In Which Our Hero Resolves The Question of Nature vs. Nurture

(x-posted to The Valve, of course)

Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins.
–Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers

Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read. I say this because, unlike traditional works of historicist criticism, Breeding never makes an overt argument about how modern readers should feel about its subject, the nature vs. nurture debates of the 18th Century. It risks seeming purposeless in order to pit Steven Pinker, a contemporary researcher and author on matters of cognition and evolution, against William Godwin, a pedagogue and Romantic who died in 1836. This fundamental comparison seems to be more an effect of the text than something Davidson consciously intended; she spells out her intentions in the Introduction, citing W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes as inspirations for a text that seeks only to explore the “grid” of an issue and to present its nuances in a tolerant, dispassionate fashion.

In so doing, however, the text is bound to leave us mildly disappointed. It is not that it lacks erudition or insight; in fact, as the great diversity of responses published on the Valve indicates, its plentiful supply of both encourages readers to enter this debate as one might a house preserved from that time, lingering over those artifacts that they, for their own reasons, find most compelling. But I think that, even despite ourselves, we come to a book like Breeding in the hopes that we might end up a little closer to answering those same raw and troubling questions that inspired Locke and Rousseau. That remains, in this case, the road not taken. Still, Davidson’s book suggests, if only by what it chooses to include, some important ways of cutting the Gordian knot of nature and nurture.

***

Davidson claims that the uncertainty produced by the tension between nature and nurture is morally ideal. She writes in the conclusion to the book that “a hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation, a hard-core advocacy of nurture” are both likely to make us, in Godwin’s words, “the helpless victims of a blind and remorseless destiny” (205). The real problem with having a destiny of this kind is that it enables us to be summed up by the controlling forces of society: if society knows exactly who we are, either because of our inborn nature or because of how it has formed us, than it can legitimately claim the right to act on that knowledge, effectively depriving us of our freedom. To this end, Davidson revisits not only the intertwined histories of racism and eugenics, but also quotes Mary Midgley on the necessary limits of nurture: “If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it” (7).

Over the course of the book, Davidson presents Godwin as a zealous pedagogue who started out believing entirely in “nurture,” but who eventually had to confront the limits of his own theories:

Yet Political Justice‘s uncompromising position on the natural equality of men would be modified by Godwin in subsequent editions of the book, a retraction that speaks to Godwin’s intellectual honesty in the face of his experience as an educator of real children (as opposed to a pure theorist of education). (174)

Davidson continues, after quoting Godwin at length:

The irony is that Godwin should have been so perfectly positioned to see and to articulate the workings of hereditary causes in spite of–because of?–his early adherence to an extreme Helvetian position. In the end, he argues for balance [...] Man “brings a certain character into the world with him,” but not “an immutable character,” although elsewhere in the same collection an older position resurfaces.” (178)

Steven Pinker, by contrast, is the modern academic researcher who never exposes himself to the rough winds of doubt, and who is therefore guilty of resorting to “what seems like intellectual bullying” (40) in support of a heavily deterministic, evolutionary interpretation of human nature and culture, one that even “many of his professional peers are inclined to question” (39). Pinker epitomizes the “hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation” that ultimately puts our personal freedoms in danger.

This is, by now, familiar territory for scholarship in the humanities, as both John Holbo and Miriam Burstein have pointed out. Davidson presents herself as a moderate, championing an ongoing process of inquiry as well as the habit of wary scepticism that sustains it. (Pinker, by contrast, calls himself a moderate but is no such thing.) Such an attitude, her text promises, is both a means of potentially making ourselves better than we currently are, and an antidote to dangerous political enthusiasms.

I hope that I will not give offense by describing such an approach, with its focus on self-improvement and gradualism, as comfortably bourgeois, in the same sense in which we might usefully apply the term to both Barthes and Sebald. (After all, Sebald, in the indictment of a very poor meal that Davidson quotes, is not only preparing the way for his description of starving refugee children; he is also railing against frozen seafood and mass-produced tartar sauce.) In writing about our determination to be “better than we once were” (201, quoting John Passmore), Davidson calls New Year’s resolutions to mind, as well our desire to exercise more, to criticize the action rather than the person, to take piano lessons, and to finally itemize our household expenses. (In the context, one wants to ask: do not even the publicans the same?) It is closer than necessary to the slippery pseudo-critiques of American society in Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics, many of which reduce down to new versions of old self-help truisms. Politically, it is once again the French Revolution as seen from the perspective of English aristocrats who felt the Terror, and the Napoleonic threat, rather more keenly than the horrors of monarchy or empire.

At the same time, Davidson’s book is potentially much better than its excessively determined beginning and end. In her illuminating discussions of Shakespeare, Defoe, Rousseau, and others, she paves the way for a transformation of the debate over nature and nurture into a conversation about the role of art and imagination in the constitution of the individual, and the importance of defending an imaginative, singular Gestalt against the totalizing claims of reason. Davidson spends considerable time on the popular belief that what women imagined during conception and pregnancy influenced the appearance and nature of the child. She mentions twice that women could bear a child who resembled their husband if they pictured the husband while committing adultery. This led to the unintentionally hilarious theory that “resemblance might be brought about because the mother, lying her lover’s arms, feared discovery by her real husband” (23) and therefore practiced a kind of exculpatory visualization exercise.

This seems like a fairly obvious case of reversal, especially considering how that paradigm has evolved up to the present: the real fear is not that the woman will be thinking of her husband while making it with the matador, but rather that she will be thinking of another man while having sex with her husband. Out of this comes all the scenes in modern comedies and soap operas where a lover shouts out the wrong name in the heat of passion, or somebody confesses to “Thinking of you / in the final throes,” as Amy Winehouse puts it. What is terrifying is that the sexual act, which is supposed to produce a merging of subjectivities, cannot banish the stubbornly personal and solitary nature of the imagination. Furthermore, it is the imagination that makes sense of the present through reference to the past, literally putting its “stamp” on an individual’s perceptions in the same way that the parent’s visage stamps the child. The concept of the association of ideas, which was so central to both Locke and Godwin, leads us to analyze the synthetic processes at work in such phenomena as dreams — it leads us, in other words, toward a Freudian understanding of individuality.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we see imagination and reason divided along gendered lines, with the personal accidents of the feminine imagination always figured as a threat to or disfigurement of the perfect, rational male mind, and the correspondingly perfect body. It is especially noteworthy that desire and trauma, which so heavily determine the gap between ourselves and others, are always the points of reference for inherited characteristics. In addition to the anxieties about adultery, “a desire for strawberries might produce a strawberry birthmark” (21), and “the sight of a mutilated beggar [might produce] a child with missing limbs.” The list of traumas expands to include a child whose ear bears the mark of her father’s dueling injury, and a lamb with wool affected by its mother’s once-broken leg.

What may appear to be unscientific fairy stories touch unexpectedly on truths: children are very much subject to the traumas their parents have experienced, both as individual people and as a couple, and they are also subject to the fantasies, superstitions, and other constructs upon which the adults nearest to them depend. This remains a source of great anxiety, as we see in a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, about the suffocating hold of a governess’s imagination over her two charges. On a larger scale, in both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, we see Dostoevsky driven to distraction by the persistence of superstitions and cults that almost sanction insanity, and which are passed down from one generation to the next. But mixed in with this reasonable complaint, one senses, in this contempt for the impressionable and disordered female mind, an intolerant attitude towards the contingent elements in sensibility and subjective perceptions, because these contingencies produce heterogeneous, ungovernable subjects.

It is unfortunate that a book that deals so freely with the “erotic investments” of Rousseau and the sexual anxieties of Swift, Godwin, Malthus and others should dismiss Freud in a single paragraph:

Rousseau’s discussion would find a famous sequel in Freud’s contention “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” But all such arguments hinge on a foundational act of self-deception or self-contradiction in which the writer only pretends to abnegate a culture on which he depends, however much he may deplore it. (120)

This reading of Rousseau and Civilization and Its Discontents reduces all people to helplessness in the face of whatever happens to be their inherited culture and circumstances. It is anti-literary and perhaps even anti-intellectual in its implications. It is difficult to see why Rousseau’s noble savage should be denied the tolerant attitude Davidson adopts towards Jonathan Swift’s fantastical backdrops for social criticism. The very act of going back to the eighteenth century, and imagining oneself to be observing the impact of dealing with unruly children on William Godwin, is an enabling fiction for historical scholarship. Furthermore, any act of repentance is necessarily an act of self-contradiction, which is why Friedrich Nietzsche opposed such attitudes on logical grounds — to strive for perfection, as Davidson wishes us to do, is to stand in contradiction to one’s own history and past choices. Rousseau and Freud are neither more nor less “counterfactual” than she herself wishes to be.

