the new aesthetic?

Source: new-aesthetic.tumblr.com via Joseph on Pinterest

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Perhaps you have already observed that in Casablanca, life is cheap.

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A few days ago, theorist Ian Bogost published an article in The Atlantic that features this incredible section heading, written in the form of a command:

Take the existence of objects seriously.

That’s his tagline for “object-oriented ontology” (the ridiculous acronym is OOO), a collaboration between several academics that claims to be the beginning of a new movement in the humanities.

It’s not going to be the beginning of anything. It’s not affecting, and it certainly isn’t new. The idea is to transport ourselves, imaginatively, into the consciousness of things. Bogost is not hurting for lists of these things; a list punctuates nearly every point he makes. For example, he’s interested in the experiences of “airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 777 Dreamliner, the brand name ‘TaB.’”

By itself, this might be a little underwhelming, so Bogost positions his movement as an alternative to the “New Aesthetic,” a project currently underway at one site on Tumblr. He also claims that the “New Aesthetic” is a disappointment to seasoned aesthetes like himself, because it’s less ambitious and less kooky than Futurism, the pro-Fascist, machine-positive art that flourished briefly a few years before World War I. He cites an essay by Bruce Sterling in WIRED, writing that the Tumblr needs “a dose of good, old-fashioned twentieth century immodesty. Not naïve fascism or impulsive radicalism, but bigger eyes, larger hopes, weirder goals. Sterling shares this impression: ‘a heap of eye-catching curiosities don’t constitute a compelling worldview.’”

I like Sterling’s essay, which moves deftly between appreciations of what some of the new-aesthetic work accomplishes, and skeptical responses to the new-aesthetic’s overreaching claims. The only weakness of the essay is that, albeit to lesser extent than Bogost, he takes the idea of the New Aesthetic too seriously.

The New Aesthetic is a Tumblr, which means it’s somewhere between a blog, a magazine, and a gallery exhibition. The various posts fit together reasonably well. None of the ideas are new; if you follow indie music, you’ve been following this 8-bit video game aesthetic for almost two decades. Is it really possible that none of these writers own OK Computer? Because I am quite certain that Radiohead, the paranoid-but-fairly-conventional rock band who recorded The Bends, were popularizers, not pioneers. For example, there was that German band, I think called something like “Craft Work,” that claimed to be letting synthesizers speak for themselves.

I am perfectly happy to let artists tell themselves whatever stories their art seems to demand. Some artists believe themselves to be channeling the subconscious, like Salvador Dali. John Lennon thought his best songs were “the music of the spheres,” and that he was transcribing them, rather than inventing them. Sure. Sounds great to me. In the end, there’s very little difference between personal explanations, a la Lennon, and programmatic ones a la “the New Aesthetic.” They are what, in a creative writing class, one would call “prompts.”

Furthermore, because the Tumblr is inspiring and collecting good work, there’s really no point in firing off a political critique. The New Aesthetic doesn’t stand for many of my values, but that’s not its job; the photograph above would be enough to justify its existence. It’s a great photo. The advisory, with its frightening overtones of organized, routinized misery, is pressed right up against the lens. The overall depth-of-field and blurry background amplify this effect: the future is taking us somewhere — so says the snapshot — but where? Where does that highway lead to? Why the escalator, disappearing downward? Notice that the photo doesn’t even fit in very well with the pro-robot dicta of the New Aesthetics…and that’s to be expected. These artists won’t allow themselves to be constrained by their own chest-thumping; when modern artists start adhering to their own stated principles, that’s usually because their best work is over.

Back to Bogost. He can’t admit any of this, because as an academic who’d really like to be an artist, he’d like to believe that if somehow he can “win” the ideological debate, his own “object-oriented ontology” will have proven itself to be valid. But it will never be valid for two reasons. First, the proposal is staggeringly ignorant of science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, and all the other modern genres that have already produced broad traditions and beloved masterpieces doing exactly what Bogost thinks he’s invented — namely, speaking for objects, robots, and aliens. If he wants to speak for the robots, he’ll have to somehow improve upon Asimov. If he wants to speak for the trees, he’ll have to answer to the Lorax. And if he wants to beam down information about Mars, he’ll need to tell us something we and our water-sharers don’t already grok. There are even television commercials that ponder what a household mop ponders. In fact, there are many.

