Ethics and Melodrama 2: The Last Stand
Happy Thanksgiving! I am full of foods which you might already be able to guess (except for the pomegranate seeds), and am seriously considering, partly on the basis of today and partly on the basis of the weekend, starting a blog which would be not so much about cooking food as about the experience of eating it, bad food included. I would have a wonderful literary precedent in the novel Dead Souls, which (I’ll save you the trouble) defaults to descriptions of fine eatin’ whenever Gogol runs out of plot.
However, unlike Nikolai Gogol, we here at the Kugelmass Episodes have plenty to chew on: namely, the responses to my earlier post, entitled “Ethics and Melodrama.” You may wonder, since the very question of ethics amidst modernity has clearly been raised, whether it is worthwhile to begin this post by talking about food. I apologize for having digression on my mind; you see, I’ve just finished watching the soggy movie version of Tristram Shandy, and it’s reminding me that, in addition to the talent for digression which old writers like Sterne possessed, they had a talent for the easy admission that where art is, life is elsewhere; in Sterne, as in Montaigne, we hear a constant refrain that the soberest and most admirable product of inductive reasoning, the ethical absolute, looks wonderful on the page but does little in real life.
Therefore I will try to expose the places where my reasoning is in tension. These tensions — perhaps “attempts at balance” is a more cheerful description — seem like a productive alternative to absolutes.
Miso writes that the anxiety expressed in the epigraph (from My Dinner with Andre) is something that she “happen(s) to find every cute, in that miserable existential way reminiscent of ‘cute’ misanthropes. I don’t know what context it was in though. You have to admit that these sorts of characters are ripe for poking fun at. It’s also a luxury. A damn luxury to fucking worry about whether you’re a sham.”
I disagree with this, although I share miso’s affection for thoughtful misanthropes. Art is indispensable; the questions that haunt an examined life are indispensable. First of all, you cannot find a culture anywhere that exists without the superfluities of culture; it is provably a mistake to believe that poorer people do not have pieces of music and sculpture that seem transcendent to them, or that they never stop to ask themselves questions about the relation of their life to their values.
The reason we gravitate towards this belief — in the luxury of fundamental questions — is our dim, uneasy awareness of life as it is lived by the poor, particularly in third world countries where there is practically no exception to poverty. I have seen a slideshow, courtesy of the New York Times, where I saw people in Haiti making tortillas out of inedible clay, and digging through enormous piles of garbage for food. I have read in various places about the conditions in maquiladoras and in the slave-labor factories in China (where, presumably, most of my clothing is made). I cannot get these things out of my mind.
That is why one must possess the acuity to see that by making of this wretchedness a peculiar sort of injunction to view our own misery as superficial, we are actually giving in to the work ethic, and accepting, in our heart of hearts, making their 14-hour work day our own. In fact, we do need to do this, but not by merely taking on greater labors and luxuriating in sadness from time to time. The effect is inevitably to, first, conclude that luxury is an essential part of life, and then, to feel oneself moving in imperceptible steps away from the real core of the problem (which contains both our doubts and their privation) towards a completely arbitrary “middle ground” between opposites: work and play; public and private; family, versus those others who benefit from one’s labor.
By contrast to the genial, but not serene, bourgeois lives of Montaigne and Sterne, consider Simone Weil, who I have recently been discussing with JuniperJune. Weil believed it was her duty not only to embrace sacrifice on religious grounds, but to recreate in her unjustly privileged person the conditions that others had to undergo (such as those living on meager rations in occupied France). She killed herself this way, and I mean that quite literally: she ruined her health and died early, without causing any serious damage to the capitalist and militarist superstructures that offended her so greatly, except perhaps through the small body of writings she produced and which we have inherited.
I am thinking of this, from the beginning of Middlemarch:
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
The phrases “meanness of opportunity” and “no coherent social faith and order” stand out boldly here. Weil did what she was able, but her opportunities were too often meager, and, in the absence of a common social faith, her sacrifice was not easily interpreted by those few who even heard of it. Therefore the questions we have for ourselves about the meaning of our lives, and the authenticity of our efforts, cannot be extinguished in our obligations to others; rather, we cannot fulfill those obligations without answering those questions.