Rather than dismissing a “return to the state of Nature” as a mere impossibility, it seems to me that we can usefully read Rousseau as advocating encounters with Nature in a manner that must, now as then, be deliberately arranged. If we want to have an experience of wildness, we have to arrange time off from work, and we usually have to drive or fly quite a distance, almost as though there were indeed a “deficiency [of Nature's reach or presence] that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature” (115, quoting Derrida). Derrida’s attempts to “disprove” the loss of the natural environment lead to what is, I would argue, a very serious misreading of Rousseau’s passage on men “accustomed from childhood to the inclemencies of the weather, and the rigor of the seasons, hardened to fatigue, and forced to defend naked and unarmed their life and their Prey [...] [who thereby] develop a robust and almost unalterable temperament” that their children come to share. Davidson describes this as the judicious strengthening of “a constitution or temperament [...] by culture” (117), which is simply too reductive. If it is part of one’s culture to consume large amounts of green tea, it is nonetheless not the culture that actually reduces the propensity of one’s cells to form cancerous tumors. It is still the compounds in the tea. I say this because of the inclination to discredit everything Rousseau is saying about Nature by linking it to matters of preference and habit that apply equally to other ideologies, as though the content of the encounter itself was therefore rendered irrelevant.

If we think of Freud and Rousseau as proposing encounters of a certain salutary kind — with the traumatic past and with the bracing impersonality and grandeur of Nature, respectively — then it is not so hard to see them as akin to us in their pursuit of perfection, or rather, to see their stamp upon our own endeavors. In all cases it falls to the individual to bring into harmony that which is contradictory and unresolved in her own experience: the country and the city, the past and the present, theory and practice. We do not know what combination of bitter experience and inbred melancholy produces a Swift, but both are encompassed and transcended by the creative triumph of his work, which he leaves behind as his legacy. (Nor do we know the proportions of myopia and gentleness in the visions of Monet.) Because we have Swift, and Sylvia Plath, and the Sex Pistols, and de Sade, and the rest, we can say, like Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son, “All these…weirdos, and me…getting a little better every day. I had never known…I had never imagined even for a heartbeat that…there might be a place in the world for people like us.” But the search for that place, or rather the heterotopia of many such places, still puts us violently at odds with the general drift of the society, still strands us in the hope that such personal visions, sealed up inside of art, can be awoken into a real and common life.

Good Paulina, lead us from hence,
Where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part
Performed in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissevered. Hastily lead away.
–William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Those Obscene Octuplets

(x-posted to The Valve)

Greetings from California, where, as is now very widely known, people do crazy things with the help of doctors, up to and including giving birth to children 7 through 14 at the same time.

Since most people’s interest in the Guinness Book of World Records begins to wane by age 11, it’s surprising to me that the Suleman octuplets have created such an enormous scandal. They are an inescapable subject across completely different workplaces, social settings, and social classes. The story has been told by nearly everyone, major media included, in an emotional register that goes all the way from outrage to very angry mockery.

How will she (Nadya) pay for the family? Why is she so “obsessed” with having children? Why would she have more children if it meant that her mother would speak disapprovingly of her? Why would a doctor assist with the process, despite having taken some kind of Greek oath early on? Where’s Dad?

At first, this story struck me as merely another case of something small getting a lot of media time, a category that also includes sensational murders and descriptions of how the First Family relaxes. That was my initial reaction; as I continued to bump into the story again and again, I was struck by the fact that it is really obscene, in the sense of an event or practice that attracts hatred and disgust exceeding any legitimate objection. Suleman certainly strikes me as foolish, but why does her decision strike so many Americans as obscene?

***

The simplest answer is that she is bringing a huge number of children into the world during an economic depression. Even though there is little evidence that Suleman is currently penniless, we worry for the future of all those children because right now the future seems bleak, period. The ur-mother becomes a source of anxiety, rather than a symbol of American vitality.

I think the meaning of the event goes deeper, though. Look at how Yahoo! News reported the story:

 

There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn’t want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.

Her mother and doctors have said the woman was told she had the option to abort some of the embryos and, later, the fetuses. She refused.

Her mother said she does not believe her daughter will have any more children.

“She doesn’t have any more (frozen embryos), so it’s over now,” she said. “It has to be.”

Suleman actually played by the rules of the anti-abortion movement. She treated each of her fertilized embryos as a human individual possessing a right to life, and refused to either destroy the embryos or abort the fetuses. The whole event was set in motion by a perfectly justifiable procedure — she couldn’t have had any children without medical help — and carried forward by an ideological way of interpreting fertilization and pregnancy that has nothing to do with such concerns as the whereabouts of the father, or her ability to pay her children’s expenses.

It doesn’t help that the anti-abortion movement thinks about conception in a rigidly naturalistic way, and therefore has practically no framework for dealing with the categorical disruptions implied by these “artificial” births. The great storm of public fury that has been kicked up by these octuplets is more than an annoyance at the water cooler. It is a vivid demonstration of the price that our country pays every day for the comforting moral clarity of the “right to life,” a fragile construct that has always been partly about not letting pregnant women “escape responsibility” for their actions. If a mother’s life goes to hell because she can’t afford to raise a child, well, she should have thought of that when she let herself get knocked up. The child becomes a sort of righteous punishment, not a person — and, in similar fashion, those “outraged” by Suleman’s story clearly hope that she (and, inevitably, her children) will have a rough time of it. It is the worship of motherhood, and the hatred of mothers.

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies

(x-posted to The Valve)

Amardeep Singh at The Valve drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long Sunday.

This is Deresiewicz:

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the “conflicts” still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

CR responds:

The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I’m mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn’t much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn’t a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I’d mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on “liberal bias” were front and center in the news [...] I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major.

Amardeep, in his post, links to a terrifically helpful report from 2001-2002 to ground his point that “theory” has not been responsible for the decline of the English major.

I am on my way to responding to a fascinating special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), edited by Michael Szalay and Valve contributor Sean McCann, entitled “Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren’t There,” and featuring Szalay and McCann’s own essay “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left.” So, in some ways, this post is a prelude. It is also a reflection on what it means to be apprenticing for a profession that Deresiewicz, an Associate Professor at Yale, thinks “is, however slowly, dying.” To put this in perspective, the job Deresiewicz currently holds is, for anybody in my position, more or less the pinnacle of their professional hopes ten years out.

***

Rather than letting “the decline of the English major” remain an abstraction, let me give some particulars of my own experience. When I was getting my B.A. in English, of my eight closest friends, five were either English or Comparative Literature majors; all had taken part in an intensive humanities program freshman year that included housing all the participants together. By senior year, there was absolutely no distinction between our academic work and the rest of our time. We were working on essays and theses about Henry James, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Samuel Beckett, and so on; we were writing our own manifestos, poems, and really long emails; we were drinking cheap vodka (or sometimes some new thing purchased with fledgling credit cards, like cinnamon schnapps) and watching Barfly, High Fidelity, or a student production of Dangerous Liaisons. I’d throw a party, my friend would sit cross-legged on the floor, soliloquizing about track 13 on Exile on Main Street and then disappearing home to write a story called “Rocket Queen.” A series of intensely heated arguments about Heidegger, conducted mostly at around three in the morning, led me to an independent study on Being and Time and my first real introduction to Continental philosophy and “theory.”

By 2002, one year after graduation, my girlfriend at the time had completed her M.A. in Slavic Literature at Stanford, with plans to write and direct for the stage; my other five friends had been accepted to graduate programs in English (Cornell, U. of Chicago), Comparative Literature (U. Penn), and Slavic Literature (UC Berkeley). I began graduate studies in English at UC Irvine in 2003.

Of those five people, one is still in graduate school doing literary studies; she is currently on the job market. My friend who majored in Slavic Literature, once he realized the kind of work he would be allowed to do (historicizing work on lesser-known Russian authors), switched to graduate work in computer science. The rest dropped out in order to attend law school.

When my roommate at Irvine, a new friend and a remarkable scholar, and yet another college friend switched from literature to law school in the space of a year, I remember telling my parents that the discipline had lost its edge. Nothing was “happening,” as we say, and young intellectuals were looking for other ways to have a social impact, or other careers to pursue while they worked on their own poems and novels.