Second, the implied parallel with deep ecology is a joke. Deep ecology arose as a protest against our own destructive habit of thinking of the natural world as a storehouse of “resources,” to be vacuumed up at whatever rate we please. There’s nothing revolutionary about treating myself as the equal of my toaster, because the toaster manufacturer (and, ultimately, the society at large) already thinks of me that way. That’s what it means when capitalism assigns a monetary value to both people and objects. Pretending that my toaster has a song in its heart is, in this context, just a sentimental imitation of the advertisers I mentioned a moment ago.

All Bogost has really done is juxtapose things for rhetorical effect. Airports = sentiment (the arrivals gate, The Terminal) in the context of modernity. Sandstone = but I also care about nature! Koalas = I can has cute animals. Toaster pastries = unpretentious everydayness. Climate = but I also care about the environment! The International 505 racing dinghy = yeah, I eat Pop Tarts, but I’ve also been to Monaco. The Boeing 777 Dreamliner = dreams, and the futurism of the 1950s, which was so innocent and sweet. The brand name TaB = advertising is an art form, too. I’m not some boring Marxist!

I can just hear everyone at new-aesthetic begging Bogost to dictate to them how they can be more like Marinetti, or how many posts they can upload per day without exceeding his mental bandwidth limit. The irony is that even though the New Aesthetic seems cold, it’s not. It’s sensitive, just like OK Computer. It’s actually humanistic and sweet. It is full of panic and love and whimsy, because it’s a childlike aesthetic. Remember Radiohead’s mascot? It was a drawing of a bear; a freaky bear, definitely, but a bear nonetheless.

Bogost doesn’t realize that whatever he grew up loving is what he needs to promote, because otherwise, it may disappear into the archives. He thinks that he can be both archivist and hipster, and not only does that make him look silly, it spurs him to present quotes like this from Marinetti: “We want to glorify war.”

The new aesthetic does not look like Super Mario Bros. or Boeing’s version of The Aviator. I can tell you exactly what it looks like, and trust me, I wish it wasn’t the case. You can see it in No Country for Old Men, or in music videos from “Bad Girls” to “Part of Me” to “Human.” You can hear it in dubstep, or see a slicked-up version of it at any theater showing The Hunger Games. Tarantino’s been inhabiting it ever since Kill Bill. “That woman deserves her revenge…and we deserve to die.”

It is art that foretells numerous clashing ideologies — instead of a global war between two ideologies, a global situation of scarcity in which many small, regional wars infest every continent. I don’t mean some fantasy of scarcity, such as “peak oil.” I mean incremental changes, compounded by human overreactions. The art is dusty, and dry as high noon. Because it is so ideological and saturated with belief, it is noticeably psychedelic, but of course in a very different key than the psychedelic art of the 1960s. It is, incidentally, post-sexist, but above all it is martial.

If you can’t hear the new song, you should be glad. Winter is coming. There’s nothing wrong with asking Sam to play ” As Time Goes By,” once more, for old time’s sake.

alain de botton’s religious atheism

The dream is always the same. I awaken to find I’ve been transformed, not into a hideous insect, but into something much worse: Alain de Botton, my doppelganger.

Like me, de Botton loves Proust. Like me, de Botton likes classical and medieval philosophy, and approaches philosophy as a conversation about the conduct of life. By themselves, those facts aren’t overly remarkable. But now he’s jumped the shark. He’s on tour promoting a book on basically the exact same subject as my dissertation. His new book, Religion for Atheists, asks what a secular society can “import” from religious traditions. For four years now, I’ve been looking at Henry James, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, investigating their projects for rebuilding society. Every one of these artists wanted to rebuild society by applying religious ideas and practices in creative new ways. If there was world enough and time, I would have studied even more figures, from the poet Hilda Doolittle to James’s own brother William.