I am currently reading Michael Berube’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, in which he concludes that even though professors in the humanities have less job security than ever, and are particularly sensitive to the demands of (even unreasonable) students, they have been successfully demonized by David Horowitz and others as agents of leftist indoctrination. So, there is plenty of reason to wonder, at least in the United States, what more than one’s patent duty one can do to avoid being blackballed or just buried by indifference.
Those are the most visible effects of this creeping helplessness to me, but that’s nothing like the full extent of the problem. Two important, recent political films, Clooney’s Syriana and the just-released Fast Food Nation, share the assumption that there is basically nothing one can do to reverse global trends towards exploitation and environmental disaster. (Thanks to the Punk Ass Blog for a fine exposition of Fast Food Nation.) I am not persuaded by this kind of resignation, but I was affected by the stories of single individuals (like the well-meaning executive in Fast Food Nation, or the prince and the intelligence agent in Syriana) struggling with intelligence and passion, but without ingenuity, and getting nowhere.
This is, then, the best response I can give to Matt and to the final part of Miso’s comment. Matt’s comments (see comment thread linked above) eventually seem to make the following argument: heroism and ethics are both at their most real when they emphasize the effort towards attainable goals, according to one’s talents, and through a relinquishing of the self (particularly the egoistic fantasies of the self) in favor of the needs of others. Miso might add that the dramatic presentation of those needs, through rarified ethical exercises, enables us to clarify our beliefs and attitudes.
I owe both of them thanks for making my own thinking clearer, and for expressing so much of worth. I am equally indebted to petitpoussin for her fierce reply, because (to return to where we started) I suspect we will find the answer to the claustrophobic feeling of helplessness in the tension between the self and the other, and not in an absorption in one or the other — nor in a “resolution” between the exceptional circumstances that prove the ethical, and the everyday.
It is an awareness of others, including a political awareness, that preserves us from the insufferable phenomenon of celebrity, and its games of mirrored desire (which is really the kind of “iconicity” I’m critiquing in the posts Matt mentions). But it is the awareness of self that preserves us from lying down and being snowed under like Weil, like Clooney’s renegade agent, like the well-meaning people in Fast Food Nation. It is self that keeps every blog from turning into a re-tread of the same YouTube videos and linked updates in the name of liberal politics.
In short, it is at the intersection of self and other that the problem of tactics truly arises in the consideration of ethics and politics. The motif of the unwilling hero, in Spider-Man and other films, is actually another way of avoiding the problem of sublating the distance between what has already been assimilated (everyday life) and ethics-as-entertainment (melodrama). Peter Parker is simply kidnapped out of one into the other, and then returns to the idiocy of the everyday when heroism turns out to be his inescapable job. I have been so interested recently in “I Blame The Patriarchy” (for which I beg your patience) because Twisty takes impossible, despairing positions, and her readers (in the comments’ section) quickly convert these into the ordinary obligation to fight the good fight every single day.
In vain. Such fights aren’t anywhere near the front lines, which is why one can’t return from the rarified to the ordinary with merely a clearer understanding of one’s own values. Today the ethical task, not for one person but for every person who can, is to create the moment of opportunity, and through nihilating personal doubts about ordinary dutifulness, to begin to re-weave a coherent social faith that will give our actions meaning.
This topic must be in the air – I’ve been discussing very similar issues recently with Kerim Friedman – and, in a slightly more sprawling discussion, with Sinthome.
The very final issue you raise, though, I think is very important: the issue of “weaving a coherent social faith that will give our actions meaning” – I’ve written here and there about this, just scattered thoughts, but I think this is a quite central issue – that, failing to articulate our own account of recent transformations, for example, we lost great ground to less humane narratives that have, nevertheless, rendered recent transformations meaningful, and therefore helped people organise their actions and make sense of their purpose. I’m very tired at the moment, and so probably not making a great deal of sense – just wanted to flag that I agree this is an extremely important issue.
“So, here are my Dinner With Andre action figures, and you know, you can just play with them. Like… Hello, how are you. I’m good…I mean, I know they don’t actually say that, but you can just make things up.”