In the four years since then, things have gotten much worse. This is particularly true in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger has continually sought to cut funding for higher education, but it is true everywhere in the United States. There are practical problems: increased fees and overhead costs, shrinking budgets for grants, less guaranteed teaching, fewer tenure-track jobs. This financial squeeze is one cause of a rash of damaging wars within literary studies, and academia more generally, that illustrate how desperate the situation has become.

For example, there is the spectacle of professors calling for the reform or elimination of tenure, using the same specious arguments that conservatives used during the first Bush Administration about tenured high school teachers; in essence, the idea is to treat teachers like salesmen working on commission. There are also media outlets like The New York Times calling for taxes on university endowments, then supplementing that with reminders that professors aren’t no better than anybody else, and shouldn’t be so uppity. At his blog Acephalous, Scott Kaufman took on the unenviable job of calling out K.C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who created a sensation by fearlessly exposing “political correctness” among fellow professors at Duke.

About a year and a half ago, at the Valve, I wrote:

The ideological differences between Badiou and Michaels, or Zizek and Michaels, are not trivial. (Neither are the differences between Zizek and Badiou.) I am not suggesting that the well-rehearsed disagreements between Lacanians and historicists can be easily overcome. Nonetheless, my belief in the projects of universalism and equality leave me out of patience with the refusal to recognize common ground.

I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Petulance,” from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain: “What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage” (673, trans. Woods). The great petulance follows the death of Mynheer Peeperkorn in Mann; for us, it has followed the death of the brilliant and charismatic figure of Derrida.

I now believe that the kind of reconciliation I hoped for in that post will not arrive, at least not without significant clashes coming first. It’s the nature of the blogosphere to invite articulate conflict, of course, but even so I’ve watched one conversation after another in which I participated, and which I thought were cordial dialogues about academia, quickly become bitter disputes. (I should add that in the time since that post, it has become clear that Slavoj Zizek can’t replace Derrida. His fatuous and repetitive lists of political “ironies,” e.g. that Whole Foods is just another capitalist organ, have begun to alienate even his most devoted followers.)

As things stand, there are basically four schools of thought about literary studies:

(1) Critical thinking and writing skills. Some academics believe that the primary value of literary studies is in teaching marketable writing skills, along with “critical thinking,” which is basically the ability to separate yourself from received ideas and representations, and fits with old Jeffersonian ideas about a democratic citizenry. These people are usually the most eager to sink literary studies into broader writing and rhetoric programs, and they like to try to reach students by using multimedia and the Internet (e.g. applying critical thinking skills to a YouTube video). Politically, they advocate a sort of deliberative centrism that in the United States reads as “Democratic.”

The biggest problem with this is that all humanities scholars are qualified to teach writing and critical thinking; these general skills have no special relationship to literary studies.

(2) Historicism. Considering historicism as a whole school of thought, one that has gathered momentum now independent of Michel Foucault and even Stephen Greenblatt, the project is a Marxist project that seeks to explain the material foundations for ideological products (i.e. literary works). There is some lingering regard here for the literary in and of itself, insofar as these literary critics believe that literature represents and preserves ideology in ways other artifacts do not.

This approach blurs the lines between history and literary studies, but the deeper problem is one of sensibility: this particular version of Marxism condescends to its subjects. Because historicism suppresses the counterfactual element in literature — imaginative leaps in excess of historical givens, and frequently opposed to them — it comes off as both pedestrian and pessimistic.

If this seems excessively harsh, consider how many historicist works center on claims about a) popular scientific errors of the time, b) wishful utopianism or progressivism, c) wishful literary solutions to real and perhaps insoluble problems, or d) secret sympathies between a narrative and the prevailing social hierarchy.

(3) The mandarins. This group represents the strange alliance between scholars who have disappeared into the labyrinth of theoretical debate, and scholars who have made aesthetics, in some “purified” form, their justification and refuge. It encompasses both spiraling Zizekian or Derridean ironies as well as Harold Bloom’s gasps of awe. This group mainly consists of academics who already have tenure, or other people in relatively privileged situations, and gets some support (at least on the blogs) from people outside academia who like to think of literature and philosophy as lofty, removed realms. Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” columns fall very much in this category.

(4) The militants. A group that no longer exists, and so will have to be invented. In Saint Paul, Alain Badiou writes in the prologue that “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure [on the order of Paul]—even if it takes the form of denying its possibility—called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of this century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant” (2).

I’m amused by Badiou’s notion of a widespread search: it brings to mind comic book scenarios of searching for a hero or a cure, and perhaps also the image of bloodhounds sniffing out a forest. In truth, no such search is really underway. The very idea is horrifying to professors most invested in teaching critical thinking, who see their job as teaching resistance to militancy and dogmatism. It is equally annoying to many other academics who believe that literature and philosophy are not the proper arenas for militancy, either because culture is ineffectual at producing radical change, or because it is a distant Olympus of intellectual pleasure.

What does it mean to speak of militancy within literary studies? It means passionate commitment to a way of living in the world, one that feels itself to be somewhat at odds with its own time. I love what CR has to say about the rise of self-censorship and phony irony during political discussions with students, but I am also certain that the answer is not just making extreme political statements. The vitality of contemporary popular music is based in part on its association with ways of living life: hedonism, excess, self-expression, community. The glamour that attaches to writing fiction and poetry gains similarly from our notion of that life: among recent critical successes, one might look at Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which is joyously concerned with the communities of bohemians and would-be artists in Mexico. This delight in the absolutism of living through art is equally there in Annie Dillard’s ascetic experiments in sharpened consciousness, and in Jonathan Lethem’s version of nerdy urban hip. When I think back on my engagement with literature and art in college, it was an essential part of a whole life I was living at that time. It is not merely that no major theoretical school has emerged since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, as Deresiewicz writes — it is also that one can trace the decline of that work’s meaningfulness in Butler’s persistent effort afterwards to detach her queer studies from the lived experiences of alternative lifestyles, alternative communities, and drag. It is really any wonder that our private conversations come to linger more on the films of Pedro Almodovar or on camp films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where drag is not merely the subject, but is also allowed to be present? Yet that arc repeats itself everywhere in the profession.

In short, militancy is another word for idealism, both in the sense of hopefulness, and in the sense of living according to ideas, taken broadly to include all forms of intentional representation. It sounds very adolescent, surely, and yet there is something strange in Deresiewicz’s complaint that “the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.” This isn’t true at all; the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by the condescending notions of adults about what makes something feel relevant to younger persons, as well as by our own preference for “sexy” topics, identity myths, and multimedia. In fact, the alienated attitude our students adopt derives from the distance we ourselves keep from the literature in question. Furthermore, education always defines itself in relation to youth: without its ardor and skepticism, there would be no Socratic dialogues, no Emile, nor any other treasure of pedagogy.

***

What the profession is experiencing now is less an absolute decline than it is a drop-off following an unprecedented boom in the 1960s; historically speaking, the 1960s were an anomalous period of extraordinary interest in literary studies. In my next post, I will examine how then-popular ideas about culture, identity, and experience created this boom, the backlash against those ideas, and why that backlash has finally led to the presently underwhelming state of literary studies and Continental philosophy.

A Little Something You Can Touch: HBO’s Wire and the Politics of Visual Media

(x-posted to The Valve)

Spend some on a little something you can touch. A new car, a new coat…it’s why we get up in the morning.
-The Greek

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.
-Marlo

Talking about The Wire, which most of the people I know do twice per day, is like repeating a mantra: Season 1 is the police station. Season 2 is the docks. Season 3 is the streets (or, more inaccurately, “politics”). Season 4 is public schools. Season 5 is the press — I haven’t even seen Season 5, but I must’ve heard that six times already. People talk about each season as though they were separate reports from the President’s Council: “Have you started Season 5 yet? Wait, you didn’t see Season 2?” The show’s schematic design encourages people to talk about it in ways usually reserved for non-fiction, with an emphasis on its structural critiques of one poorer-than-average city (Baltimore), and maybe a comment in passing about the show’s brilliant detective/fuck-up in residence, McNulty.

Yes, McNulty’s no angel, but the terms of the discussion are themselves interesting and relevant to the perspective of the show’s writers. The Wire, unlike (for example) The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, is a show written almost entirely from outside the consciousness of its characters. Whereas, in the case of Tony Soprano or Claire Fisher, we felt their highs and lows, inhabited their dreams, and saw how their psychic lives bled into reality, The Wire keeps its distance from the cast, and does a good job of representing the systems that contain them. This (not the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand) ought properly to be called the new objectivism, and it is a sign of the increasing dominance of visual representation (e.g. the television serial) as well as of a certain form of functionalist liberalism. I’d expect nothing less of a show whose very title substitutes media for persons, and I’m not critical of The Wire per se — rather, I think of the show as one of the best versions of a paradigm that should not be allowed to foreclose other ways of seeing.

