Academics, Political Scholarship, and Jonah Goldberg

(x-posted to The Valve)

Over at Acephalous (and at The Edge of the American West), Scott Kaufman has posted the text of Friday’s panel presentation on Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism) and the right-wing version of what we might call “political scholarship,” a genre that (taken loosely) might also include K. C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent (which Scott also tackled), and that, interestingly, comes in both cases from the desks of committed bloggers. I write “political scholarship” rather than “political science” because of the deep strain of revisionist history in Goldberg and Johnson’s work.

First of all, as his political posts so often do, this puts Scott once again at the forefront of academic blogging. He is carving out a niche for himself as a defender of liberal fair-mindedness and plain old scholarly integrity.

I am also glad that Brandon Gordon, the UC Irvine grad student who corresponded with Goldberg, refused Goldberg’s Facebook request and that Scott reported it. The creepy pretense of affability that characterized William F. Buckley’s unctuous conservatism will, I hope, go to rest with him in the grave.

Scott raises a valuable question: what role ought academics to play with respect to middlebrow political scholarship of this kind? Works like Liberal Fascism are riddled with factual errors, an unavoidable side effect of their fundamental biases, and Scott argues that we should respond to them with refutations. In his paper, he gives the specific example of Goldberg’s hasty claims about evolutionary theorist Herbert Spencer, which fly in the face of Scott’s own doctoral research.

For my money, refuting specific factual inaccuracies in these texts is beyond reproach, yet ultimately insufficient. It can end up in the same doldrums as the Gore and Kerry campaigns when they tried to run on reasonableness: we are smarter than Republicans, we understand how to wage the Iraq War better, we have read more documents and juggled more numbers. Barack Obama, by contrast, has foregrounded emotion — faith, hope — and has let his intelligence be something obvious that others praise for him.

Goldberg’s book is mostly an epiphenomenon. Its split platform of villainizing the Left and defending laissez-faire is a re-tread of the persistent and illogical synthesis of social and fiscal conservatism in the Republican Party. For the people who believe that public schools teach atheism, you had them at “Liberal Fascism.” For wealthy conservatives, there’s the appealing idea that expensive social programs can be traced back to Hitler. Because these ideas are so well-worn, they aren’t really dangerous. Furthermore, Goldberg’s timing is bad. In the midst of the current economic crisis, comparing government-led economic initiatives and regulation to Nazism will ensure that the book has a very short lifespan.

In truth, there has been no shortage of similar work on the Left. Whole shelves of books and movies attacking Bush, satirizing Bush, attacking right-wing Christian movements, etc. have appeared, everything from God Is Not Great to Bushwhacked to Al Franken to Michael Moore. Along with this bunch goes the more focused, level-headed works like The Assault on Reason. All of these have more going for them than their counterparts on the Right, but they are all dwarfed by what Obama has done in building a real American political coalition in support of a Democratic candidate.

I do not mean to sing Obama’s praises too highly: like many of my colleagues in academia, I am concerned that his focus on the middle class still leaves the majority of Americans behind. I also realize that most academics recoil with horror from something like Sicko or God Is Not Great, afraid of the alienating and dogmatic style, the guerrilla tactics. But academics are not the more noble for being constantly irritable and restless in their responses to political broadsides: acting like someone stung by a gadfly does not make one a gadfly. Many academics feel themselves to be “to the left” of Obama even though it has been years since the academic mainstream in the States has embraced socialism as a real possibility for the future. Even multiculturalism, for all of its occasional fatuousness and its wayward political consequences, represented a triumphant imaginative leap. Only a vision can compete with visions, even if the competition is wrong in every detail and rotten to the core.

Time Must Have A Stop

(x-posted to The Valve)

At least three ABD students, myself included, are currently working on James Joyce at UC Irvine; all of them are working on Joyce’s representations of time, particularly the tension in his novels between diachronic (linear) time, the usual sort, and synchronic (simultaneous) time.

