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.

The Return of the SoCal Bloggers: Tomemos, Uncomplicatedly, Girl Detective, Surlacarte

Dear readers,

Happy new year!

Blogging is a reflection of brick-and-mortar communities, and it creates and sustains new communities of its own. Discussions begin through blogging that could never have happened otherwise, and friendships and relationships begun through blogging have the potential to be life-changing. I’ve just returned from New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, my birthday present from petitpoussin. We met through blogging in the fall of 2006; one year later, she moved out from Hawaii to join me here in Southern California, by far the most significant and wonderful development of 2007 for me personally.

It delights me when the leisure of the holidays permits academic bloggers living here to return to their keyboards. Surlacarte is back with two excellent posts, covering the disappointing end-of-year music lists and his own list of 2006′s underrated albums. Yes, it takes a particular kind of mind to sum up 2007 by writing about 2006, and surlacarte has that mind. My own music post is coming soon.

Meanwhile, tomemos, girldetective, and uncomplicatedly have written a series of posts on feminism and vegetarianism, with tomemos suggesting some points in common between the two conversations. Here’s your roadmap: start with tomemos’s post “Don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan,” partly a follow-up to the recent debates at tekanji’s Shrub Blog mentioned in my earlier post. Tomemos has a very different take on the proceedings, and on Valenti and Friedman’s forthcoming book. Then check out uncomplicatedly’s response to tomemos, punningly titled “Making Friends With Salad,” and girldetective’s own version of and thoughts on the Night of Drunken Political Rebuke, “False Allies and Sexist Women.” Finally, tomemos responds in brief to both posts in “Omitofo.”

Vegetarianism is, in my view, a good way of life that I do not practice. The arguments in favor of it are immensely compelling: it is healthier, less cruel, and more ecologically sound to avoid eating meat, given the way most meat is produced and the overall environmental burden of sustaining a global human population exceeding 6.75 billion. With rare exceptions, I never buy meat at the grocery store, but I do eat what meat others cook for me, and I order meat dishes at restaurants.

I eat meat for three reasons: first, because of its aesthetic pleasures. Second, because I enjoy sharing that pleasure with other people, particularly when I am a guest. Third, because my schedule is prone to various disruptions — traveling first and foremost — and in those cases it is an inexpensive, convenient source of complete proteins.

Nonetheless, being vegetarian is eminently workable. Most reasonable people will accomodate vegetarian guests, and, as uncomplicatedly notes, so will most restaurants. There are, of course, other sources of good protein. Also, as vegetarianism gains adherents, the aesthetics of it are improving: petitpoussin is vegetarian, and for her birthday we went to a restaurant in Los Angeles that served better fake meat barbecue than I had eating real meat in the Deep South.

All that’s old news, and what is new in what uncomplicatedly and tomemos have written is very joyous: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself…” Yet I demur. Tomemos writes about deciding to eat fish tacos on his recent Mexican honeymoon:

In the end, though, I think this experiment ended up strengthening my vegetarianism. The fish tacos tasted good; they didn’t make me feel like I had been missing out on something amazing for fifteen years. At one point during our trip, I had a vegetarian tostada, and that was as satisfying a meal as anything else I ate in Mexico. Taste is possibly the most transitory aesthetic experience: even if you eat a meal that you remember for the rest of your life—and I’ve had one or two—it can’t make you want to live a different way. My feelings on eating meat are unchanged: for me, it is a moral issue, but not a moral absolute.

In her post, uncomplicatedly responded thus:

[Tomemos's final evaluation of eating fish tacos] was immensely reassuring, because it appeared that amazing things were happening on my family members’ plates [this holiday] and I was a little bit jealous. I’m sure they were great, but the truth was that I managed to eat pretty well.