In other words, the secular appropriation of religion has been underway since the 19th Century. At many points during the 20th Century, it was almost unchallenged as the artistic raison d’etre. During certain periods, “reinventing religion” is what almost every artist and intellectual was trying to do. Still, for the most part, secular religion failed. There were many reasons why, including the fact that most people were, and are, actually religious, and find this whole endeavor either amusing or offensive. The dream isn’t necessarily over, but we’re not at liberty to just shrug off those monumental attempts if we want to change anything at all.

Alain de Botton ignores the history, skipping ahead to present the world with his own eccentric mixture of commonplace advice and wild speculation. He’s getting good publicity because it makes fantastic copy. Wouldn’t it be wild if restaurants were like this? In a short newspaper column, it’s perfectly easy to stop right there. It’s an instant “think piece.” It works for every possible reader. Religious readers will appreciate de Botton’s stern reproofs to atheists who think we can do without religion. Atheists will appreciate that he says “atheist” a lot. He seems bipartisan.

Yet when you stop to consider de Botton’s actual claims and ideas, they crumble at the slightest pressure. Mostly, this is because an equivalent for what de Botton’s proposing already exists, though not always.

Secular Temples
We already have secular temples. They’re called museums, campuses, libraries, parks. I know — this is such an obvious objection that it almost feels like something must be wrong with it, but de Botton’s idea is really that empty. The fact that he’s included drawings of a “secular temple” is the sort of overreach that I’d find slightly endearing — if it wasn’t echoing the complaints of fascists who really did build new temples, enshrining their power.

Agape Restaurants
That is, restaurants where strangers “break bread” together and interact. If de Botton doesn’t think this exists, he hasn’t looked very hard. There are lots of cafeterias and restaurants that seat strangers together. I’ve been to such places in cities all over the world. Most Hare Krishna restaurants operate this way, as do many university eating facilities. There are also restaurants of all sorts, mostly quite normal, but with a slightly “hippie” mentality and thus communal seating. de Botton gets away with asking “Why don’t we eat together?” because he’s writing for middle-class professionals; after a long day of stressful interactions, the last thing they want is to be surrounded by importunate strangers. But that doesn’t mean a few people wouldn’t like a chance to do some hand-wringing about our tragically lonely eating habits. de Botton’s pitching to them.

He claims we don’t sing together. We do. It’s called “karaoke.” We get up in front of huge crowds of strangers and sing our lungs out. If that’s too technological and modern, and de Botton prefers a group of people singing without mikes, in a circle around a guitar player — that happens too. It’s rarer than karaoke, to be sure, but at some point one must ask: who are we to start imposing one condition after another on how people do their communal singing? At an earlier point in history the church organ was a technological wonder, too.

He claims we don’t go on pilgrimages — because he’s thinking of himself. Young people go on pilgrimages constantly. Youth hostels are stuffed with pilgrims. Some of them are on a religious quest. Others are just looking for culture, adventure, and romance. If older people weren’t pinned down by work and family, they would probably turn pilgrim also, much more often they do right now. Still, there are older pilgrims. They eat, pray, and love.

It’s obvious that he hasn’t gone to raves, or to the Burning Man Festival, or to countless other contemporary, thriving experiments in “intentional community.” I’m not naive about the limitations of such events, which are severe, but I also wouldn’t embark on a book about the post-religious in ignorance of them. One of their greatest limitations also goes for “agape restaurants”: they self-select. You get a group of people who are unusually willing to interact with strangers under novel conditions. That is not a representative slice of any industrialized Western society, nor is it the only community to which the participants belong. They go home, and go back to knowing nobody on their street.

There are versions of this book that might, conceivably, be good. I could imagine a good “Communalism, Humility, and Consolation for Dummies” book. It would tell you how to sing karaoke, where to find cafeterias, how to go on a modern pilgrimage, and how to approach conflict in a more humble manner. It wouldn’t be for society; it would be for you. I can also imagine a good book about lessons from underrepresented religions. Let’s hear about Zoroaster. Let’s hear about Quetzalcoatl. Let’s hear from Shinto. If we need a new approach, is it really going to come from Judao-Christianity and Buddhism, the same combination that failed T. S. Eliot? By ignoring even Islam, de Botton guarantees that his book will have very little new to say.

