why my blog is so obsessed with ad culture – so many utopian diversions of the normal path out there right now… Interesting reactive stuff hidden in plain sight…)
LS:
Often I find myself reading texts that are pervaded by some grand vision of revolutionary political transformation and I find myself thinking of my neighbors, my students, family members, existing infrastructure, etc., and I just wonder how such a grand vision can even be enacted concretely in practice. I then find myself suspecting that these political theories are more about ego and being superior, than about enacting any sort of real world change and are more about shoring up one’s academic standing and cred than the world. If theory isn’t working from the concreteness of a situation, then I just don’t see what good it can be.
Yes. This is excellently put. The point is (to my eyes) not simply take for granted that a truth or position well established in an English department and nowhere beyond an English department means all that much or should ever serve as a credential of purposefulness. We need to start taking very, very seriously the dissemination of our work, the ways that it might become actually useful. By this I don’t mean, necessarily, something silly like society-wide distribution. Even winning back the front table at the better bookstores of the world would be start – we can’t even reach the high end public sphere anymore. But actual anticipation of actual readership (beyond confines of the field itself) would be a real start…
Rich again:
This is probably diverting the thread too much, but one of the relics of cultural Marxism that I’d like to toss in the dustbin is the strange idea that middle-class values are bad. If we do progress towards a classless society, more and more people are going to be something more like a middle class than a class of poorly educated people working to make ends meet.
This is an interesting point, Rich. In a certain way, I think I agree with you, but hesitantly. And I definitely think that a form of self-consciousness most definitely is one of the defining trains of the middle class, yes. But there are different sorts of self-consciousness, right (see literary modernism, just about the whole of it, for examples).
Your difficulty is society’s lack of difficulty, tomemos. If there were enough academic jobs to incorporate everyone who wanted to be an academic, the system wouldn’t work.
Now come on Rich, that isn’t fair. You know about the belt-tightening and “rationalization” of the university that’s been going on, the replacement of permanent jobs with casual ones (which, of course, mirrors the wider labor market). My undergraduate classes – upper level classes – have 45 students in them each time. 45 is a crazy number for an upper-level college classroom. There is unmet demand for university professors, even in the humanities – unmet because of defunding or shifted funding to lucrative fields that attract corporate financing.
You would at least agree that the kids who want to take English classes should be able to at a large and relatively high quality state university, right?
Phew. That’s it for now. Absolutely terrific thread. I think we should all quit whatever current affiliations we have and form a new group blog focused on exactly this question – one that is truly worthy of sustained attention. I’m half serious, by the way…
I’ll try to get myself back to the original topic. You wrote: “By “radical,” I mean those ideas and persons who commit themselves to something like a total break with the normal practices and politics of our contemporary life.” You’re right that belief in the idea to come can be a kind of superstitious belief, but I don’t think that it’s really radical in the sense that you describe. The radical makes a break in the present. Superstitious belief in the possibilities of the future is still of the future.
But I don’t think that my belief is entirely superstitious. Unless things get much worse, increasing productivity makes it more and more difficult to wall off the necessities of life from people. At some point it’s easier to just start giving things away than to preserve a method of social control based on scarcity rather than status, and I do think that this could happen fairly quickly — over a couple of decades, say. One important component, though, is to make sure that things don’t get worse (through environmental collapse, etc.) before they start to get better.
There is a tension between the preservation of the slowness of change that you figure as a site of resistance and the kind of nostalgia that I think is harmful. You write: “All resistance should be aimed at protecting those processes of development and change that are slow enough to have a past; resistance derives its strength from the slow time of human life, including the continual grief of repressed cultural or personal identity, and the protracted agonies of living under oppression.” But that’s getting close in some ways to Burkean conservatism, isn’t it? I would rather skip the continual grief and protracted agonies if at all possible. It may be escapist to think that this is possible, and in some sense, I don’t really think that it is. But the goal, rather than the likely path, doesn’t for me lie in that direction.
CR: “Now come on Rich, that isn’t fair. You know about the belt-tightening and “rationalization” of the university that’s been going on, the replacement of permanent jobs with casual ones […]”
Since both CR and Joseph seemed to think that I was telling tomemos that it was a good thing that he was having difficulty, I should write that that wasn’t my intention. What I was trying to say was that the system is set up to overproduce people who want to go into academia, as compared to the number of academic jobs. That leads to a continual overflow of people who end up getting “good jobs” that aren’t what they want to do. It’s a feature, not a bug, just as every kind of oversupply of labor is a feature.
The answer is only in part to devote a larger proportion of societal resources to academia; over a longer term, it’s to ensure that people can do academic-like things without actually being academics.
Rich, I’ve never heard you say this before, and I have to tell you, it sounds a little bit insane:
Unless things get much worse, increasing productivity makes it more and more difficult to wall off the necessities of life from people. At some point it’s easier to just start giving things away than to preserve a method of social control based on scarcity rather than status, and I do think that this could happen fairly quickly — over a couple of decades, say.