“…um…you can re-enact the whole scene you know where the two guys talk to each other and say you know boy I sure am glad you found a good restaurant it’s so hard these days to get in and who do you know?…Oh I just called…made a call…spur of the moment….HA HA HA oh you can always get a reservation…”
Pingback: the oh zone » Blog Archive » Ethics and Melodrama !!
A few thoughts, Kugelmass – pardons for belated response. These are prelim, I have yet to carefully read the second half (Post middlemarch quote) of the post.
‘cute’ misanthropes.” -implies that this is an experience enjoyed by all.
“Art is indispensable; the questions that haunt an examined life are indispensable.”
-Not disputing the indispensibility or necessity of questioning and art. What I’m arguing is the necessity of pulling oneself away from one’s questioning/art to poke fun at oneself or relativize one’s view to arrive at an enriched perspective.
“poorer people do not have pieces of music and sculpture that seem transcendent to them, or that they never stop to ask themselves questions about the relation of their life to their values.”
True, true. However the worrying about bourgeois-ness like being a “sham” can only go so far. The truth, in my opinion, is found in action, reflection, action – instead of stymieing oneself with blame.
“…dim, uneasy awareness of life as it is lived by the poor, particularly in third world countries where there is practically no exception to poverty.
I cannot get these things out of my mind.”
I take this point but find this kind of presumptuous and “absolute” instead of in the middle as you are attempting – contrasting poverty with non-poverty. we’re not all white bourgie’s unaware of life’s tribulations. I’ve experience pretty severe poverty for the new world – I mean, in the context of white middle class america, and not third-world countries. I know what it is to be poor AND worry about existential questions about our life. I’m notsaying those are mutually exclusive.
“making of this wretchedness a peculiar sort of injunction to view our own misery as superficial, we are actually giving in to the work ethic”
I don’t think that our misery is superficial, but I think it is typical and banal to worry too much about being a “sham”. It’s like, just don’t be a sham! Move on! You don’t have to appropriate poverty as an “injunction” but please let’s luxuriate in community and commonalities with each other. Instead of the differences, gaps that make us guilty. There will always be guilt among the privileged – I think this is necessary, but wasteful to indulge at length without question. One must always occupy a cultural knowledge of this meta guilt, if you will.
Miso, I understand and accept that you may have experienced pretty severe privation. For my part, in thinking about the difference in wealth between myself and the average citizen of Haiti, it seemed like a distinction was more realistic and respectful than asserting that I’ve been through anything remotely similar. At the same time, the point of talking about commonalities of culture was to show that there’s not some ontological difference between myself and people who have less money.
I am all in favor of self-satire and a certain ability to continue living and acting while continuing to ask oneself difficult philosophical questions. I should probably be clearer about what I take to be André’s meaning — one can be a sham without intending to be. The question is not, “Am I intentionally manipulating people or representing myself falsely?” The question is, “Have I found myself in a life that doesn’t match my ideals, because of the way privilege and culture are constituted where I live? Am I being trapped into hypocrisy?”
When you write “don’t be a sham,” I agree, but that can mean huge life changes (quitting a job, turning one’s back on one’s audience, etc.) that may take years to resolve upon.
A few thoughts, Kugelmass – pardons for belated response. These are prelim, I have yet to carefully read the second half (Post middlemarch quote) of the post.
‘cute’ misanthropes.” -implies that this is an experience enjoyed by all.
“Art is indispensable; the questions that haunt an examined life are indispensable.”
-Not disputing the indispensibility or necessity of questioning and art. What I’m arguing is the necessity of pulling oneself away from one’s questioning/art to poke fun at oneself or relativize one’s view to arrive at an enriched perspective.
“poorer people do not have pieces of music and sculpture that seem transcendent to them, or that they never stop to ask themselves questions about the relation of their life to their values.”
True, true. However the worrying about bourgeois-ness like being a “sham” can only go so far. The truth, in my opinion, is found in action, reflection, action – instead of stymieing oneself with blame.
“…dim, uneasy awareness of life as it is lived by the poor, particularly in third world countries where there is practically no exception to poverty.
I cannot get these things out of my mind.”