In the grand scheme of things, the singularity of meat dishes is something one can forego. But that does not mean that it does not exist. The poached lobster and huckleberry venison I had in Mandalay Bay were amazing, and I see no justification for treating aesthetic pleasure so abstractly that I would be able to call a polenta strictly equivalent. It is very likely that what uncomplicatedly saw on those other plates was special indeed, and we can understand her jealousy without concluding that she should have bitten in.

Hindsight can lend a tidiness to excess, and reflection can corral it dialectically, and thank goodness — we might go out of our minds thinking about the possibilities of lives we didn’t lead, or for which we weren’t chosen because of lack of opportunity or talent. (For example, in my case, baseball.) There’s still the dust of Nevada on my shoes; Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, as much as anything, a book devoted to restoring to fantasy its chaotic and terrifying force by unmasking the advertiser’s illusion that Vegas can fit comfortably into American normalcy via the cognitive dissonance of “vacation.” But an unacknowledged source of so much of our curiosity about other lives is the sorrow of our historical and material finitude, and the double bind of decisions that entail sacrifice. We cannot avoid making sacrifices as part of the devoted act of choice — that is perhaps the very meaning of becoming who one is — but we are, as H.D. once put it, permitted to wonder.

In following this conversation, I am reminded again of Thomas Wolfe’s opening to Look Homeward, Angel, that each of us is the sums we have not counted. Uncomplicatedly writes engagingly about the experience of getting to know a chef by making a special request for a vegetarian dish, and there are plenty of other versions of that pleasure. This Thanksgiving, my family had to make a vegetarian turkey (the “Tofurkey”) for the first time in our history, and doing so was a lot of fun. However, it is also true that plenty of people find vegetarianism alienating, or simply don’t have the ability to provide a very good alternative to what they know. The former are legitimate objects of satire, as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but the fact remains that people enjoy communion. If you don’t drink, you can’t toast; if you don’t eat meat, there are certain dishes you can’t share. In my own nuclear family of three, being vegetarian would mean eating a separate dinner every night I’m home. Meanwhile, for one of my high school friends, being vegan and abstaining from alcohol meant that he was regarded warmly throughout his travels in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia.

Uncomplicatedly continues,

One summer in college, I lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. One afternoon, I was assigned the job of sweeping out the spider webs from the temple’s windows. “But won’t that kill the spiders?” I asked. The monk responded, “We avoid harming other creatures when we can, but sometimes we have to. It’s not our intention to kill the spiders, but we need to clean our windows. You should bow to the spiders, say ‘Omitofo,’ and pray that they get reborn as humans.”

What is strange about this response from the monk is how it echoes certain Native American rituals performed on the occasion of a hunt. The spiritual practice of apology, as a complement to a postulated need, can be directed towards acts or victims of any kind, up to and including human beings. Uncomplicatedly focuses on the experience of having actually unintentionally caused harm by eating shrimp, and so makes good use of what amounts to a confused iteration of “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs,” one that tries to sever intention from admitted consequence.

***

Tomemos is right, I think, to see similarities between the conversation about vegetarianism and those about feminism and other political work: it is again a question of recognizing the importance of what is singular and what must, at least initially, tarry with the negative. Careers are not equivalent to one another; suggesting that volunteering in New Orleans is right for everyone, as the Tipsy Crusader did, is a form of madness. At the same time, tomemos does lose a lot of direct political efficacy by working as a teacher of English, something that Rich Puchalsky pointed out in comments to my Valve post on the year in intellectual blogs. There is some horizon point where these different kinds of service converge, but the requisite disposition and skills are so different, and the experiential quality of the work so variant, that the truth is in the singular differences as much as in one’s general feeling of solidarity.

The problem with Yes Means Yes is not that there aren’t connections between rape and sexuality, but rather that the authors are at such pains to identify the two — even in their initial call for contributors — that they sound like nothing so much as academics who strain to put a political point on every piece of criticism they produce. They over-identify the two things, and do it probably for reasons similar to those that turn academics into pundits: unconsciously, they feel that the standard version of feminist sexual revolution has already been done, just as most literary critics worry that regular ol’ literary criticism is an exhausted genre. That said, tomemos is right that yet another act of generalization, whereby some critics of Yes Means Yes want to use the book as an opportunity to declare their separateness from a mostly imaginary faux-liberal status quo, can create needless dissensions among progressives, as opposed to the necessary divergence of vocation.