Illustration #1 of the pernicious effect of bad science-fiction – I imagine that is where it comes from. You have noticed, right, that the closer we get to a post-scarcity economy, the faster and louder come the calls of the unsustainability of the welfare state (here and abroad), and with them the dismantling of what’s left of socialism picks up pace.
I’ll put it this way: there is historical example after historical example of the fact that the moment things shift into a constellation in which people don’t have to work or don’t have to work very much, those who profit from work and who profit on the spending of the fruits of labor, inevitably pull the rug out from under the relatively content.
(Just one particularly vivid example: apartheid, like the horrors described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness, both begin in efforts to make Africans, otherwise content to lead their sustainable if meagerly fitted out lives, get busy generating profit. In the Congo, first Ivory, and when that ran out, Latex, until that too ran out. In SA, of course, it started with diamonds and went on from there…)
There is something that doesn’t love equilibrium, Rich. That something is called the structure of capitalism. It won’t leave us alone until we change it – there is no way to grow out of it. There’s lots that Marx was fuzzy about, but one thing that he definitely wasn’t and that’s the need for a hungry reserve army of labor. (I’ve retold the anecdote before about Clinton learning that “full employment” isn’t something that you want to achieve under the current dispensation, right? He didn’t know! Bob Rubin had to teach him…)
In other words, when they build the little box that builds whatever I like on demand, even more little building boxes to give away to starving africans if that’s what I want to do, unless the structure is changed, it is absolutely inevitable that someone will come and take my box away… And when they do, they will tell me that it is not only my own good, but for the collective good. And, given current conditions, they will in effect be right….
(Four blocks away from me, there are human beings living in nearly medieval conditions – houses without doors, starving children, of course all the social disorders that you’d expect etc etc. I wonder when the rising tide will lift their boats?)
If I trusted you with my name, Rich – which I almost do, but who knows what spats we’ll get in down the road – I’d send you my paper Wells’s panicked reaction to post-scarcity in The Time Machine – surely a book that you’ve read. (My only published piece right now, though there’s better stuff coming…)
Ever notice how the novella just hangs around the Eloi, almost plotlessly, for quite awhile before really introducing the Morlocks? How the reintroduction of class struggle kick starts the adventure story? For “plot” you might well substitute “imperatives of the structure” that I described above. It’s a case of a Fabian confronting the structural impossibility of his own political theory. (You are a Fabian too, by the way…) When you look at the phylogenic (or is it ontogenetic) emergence of the final version of the TM out of the earlier ones, this becomes in a way even clearer…
(And I will say that once again a conversation with you is really, really helping me out bust through a wall with my work. I only dimly realized that my ex-diss / almost-book is really, really centrally about panic-reactions to post-scarcity, and that this panic is far more than “human psychology” or worries about how boring heaven will be… So… Thanks for sparring, yet again..)
Holy shit is this a good thread! My faith in our part of the b’sphere needed just this sort of boost!
Rich—
…people with this kind of self-consciousness generally seem to me to emerge from the kind of education that prepares them for a middle-class job and middle-class habits of thought
Your reasoning looks pretty circular to me. In essence, you’re saying that self-consciousness is a middle-class trait because it is found in those educated with middle-class habits of thought. What are those habits? Self-consciousness, for one.
In fact, what you seem to be defining as “a middle-class mindset” seems to amount to awareness and education; if your point is that the middle classes tend to be more educated than the lower classes, I’d call that tautological, with no bearing on what class, if any, education and analysis intrinsically belong to. And I’ll reiterate my question, since I don’t think you’ve answered it: if what is needed for political change is an engaged connection with reality and facts, how could education not be politically functional?
CR: “You have noticed, right, that the closer we get to a post-scarcity economy, the faster and louder come the calls of the unsustainability of the welfare state (here and abroad), and with them the dismantling of what’s left of socialism picks up pace.”
Well, here’s where we’re getting into actual political theory. I don’t know whether this is the closest model of reality or not. It could be right; I don’t know enough to know whether it is.
But I prefer an alternate theory that seems to me to fit observation. In this one, there are always calls for the end of socialism and for whatever safety net exists, but the success of these don’t really depend on how close we are to a post-scarcity economy. Since we are (hopefully near the end of) a period of reaction that began in the U.S. with Reagan, you’re mistaking the success of this call for an inevitable trend rather than a local-historic one.
This theory should be tested, as you imply above, starting around 2009. Until then, what I do doesn’t seem to depend much on which one is right, so I don’t think it’s critical for me in particular to figure out which one is really most likely.
And in either version of events (plus there are many more, of course, I’m not implying a false dichotomy) there is a role for convincing people that they shouldn’t have this panic reaction to post-scarcity. That could be the kind of role that you want the humanities to play in some fashion. I’m unconvinced, but certainly wouldn’t get in the way of anyone trying. My feeling, though, is summed up by the way you describe it as a panic reaction: you can’t really keep people panicked indefinitely. Sooner or later, they calm down.