I have no idea why de Botton thinks his book is compatible with his Twitter feed, but it’s not, and the disconnect is instructive. I unfollowed him a while back, but checking in right now, here’s one of his latest thefts from Proust: “We should keep a diary of incidents of envy — from which to deduce what to do next.” Also this: “There are people we’d have forgotten about long ago if they hadn’t started to ignore us.” Every time de Botton posts a tweet, he’s broadcasting to a world full of strangers. The chance to be magnificent comes again, and again, and again. He’s not missing it by accident when he flatters our prickliness or envy. He’s not trying to spread light or warmth. The only reason to buy his book, or take his recycled “thesis” seriously, would be in order to do the same. To do nothing.

It’s like I sang in front of strangers the other night, while they shouted along: Well I’m sorry, but I don’t pray that way.

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.

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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?

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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.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stranger: Heath Ledger’s Joker

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.

***

It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.

I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.

In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.

What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?

***

I advise you to hire a poet.
-Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).

The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.

The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.

The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.

***

In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)

That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.

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.

The Scientistic Fallacy: Peter Kramer, Judith Warner, and the Debate Over Psychiatric Medication

(x-posted to The Valve)

For scholars in the humanities, there is no way to avoid reflecting on what’s ahead for the discipline, a question that branches in two directions. First, how do scholars respond to the perception that they need increasing amounts of “hard evidence,” particularly historical evidence and cognitive research, in order to justify their claims? A strange disequilibrium has emerged: scientists who appreciate and cite cultural materials are heralded as Renaissance men, while literary scholars and philosophers who draw upon work from other disciplines are merely being faithful to the necessity of rigor, and saving themselves from laughable kinds of theoretical speculation. Second, what can we do with the expanding field of cultural studies? Its impact has been enormous: it has eroded traditional distinctions between media-specific fields (art history and literary studies, for example) as well as between modes of analysis (e.g. anthropology and “close reading”). What kind of work can cultural studies perform for the culture?

The real value of cultural studies is the revival of the broad study of rhetoric, with the aim of creating a more self-aware culture. A case in point is the current debate over medication prescribed for psychiatric disorders. For years now, one of the most recognizable voices in this debate has been that of Peter Kramer, a psychiatrist who rose to fame after publishing an anxious little volume entitled Listening to Prozac. Listening to Prozac was, essentially, a plea for caution. Kramer was impressed by what he’d seen then-newer antidepressants accomplish for suffering patients, but he was concerned that they would be over-prescribed or used to enforce conformity. Then as now, Kramer used amateur credentials as a lover of culture (he has, among other things, published a novel) to add depth and shading to his claims. Over time, Kramer has responded to the evolving conversation about psychiatric medication by taking on the new critics of antidepressants. Instead of urging us to be cautious about medications like Prozac, he now works to neutralize the perceived threat of books like Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating A Nation.

Judith Warner, writing for The New York Times, recently applauded Kramer’s deeply critical review of Barber, published on Slate. Both Warner and Kramer make extremely poor arguments, arguments whose weaknesses appear to be invisible to them because of their disciplinary confidence and ways of understanding expertise. What is remarkable about both columns is the absolute lack of rhetorical understanding: blindness to the rhetorical function of certain medical practices in the context in a given culture, and a worrisome readiness to ground claims about the culture in irrelevant scientific data. What we need is not Kramer’s misleading “hard evidence,” but rather knowledge of what cultural factors are producing the debate over psychiatric drugs, and a sense of how the discourse can be not “disproven,” but transformed.

***

To begin with Kramer’s ending:

We may—this concern was at the core of Listening to Prozac—be using medication to achieve the assertiveness and confidence that our society demands. Or, as Barber suggests, we may be numbing ourselves. But two other possibilities remain on the table. We may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have. Or we may still be failing to reach numbers of people with substantial mental illness.