I take this point but find this kind of presumptuous and “absolute” instead of in the middle as you are attempting – contrasting poverty with non-poverty. we’re not all white bourgie’s unaware of life’s tribulations. I’ve experience pretty severe poverty for the new world – I mean, in the context of white middle class america, and not third-world countries. I know what it is to be poor AND worry about existential questions about our life. I’m notsaying those are mutually exclusive.
“making of this wretchedness a peculiar sort of injunction to view our own misery as superficial, we are actually giving in to the work ethic”
I don’t think that existential misery is superficial, but I think it is banal to worry too much about being a “sham” without being aware of it. You don’t have to appropriate poverty as an “injunction” but let’s take the opportunity of recognizing sham-ness to luxuriate in community and commonalities with each other. Maybe that’s the tension you speak of? The gaps that make us guilty can be considered a bridge. After all, there will always be guilt among the privileged – nothing new -which is necessary, but wasteful to indulge at length without question or reflection. I guess, employ a macro understanding of a guilt, meta.
Dear readers, check out the “director’s cut” of miso’s comment above! I defy literary critics around the world to compare the two versions and to produce scholarly articles explaining the hermaneutic waves these differences produces.
Miso, even after reading both versions of your comment, it seems that you and K agree on the importance of the action/reflection duo in taking these sorts of considerations beyond white/liberal guilt.
K says in the post: Today the ethical task, not for one person but for every person who can, is to create the moment of opportunity, and through nihilating personal doubts about ordinary dutifulness, to begin to re-weave a coherent social faith that will give our actions meaning.
You say: However the worrying about bourgeois-ness like being a “sham” can only go so far. The truth, in my opinion, is found in action, reflection, action – instead of stymieing oneself with blame.
I guess I’m asking, where do you part ways? Over the question of satire?
Jos, the two versions meaning the first comment on the second? are you saying I wasn’t effective in elaborating my point? perhaps? methinks? hermeneutic waves, eh? yum. I have no idea what you are talking about.
Speaking of, I’m listening to magnetic fields right now.
Also, petit – yes perhaps we are in the same. However K’s contrast of poor vs guilt is nil regarding my comment, which I think is the only point of difference at second glance. However – satire? whaddya mean?
Also, since I’m reading Miller – he seeks essence via action – perhaps this is the tension you speak of Kuge? Circumventing white guilt through ethical tasks – however “coherent social faith” smacks of “ordinary dutifulness”. I say just shut up (to white guilt) and do.
Like your Nike’s. (couldn’t resist)
By hermaneutic waves, I mean the challenges to interpretive method posed by your comments. As far as I can tell, you posted two comments that were mostly similar, aside from the wording in the final paragraph. Which is totally cool — we here at TKE love comments — but mildly bewildering. Also you should definitely make it past the George Eliot quote; Roger Ebert has called the latter half of the post a “searing, cinematic apocalypse.”
I’m not into paralyzing liberal guilt either! I just had a turkey sandwich without feeling any guilt at all! With mayo!
I tend to agree with petitpoussin that, given the clarifications you make in your comments, we just don’t disagree that much. The tension, though, isn’t between essence and action here. That would be closer to the tensions in my posts on Hegel and fashion. Here the tension is between a sort of martyrdom or unconsidered goodness, and an opposed egoistic excess. Hopefully, in the middle, there is room for trying to work in the common interest without being swallowed up by it.
For those of you confused by miso’s comments about Nikes and the Magnetic Fields, see her blog (I’ve linked to it on the right)…
Oh, I get this hermeneutic wave – you’re making fun of me…ahh. i see. however i thought i ought to add in a director’s cut seeing as I was so flippant before, what with calling those misanthropes “cute” and so forth. i thought the director’s cut was needed.
so there.
god forbid i invite you to any slumber parties for fear of director’s cuts. anyway.