Marx was right about the need for a hungry reserve army of labor; that’s why I was saying that tomemos’ difficulty in finding an academic job was not society’s difficulty. But I think that “hungry” “reserve” and “labor” are all susceptible to redefinition. I think that it’s possible for the shift to go to power and status with the lower (?) classes being just as hungry for that without being literally hungry, just as tomemos is being kept hungry without, hopefully, having to go literally hungry. That’s not a perfect state of affairs, but all else being equal I’d rather that people were grad students wondering whether they could be professors than that they were wage laborers wondering whether they were going to get laid off.
tomemos (and Joseph), you’re right to call my characterization of the middle class circular. I don’t know if I can do much better in a comment thread. I suppose that what I mean is that one can become educated without becoming middle-class — say, in a two-year technical school that teaches you how to fix something in a non-unionized field. Teaching literary interpretation seems to me to be ideal way of teaching middle-class habits of thought, because you need to 1) read and study, 2) learn how to fit apparently disconnected events into an overall theory, or at least a narrative, 3) learn a particularly abstracted way of studying people’s motives, 4) learn to study your own reactions to the narrative, 5) learn how to express /rationalize a view about all this. Those seem to me to be the essential qualities that make up middle-class knowledge work. Remember that Valve book event on how novels taught us how to think? I think that was overdone, but I think that looking at what actually happens to people does often reveal that education designed to teach love of literature ends up teaching something else entirely. (Not a bad thing, necessarily — just that the “authorial intention” of education isn’t necessarily what’s read out of it.)
tomemos: “if what is needed for political change is an engaged connection with reality and facts, how could education not be politically functional?”
Everything is politically functional in some sense. That’s a sense of “political” that I don’t find that helpful, it’s tautological. Widespread education is something that I’d characterize as an innate good, and something that is necessary for my particular political goals, but it could happen for non-political reasons (if you are willing to admit that there could be such a thing as a non-political reason.)
Because what people seem to be talking about is intentionality. petitpousinn, as quoted above, writes: “How can I turn my own ‘radical’ self into my daily self? Very importantly, what resources can I find to move beyond what I can do and start working for an ‘us’?” That’s a question that assumes a disjunction between politics-as-social-role and politics-as-project.
I’d say that when you are educate people, you are doing a good thing — possibly, a better thing than an equivalent amount of energy spent in political work — but it’s not inherently a political thing. Does that explain why any better?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention — CR, you write “Illustration #1 of the pernicious effect of bad science-fiction – I imagine that is where it comes from.” But elsewhere you complain about people no longer being able to imagine social change. Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction?
I’ll get back to the first comment in a bit, but the emphasis in ““Illustration #1 of the pernicious effect of bad science-fiction” is on the bad.
I’m again derailing the thread, but I don’t think that the emphasis on the bad really works, CR. Can we agree that Star Trek qualifies as bad SF? Assuming that we can, I should point out that there’s no such thing as money in the Federation; it was written from the start as a post-scarcity society. As a result, every trekkie at least dimly has the idea that such a thing is possible. In an interesting WBM-esque instance of race eclipsing class, Star Trek was considered to be boundary-pushing because it had the first televised interracial kiss in the U.S., but no one bothered to notice the admittedly less dramatic socialist background.
I want to foreground the questions of scarcity and Burkean conservatism. Rich writes:
I disagree with this, for many of the same reasons as CR. The “necessities of life,” along with the rest of the commodity market, gets converted into cash, and almost all of that cash ends up in the hands of a very small number of people. Scarcity is not an unfortunate accident of over-population; it is a deliberate calculus of a system that thrives on inequality.
That said, I don’t see any evidence that scarcity — even understood as a purely material phenomenon — is declining. The whole continent of Africa is losing out economically to the ravages of desertification and AIDS. Petroleum is becoming scarce. Potable water is scarcer than ever.
I think everyone taking part in this conversation is concerned about these trends. I just want to point out that I don’t approach the issue by taking any sort of massive, impending social change for granted.
Returning to the original post, Rich writes:
In a sense, yes, this is like Burke. I was thinking of him as I wrote those words. At the same time, I’m not localizing the notion of “the past” as Burke did. I used vegetarian and vegan culture as an example of a cosmopolitan, international approach to solving environmental and social problems.
That said, there is no productive way to ignore locality. The anarchic conditions in Russia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are partly the result of multiple, “radical” interventions, including the establishment of weakly founded governments, and military occupations by foreign powers.
I’ve done some reading in the feminist and activist blogospheres, and I am positive that the sentence “I would rather skip the continual grief and protracted agonies if at all possible” would be read by many bloggers as white, male, and colonialist. That doesn’t mean that we can’t progress with all deliberate speed towards more equitable distribution of goods. But we are unlikely to achieve equality where the old evils of racism, colonialism, and ethnic tension persist. They can’t be ignored.