***

First of all, The Wire did not exactly invent the drama of the insubordinate detective who bucks the front office to catch crooks. I’m reminded of the brilliant Dirty Harry parody in The Simpsons:

Chief: You busted up that crack house pretty bad, McGonigle. Did you really have to break so much furniture?
McGonigle: You tell me, Chief. You had a pretty good view from behind your desk.
Homer: Ah, McGonigle: eases the pain.
Chief: You’re off the case, McGonigle!
McGonigle: You’re off your case, Chief!
Chief: What does that mean exactly?
Homer: (yelling) It means he gets results, you stupid chief!
Lisa: Dad, sit down.
Homer: Oh, I’m sorry.

The dynamic goes all the way back to the formative years of noir, which has two particularly interesting features as a genre. First of all, from pretty early on, it had a very cozy relationship with film and television. Works by James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, and Mickey Spillane (among others) were adapted brilliantly for the screen. Film noir directors like Alfred Hitchcock worked with both film and television, and characters like Mike Hammer were used for both. Noir writing was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s journalistic prose, and emphasized action and things in precise, staccato sentences. It came of age during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and in fact in noir novels one can watch two things begin to fuse: the vicarious gaze of visual media, and a journalistic insistence on unvarnished facts.

Noir was also a genre filled with sins and dark lusts: crime, drugs, deviant sexuality, and whole ensembles of morally gray Machiavellis. It indulged our appetites but retained an antiseptic distance, suggesting more than it showed. The noir hero makes sense of this purgatorial darkness by accepting man’s sinful nature for what it is, and also by martyring himself through a pantomime of corruption. He drinks without getting drunk, kisses almost without changing his expression. He sinks to the depths, and yet the depths do not claim him; he is not aloof, but he does not succumb. He is, in fact, the personification of the camera, and a familiarly American notion of original sin grounds all the “facts” the narrating eye fearlessly reveals.

The best example of how the noir genre then transforms into a politics comes during the third season, when The Wire broaches the subject of legalizing drugs. A renegade major establishes “free zones” in three places in Western Baltimore, enabling drug addicts to purchase and use drugs without interference. The show’s perspective on this is pretty much in line with all the sound arguments for legalizing drugs: violent crime goes down, and some public health outreach becomes possible that would have been impossible before. While the mayor is debating whether he can sell the free zones to the public and the Feds, an aspiring candidate for mayor gets hold of the news and blows the whistle.

So far, so good. Somewhere, in the back of it all, you can hear David Simon saying “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d favor legalization too,” and I agree with him. That said, after watching the show for three seasons, it begins to dawn on you that you have no idea what’s drawing people to the free zones. You’ve seen the character Bubbles getting high maybe a dozen times, then nodding off — cut. You see McNulty and Bunk drinking Jameson until they fall down on the train tracks, and cut. You see the newly hired soldier in Barksdale’s army walking into the room with a prostitute, and cut.

It is critical to see how up-to-the-minute this strange marriage of invasiveness and incuriosity really is. On the one hand, we know everything the characters are doing — my point is certainly not that the show ought to be more vicarious. The show is called The Wire, after all, and despite being filmed during the heyday of the Patriot Act, the show never has the slightest twinge of guilt about any form of surveillance, including wiretaps obtained specifically by manipulating anti-terrorist statutes to aid an ongoing drug investigation. On the other hand, we only rarely understand why a character indulges in the vices that drive the show, just as it is presently fashionable to be frustrated and impatient with other causal theories of human behavior, such as psychoanalysis.

The synchronicity of journalistic objectivity, visual representation, and the privileging of plot (representation of action) over representations of consciousness ultimately produces functionalism: people are what they do, and they do what they do. If that sounds like circular reasoning, well, it is, just like Avon’s “No Marlo, no game.” “If people are going to do drugs, they might as well be able to do it safely without spreading disease or swamping the criminal justice system.” That’s true, but it’s possibly not as trenchant as Trainspotting, which begins and ends with a snarling (and famous) indictment of the alternative:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else.

At many points, The Wire can’t improve on a paternalistic version of laissez-faire: why can’t the drug trade exist in harmony with the world, like other trades? The pushers sell, the users indulge, and McNulty’s there listening in case things get out of hand. Whereas in The Sopranos, it was understood that the Jersey gangsters were a microcosm for capitalism, and the toll, the proverbial “cut” taken out of every life, was very heavy.

Arguably, The Wire is better as a narrative than The Sopranos, and it is much better than Six Feet Under. The plotting in Six Feet Under was horrible: a subplot about a missing woman that dragged on forever, pointlessly complicated medical drama, multiple drug-induced revelations, and petty (and ultimately boring) villainy. Furthermore, the show indulged a kind of histrionic American WASP self-concern in which nothing beyond the personal appeared to have any existence at all. That said, Claire Fisher’s gradual development into an artist was a credible version of a wayward and often invisible process of individuation. In her case, at least, something came of all that chaotic and destructive desire, in a process that involved both her and us in wrestling with interiority. When visual media have to do this, it tends to jam the narrative machine. Transpotting resorts to the voice-over. Both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under employed talky dream sequences and quoted extensively from Yeats, Wordsworth, and the Bhagavad Gita. It was often insufferable, though other directors like David Lynch can make the awkwardness charming. I’m ready to admit that The Wire may be more perfect for its medium simply because it doesn’t play around nervously and ironically with sermons taken from religious and literary texts.

I’ll end with two characters from The Wire‘s second season: Frank Sobotka and Ziggy. If McNulty symbolically martyrs himself on his debauches, Frank literally martyrs himself. He works himself to the bone, up to and including getting involved with every sort of illegal trading, in order to keep the docks he represents alive. He processes a huge amount of dirty cash but sees none of it, passing everything along to his men. He is a creature of such integrity that he actually worries his associate, a criminal boss known as The Greek. Meanwhile, every thing Frank tries to do is undone by Ziggy, his son, who goes even further into crime and then spends the money on fancy jackets and a duck with a diamond-studded collar. When Frank confronts Ziggy about his risky behavior, Ziggy gives a rather pathetic response about the decline of Baltimore’s industries. He’s sad that things aren’t how they used to be, and that’s why he goes into the union bar and sets fire to a hundred dollars. It’s a joke of a causal explanation, and yet Ziggy sees the hopelessness of the situation feelingly, in a way Frank cannot. Instead Frank just keeps going, trying to make it all cohere, until he winds up dead.

We have had a great deal of mysterious badness lately, within and without: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell describes Anton Chigurh as a “ghost” in No Country for Old Men. In the same film, another character says, “Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming.” Whether it’s the dry Texas plains or the Baltimore projects, the people who move across these places are ghosts to us: we see them, but we don’t know who they are. What makes Avon Barksdale turn out so differently from Stringer Bell? Why is Greggs driven down the same path as McNulty? What makes an Omar, a Landsman, a Royce?

I won’t ever know the answer. I’ll have to talk about bureaucracies, and I’ll have to ask people which seasons they’ve seen. But Ziggy? Alas, poor Ziggy! I knew him, readers.

There Is No Such Thing As Intelligence

(x-posted to The Valve)

The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate.

We’ll have to start out by getting a bit technical. The adjectival form, “intelligent” (or “brilliant” or “smart” or etc.), has its uses. Intelligence, as we use the word, refers to the ability to do a good job at complex tasks that require a high degree of abstraction. Thus, a given piece of work can be intelligent if it successfully addresses a complex problem.

To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. For a long time now, intellectuals have been chipping away at the mythology of race and gender, while leaving the mythical quality of intelligence relatively untouched because they have too much invested in the hierarchies it produces.

I. Memory, speed reading, and vocabulary

Vocabulary is a sub-category of memory: how many words one can remember and use. Memory is a talent with a strange, ambivalent reception. On the one hand, people with good memories are considered blessed and provably intelligent. Professors who can cite difficult works of philosophy from memory are celebrated for doing so; undoubtedly, part of the reason Harold Bloom rarely bothers to cite his quotations is that doing so would undermine his claim to have it all memorized. The phenomenon of memory is often linked to speed reading, as it is with Bloom: Bill Clinton was also renowned for his ability to read enormous quantities of books each day and remember everything, while still fulfilling his Presidential duties. Popular culture attributes far more to memory than it could ever enable. In the television show Heroes, a waitress with a photographic memory learns to speak flawless, unaccented Japanese by glancing at a phrasebook.