Girl Detective points out that the present connotations of the word “liberal” are partly an invention of the Right:

The definition of “liberal” is a matter of semantics, not policy; it depends on who you ask, and people fighting for the same causes may give themselves very different labels. If you support religious tolerance, social welfare, environmental protection, and the eradication of racism, but hate liberals and everything “they” stand for, then you’ve been duped by the Right’s misinformation campaign. Also, I’m sick of people who call themselves allies – male allies to women, white allies to people of color, first world allies to third world nations – but are more concerned with boosting their ego by yelling at fellow leftists than with actually developing any strategies for change.

I assume that, in most of the cases to which she refers, these leftist critics are thinking of Martin Luther King, who wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” these words:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

So, in response, one is obliged to point out that King aims his words against moderates, not against liberals. Throughout his letter, King stands behind the constructive foregrounding of tension over and against the “negative peace which is the absence of tension.” There is no way to banish negativity and tension — the woman who cornered girldetective had to become an object of rebuke in turn. Calls for solidarity always entail strong words against dissensus, and girldetective and tomemos rise to the occasion here.

King writes, “Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.” This, finally, is the spirit of my answer to what tomemos says about the transitory nature of gustatory pleasure, and the urge to live a different way. The aesthetic is a realm of exquisite tensions: between flavors, between lines of melody, between characters, between the different parts of a composed picture. It appears, not in the ethical determination to eat less meat, but in the scene that transpires between an unprepared chef and an inconvenienced patron, or in the moment of reflection occasioned by breaking a rule. It is inevitable that we should relax into the confidence of habit after the crisis has passed, but for me, to seek out the aesthetic is to beckon those pleasures to return, to feel break upon one’s consciousness what was still unguessed about life, and to experience in its bittersweet fullness the uncertainty that decides us, each to each.

Gee, Officer Krupke: Disillusionment with Reflexivity

(x-posted to The Valve)

(N.B. As I prepare simultaneously for a dissertation that will be grappling with the rise of self-help, and a post about sex and love, I find myself reading a number of fairly badly written books: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Rules, as well as random web pages about sexuality and dating. It is, by comparison, almost restful to turn to the besetting problems of phenomenology and critique.)

Throughout this summer, there has been a wonderful, sprawling discussion between N. Pepperell and a host of other blogs about NP’s great theme, that of reflexivity (or, as NP calls it, self-reflexivity). A good road map for the discussion is here, at the Rough Theory site. From my point of view, reflexive critiques are not capable of doing what we want them to do; to understand what, exactly, it is we do want, we must turn to Stephen Sondheim and Slavoj Zizek.

The following two quotes go together so well that it’s surprising they haven’t been previously paired. They also get right to the heart of the trouble with reflexive analysis:

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
my parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
they won’t give me a puff!
They didn’t want to have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!
-West Side Story

This “excessive” and “groundless” violence involves its own mode of knowledge, that of impotent cynical reflection – back to our example of Id-Evil, of a skinhead beating up foreigners: when really pressed for the reasons for his violence, and if capable of minimal theoretical reflection, he will suddenly start to talk like social workers, sociologists and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood… in short, he will provide a more or less precise psycho-sociological account of his acts so dear to enlightened liberals eager to “understand” the violent youth as a tragic victim of their social and familial conditions. The standard enlightened formula of the efficiency of the “critique of ideology” from Plato onwards (“they are doing it, because they do not know what they are doing,” i.e. knowledge is in itself liberating, when the erring subject reflects upon what he is doing, he will no longer be doing it) is here turned around: the violent skinhead “knows very well what he is doing, but he is nonetheless doing it.” The symbolically efficient knowledge embedded in the subject’s effective social praxis disintegrates into, on the one hand, excessive “irrational” violence with no ideologico-political foundation and, on the other hand, impotent external reflection that leaves the subject’s acts intact. In the guise of this cynicallly-impotent reflecting skinhead who, with an ironic smile, explains to the perplexed journalist the roots of his senselessly violent behavior, the enlightened tolerant multiculturalist bent on “understanding” forms of excessive violence gets his own message in its inverted, true form.
–Slavoj Zizek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France and Related Matters” (link here)