Furthermore, the exclusive focus on the economy still tends to pull us away from literature. Radical movements that tackle issues of race and gender do intersect with literature and philosophy, and may not be specifically economic in nature. The humanities are a place where we can go to try to understand the intersection between identitarian categories like race, and political realities like immigration; between discourses of gender, and homophobia and domestic violence.
*
I have a lot of respect for science fiction, but it’s not always effectively political. Star Trek doesn’t force us to imagine a new future for ourselves; instead, it imposes a break between our world and the world of the future. In the world of the future, there’s no money, large machines that synthesize food, and low costume budgets. It is so removed from the world in which we live, that our ability to imagine it may not have any political ramifications at all. We would have to discover some way to translate it, and that puts us back at square one.
Imagine the following conversation:
“Is it a good thing that the Federation feeds all of its members, and does not require the use of money?”
“Yes. It’s ideal.”
“Should we re-distribute incomes, savings, and inheritances in order to approximate on Earth the conditions of the Federation?”
“No. Somebody worked hard for that money.”
That’s not cognitive dissonance, or at least it’s not considered cognitive dissonance; in American culture, it reads as the difference between a fondness for fictions, and a grasp on economic reality.
Rich, it’s very kind of you to keep putting pointers to this over at Save Our Kaufman.
Also, I wasn’t sure how to read this:
That’s a question that assumes a disjunction between politics-as-social-role and politics-as-project.
I am coming very late to this post, and can’t say much due to other writing obligations, paper-grading, etc., but, um . . . wow. This is one of the BEST blog posts I have ever read. Ever ever ever. Thank you, Lord, for giving us Joseph Kugelmass. Cheers, Eileen
Thanks so much, Eileen!
“[…] I am positive that the sentence “I would rather skip the continual grief and protracted agonies if at all possible” would be read by many bloggers as white, male, and colonialist.”
All right. But I don’t understand a leftism that insists on the necessity for continual grief and protracted agony. A major goal of leftism is to make a world in which people don’t have to suffer these things. That doesn’t mean that you can ignore problems, as if you can tell people suffering from “racism, colonialism, and ethnic tension” to get over it. But it seems to me to come close to romanticising these social structures as sources of strength rather than as problems to be done away with. That’s what seems especially Burkean about it — go slow, the conditions of current society are there for a reason and there is strength in them, etc.
Something about this is getting back to the concept of “confrontation with real traumas”. I don’t think that people really want their traumas confronted. They want the actual conditions that cause those traumas to be changed so that they don’t persist. I don’t think that you can metaphorically psychoanalyze a society.
For SF, I see what you’re saying, but it’s a common complaint (which I’ve seen from CR and others) that people have lost the ability to imagine a future without capitalism. Your point seems to be that they can imagine it, but only as a fantasy, that they can’t see a way to get from here to there. Well, Star Trek actually has had a number of shows where the characters go back in time to formative moments of the Federation and show the social changes happening. It may not be much, but if you’re concerned about this kind of imaginative problem, it’s a lot more than any other area of culture seems to have achieved.
“That’s a question that assumes a disjunction between politics-as-social-role and politics-as-project.”
When petitpoussin writes about “mov[ing] my life more in line with my beliefs” and similar things, it’s politics as project, the deliberate effort to make an effort. What tomemos was talking about was politics as social role — a professor teaches well, engaging with their students, and this has a political effect. Politics-as-social-role requires no individual focus on effort over what you’re supposed to be doing to be a good fulfiller of the role. (Before the next round of misinterpretation, I’m not saying it’s easy to be a good teacher.)
Rich,
I understand what you’re saying about romanticizing the problems themselves, but there is ample ground between fetishizing disequilibrium and your position, which leaves us quiescently awaiting the moment when the scientist announces that the problems are solved.
You do understand how absolultely dangerous it is to endorse the “automatic abundance just around the corner” version of the future, right? Like Christians awaiting the apocalypse, it renders action in the present meaningless, save for scientific development. It is, in short, a great excuse to liberalize (in the wider sense, of couse) away social protections: “Don’t worry about unemployment insurance now – everyone’s basket will be incessantly and automatically full with ten or twenty (your timeframe, right?) years anyway!”
Honest question from a non-trekkie: so what do they fight over on the show, then? Why keep having it out with the aliens / other races?
Sorry for overposting again — just tell me if you’d like me to post less — but I thought I should address the following:
“I disagree with this, for many of the same reasons as CR. The “necessities of life,” along with the rest of the commodity market, gets converted into cash, and almost all of that cash ends up in the hands of a very small number of people. Scarcity is not an unfortunate accident of over-population; it is a deliberate calculus of a system that thrives on inequality.
That said, I don’t see any evidence that scarcity — even understood as a purely material phenomenon — is declining. The whole continent of Africa is losing out economically to the ravages of desertification and AIDS. Petroleum is becoming scarce. Potable water is scarcer than ever.”