These mythic versions of the consumption of knowledge make it very difficult to remember that memory and reading speed both wax or wane according to the use we make of them. Every child who grows up in a culture with a strong oral tradition will have more “text” memorized than an average American child; Erasmus memorized more than professors do today; the Greeks knew Homer by heart. Reading speed depends on reading frequently, and reading for pleasure — a recent study found that people who habitually read for pleasure also read other texts faster. We may not even need to memorize text the way we did before, now that we live in an era of easily accessible archives, which means that the shape of memory itself will change to reflect a different cultural landscape. Unfortunately, there will be nobody there to track this shift, because we will continue to assume either an overall cultural decline, or the presence/absence of an inborn talent, reified by “geniuses” like Clinton and Bloom.

Whether or not we should be concerned about losing mnemotechnics is still in question. In the meantime, the cult of genius also produces a cult of mediocrity. In academia, a tradition that stretches back at least to Montaigne, and arguably to Plato’s Dialogues, valorizes the thinker with a fuzzy memory, who has to work hard and earnestly to make sense of texts that others find suspiciously easy. Rousseau calls his ideal pupil Emile mediocre, and separates him from the race of geniuses. Within the academy, this has produced excruciating overloads of citation (a serious problem throughout Montaigne’s Essays), and encouraged numbingly slow readings of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s bizarre institutional authority is largely constituted by the odd couple of academics who respect him, but don’t consider themselves smart enough to read him (thus letting themselves off the hook), and academics who read him, and feel that his brilliance makes it impossible to ever stop, or even pause, the process of doing so.

Outside the academy, the proud inability to remember has had its most contemptible exemplars in Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom have used it as a way of evading political responsibility, justifying smoke-and-mirrors systems of favoritism and delegation, and communicating folksiness.

The link between vocabulary and intelligence produces all kinds of cognitive dissonance. I’m not suggesting that a large vocabulary is bad — it is plainly a useful tool. However, nobody nowadays would assert that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a more intelligent writer than Ernest Hemingway, despite the fact that Fitzgerald clearly has a larger vocabulary. Hemingway compensated for this impoverishment by using rhythm and repetition to create complex effects with simple materials. The difference between them was a difference of privilege: Hemingway had not gone to Princeton. Privilege is a good word for the triptych of erudition, vocabulary, and standardized usage that is treated as synonymous with complexity; in an earlier post at The Kugelmass Episodes, I argued for the complexity and sense of valley girl talk, hip-hop, and the “broken” speech of anxiety. The more that critics develop ways of reading silences, stutters, inversions, fragmented words, slang, abject or undignified erudition, and so on — all of which, by no coincidence, one needs in order to read Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, or Langston Hughes — the better they’ll be at breaking down linguistic privilege, at which point “intelligence” will suddenly be visible everywhere, not just in the golden hallways of genius, and not just as a vague democratic assumption.

II. Cash Versus Context

It’s worth remembering that one of the most famous prodigies in Western Civilization, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was born into a culture well-prepared to celebrate genius as a species of the grotesque. Mozart’s youth was shaped by the experience of performing his prodigy in order to make his father money, and that continues to be the role of intelligence today. It is a commodified form of intellectual labor, and as such we have come to believe that it can be exchanged anywhere, just like the sweat of one’s brow: if a student does well on standardized tests, then we assume they will succeed in the adult world of skilled labor.

The effects of this belief in abstracted “intelligence” have been so widespread and pernicious that one hardly knows where to begin. Ironically, “intelligence” has made it harder to evaluate whether or not given pieces of work are in fact intelligent in context, and has contributed greatly to dehumanization. The problem of dehumanization is the insoluble problem of realizing one’s intelligence; the problem of judging the intelligence of a work is a problem of the desire for intelligence to inhere in an author.

To begin with realizing intelligence: everybody knows that an intelligent person will get nowhere unless they’re also willing to work hard. In Woody Allen’s film Match Point, Chris Wilton announces that, of course, “hard work is mandatory,” before going on to call privilege a matter of luck. Mandatory is the right word, since every employee and student knows that one must not only work hard, but also appear to be doing so. In fact, it is quite possible to have an easy time fulfilling one’s duties, at least on a given day, but ease is insulting.

Still, let’s grant that a lot of effort is usually required to produce excellent work, regardless of the field. Then we run into the problem of wasted effort: the person who works furiously, but produces mediocre or frankly awful work. In these cases, a supposed lack of intelligence or talent is frequently the alibi for the work ethic itself. How many of these casualties of effort fail precisely because of over-work and fatigue? How many fail because the drudgery of innumerable small and laborious acts, on which another person might discreetly renege, prevents them from doing synthetic and innovative thinking? In business, one tries to compensate by encouraging a “culture of innovation,” but this is fraught with danger. It undermines espirit de corps, and it actually heightens alienation, since one’s ideas tend to become other people’s property.

The relationship between innovation, which requires independence of thought, and manageability, which requires conformism and respect for authority, is not a dialectical relationship. The two modes do not immanently “contain” one another; they sit together uncomfortably, each sapping the other’s strength, with “intelligence + hard work” as the magic formula that is supposed to reconcile them.

To borrow Derrida’s phrase about clinical madness, there is a “terribly trivial” sense in which a given person may not be able to master a given situation: brain damage, developmental disability, physical disability. I call this trivial because all of the most progressive advances in our approach to these impairments and disabilities have involved abandoning assumptions about intelligence. Until very recently, autistic persons were classed as mental deficients. Only recently has it become clear the extent to which developmentally disabled persons can be integrated into “normal” classrooms, hired for paying jobs, and generally accomodated on an individual basis rather than marginalized by evaluations of “intelligence.”

And what of personality? Introversion and extroversion produce different kinds of intelligence. Intelligence is molded by persistent anxiety or its absence, and by tendencies toward manic/depression, schizophrenia, or autism (i.e. Asperger’s). As a result, some of the best critiques of psychiatry and socialization have been made in the name of genius. Sadly, this is a trap. It accepts that difference has to immediately prove, via intelligence and “genius,” measurable social utility, and thus re-affirms the total domination of the social over the individual. It also opens the door for correcting difference whenever it “goes too far” — that is, when a given asocial or abnormal state stops being immediately profitable. Lastly, as little as the defense of introversion has done for actual introverts, it has helped sustain the myth of superficial extroversion. That means fashion, socializing — the extroverted feminine, which lacks the right to create hierarchies of intelligence, except under the ban of severe moral judgement (as cunning, for example).

Standardized tests, IQ tests, and their ilk have been subject to criticism for a long time now. It’s reached the point where every schoolchild knows that the SAT only measures “how good you are at taking tests,” and yet nobody really challenges the role of SAT tests in college admissions. In fact, the SAT isn’t that simplistically useless, but the fact that standardized testing is on the rise (thanks to No Child Left Behind), despite the popular wisdom about such tests, should alert us to the fact that “teaching to the test” is not a side effect of standardized testing, but its real mission. The cynicism of test-takers, like the cynicism of consumers, reinforces the system it seems to oppose. It is fundamentally shallow cynicism, overmatched by an awe of the test through which all the old myths survive. In the film Spellbound, the family members and teachers of the children competing in the National Spelling Bee ascribe their charges’ success to — depending on the child — their own love of puns, meditation, the love of Jesus Christ, the child’s well-rounded existence (“He’s not like those other kids, he has a life,” one sister says), ethnicity, and/or the greatness of America. In other words, the adults are eager to cash in on this success for an affirmation of certain values, while the children focus on the basically mechanical task at hand, with a devastating awareness that all but one of them will lose.

The most famous response to the traditional theory of intelligence, Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” creates more problems than it solves. I’ve already implied that Gardner’s distinction between “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal” intelligences reverses cause and effect, by ascribing to an inborn talent what could just as easily be founded in inherited affects or the long practice of certain habits (e.g. solitary reading). Since so many professions involve ludicrous, specialty-coffee-like “blends” of intelligences (let’s see, a poet has some musical intelligence and some linguistic intelligence…), and since the distinctions between intelligences are quite tenuous (e.g. the difference between musical and mathematical intelligence), Gardner is mostly useful as an example of two things: our unified theory of intelligence beginning to unravel upon closer consideration, and our confusion between talent and right. Gardner clearly wants intelligences to be recognized and respected, in order to give children greater freedom to utilize their talents. One wonders why those talents should be codified into an awkward and inadequate sevenfold system that has, in fact, already been supplemented by the laughable category of “nature intelligence,” possessed by gardeners and Charles Darwin.