In my view, Zizek’s ultimate conclusion, that skinheads cause violence for the sheer joy of it, is a reactionary claim that separates human beings according to the irrational (but either good or bad) sources of their pleasure.

That said, Zizek’s critique of this sort of reflexivity is dead-on, if not exactly original. (Most modern crime films take pains to mock the notion that a deviant with a tough childhood is innocent of his crimes. There’s always another character who had it just as tough, but chose the high road.) If you look at all of Sondheim’s wonderful song “Gee, Officer Krupke!,” you find that the members of the Jets can easily re-frame their own experiences to win the maximum of sympathy from each successive “handler” — meanwhile, the handlers are having none of it, and instead use the Jets as pawns in a debate amongst themselves about human nature.

The Jets aren’t simply making fun of the notion of delinquency. They are genuinely confused about their own actions, and suspect that somebody educated has the answer, but meanwhile there is a fundamental and unresolvable problem: the Jets like their gang, and the people in authority don’t, regardless of what etiological theory is in play.

The fact that the Jets like being troublemakers is not actually a disproof of any theory another person might entertain about their crimes; it’s merely a disproof of the idea that a conversation can ever be so self-aware as to lack an unconscious element – here, a real and perpetually deferred dispute about desirable behavior — or that self-awareness is by itself sufficient to transform human beings or societies. In the case of psychoanalytic analyses, there is usually a hidden belief that consciousness is dissociative. In other words, if I come to understand what is causing my behavior, I will lose interest in repeating that behavior, and will assert my freedom and distance from the originating event. This is wrong twice over. First of all, if I become conscious of something, I am perfectly likely to claim it as my own, forever — as Jean Genet did when he said he would become what crime made of him, or as cigarette smokers do when they finally talk openly about being addicted to their smokes. Second, all of us make decisions based on past experiences. If we switch cell phone providers based on past experiences, and choose our leisure activities based on what we know we enjoy, why would we expect someone to change how they act on those same grounds?

Any glance around a social networking site (such as MySpace or Facebook or Friendster) will also confirm that people frequently speak and write about themselves in a seemingly confessional way in order to produce various rhetorical effects. For example, a college student on Facebook will “confess” to being a drunk in order to disarm acquaintances or in order to appear hedonistic. Others will confess to being “crazy” in order to appear spontaneous or unique. A famous example of this tactic is the person who, while interviewing for a job, confesses to being a perfectionist.

What is true of individuals is also true of societies: reflexive thinking is not necessarily emancipatory, and vice versa. Fundamentalists, traditionalists, and conservatives are quite aware of their obduracy, and are proud of it. When Karl Marx wrote that the contradictions within capitalism would eventually destroy it, he wasn’t writing a purely reflexive analysis. He was writing a historical analysis that used the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a model for the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Lots of people who strongly oppose radical action are aware of the costs of oppressive economic practice, and can speak volubly about the spread of disease, global warming, shortened life spans, uncontrolled population growth, urban sprawl, collapsing infrastructure, and so on. It’s not that they are unintelligent or uninformed; rather, they make a series of usually unconscious assumptions about human beings — what motivates them, what capacity they have for change, and what wealthy human beings deserve — that hold up against and even assimilate the most damning indictments of the status quo.