But you’re really talking about three different things here:
1. Wealth concentration to create scarcity
This is a feature of capitalism, not a bug, I agree. But it takes a continual struggle for this to occur, and it becomes a larger and larger political problem to immiserate people as more wealth is available. For instance, even though wealth concentration has increased during the Bush years, it still hasn’t increased quickly enough to sop up all the additional per capita wealth that productivity has created for the lower and middle classes. The upper class simply can’t win this battle forever within our current social structure — there could be a collapse into authoritarianism or theocracy, but that would essentially take late capitalism with it. So the most likely outcome that I see is a continual shift in which the same social structure is attempted to be preserved, but it relies more and more on wealth as enabler of differential access to status or power rather than to commodities as such.
2. Local societal collapse (from environmental crisis, disease, or war)
This is indeed an area where local conditions require locally modified solutions.
3. Global resource scarcity
This is an area that offers leverage, frankly. Take the example that you use, of petroleum running short. Well, physical societal infrastructure is going to need to be replaced on a large scale — exactly the kind of thing that boosters of capitalism say it’s good at doing, but that in fact it is actually really bad at doing without a lot of governmental intervention.
Well, I would never say “don’t worry about unemployment insurance now”, CR. Unemployment insurance, minimum wage, unionization law, tax policy, social support and so on are the battleground over which income inequality is fought. It’s never going to just magically happen. What I’m predicting is what I think is likely to happen if people continue to be about as good at fighting for these things as they have been in the past.
I’m not a trekkie myself, really, but the show has the normal requirements of drama. I can say that it’s the only TV drama I’m familiar with in which the character archetype of the Ambassador is most admired, and in which a staple plot is the initially violent conflict that turns out to be negotiable. There’s a whole lot of the shows in which the regular characters either get to take on special ambassodorial duties — which is almost always seen as far better and of higher status than war leadership would be — or their mission is basically to deliver an ambassador from one place to another or ensure that a negotiation proceeds without being derailed by violence.
Rich, the question before this house is precisely, “how shall literary theory and criticism be made more efficacious?” I didn’t say that teaching is inherently politically functional, only that it can and should be so, which is a large part of what I took Joe to be saying in the first place. (Joe, correct me if I’ve taken this somewhere strange.)
As for the question of effort, I really don’t see your distinction between project and social role, particularly within the academy, where one’s self and and commitments become intrinsically a part of what one writes and teaches. When you write that “Politics-as-social-role requires no individual focus on effort over what you’re supposed to be doing to be a good fulfiller of the role,” you overlook the fact that there is no single definition of what that entails; the “individual focus on effort” is spent answering that question.
Which is not to say that all academics are deeply thoughtful about this, nor that the issue is unique to academia. Mainly I’m just confused by your apparent contention that the political is not political if you receive a paycheck for it.
tomemos, I’m not really sure how to approach your comment. Do you think that people who do political work don’t get paychecks? Of course they do. I live off of political work, and I make sure that I get a paycheck. The association of political work with volunteerism is an exact manifestation of politics-as-project.
But the kind of education that you’re talking about really is not political work. You can, if you choose, think about how “literary theory and criticism [can] be made more efficacious” for presumably generally leftist political purposes, just as someone else could for generally rightist political purposes. Or you could choose not to think about it. But if you’re *not* saying that teaching is inherently politically functional through the kind of minds that it tends to produce, then political effect from your teaching is a sort of project. You can choose whether or not to try to be more politically efficacious in your teaching; you can not decide to leave 20th century American literature out of a course on 20th century American literature.
(One last thing on the post-scarcity issue – I’m all for getting back to the primary topic).
Rich – it is interesting, isn’t it, that you’ve ended up constructing a sort of nouveau Marxist argument about the contradictions of capitalism and the inevitability of collapse of the structure under its own weight. Capitalist productivity itself will be its own undoing. In a way, its a sunny-side reading of the “tendency of profits to fall” issue. But let me just say one more time: as with marxist historical determinism the first time around, it is easy and dangerous to play games with inevitability, which can push individuals and delude masses into a kind of passive reactionariness…
Ever read Conrad’s Secret Agent? There’s a character in there that emblematizes this posture, Michaelis – the fat radical who sits back to wait for the gears of history to work things out for themselves.
But yes, let’s get back to Joe’s post…
Well, CR, you’re constructing a very odd gauntlet for people to run through. If they don’t imagine change, they’re indoctrinated, if they’re optimistic, they’re too quietist — but you don’t seem to have any particular path in mind. Pessimism is not particularly active either.
A lot of Joseph’s original post really was about the feeling of “what is to be done?”. I don’t think that you can really suggest what is to be done without some kind of idea of what your goal is and how to get there. It’s neither inevitable nor dependent on superhuman individual effort, but you have to think that it’s at least likely.
I really wasn’t trying to be harsh in the last comment – I really did find it interesting to think that way about what you are saying. But, yes, getting leftist thought and action right is indeed requires passing through “very odd gauntlet,” one that navigates optimistic planning and pessimistic self-criticism at every step.