III. The Problem of Premises

In the previous section, I alluded to the stereotype of the hard worker who accomplishes nothing, a problem we usually attribute to an inherent “unfittedness” or lack of talent. From there, I discussed the problems of innovation and independence, which opens a whole field for the investigation of passivity, resentment, timidity, socialization (particularly in its nastiest forms as silencing or dogma) and despair as contingent conditions that become naturalized in terms of a lack of aptitude. We might describe this as a substitution of the scale of intelligence for the social and psychological problem of freedom. Harold Bloom himself, in the face of his own failure to produce literature, wrote a classic study of psychological obstruction in The Anxiety of Influence.

The problem of innovation also gets at the problem of false premises, which may be the strongest argument for an attack on the cult of intelligence. For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air. Over at Sour Duck, Melinda Casino raised this very point with regard to blogging: earnest and awkward can work better as a style.

Nonetheless, even as they are charming us with a Socratic/Rousseauean show of plainness, we expect our authors to be brilliant, which is why most people still have such trouble comprehending the truisms about punk. The punks were not, all the way down the line, brilliant or geniuses. This was true by accident (Sid Vicious) and also by design. If you thought of yourself as a genius, you ended up like the people the punks hated, because being a musical genius meant thinking of music in terms of composition, rather than in terms of reception. The insular premise of virtuoso rock produced insular, useless music: noodling.

Noodling is a good word for the final casualty of false premises: the theory of intelligence as it is applied to political and philosophical debate. I discussed this topic at some length during the Valve book event on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?. As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence.

***

Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions (e.g. debate shows like Counterpoint, choreographed academic debates between “schools of thought”) and non-signifying refinements of craft (e.g. a certain kind of technical proficiency in music). It obscures the alternation between “innovating” and “doing one’s task well,” an alternation grounded in the contradictions of the modern economy, and one that produces real casualties on both sides: burnouts, drudges, exploited inventors, unemployed iconoclasts. It encourages irrational responses to radical work, by simultaneously putting authors on pedestals and, with a wistful “if I had more time…”, ignoring them. It condescends to madness, puts it to work without further questions, and warns it to walk a fine line. It subtly justifies anti-intellectualism, and creates its own set of simulacra — for example, the simulation of genius in the movies — which are preferable to the real thing, in part because the shrill protests of mediocrity always get a turn. It commodifies young learners and encourages complacent cynicism towards standardized tests. The concept of “intelligence” doesn’t help us accommodate disability, but rather encourages us to speculate wrongly about what a given disability really forecloses.

Once we recover from the genteel, congratulatory paralysis of brilliance, we’ll be able to see what tasks really summon us, and what darker obstacles lie behind the antagonism of Mozart and Salieri — his likeness — his brother!

Theaters of Comity and Cruelty: The Ethics of Performing Selves

(x-posted to The Valve)

In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve gives a succinct and compelling account of the irony of the “fight to the death” which occurs (in G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) when two subjects risk their lives in a confrontation. For each combatant, this fight is for recognition of the uniqueness of their subjectivity, what Hegel calls their “personality.” Kojeve writes:

Death….continues to lack the significance required for recognition….And if one of the adversaries remains alive but kills the other, he can no longer be recognized by the other….Therefore, the victor’s certainty of his being and of his value remains subjective, and thus has no “truth.” (14)

Thus, for thinkers of subjectivity after Hegel and Kojeve, a critical problem emerges: how to stage the battle to the death without, on the one hand, actually producing death, and, on the other, the battle becoming merely feigned. Theorists who have taken up the metaphors of the stage have done so because the ironies of performance correspond to the irony of the struggle “to the death” for recognition. Through the play of performance, there is symbolic death, and symbolic victory, undertaken consciously with the fundamental goal of synthesizing the initially contrary ethical goals of mutual preservation and subjective recognition. The most important consideration here is that the tragic violence finally be transferred to the drama itself, rather than to any of the participating subjects, and thus drama (and dramaturgic representation) undergoes a constant process of dissolution and reconstitution, death and resurrection.

In order to grasp the death of the theater, a death that in turn resurrects the slain players, we have to identify the kinds of acts with the symbolic meaning and legitimacy of violence. Among the most important of such symbolic acts are furious bursts of laughter. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler embarks on a close and admiring analysis of Michel Foucault’s response to the codification of homosexuality – in particular, the interest in describing essential differences between male and female homosexuals. Butler, quoting an interview with James O’Higgins, notes that Foucault responds to O’Higgins

… by laughing, suggested by the bracketed ‘[Laughs],’ and he says, ‘All I can do is explode with laughter. This explosive laughter, we may remember, also followed Foucault’s reading of Borges, reported in the preface to The Order of Things. (139)

Butler goes on to quote the preface, where Foucault describes the “laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought….breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.” She cites the correspondences between this shattering laughter, and the laughter of Pierre Riviere at his own “murderous destruction of his family, or, perhaps, for Foucault, of the family” (140). She also links it to the excessive and liberating laughter of Georges Bataille, as he is figured in Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference.

Nonetheless, Butler differentiates herself from Bataille (at least from the Bataille of Derrida’s essay) through a series of references to feminist theorists who ironize the violent (i.e. “shattering,” “murderous”) sovereignty of laughter by showing it arising within the most petrifying and petrified representations, as inseparable from them. Butler’s theory of performance is based on a series of tensions; we should remember that the subversive potential in Borges is expressed through an illogical series that is nonetheless a list. Butler describes the “laugh of Medusa” in the works of Helene Cixous, which “shatters the placid surface constituted by the petrifying gaze and which exposes the dialectic of Same and Other” (140). The dialectic is exposed, not ended; Medusa the petrifier is also the source of shattering laughter. For Foucault’s own hero, the hermaphroditic Herculine, Butler writes that “laughter appears to designate either humiliation or scorn, two positions unambiguously related to a damning law” (141). Ultimately, the violence of laughter reverses itself. Its chaotic, violent nature is bound up with the laws of representation and sexual difference, dialectically enabling the repetition of representation.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman gives a particularly compelling account of the psychological relief inherent in the subversive forms of satire and parody that perform Hegel’s drama of recognition, the relationship of “bondsman” and “Lord,” as the Butlerian alternation of “humiliation” and “scorn.” For Goffman, the failure of representation is built into his notion of a doubled stage, or “stage” and “backstage.” Goffman writes:

When the audience has left or has not yet arrived, the performers will sometimes play out a satire on their interaction with the audience, and with some members of the team taking the role of the audience. (171)

Goffman recognizes that representation as a whole does not come to an end when the performers are “backstage.” It is merely the performance of “employee” and “customer” that is suspended and then parodistically shattered. These representational inversions, in the form of shattering laughter, are critical to the preservation of morality because, as Goffman writes,

Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we do not have a moral concern with them. As performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our minds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but it may well be that the more attention we give to these goods, then the more distant we feel from them and from those who are believing enough to buy them. (251)

Ironically, this is a kind of Marxist analysis without a revolutionary impulse. By imbuing the products they are selling with the luster of the performance, salespeople allow the everyday morality of the marketplace to take its course. But, in the process, the employees become alienated from the customers, who are here being explicitly “recognized” and made to feel masters of both people and things, in part because the customer comes to confuse the performance with the purchase. So this oppressive and paradoxical relationship, like the relationships of sexual difference that concern Butler, have to be worked through backwards via parody, shattered with laughter.

In his essay on Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” (from Writing and Difference), Jacques Derrida presents the Medusan coincidence of contraries in theater as the intimate relationship between “play” and “closure.” Derrida writes, “Closure is the circular limit within which the repetition of difference infinitely repeats itself. That is to say, closure is its playing space. This movement is the movement of the world as play” (250). Here “play” performs both the pleasurable and the destructive function of laughter, and “closure” repeats the deadly action of representation: “To think the closure of representation is thus to think the cruel powers of death and play which permit presence to born to itself, and pleasurably to consume itself through the representation which eludes itself in its deferral” (250). Derrida’s use of the term “closure” allows us to think through another element of the fatal tendency of representation: the problem of an ending. The ending of representation, which is the tragic performance of a Hegelian struggle to the death, can only be fatality or a series of fatalities, as it is in Greek tragedy, in Shakespearean tragedy, and so on. Thus, for Derrida, the only way to escape “the representation of fate,” the death of the other, is through the “thinking” of the “fate of representation,” the theatrical closure which is the deferral of permanent closure. His ending connects the idea that “representation has no end,” reminiscent of Goffman’s doubled stage (and drawn from Artaud), with the necessity of symbolic death as the sign of victory and closure: “And it is to think why it is fatal that, in its closure, representation continues” (250). It continues, but not in the same way; like the employees playing “employees” in the backstage parody, it becomes an image of itself.