If you want people or societies to change, then you have to prove that change is both possible and desirable, to a quorum if not to everyone. That may be a highly reflexive process, or it may not, depending on the situation. Thus the critical process of argumentation and change happens intersubjectively.

The production of knowledge without any specific expectation of change also happens intersubjectively. N. Pepperell takes a strong stand against theories that emphasize intersubjectivity. In a comment to this post, she writes:

I am specifically critical of attempts to centre critical theory on analyses of intersubjectivity – and of the tendency to equate “the social” with “the intersubjective”. Realising that this won’t mean much at this point, my position would be that central dimensions of contemporary society – dimensions that are important for understanding shapes of consciousness, patterns of social reproduction, and potentials for transformations – simply won’t be captured adequately by the attempt to transcend the limitations of theories of the “subject” via theories of the intersubjective constitution of meaning.

If I had to venture a guess, I would guess that NP’s problem with theories of intersubjectivity is that they don’t provide a consistent methodological framework, and don’t take into account the phenomenology (and relevant ideological structures) of our encounters with objects. I can’t be sure because I don’t know exactly what she means by the “central dimensions of contemporary society.”

In the sciences, the scientific method is certainly intersubjective, but also consistent: it is an agreed-upon method for producing uniform and objective results. It is true that scientists do not always peer closely into the motivating forces behind the scientific method, and it is also true that psychological and historical analyses of the scientific method have not altered it. If a scientist were to write not only a description of her method, but also a full account of the historical, cultural, and personal factors condensed in an experiment, the analytic question would still not disappear. It would merely become different: “Why these details? Why this confession?” Anthropologists who live amongst their subjects, rather than surveilling or interviewing them, are not necessarily more knowledgeable anthropologists. They are simply creating a different, and possibly less hostile, “clearing” (Martin Heidegger’s term, from the Greek aletheia) in the name of knowledge.

Objects and perceptions are not intersubjective, of course, but statements about objects are since they happen through language.

Similarly, essays written by Derrideans that attempt, mid-stream, to partially or wholly deconstruct themselves by noting slippages and so forth are not exactly wasting our time, but are nonetheless like the party animal on Facebook who ponies up with a glamorous confession. It only means that the invisible foundations of the text are elsewhere.

The most humble and honest that we can be, as speakers, is to speak as objectively as possible and to reach the intersubjective on the far shore of that attempt. If I explain exactly what I know, how I came to understand it, and why I wanted to know it in the first place, without once speaking the dead language of the impersonated Other (as the Jets do in their song), then I give my interlocutor the opportunity to be a true partner with me, making observations about the thing and about myself that I could not possibly have reached. Those observations do not escape the contingent field of intersubjectivity; if they did, the Other would have the authority of God. But they are something new: a spark of conversation, a beginning.

(Update: it occurs to me that Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh is one of the most poignant and devastating investigations into reflexive speech. The lucidity of self-reflection, which is contrasted with the haze of nights at the saloon, is actually so dispiriting and useless that it produces murder, suicide, and bleak depression.)

Here at The Kugelmass Episodes…

…we play your requests, as The Constructivist knows.

Ben Wolfson‘s asked for copies of my current reading for my upcoming qualifying exams in literature.

The exams are based on three lists and accompanying essays. The first list covers American and Continental Modernism; the second, “self-fashioning” from the Greeks all the way to American Transcendentalism; the third, philosophical and theoretical writing on selfhood and authenticity.

Modernism
Self-Fashioning and Western Culture
Philosophy and Theory

In other news, the filmosphere appears to have gotten back on its feet. One of the best absentee bloggers in the world, R. Sheehan, has unexpectedly returned to Terrible Beauty with a new post on Pan’s Labyrinth. The blog is still so freshly unwrapped that there’s no blogroll, but there is a whole lot of interesting thinking. After I saw PL, I wrote some quickie criticism and proposed a video game.

Petitpoussin has also been turning her attention to film criticism, with terrific posts on Clint Eastwood and masculinity, as well as on Speed and the American capitalist sublime.