Kramer has got to get over the idea that his credentials as a sensitive and concerned individual are guaranteed for perpetuity because he once wrote Listening to Prozac. His penchant for leaving questions open is misleading, since he has no patience at all with Barber and his ilk. Instead, Kramer’s guarded language is designed to camouflage the fact that he uses Listening to Prozac, a book about vigilance and the value of concern, to justify incredibly complacent statements like “we may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” For someone who takes such an active interest in the culture, he has no inkling of how much his own comments echo similar rhetorical moves by ex-radicals, and before them, ex-Communists like Sidney Hook. Warner’s solution is to list all the panicky volumes that reside on the shelf at her office, as though the mere fact of having purchased these books at Borders implies her full and serious consideration of them.

In addition, Kramer has for a long time tried to set inadequate mental health services against criticisms of therapeutic practice, as though Charles Barber’s book had the power to keep impoverished Americans with mental illness from receiving needed prescriptions. How Americans with access to health care are treated is almost entirely separate from the American health care gap. You might just as well argue that attempts to reform nursing homes hurt elderly citizens who haven’t been able to find or afford assisted living. In fact, the health care industry quite cynically advances versions of this argument all the time, for example around the issue of malpractice suits.

These logical fallacies aside, there is a problem with the way Kramer and Warner put such absolute faith in diagnoses of mental illness, at the expense of every historicist anxiety. For example, Warner writes,

We don’t know how many adults suffered from things like depression in the distant past because no one ever asked. The words and concepts through which we understand common mental health disorders today didn’t exist until the last few decades.

In other words, finally, after untold millenia of darkness, we have attained a clear and objective understanding of the human mind. Yet consider what Henry James wrote in 1902, when he published The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are [...] It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgement. It has no physiological theory of the production of these favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent [...] for aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.

James is already fully aware of schizophrenic symptoms, which he terms “hereditary degeneracy” and attributes to George Fox and Saint Francis among others. He is aware of manic states, which he calls “auto-intoxication” and attributes to Carlyle, as well as “melancholy,” various anxiety disorders, and epilepsy. The key difference between James’s pragmatism and Warner’s scientism is James’s willingness to uphold those epiphanies that exert a consistent fascination for a human being and her sympathizers, because they seem to possess “immediate luminousness,” which James parses as “philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.”

Warner has no feeling whatsoever for the tensions that exist between “ordinary spiritual judgement” and “immediate luminousness” within the discourse of psychiatry. She assumes that if we could establish a historical baseline for psychological problems like depression, we could then evaluate whether current levels of treatment are scaled appropriately. This misses the fact that even if you could explain to someone from the 17th Century that “melancholy” was actually the illness “depression,” there is no guarantee that you could convince them to accept modern causal explanations or forms of treatment. Differences of psychological and medical vocabularies do not merely divide truth from error; they express competing and potentially unresolvable value judgements. Warner makes no allowance for the contemporary paradigm that would condition such historical research, despite the fact that even while she imagines a complete history of depression, relying completely on the fixity of modern diagnostic words and concepts, Kramer is trying to stretch the definition of treatable illness to cover any person who has “suffered mental illness in the past” or has “one of three other indicators of need.”

In Kramer’s review, inattention to these implicit value judgements plays out when he describes his research on Valium. In response to complaints that Valium was substituting for other kinds of therapy, Kramer observes that women received more talk therapy than men, then announces cheerfully that “Prescribing did not replace ‘quality time’; it supplemented it.” Looking at that data, either the women were being condescended to, therapeutically speaking, or the men were getting inadequate treatment, but this does not worry Kramer. All such concerns must be sacrificed to the grand narrative of “doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” He continues:

A quarter century later, the evidence about mother’s little helpers is no clearer, but the case can be made that what was at stake had less to do with medication than with society at large. Yes, Valium had its beneficiaries and its victims. But the broad trends now look to have had their own momentum—more conflicting responsibilities for women, less time with patients for doctors, and a loss of cohesion and gravitas throughout the culture.