Given Butler’s work on performance, one would expect that the discovery of failure, like Herculine’s discovery of humiliated laughter and Artaud’s play of closure, would itself become a new spur to representation and performance. That is precisely how Richard Poirier imagines it in The Performing Self. Poirier, describing the method and impulse behind James Joyce’s prose, writes,

Creation follows on the discovery of waste. Fictions….produce, in reaction against waste and loss, the desire to create new fictions, the desire to create new fictions, the excuse for new performances, new assertions of life. Joyce initiates a tradition of self-parody now conspicuously at work in literature. But he does far more than that. He simultaneously passed beyond it into something which writers of the present and future have still to emulate…to create and create again under the acknowledged aegis of death. (39)

Thus, finally, we have each part of the cycle of theatrical representation, which perpetuates itself through a series of reversals. In an echo of Freud’s thesis (advanced, among other places, in Civilization and Its Discontents) that the aggressive impulses can only be successfully repressed by being directed inwards, against themselves, we see the aggressive impulse for recognition displaced into various theatrical settings: the workplace in Goffman, the “theater of cruelty” in Artaud, performative literature in Poirier, the Self and Other of sexual difference in Butler and Foucault. There we see violence and killing transformed into the symbolic, tragic drama. Inevitably, the moment arrives when this spectacle threatens to become its own principle of death, through a Medusa-like petrifaction of both victor and vanquished. Then the representation itself has to become a subject of fate, overturned and shattered by parody and play, inaugurated by laughter. The aegis – hallmark or inscription – of death, the insignia that reveals the fatal outcome of representation, is also the shield that saves the “bondsman” at the moment when representations are reversed, so that, as Poirier observes, they can begin anew. The slain players arise from the stage, and bow; once the space of representation expands to encompass this irony, under the aegis of a battle to the death, it can become the ironic preservation and triumph of life.

The Assault on Hedonism, Part 1: Plutarch

(x-posted to The Valve)

This morning, as I was rummaging in my fridge for celery, tomato juice, and raw eggs, it occurred to me that an all-out attack on the “permissive hedonism” of our society has begun. For conservatives, the theme is already familiar and exhausted; it derives from a particular interpretation of Christian moralism, and takes the rhetorical form of a defense of values, and a return to values. It is a shelter for homophobia, panopticism, evangelism — and sexism, since the threat of pleasure frequently comes in the tempting form of a woman. It is also a bait-and-switch. Conservative politicians with primarily economic agendas pay lip service to values, and the worrisome decline of values.

For liberals, however, criticizing hedonism is an innovation. In a recent post at Long Sunday, CR reminded us of a question W. J. T. Mitchell asked back in 2003, in an introduction to the “Future of Criticism” special issue of Critical Inquiry:

It has been suggested that theory now has backed off from its earlier sociopolitical engagements and its sense of revolutionary possibility and has undergone a “therapeutic turn” to concerns with ethics, aesthetics, and care of the self, a turn of which Lacan is the major theoretical symptom. True?

The phrase “care of the self” is a nod to Michel Foucault, who popularized the phrase in his multi-volume History of Sexuality. Foucault, who conceived The History of Sexuality as an attack on the dogma of sexual liberation, helped dissociate political theory from the old counterculture view that personal freedom was politically valuable. In other words, the “therapeutic turn” is inaccurately named. What really turned, taking ethics and aesthetics along with it, were the attitudes towards discipline and pleasure.

Therefore, Slavoj Zizek’s review of the film 300 is not, contra the claims of his apologists, an aberration or a falling-off. Zizek’s calls for discipline are a fundamental articulation of the dominant fantasies of contemporary theory. Since this conversation, about pleasure and about ancient Greece, is over-determined by the studies of the pleasures of the Greeks, that is where we have to look. Here, I’ll be framing the triangle of culture, pleasure, and politics using Plutarch’s comparison between Spartan and Roman rule. In my next post, I’ll draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance to understand the problem discipline is trying to solve. Ultimately, I will argue that we have to decide between the futile discipline that opposes itself to pleasure, and the spontaneous discipline of aesthetics, which is constructed by pleasure.

***

The nature of all discipline antagonistic to pleasure is war. 300 is a film about the Battle of Thermopylae; after watching it, Zizek praises it for its “Spartan spirit of military discipline.” Alain Badiou, in his book on Saint Paul, announced that contemporary philosophy is on the hunt for a way to resurrect the “militant” as an exemplary figure. Of course, as Daniel at Antigram has written, there is no way to determine what is pure, untainted discipline, and what is masochistic pleasure; the important point is that the rhetoric is anti-hedonistic.

Zizek argues that in order to understand Sparta, we ought to “subtract all historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule” and “ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves.” Plutarch, who greatly admired the Spartans, felt no such divestment was possible. His comparison between the Spartan founder, Lycurgus, and the Roman, Numa Pompilius, is a crucial starting-point:

As the musicians tune their harps, so the one let down the high-flown spirits of the people at Rome to a lower key, as the other screwed them up at Sparta to a higher note, when they were sunken low by dissoluteness and riot. The harder task was that of Lycurgus; for it was not so much his business to persuade his citizens to put off their armour or ungird their swords, as to cast away their gold or silver, and abandon costly furniture and rich tables; nor was it necessary to preach to them, that, laying aside their arms, they should observe the festivals, and sacrifice to the gods, but rather, that, giving up feasting and drinking, they should employ their time in laborious and martial exercises….Numa’s muse was a gentle and loving inspiration, fitting him well to turn and soothe his people into peace and justice out of their violent and fiery tempers; whereas, if we must admit the treatment of the Helots to a part of Lycurgus’s legislation, a most cruel and iniquitous proceeding, we must own that Numa was by a great deal the more humane and Greek like legislator, granting even to actual slaves a license to sit at meat with their masters at the feast of Saturn, that they also might have some taste and relish of the sweets of liberty….[Numa] ruled a city that as yet had scarce become one city, without recurring to arms or any violence (such as Lycurgus used, supporting himself by the aid of the nobler citizens against the commonalty). (trans. Dryden)

Lycurgus, in this account, maintains martial discipline through the repressive use of internal force, and by encouraging continual war against the Helots, an enslaved population. (George Orwell appropriated this analysis, and Lycurgus reads nowadays as Orwellian.) And, in fact, it is clear enough how our contemporary rhetoric repeats this “screwing up” to “a higher note” through violence. Jodi Dean employs the vocabulary of sabotage, urging us toward a “discipline and spirit of sacrifice” working like “objects jamming the machinery of enjoyment.”

To whom are these paeans to discipline addressed? Who is it that lacks discipline and lives hedonistically? The answer is the consumer, or rather that portion of each individual’s life taken up by consumption. Let’s assume that our own desire, in the midst of a drawn-out, unjust, costly war, is to let down our spirits to a lower key, instead of embracing the incursion of militarism into every venue for art and culture. At least, since we have to start somewhere, to start by tackling the relationship between consumption and pleasure, and the silent withdrawal of the festival from daily life.

To be continued.

Beyond Values?

DM, at Antigram, has a new post up about the Zizek debate. It’s good; the first part of it is about Western “hedonism” and debate over enjoyment, which I’ll try to address in a post following. The second part of it is about the relationship between politics, in the practical sense, and values, whether personal or collective.

DM writes:

The struggle between the Right and the Left is an asymmetric struggle. It is not true to say that we believe different things but share common assumptions: we do not share common assumptions. And principally, we do not share the assumption that the question: “What are your values?” bears witness to any political reality whatsoever…

In the end, “values” is not a Leftist category, for the simple reason that it is not a real category. There is no actual terrain upon which values battle, as there is no real stage upon which “civilizations” clash. Rather, concrete actors, take concrete decisions, for concrete reasons. These reasons may be economic, strategic, political or psychological, but “values” simply do not enter into the equation, except ex post facto as illusory means of concealment, then perhaps disseminated as psychological black ops. As Marx and Freud, and also Nietzsche taught us, “values” are generated [and] produced by material forces….The theater of values is a theater of shadows, and true Leftists should burn it to the ground.

Conservative political thinkers do foreground shadow theaters of values when they talk about “family values,” or when they speak out to endorse a return to values. The word may have acquired a taint, as, in a recent post, I argued that the word “radical” had.