(i still think it is retarded to worry about being a sham, albeit its necessity.)
i thought this was something i hadn’t said before: “we’re not all white bourgie’s unaware of life’s tribulations. I’ve experience pretty severe poverty for the new world – I mean, in the context of white middle class america, and not third-world countries. I know what it is to be poor AND worry about existential questions about our life. I’m notsaying those are mutually exclusive. ”
what do turkey sandwiches and mayo haave anything to do with paralyzing liberal guilt? are you craze? turkey sandwiches are so gay! slash it would have been better if you were eating a hamburger. waitaminute – sushi eater!
you do seem to be hoping for a happy medium whereas i veer on the side of the work ethic, like I frown upon solipstistic meanderings engendered from bourgeois upbringings. ya know? ironic i’m reading Miller – however he was was part the prols….
i gotta leave and help someone ruin their life – so I will read that other bit later – sorry, i have only responded to comments at this round – i will get to primary sources i swear. not that it’s that important….but yeah….anyway…
that middlemarch stuff got me. got me.
I disagree with this: “heroism and ethics are both at their most real when they emphasize the effort towards attainable goals, according to one’s talents, and through a relinquishing of the self (particularly the egoistic fantasies of the self) in favor of the needs of others. ”
When you say “egoistic fantasy” do you mean existential questioning? Heroism doesn’t have to equal the relinquishing of the self or egoistic fantasies. They can be one and the same – i mean giving and taking. or whatever. I just think that passage of “Andre” (which i must read the whole book of) represents a cliche bourgie concern that smacked of “luxuriating” as you put it.
anyway i think i can put away my forks and knives and be satisfied that you and I are vaguely ethical in our efforts to check our egoistic fantasies in the name of a truer authenticity (which i think is not found in being concerned with being a sham).
I was on the train yesterday and strangely – my train of being, which is normally irritated, self-assured, buried in a book, impatient, was interrupted with this idea of sham-ness.
I was surrounded by the uber hipsters of the L train that bridges Williamsburg, Brooklyn (the hipster mecca of the world) and Manhattan. I hadn’t ridden the L train with much frequency lately and was surrounded by more than the usual bevies of asian girls and white men wearing the silly relics of 2003-2004 (headbands, diesel jeans, embroidered bags and ruched boots) – I suddenly felt self-conscious and compelled to analyze and take in the changed situation. Three years ago there was nary an asian girl to be found. The concentration of hipsters had reached a critical mass.
Would they take my usually flagrant doing-homework-on-the-train-with-absorbed-half-angry-look-on-face as unnapproachability, would they take it seriously? I desperately wanted to check people out, as I never do because I am usually bored to death by the kids ’round here, but dare I, since it is an unspoken rule that we must all look half dead and overcome by living in basement/loft pallor?
I tried to sneak looks at this particularly long-lashed asian girl with fat lips, thinking of all sorts of things like my ex boyfriend and his possible fancying of this asian girl as he says “i just like the way asians look” and the horrible ramifications of this -projecting insecurities, petty fascinations, twisted bitterness against both the youth and the fading professionals whose dreams got muddled with film production and graphic design ventures – whilst maintaining a damned facade. How to indulge in the observational acuity evidenced by Miller but at the same time absorbing oneself into oneself and one’s subway literature as one is accustomed to ?
and i thought to myself, am I a sham?
Miso, I agree with your disagreement. The line you’re quoting is actually a paraphrase of Matt, to which I then respond.
It’s funny all the times when we feel like imposters because of the risk of being seen as such. Hipsters really aren’t the best people for giving you an accurate sense of your own worth. Their judgements are all they have. That puts a lot of pressure on those judgements and distorts them.
Meanwhile, in Irvine, I watched Casino Royale again and thought, am I sham for only blogging about graduate school? There’s a whole other part of my life where I’m a secret agent working for SD-6.
(A great example of the hipster judgement phenomenon, and the backlash against it, and so on and so forth, is the “Pitchfork effect” and the spate of articles and angry blog posts on the subject.)
Pingback: the oh zone » Blog Archive » Kugelmass’s Ethics post part III and I have a life part II
Sorry for the sort of slow response, but I think the thing what was holding me up was that I had a hard time recognizing my original comment in your response. The way you paraphrase me:
“heroism and ethics are both at their most real when they emphasize the effort towards attainable goals, according to one’s talents, and through a relinquishing of the self (particularly the egoistic fantasies of the self) in favor of the needs of others”
…makes my comment seem much more like a comment about ethical action than about reasoning, and I think occassions some of Miso’s responses, as I’ll try to explain.