I expected, of course, that when I arrived at graduate school I would find a lot of interest in the philosophy of time, both because of its consistent fascination for thinkers in the 20th Century, and because of the games that fictions play with it. But despite the many ways of cognizing time, simultaneous perceptions get all the limelight: why? Why should it be that Walter Benjamin’s description of history “shot through with chips of Messianic time” now strikes so many critics so forcefully? In my last post, I asked readers for examples of vast alien intelligences, and maybe half of all the passages recommended to me dealt specifically with simultaneity (for example, “Story of Your Life” and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End).

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I am reminded, looking back, that Marcel Proust’s revelations of simultaneity hold little interest for us, however much we enjoy their poignancy and the intimacy of their truth. Work is not being done, at least not in the non-Le Clezio reading world, on his madeleine or his overlapping cathedrals. We look instead to Benjamin’s 1939 piece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written after the rise of Fascism in Europe, only a year before Benjamin was driven to suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Or we might look at Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology, from which I derive my terms “diachronic” and “synchronic,” published in 1958 at the height of the Cold War. These are views of time as it applies to all of society at once, and they were born out of past periods when the whole society felt itself under threat, each moment brought into bas-relief by war.

It is strange that we should feel so comfortable discussing simultaneity when we rarely, if ever, experience such a thing. The Blakes and Rilkes of the world are always in a tiny minority, and most of us know time in the plain, old-fashioned way, as something like a rope knotted around one ankle, pulling us along. As late as 1986, when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons produced Watchmen, the imminent threat was fairly easy to discern: a nuclear war with Russia that produces Messianic time. “Dr. Manhattan,” of course, is the name of the god who announces that “There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.” Now, with the post-Spider-Man film of Watchmen due to arrive next year, circumstances have changed. It is not so much that we can picture the end of the world as that we feel terribly blind, and that this blindness coincides with the happy arrival of the Internet as a storehouse of knowledge, an infinite archive — not only in the literal sense of online text, but in the (perhaps more significant) linkages it creates between researchers and research facilities all over the world.

Eternity is a comfort. It is relaxing to think of narratives repeating themselves across time, to imagine, as Levi-Strauss hungered to do, the structural webs that could make sense of contraries and bring them to peace. But the old homologies, the sparkle of humanistic erudition that unites Derrida with Plato or Shakespeare with Agamben is now a pose, a front for a deeper anxiety that something terrible is coming and that it will take us unawares. Think of all those scenes in the movies where somebody tries to unscramble a coded message, or copy a computer file, or do other kinds of information work while their friend struggles to barricade the door against monsters: that is the real terror underneath these continual re-discoveries of the beautiful fact that time is simultaneous, eternal, unmoving, its truths waiting to be collected, like laundry hanging on the line.

It’s as if I were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea [...] That little woman was probably right, it could be a matter of nerves, nerves are the very devil, No need to talk to me about it, it’s a disaster, yes a disaster [...] Faltering, as if his lack of sight had weakened his memory, the blind man gave his address, then he said, I have no words to thank you, and the other replied, Now then, don’t give it another thought, today it’s your turn, tomorrow it will be mine, we never know what might lie in store for us, You’re right, who would have thought, when I left the house this morning, that something as dreadful as this was about to happen. He was puzzled that they should be at a standstill. Why aren’t we moving, he asked, The light is on red, replied the other. From now on he would no longer know when the light was red.

-José Saramago

The Idea of Order and the problem of Stravinsky

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers,

The heated, often deeply antagonistic exchange that has developed at The Valve in the comments to my post on David Foster Wallace reminds me of something from the recent past of my graduate studies. Tom Mellers writes:

[Kugelmass] should possibly watch a little less television, though.  I know that whenever I watch too much TV, my sense of order and logic suffers.

My response to his comment was focused on literary works that challenge order and logic, works like those produced by Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud. Meanwhile, his comment reminded me of something else: two periods of time when I tried to listen exclusively to music that reinforced my sentiments of order and my faith in the logical development of ideas.