That’s right — women were taking Valium because all that social turmoil was giving them a pain! There was a serious loss of gravitas (a vitamin found in deep manly voices) causing distress everywhere! Nowhere does Kramer note that women faced “conflicting responsibilites” due to a combination of frozen wages, which forced many women to go to work, and patriarchal domestic life, which forced them to continue doing most of the work of the household. Nor does he talk about the women’s movement, which encouraged many women to take up careers, and the psychological toll involved in thus challenging the expectations of husbands, families, and friends. Any of these explanations would raise questions about the relationship of American psychiatry to ongoing conditions of oppression and injustice — questions, not accusations, designed to maintain our awareness of the historically contingent nature of mental illness and legitimate mental health treatment. Instead, he gives a suspect and reactionary account that detaches psychiatry from “broad trends” that “look to have had their own momentum,” and so turns psychiatry into something it must not be: a discipline that takes no responsibility for its role in American society, existing unconscious of its own ideological foundations.

***

Most troubling of all, though, is Kramer’s (and then Warner’s) trump card: the fact that other industrialized countries prescribe Valium and antidepressants as well, sometimes at a higher rate per capita. As a result, Kramer concludes that “little in the scientific literature suggested a crisis or even a uniquely American response to anxiety.” Warner ties this to her amazingly out-of-character (for a psychologist) statement about the irrelevance of our sentiments in light of Human History Since The Beginning Of Time:

Just because it feels like, just because it sounds like, just because soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad doesn’t mean that they are doing so. Nor does it mean that we’re in the grip of some new, previously unheard-of, and uniquely epoch-defining social phenomenon.

People have been unofficially drugging themselves for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so. They smoked cigarettes to boost their concentration. They drank cocktails with lunch and dinner — and more — to deal with anxiety and despair. Prior to the modern era of F.D.A.-regulated prescribing practices, they slugged down untold quantities of tonics and bromides.All of which suggests that what social critics now identify as the signature event of our time (the urge to manage psychic pain through substance use) may, in fact, almost always have been a facet of the human condition. It may just be that we’re better at it than ever before – with cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating tools at our disposal.

This is the cognitive version of James’s “medical materialism.” Since neurotransmitters and drug interactions have always been the same, there is nothing unique to a time or place about “drugging.” Imagine Kramer following this train of thought even further:

I was able to help compile research that proved that vodka was being exported out of Russia in enormous quantities; vodka is consumed in almost every country in the world, and even plays a prominent role in the “cosmopolitan” cocktail that is so central to the American experience of “Sex and the City.” Little of this evidence suggests a uniquely Russian relationship to vodka.

Based on the evidence I have compiled at Starbuck’s and countless independent coffeeshops in the West, little suggests a uniquely Japanese response to green tea; human beings have been consuming caffeine for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so.

People love wine; they love its smooth and complex flavor, and they often have it as the delicious complement to their dinner, just as their ancestors did. It seems hardly likely that Catholics attending religious ceremonies have a different experience of fermented grape juice than anybody else.

The point should be clear enough; but in addition to these examples of “drugging” in their real social contexts, there are all the cases where human beings have reacted with fear and moral concern against self-medication. Examples range from religious abstainers, including Mormons and Muslims, to atheistic teetotalers like Percy Shelley and Friedrich Nietzsche. Presumably, none of these individuals are interested in “cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating” forms of intoxication.

Warner deploys the tools of cultural studies; she calls fears about psychiatric medication “one of the defining tropes of our era,” and later refers to the “storyline” or “narrative” of “mentally vulnerable children and adults” as a fable without an upside. Kramer is similarly eager to engage with culture through its own products: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” he writes, sounding a bit like Wordsworth. But neither writer can see what we’re prescribing along with the somewhat plastic drugs themselves when we prescribe psychiatric medication in the United States. Naturally, these implicit cultural narratives affect not only patients under treatment, but everyone else as well, for whom the drugs create dividing lines between what is pathological and what is not. Kramer and Warner make their forays into cultural analysis in order to protect against it, a bad methodology that leads to wildly untenable statements about history and culture. Quoting Wordsworth begins to seem tactical, rather than earnest. Their approach will only entrench both sides, particularly when they try to use facts like prescription rates in Sweden to devalue felt responses to the current situation. If Kramer and Warner are serious about protecting the mental health of Americans who need psychiatric medication, they have to accept the challenge of discovering what it is about the ideology of treatment that is making lots of people so uncomfortable: not just drugs that help people resume their lives, but tropes and narratives they can live with.