Enjoy!

-Kugelmass

Plato and Derrida on Democracy: States of Desire

(x-posted to The Valve)

In a recent post at the Lacanian blog Larval Subjects, the eponymous author (we’ll call him LS) writes:

Is it truly possible, I wonder, to ever desire the difference of the Other, or is this simply impressive sounding talk?

I was reminded of a marvelous paraphrase of The Republic, from Jacques Derrida’s book on democratic states, Rogues:

[In a democracy one finds] all sorts of people, a greater variety than anywhere else. Whence the multicolored beauty of democracy. Plato insists as much on the beauty as on the medley of colors. Democracy seems—and this is its appearing, if not its appearance and its simulacrum—the most beautiful, the most seductive of constitutions. Its beauty resembles that of a multi- and brightly colored garment. The seduction matters here; it provokes; it is provocative in this “milieu” of sexual difference, where roués and voyous roam about. (26)

In his own roundabout fashion, Derrida follows Plato’s example, but inverts him: Derrida will desire the presence of rogues and vagabonds, will insist roguishly on seduction and shiftlessness, and will hint at debaucheries and even at insurrections. All of which confirms, for us, that democracy is, in LS’s apt phrase, a process of desiring the difference of the Other.

I wonder whether it is reasonable to establish a democracy on these grounds; or whether, in fact, democracy is a best understood as a matter of indifference.

***

In order to understand this question of desire, it is crucial to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary states. If a poor person goes hungry, we assume, and rightly so, that they are involuntarily hungry, and that something should be done to either feed them or teach them to fish. If, on the other hand, a person is fasting, we assume that they are acting of their own free will, and do not try to compel them to eat.

The question of what is voluntary, and what is not, is a question about free will, and the limits of free will. (For example, we routinely treat the mentally disabled, and the very young, as though they did not possess free will, and this seems to be justified.) I cannot hope to answer that question here, and in fact do not need to do so.

Instead, let’s focus on that enormous field of thoughts, actions, and subjectivities which are assumed to be free. It is ridiculous to expect us to desire what Derrida calls the milieu of difference. The phrase calls up, as Derrida himself notes, a “bazaar” (26) in which other human beings serve as consumer goods, as spectacles for our entertainment.

However, in order for another person to become visible to us, thus catalyzing our desire, they must be comprehensible in some way. We become an audience for them, and audiences get very upset when difference is threatened by self-difference; that is, when a celebrity, ethnic group, friend, or lover acts in a fashion inconsistent with our expectations. Even when we expect someone to be different from ourselves, as most celebrities are different, we don’t like it when they change. Hence the outpouring of basically aggressive “concern” for Britney Spears when she had her highly publicized breakdowns, and the imperialisms of representation that characterize what Edward Said called “Orientalism.”

Furthermore, it is foolish and intellectually dishonest to enter into conversations hampered by some arbitrary marker of irreducible difference. People with strong beliefs, be they religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political, have an interest in promoting their beliefs, and this is as it should be. There’s no good reason to expect a devout Christian to want somebody else to remain a Buddhist in the same way that he or she wants to be saved, and wants to save others. Even environments that seem most pluralistic, such as classroom discussions about the meaning of a text, are underwritten by an extensive and mutual set of rules — usually, in this case, about what kind of supporting evidence is required to justify a reading. Difference seems to constantly transcend itself towards identity: group identity, family bonds, even personal identity. Every promise and every acceptance of duty determinately negates difference.

Thus one discovers, at the heart of the democratic principle, not the spectacle of seductive differences, but rather the matter of indifference, as the phrase is used in everyday conversation. It does not mean insensibility, or a lack of interest in what other people volunteer. It is simply a limit placed on what concerns me. I cease expecting others to be fully transparent to me, and I cease to expect them to create environments in which my beliefs predominate. This is the essence of the right to privacy, of toleration, and of the fair exercise of authority.