Both of these moments came at the same point in the year: mid-Spring, which is a peculiar time for me every year. On the one hand, I am looking forward to teaching back East, at an academy hundreds of years old that was founded on humanistic principles of reason and service. On the other, it is a stressful period, since I have rarely accomplished everything I set out to do at the beginning of the year in terms of my own scholarship. It is usually the time of year when I sleep least and drink the most coffee, leaving me in a state of quivering anxiety interspersed with moments of intense exhilaration.

Out of this muddle-headed striving one idea emerged clearly: I needed to be supremely rational and brilliant to cope with the challenges ahead, and the way to do that was to create an environment that encouraged the furthest flights of intellect. Rather than getting stuck in the emotional, instinctual thrashings of pop music, I needed to climb up to the Olympian heights of classical purism: Mozart, Bach, some Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Scarlatti, and then other acceptable works by Dvorak et al. In Steppenwolf, hadn’t Hesse praised Mozart for his golden serenity, and Scarlatti likewise in The Glass Bead Game? At times, I sincerely believed that this would become most or all I would listen to, and I would even go surfing around on the Internet to find essays where the authors expounded helpfully on the “simplicity” of rock compared to the compositional virtuosity of the old masters. Of course, it was easy to find just these sorts of essays.

After about a month of this, though, I started to feel there was a problem. First of all, what was I going to do about Mozart’s <i>Requiem</i>? It was written by the master, and it was absolutely thrilling music, but I knew that a piece like the famous “Dies Irae” wasn’t really leading me towards enlightened calm, but rather leaving me abject and shattered. This paled, however, next to The Problem of Stravinsky (who will have to stand in for all his fellows, like Bartok or Shostakovich, notwithstanding the great differences between them). Right there, alongside all my wonderfully smooth quartets and concertos, was The Rite of Spring in its horrible, tempestuous majesty, sounding mostly unlike the other (especially the earlier) compositions I had, yet indisputably classical music by somebody familiar with his predecessors. It was even a classic, one of classical music’s greatest hits.

Of course I at first refused to listen to it, offering myself various lame excuses, including the idea that I would listen to Stravinsky when I was doing absolutely nothing but concentrating on the music, but Mozart or Bach when the music was partly ambiance. But at that point I started to feel suffocated. I had a whole music collection, and now I was cutting it down to perhaps 45 compositions that I felt were sufficiently ennobling to hear. Thanks to Stravinsky, the project imploded. I love the story of old St. Saens walking out of a performance of The Rite of Spring, complaining that Stravinsky was torturing the instruments. Well, he was right about the implications of the piece, its radical potential.

It is sort of amazing that during all this time I was even allowed to get near a classroom or a critical project, considering how oppressive my thinking about music had become, and how that might have distorted my responses to other media. Looking back on it now, the whole project seems very feeble and childish, and even a little nuts. Nonetheless I do not believe that it is very far removed from our uncomfortable response to the fact that most of the culture around us (regardless of medium) comes out of modernism and post-modernism, and so out of a tradition of uncompromising hostility towards the status quo and mistrust of the humanist tradition. It strands us in an emotional landscape permeated by alienation and despair. It is exhausting to continually face up to the agony contained in these works: to go, in the course of a single day, from listening to Not A Pretty Girl to reading Céline to watching, say, Amores Perros. Of course the culture of distinctive personal style (“hip”) helps insulate us from the explicit meaning of these things by making them fashion accessories, but it’s not nearly enough to blunt the sharp edge.

The individual is right to feel that, in ostensibly seeking smart entertainments, he or she is in fact signing up for a weight of grief that fits in badly with the business of the day. It is natural to want to manage this exposure. It does not help us maintain logic and order within the private universe of our life. It is, however, a rite of spring. Ask anybody who lives at the snow line. The rivers turn white with fury when the thaw begins.