An Open Letter to Hugo Schwyzer

Published as a comment at his site, in response to this post. (Hat tip to Scott at Acephalous for reminding me of how these issues continue to simmer.)

Hugo,

You are wrong about the parallels between feminism and Christian evangelism. You are wrong about the pertinence of your distinction between purists and popularizers. Finally, your characterization of the Gospels, crafted to support your arguments, is faulty. All popular movements, including organized expressions of hate, aim to transform the world. Although, in your mind, there may be a closer association between feminism and Christian evangelism because you support both, the differences are far more significant than the similarities.

Feminism is not based on faith. Its premises, beginning with the principle of the equality of the sexes, are reasoned conclusions. Feminism does not seek to convert individuals; it seeks to reason persuasively with them. If you try to fudge this distinction, you do a disservice to feminism and Christian faith alike.

While individual evangelical churches or communities may be comfortable with feminist ideas, the history of the American evangelical movement has been blackened right up to the present day by its willingness to harbor misogyny and homophobia. Your idealized version of Christian evangelism cannot substitute for the historical reality.

Christian evangelism is part of the American mainstream; feminism is not, particularly when you are talking about articulate and inclusive feminisms rather than vague platitudes about equality. While it is common practice for evangelicals to denounce mainstream culture as an immoral and unwholesome influence, this is a put-on, and the target is every part of the mainstream except for evangelism.

***

Articulations of the truth cannot be divided in two; the integrity and power of an idea cannot survive every kind of translation. Luce Irigaray is not a very clear writer: that is her loss and ours. If another writer can be clearer, so much the better for the movement. Also, it is to be expected that different writers will write in different styles. But when you begin to lend vagueness, simplicity, or agreeability the virtues of clarity, you are equating two very different things: stylistic difference, and differences of ideology. All of these debates within the feminist blogosphere have concerned the latter.

These distinctions are equally bad applied to aesthetics. There is nothing compromised about Charles Dickens or Madonna; similarly, there is nothing respectable about the success The Secret or Nickelback have enjoyed. Pat Boone popularized “Tutti Frutti” in the short term by ruining it; in the long run, Little Richard’s original recording is the one that has proved immortal.

The whole text of Matthew cries out against what you have written. To begin with, you have misquoted the Bible. You write:

Sylvia, Jesus also says “whoever is not against us is for us”.

As you must be aware, this reverses the emphasis of the original: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”

I do not regard the New Testament as a historical or supernatural document. I do, however, regard it as one of the most compelling articulations of an integral worldview that the West has produced, and I am dismayed that you would be so untroubled by its calls for living with integrity.

Does it say there are purists and popularizers? No, but rather “strait is the gate and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be who find it.” While I am sympathetic to the difficulties involved in “proof-texting” the Bible, this is not an ambiguous statement.

Complaints about the difficulty of radical texts are, often as not, disguised complaints about their content. Nobody has trouble assigning difficult scientific works to undergraduates pursuing a career in science; no-one expects calculus to be “accessible,” as we use the term today. Nonetheless, we expect every high school student, and not just an imaginary 3%, to be capable of understanding calculus. A lot of complaints about feminist theory are born of discomfort with feminism. The situation is similar to the inconsistent way pundits deal with the physical size of political documents. The Clinton health plan (from 1994) was ridiculed by conservatives for being 1,300 pages long; Bush’s tax plan, however, which received conservative support, was over 700 pages long.

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?

He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

In Response To Stanley Fish’s “Will The Humanities Save Us?”

(x-posted to The Valve)

Bill Benzon calls our attention to a new blog entry by Stanley Fish, posted by The New York Times here.