I actually think we’re not all that far away from each other in some of the things that we believe about all of this – I really am a sunnyside, productivity, iPod in every pocket if iPods are what we want type of person (environmental concerns aside for the moment, of course…) I just think deploying that motif – growing out of scarcity – is dangerously double-edged. You’re right that it holds great promise. But at the same time it
When you think about it, the pro-Wal Mart side of that current national debate has affinities with this perspective. Rather than improving lots by better jobs and pay and benefits, the idea is that we’ll all buy ever more stuff with our ever less. “Sure you make minimum wage, but christ, the fritos are on 89 cents a bag now, and by next year they’ll likely be even cheaper…”
It’s an issue of the pragmatics of deploying this meme, more than anything else. Anything that sounds like “Don’t worry, we’ll grow out of it” is obviously problematic (and all too common). But to say, “We can have it, it is possible, almost easily, but there is so much work to be done to ensure that it will be ours when it arrives.”
(Exhausted tonight, and likely not making much sense…)
Rich, pardon my snottiness (the paycheck comment) earlier—it was based on a misunderstanding of your opinion of “politics-as-project.” I also would not characterize teaching or academic publishing as “political work”; as for the political importance of those things, I think we’re just dickering over price.
No problem, tomemos (and CR). There’s nothing inherently wrong with what I’ve been referring to as politics-as-project; it’s just that it can have bad interactions with the kind of fake individualism that current society tries to foster on people. The most sure sign of this is a feeling of “what can I do against all of global capitalism?” as an overwhelmed thought. If you set yourself up mentally as pitting whatever time you can spare after doing the requirements of your job, and the play that you want to do, against all of capitalism, of course you’ll think that it’s futile. But it’s not you against all that, it’s everyone working on the same things against all that, or, if you’d rather look at it that way, you against one tiny bit of the system.
I should probably hasten to say that my own work is pretty miniscule in effect. But I can’t really think of exactly what “my work” is. I can only do things through working with a varying group of about 20 other people. Maybe charismatic leaders feel differently, but if anyone out there is one of them, they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do in any case.
But I remember particular cases I’ve observed. If you’re not a revolutionary, and don’t have as your goal the radical replacement of the system, then it looks highly vulnerable in detail. There was a highly amusing set of articles that I read about this one person who’d used some data that the group I’m part of helped them get to discredit some corporation’s campaign to convince the people living near its plant that it was “clean”. When the articles appeared in local media, the corporation hired a whole crisis team of about 7 people, all highly paid, all working full time on some kind of propagandistic project. And they failed (in the sense that they had to spend tens of millions to change their industrial process), against something that was really done mostly by one activist, working with a small part of their time.
Anyways, this is getting away from the particular ways in which literary theory can be made more effective, which I can only criticize negatively, not positively, since I don’t work with literary theory.
You see…I see progress within the Western paradigm, and I’m hesitant to associate it with the way radicalism works. Progress to me is fast-paced change and always facing forward. It never reviews the situation in its entirety, only its problems in piecemeal. It’s not a very all-encompassing approach to solving problems within a system of action and institutions.
Radicalism moves considerably slower to me, and it has more of a 360 view within any systemic or institutional paradigm. It fixes problems, but it does it with a framework of influences in mind. That’s where the bricolage comes in: it pulls from history, from present information, and from ideas of what larger directions the action can precipitate and can influence. It’s a generational brand of progression that clashes with normal ideas of “progress” — the kind of movement that leaves some ideologies and structures in the cracks, leaves people’s lives in degenerative phases as it moves to the Next Best Thing. Progress is more dangerous than radicalism because it leaves little room for anything that’s not in its path.
Of course, this explanation of what I’m thinking may be guided by my radical politics. lol I see radical change more as substantial gradual change. In other words, I don’t really think at the end of this essay you’ve rejected radicalism; you’ve embraced the best characterizations of it.
really thoughtful and interesting post
Thanks, Jodi, and thanks for your response.
But I don’t understand a leftism that insists on the necessity for continual grief and protracted agony. A major goal of leftism is to make a world in which people don’t have to suffer these things.
True. One of the things I value most about literature is its ability to continue doing the work of “making the world” in opposition to sexism, racism, and other social ills, even where those things continue to evade the law, the only tool that a liberal state can use.
I don’t think that you can metaphorically psychoanalyze a society.
Well, I don’t know about metaphor here, but you certainly can psychoanalyze a society. Corporations do so proactively. They divide a population into demographics, and then analyze what sorts of desires can be created in which demographics. The only difference between advertisements and most of contemporary critical theory is that advertisements look for potential desires, and then try to realize that potential, while theory looks for already existent desires. That is why we need more proactive theory, more ads without products.
“Political Theory: The Next Generation”
I reject this emergent thesis about Star Trek. The Borg assimilate and consume. Kirk is sent to work in the mines. Even interplanetary battles over empire are essentially resource battles, but for planets and people rather than for bread or plastics.