Still, the references to Nietzsche and Freud don’t make sense here, and the idea of abandoning valuation is equally perplexing. Neither Nietzsche nor Freud were really materialists. Nietzsche was fond of describing judgments of the “muscles,” but he also spiritualized matter by holding onto a notion of the will. One has only to examine the ironies of his writings on priests. The asceticism of the priest may be contemptible, and founded on hypocritical claims about renunciation, but it is still a manifestation of the will-to-power. Nietzsche was not particularly concerned with fighting oppression, in part because of his belief in a hierarchy of wills.

Freud wasn’t a materialist either. To the end of his life, he held on to the notion of the drive, finally incarnate as Eros (desire) and Thanatos (death drive).

There are two points to make here. The first is that the conjunction of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, who are the perpetual “good guys” for contemporary philosophers (though the way things are going, we’ll have to add Saint Paul), don’t fit together all that easily. Every time the three are synthesized, a different, new philosophy emerges, whether that be the Frankfurt School, the work of Jacques Derrida, the work of Michel Foucault, or something else entirely. If a new philosophy doesn’t emerge, and we’re just making them standard-bearers for the revolution, we’ve ceased to read them with any sort of attention.

The second is that materialism should never become so naturalized that we begin to take its postulates for granted. It’s true that the free market is usually defended on purely economic grounds: private enterprise, as opposed to public ownership, is supposedly the most efficient way of producing wealth. It is also defended on ethical grounds. The strong form of the claim for laissez-faire capitalism is indifference towards inequality. What a person has, he has earned, and has a right to keep.

This is not less materialist than socialism. It is less compassionate. When “reasons” are substituted for “values,” it is as though the abstract, logical operations of reason could persuade us whether someone we have never met, have never even seen, should live or die.

Debunking Andrew Scull: Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

(x-posted to The Valve)

It is time, at last, for me to confront Andrew Scull’s recent review (now a little less so) of Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization. The book has come out in an expanded and newly translated edition.

I will be brief. Scull’s review is a disaster, and the worst of it is that some of his criticisms are undoubtedly just. Furthermore, some of what has been written against Scull is useless.

This post follows up on Scott Eric Kaufman’s two excellent posts on the subject, here (1) and here (2). I’m indebted to Scott for the links below. Though I disagree with him about the value of Foucault’s book, I think his comparison of “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” with Madness and Civilization is very helpful.

I am not merely aiming to pick apart Scull’s response to Foucault; my real target is Scull’s blithe cynicism about the 1960s. That decade, which already signifies an irresponsible utopianism in most public discourse, is now slowly being rejected by academia as an embarrassment. We literally run the risk of losing works like Madness and Civilization, Eros and Civilization, and Life Against Death to this smug and unreasoning process of expulsion.

***

To begin with, Scull’s project is fundamentally dishonest because of the difference between media. Foucault is writing an immense work of historical research, now properly annotated. Scull is writing a book review. As a result, Scull has to ask us to take a great deal on faith, without ever providing footnotes or citations of his own, and he does so in the service of a critique of a blindly credulous audience.

Let’s grant Scull as much of his argument as we can. Let’s assume that Foucault drastically over-stated the number of mental patients being held as prisoners in Western Europe; in defense of this assertion, Scull cites a book entitled Madness and Democracy, published in 1999. Let’s assume that Foucault was working from erroneous sources, when he described the public paying to observe inmates at Bedlam. Scull claims that public visitation ended much earlier, and that no fixed price was set for admissions. Finally, let’s accept the idea that most of the new asylums were not constructed on the sites of convents or monasteries.

These are frustrating mistakes to uncover. For somebody writing a history of the physical treatment and confinement of the insane, they may be fatal. Still, they are subject to qualification.

First of all, whether or not madmen continued to roam in the streets in the Classical Age, it is still possible to trace a trend favoring the establishment of asylums and hospitals. Scull himself admits that by the 19th Century, “vast museums of madness” had sprung up with the help of public funding. People with mental illnesses still walk the streets today: they show up in our lives as sources of disruption, and in our artworks as saints, apocalyptic prophets, and harbingers of magic. That hardly makes the history of institutionalization irrelevant to contemporary life. In fact, given the number of people who are now treated for various mental disorders on an outpatient basis, one could say that the asylum is now a much more real, and less visible, presence in our lives.

As for exhibiting patients at Bedlam, Scull tries his best to disguise the fact that they were exhibited, and there was a price, even if Foucault got the dates wrong, and the price was never fixed. As Richard Prouty notes at the blog One Way Street, bringing this phenomenon to our attention “is far more illuminating and provocative than knowing that the public visitation of patients at Bedlam ceased in 1770, and did not continue into the nineteenth century, as Foucault asserted. What’s important is that the patients went on display in the first place.”

*

Scull claims that “such massive incarceration” as Foucault describes, “simply never occurred in England.” He also claims that the “ships of fools” — the plural of Foucault’s historicizing metaphor for the mad individuals who, during the Middle Ages, occupied the interstices between settlements — didn’t exist, either. Since he gives absolutely no supporting evidence for these claims, he inspires me with nothing beyond a slight doubt. I am likewise unimpressed by his careful tallies of which of Foucault’s sources were written when. Scull gives us no clue as to which texts specifically are out of date, and which are not.

*

Scull continues, “Foucault’s isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is evident throughout History of Madness.” What he really means, in this single reference to an incredible omission, is that for large stretches of Madness and Civilization Foucault is concerned with interpreting works of art and philosophy that deal with madness.

This is where Foucault is on his most unassailable ground. As Gracchi remarks, at Westminster Wisdom, “the philosophical points that Foucault makes, so far as they are unrelated to the empirical evidence, are left untouched.” Foucault’s references to the “Ship of Fools” are metaphorical, even though Scull tries to make it seem as though Foucault is describing whole crews of madmen. Foucault is describing the philosophico-aesthetic (really epistemic) lenses through which even one madman on a ship would have been viewed.

The only thing that can disprove Foucault’s dozens of literary readings, stretching all the way from Erasmus, to Albrecht Dürer, to Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud, is a recourse to those works themselves. So why, then, should we want to abandon Foucault’s appeals to conscience on the grounds of a mistake about admission fees at Bedlam? We can interpret the following statement of the strength of 19th and 20th Century art alone:

There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth…the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness. (trans. Howard, 289)

*

Craig, writing at Long Sunday (here [1] and here [2]) in response to Scott, as well as Jeremy at FoucaultBlog writing in response to Scull, claim that Scull is trying to discredit all of Foucault’s work. There is no evidence for this. Scott’s deft use of Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” against the errors of Madness and Civilization proves that the critique can be immanently contained.

In fact, the entry at FoucaultBlog shows a curious unwillingness to defend Madness and Civilization. Similarly, Craig’s two posts seek to wall it off from the rest of Foucault’s work, by arguing that this Foucault was unpolished, and lacked the genealogical rigor he would bring to The Birth of the Clinic.

So why give up on Madness and Civilization, while valiantly defending Foucault against an imaginary slippery slope? We’ve known the answer for several years now: Foucault writes as though, through madness, “the world is made aware of its guilt” (288). He writes as though art that struggles at the border of madness could reveal hitherto unsuspected potentials for social transformation. And all this is embarrassing. It is not even Foucauldian enough, we hear nowadays.

Scull hopes to use the chinks in Foucault’s armor to discredit the whole history of 1960s anti-psychiatric sociology. We are told that Erving Goffman was “brilliant if idiosyncratic,” and that his “loosely linked essays lent academic lustre to the previously polemical equation of the mental hospital and the concentration camp.” Leaving aside Scull’s painful alliteration, the point is clear: he’s fond of those 60s liberals, with their academic lustre and idiosyncratic brilliance, but they were — let’s face it — a bit off the mark. He dismisses Ronnie Laing as “yesterday’s man,” and he may be right, but calling “schizophrenia” a form of “supersanity” (as Laing did) is passingly close to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who are still read and debated widely. Scull overloads his language with rhetorical devices. He calls Laing a “guru,” to remind us again of that decade’s crazy excesses, and describes a generation of historians as “midwives.” Even his description of the translated title, Madness and Civilization, is meant as a warning about the seductive power of intellectual provocation.

Scull may be right that the real historical conditions in mental institutions did not always match the rhetoric of the age. He calls Foucault out as a fortunate deceiver, “cynical” and “shameless,” and hints darkly at Foucault’s effect on “people’s lives.” But if we have learned anything from Foucault, and from his predecessor Nietzsche, it is that certain kinds of ideological errors react with material histories, and alter them. To treat the lot of Foucault’s textual criticism of madness as nothing – that is pure, indefensible ideology. It endeavors to silence Foucault, and restores to us a good conscience we have done nothing to deserve.