It is easy to imagine how, after a lifetime of dedicated scholarship, an emeritus professor like Fish might react in frustration against the platitudes in Education’s End, a new book by professor of law Anthony Kronman. Kronman has little to offer us; his vision of college as a place for the “nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together form the basis for living the best life one can” is a rhetorically tepid, repackaged version of a pedagogical philosophy shared by many earlier authors, including Matthew Arnold and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne figures prominently in Alexander Nehamas’s book The Art of Living, which is entirely devoted to the enormous history of this idea within the Western philosophical tradition alone, to say nothing of history, literary studies, or the other constituent disciplines of the humanities.

That said, the banality of Kronman’s prose is no excuse for what Fish has written. Fish ends his post thus:

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

The crux of Fish’s argument against literature as an agent of moral self-fashioning goes like this:

If [Kronman's position] were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

It my sincere belief that this argument is worthless. I hope, when I am finished, that it will be ashamed to show its face again. It is hardly original with Fish; rather, it is everywhere, since it makes scholars in the humanities feel humble and forthright, and it makes people hostile towards the humanities rejoice.

***

To begin with, there is no universal standard of behavior to which Fish can appeal in order to prove his point. Instead, one of the foundational principles of much study in the humanities is the idea of incomparability: we give up trying to decide whether one individual, or one culture, is essentially superior to another. Look at the description he chooses: “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people.” Such an account of the supposed purpose of literary studies would have sickened Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote:

The oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like, us, the patient, humble, and just.” (Genealogy of Morals, 1.14)

Nietzsche also described honesty as the virtue of those afraid of what secrets others may keep from them. Of course, nobody has to take Nietzsche at his word, but there is value in confronting him with sympathy, or with hatred. Here Kronman hits the mark. He writes about students considering “which alternatives lie closest to their own evolving sense of self,” and, presumably, which others lie furthest away. There is no reason to assume that engagement with texts produces a certain type of person, least of all a person who could equally belong to a Christian ministry.

Fish makes the ministry his standard for a justified moral vocation: “Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry.” In fact, ministers are also engaged in interpreting and teaching texts. Their proper subject is theology, and they are just as prone as other human beings to moral and ethical lapses. This fact has not yet extinguished religion, or forced it to withdraw into a sterile self-regard. Fish attacks the humanities but not other forums for moral education and reflection. He writes as though he had never read Chaucer, or, more to the point, as though he were a stranger to Milton.

Fish’s sample consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments.” That is, his sample of the human population bears absolutely no relation to the actual participation of thinking people in what we might call “the humanities.” Artists, lay readers of all kinds, and students — to name only three of the many constituencies of the arts and human sciences — are excluded here, along with any thought of the purposes the humanities serve outside of the academy. Fish also imposes judgment from the outside; while he vastly overvalues his own anecdotal observations, he leaves no space for personal accounts of a profound experience of an intellectual work. I know, from reading an earlier blog post, that Fish has been an ardent admirer of Frank Sinatra for most of his life, and that he sees Sinatra as a symbol of “single-minded dedication to craft.” Craft is, of course, the most reflexive virtue of a work of art, but it is a virtue nonetheless, and not the only one a reader, interlocutor, or listener may choose to admire. The idea of devoting oneself to a craft is precisely the sort of moral valuation that opens out onto many human enterprises, including scholarship, and endows life with resonance and meaning. Fish will have his Sinatra, but deprive us of ours.

Fish writes that the humanities are their own good, and believes in studying them for their sake. I believe in studying them for our sake. But I do not mean for the sake of the salvation of mankind, understood in some grandiose manner. There truly is a difference between the evangelist and the reader. Humanism is not, as Fish seems to think, a substitute for Sunday school. It is the emergence of a reflective capacity within human culture, and so represents the possibility of a truly self-determined culture for individuals and collectives alike. The humanities are an archive of reflective modes of encounter and expression: close reading, historical reconstruction, artistic making, anthropological study, and so on. The arts and human sciences do not make us better people, according to some a priori moral standard that Fish, despite himself, cannot help bringing to bear upon them. Instead, they make witnesses and authors of us. They make us responsible, and free.

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.