You can choose whether or not to try to be more politically efficacious in your teaching; you cannot decide to leave 20th Century American literature out of a course on 20th Century American literature.
You can’t leave America out of a course on American literature, either. It is impossible to teach James Fenimore Cooper without providing some historical context about American Indians, and it is impossible to teach F. Scott Fitzgerald without discussing class.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with what I’ve been referring to as politics-as-project; it’s just that it can have bad interactions with the kind of fake individualism that current society tries to foster on people…But it’s not you against all that, it’s everyone working on the same things against all that, or, if you’d rather look at it that way, you against one tiny bit of the system.
I agree with much of what you’ve said; in fact, the kind of “fake individualism” you’re describing here, my post calls radicalism. Still, I don’t think it’s delusory, given the political climate in America since Gingrich, to feel that perhaps not everyone is working on the same things, for the good of all. You would think that we could at least catch up with Europe. Not so far, not by a long shot.
Sylvia, it is abundantly clear that you and I are on the same side, and using the same words to mean diametrically opposite things. Of course, your definition of “progress” does match the way the term is used by corporations; they rarely describe themselves as “radical,” except in the vulgar sense (“radically innovative”).
The problem, for me, is that the word radical doesn’t seem to embrace certain important changes, like increases in the minimum wage, very well at all. What’s more, many radicals will tell you that an increase in the minimum wage is something of a distraction from the real social transformations they’re trying to achieve.
“You can’t leave America out of a course on American literature, either. It is impossible to teach James Fenimore Cooper without providing some historical context […]”
Words like “can’t” and “impossible” indicate that teaching these things is part of the social role of being an English professor. It’s fine to argue that teaching literature intrinsically has certain political effects through its effect on students’ minds; as I’ve written above, I disagree about what these effects necessarily are, but that’s a matter of interpretation. But I do think that it’s useful to divide politics-as-social-role from politics-as-project, because it clarifies what one is doing.
“perhaps not everyone is working on the same things”
I didn’t mean to imply that everyone in the country is working on the same things, or that there’s general agreement on what is good. But there is a large group of people who are working on similar things, even if you don’t know them. Basically, you should never envision political work as a confrontation between your individual self and a system.
With regard to corporations psychoanalyzing society, I think there’s a confusion of therapeutic and manipulative senses of the word that invalidates the comparison. Corporations don’t confront traumas, although they may take advantage of them; therapists don’t simply look for existing desires or try to create new ones.
But I do think that it’s useful to divide politics-as-social-role from politics-as-project, because it clarifies what one is doing.
I agree; it helps to have an awareness of the political compromises that any institution imposes, which may not apply in private life. (Here I’m using ‘institution’ broadly, to mean ‘type of work.’)
Basically, you should never envision political work as a confrontation between your individual self and a system.
That’s very sane; the alternative is more paranoia than politics.
With regard to corporations psychoanalyzing society, I think there’s a confusion of therapeutic and manipulative senses of the word that invalidates the comparison.
I agree that corporations are not psychoanalysts or therapists. Still, having come this far in the conversation, I’m interested to think of things like the arts as generative of desire in a way relevant to phenomena like advertising. Of course, this can easily tilt into thinking of the arts as propaganda, which is abhorrent to me. I mean something closer to the imaginative function you were attributing to sci-fi: the capacity to imagine alternatives to the values of the market.
Well, okay…hmm. Let’s see if I can try to put it in perspective with a recent situation.
The whole controversy surrounding Imus brought a lot of problems with American popular culture and communications to the fore. It was representative of one event, a microcosm of factors interacting between the larger problems to facilitate a breaking point. Progressivism would celebrate the firing of Imus as a decisive victory; it would view it as one step on a series of many where we make “progress.” It looks forward to similar campaigns to oust other DJs who spew racist and misogynistic tripe on the airwaves. In the meantime, it remains vigilant of more infractions so that it can beat the system back in line.
Radicals, however, are more likely to view the victory as a victory, but an inconsequential one. They’re more likely to look into alternative radio programs and promotion, or coming up with diversity-positive forms of entertainment, or tackling racism and misogyny in popular culture and figuring out its symptoms on a larger scale rather than tracking down every shock jock. It may look to the past to figure out if entertainment’s embrace of oppressive mechanisms is a new or an old phenomenon.
I think that progressivism focuses on making reforms to the system we have while radicalism focuses on changing the entire system. So progressive victories can be seen as victories through the radical lens; however, those victories are still achieved within the paradigm of that overarching flawed system. So it seems like a flawed victory because that system hasn’t changed — only a facet of it.
And while we can go through changing little facets forever, we have to ask the question: as we change things little by little, and we make our way across this large system, will the pieces we’re fixing all mesh together when we reach the stopping point? If not, will there ever be a stopping point? If there is a stopping point, where will it lie on this system of progressive change?
(Sidenote: Literary theory, in my opinion, is critical to evaluation of political and social movements because the way we absorb literature often informs our communicative frameworks. We absorb the assumptions of the literary framework in its construction as we implement it, and these assumptions often inform our abilities to perceive and to synthesize information. So it is definitely a valuable lens. I just wanted to toss that in there, lol!)
Sylvia: “will the pieces we’re fixing all mesh together when we reach the stopping point? If not, will there ever be a stopping point?”
This point that Sylvia expresses is exactly why I think that Zizek etc. picked the wrong models to emulate. The focus on fitting activity together, and on stopping points, always assumes that you know better than other people what they should be doing and why. It’s why I tend to express goals as individual even as I say that political work can only really be done as part of a group.
Joseph, I advise care with the concept of “private life” — it’s an institution of its own with many of the same limits as any other role. In particular, I think that people would often be better off, if they want to do more political work, to find a way to get paid for it, or at least rewarded through barter. That’s not to say that everyone has to fit themselves into the capitalist monetization of everything, but that getting paid, or at least envisioning getting paid, is our society’s measure of seriousness. Iain M. Banks (to speak of the power of SF as imaginative literature) had a book in which the anarcho-socialist protagonist is horrified to discover that in the nasty society that he’s visiting, some people have to see volunteer doctors. We’re socialized to think of volunteerism as noble — but very few people with a choice in our society would actually habitually see volunteer doctors rather than paid ones, even though they might admire the charitable and/or communitarian work these doctors were doing. The exaltation of volunteerism is a way of both turning politics into a leisure-time activity and helping to ensure that society doesn’t devote actual resources etc.
“I’m interested to think of things like the arts as generative of desire in a way relevant to phenomena like advertising. […] I mean something closer to the imaginative function you were attributing to sci-fi: the capacity to imagine alternatives to the values of the market.”
I’m always suspicious of art as creator of desire. I think that art is supposed to involve you in the present moment, not toss you into the future.
The closest I get to art-as-desire is the way that I dwell on the universality of amateur art in the place that I live. It both creates the desire to create art — which is meta enough to perhaps not come under the objection above — and prefigures the kind of social change I’d like to see being more widespread.
Sylvia,
I think your comment helps me conceptualize a link between two types of work that I value, and suggests that we need a new word overall. On the one hand, we have something like raising the minimum wage, which both improves people lives in an immediate and material sense, and makes it easier for them to organize for even larger, more substantial reforms. It’s a kind of progress that makes radical change more likely.
Similarly, I agree with you that we need structural analyses of certain social facts, like the mass media, rather than targeted campaigns against single individuals — cut off one head, and two grow back.
Thing is, one of my biggest problems with the term “radical” is the way it’s being used in the blogosphere. At the moment, it seems to me that it belongs overwhelmingly to blogs that love scandals like Imus, because it’s a great opportunity for an asshole-of-the-day post, even though this accomplishes little.
I agree with you here; actually, an early draft of this post had a whole diatribe against the cult of volunteerism (different from the given fact of volunteering for this or that worthy cause). Actually, this is one of the negative potentials I see with intellectual blogging — that it simultaneously becomes a lot like work for everyone involved, and proves that nobody needs actual funding for this stuff.
That said, as with the earlier discussion of teaching as a social role, I don’t think that we should surrender “private life” back to the system, as though it had been entirely assimilated. It has different potentials than work life, is all; certainly, whatever compromises we face there aren’t going to be overcome by switching to a neologism.
I’m always suspicious of art as creator of desire. I think that art is supposed to involve you in the present moment, not toss you into the future.
Desire happens in the present, which is another way of saying that human beings are always projecting futures and pasts as part of their “present.” Since I’m sure we’d all agree that the experience of art is highly involved with the pasts of its creators and consumers, I’m suspicious of any attempt to allow it a past but deny it the future.
Desire happens in the present? I guess so, in the sense that everything that happens happens in the present. I think of desire as something that barely happens in the present — desire is different than enjoyment, and you can’t really have desire for a situation that you’re currently enjoying.
Art can have a future, certainly, but I tend to think of it as one that is related to the present, just as the past of the artist and viewer is related to the moment of experiencing the art. The kind of desire fostered by an advertisement never lets you settle into a present; by the time you actually buy the product, you’re supposed to be desiring the next one.
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Good post and yes – among other things I am quite tired of much theory which calls itself ‘radical,’ and of the current designation of any politics slightly left of center as ‘radical’, etc.
I do not think of myself as a radical. I keep finding out, however, that I am far less mainstream than my tenured, homeowning, retirement-planning, credit card-owing, Subaru-driving, dress-and-makeup wearing being considers itself to be.
On the question of what ‘radical’ means I keep thinking of Hans Sluga’s Philosophy 110, a course I took back in the day. He came in on the first day and said, “Philosophical thinking is radical thinking. That means, in philosophy we think
things through from the roots on up.”
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Lots of interesting discussion here. I was led to this post from another post at another blog that offers a critical response to your discussion. If you’d care to check it out, I found it at the following site:
http://projektenlightenment.blogspot.com/2007/07/point-counter-point.html
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