Part of the confusion seems to be that there are two different kinds of sitting around and worrying if you’re a sham going on here, which seems to explain why you and Miso initially disagree but are reconciled by Miso’s reaction to the Middlemarch quote. The word “sham” seems to me to refer to two different kinds of inauthenticity:
1) In Miso’s calls for resolving ethical problems in the direction of action (“action-reflection-action”) rather than dwelling in guilt, I take authenticity to mean something like sincerity (Miso’s word), the emergence of ethical actions from ethical beliefs. From this perspective, authenticity justifiably looks like a fairly dismissible category—worrying about it is a “luxury”—because ethical actions taken for the sake of heroism are still ethical actions. Either it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between sincere and insincere ethical actions based on whether their motivation is the suffering of the other or the desire to reconstitute the self, or that distinction is irrelevant because the consequence for the other is identical regardless of the motive.
2) In Joe’s response, the question of authenticity changes. Joe states that we cannot fulfill “our obligations to others” without answering “the questions we have for ourselves about the meaning of our lives, and the authenticity of our efforts.” The danger, if we ignore questions of authenticity, is that we cannot fulfill our obligations without a “coherent social faith” that tells us what those obligations are. Questions about authenticity/inauthenticity are questions about the coherence of one’s social faith, as well as questions about the adequacies of one’s actions to one’s social faith—as Joe puts it, “Have I found myself in a life that doesn’t match my ideals, because of the way privilege and culture are constituted where I live? Am I being trapped into hypocrisy?” These questions are necessary, even if they are ultimately to be resolved in the direction of action.
This seems to be the basis of the Middlemarch quote and Miso’s subsequent reconciliation with Joe in her latest response. Both Miso and Joe appear to agree (as do I) that it’s important to think about what is ethical, both in terms of the abstraction of “social faith” and the concrete, daily ethical decision. Miso adds that it is not important to waster time worrying about one’s motives for acting ethically. This becomes, subsequently, a critique of the position that Joe has put me on—in subsequent comments, both Miso and Joe agree that “Heroism doesn’t have to equal the relinquishing of the self or egoistic fantasies.”
This is certainly true as an evaluation of ethical actions. In practice, again, the distinction between sincere and insincere ethical actions is irrelevant because the consequence for the other is identical regardless of the motive. Furthermore, the existence of “egoistic fantasies” as partial motives are not incompatible with genuinely heroic actions.
However, once it is accepted that ethical action is contingent on the development of a coherent social faith, the question of how one grounds ethics (i.e. whether we root the transformation of everyday life in modernity’s displacement of the self or modernity’s displacement of the other) becomes essential, since it is a necessary question for the construction of a coherent social faith. It doesn’t help us to evaluate ethical actions (saving a thousand people) after the fact, but it ought to play a part in figuring out what is ethical.
Joe’s response suspicion that “we will find the answer to the claustrophobic feeling of helplessness in the tension between the self and the other, and not in an absorption in one or the other” is justified insofar as his insistence on the construction of a coherent social faith instills a central place for the self and self-construction in the process of ethical reasoning. Joe, you’ve made a convincing case that self-construction is a burden of ethical reasoning, but the vague language of “I suspect” and “tension between the self and other” seems to slide an additional claim under the rug—that self-construction is a legitimate objective of ethical reasoning—a claim that you haven’t justified. In particular, I’m concerned about the fact that the principle objective is to “find the answer to the claustrophobic feeling of helplessness.” I’m concerned that when our own feeling of claustrophobia becomes the basis of our social faith, we are in danger of precisely the kind of inauthenticity that you reject, i.e. a life that is not in line with our ideals, because it will lead us to privilege the wrong kind of ethical opportunities. Making the other’s 14-hour work our own of course is not by definition an ethical act if it merely amounts to viewing our own misery as superficial and does nothing to alleviate the 14-hour workday of the other, as you eloquently argue. But even in those situations when it does help to alleviate the burden of the other, it may do little to eliminate our claustrophobic feeling of helplessness because the fruits of our labors, when they exist, may be abstract and unavailable to our experience. Such situations force a choice between our own suffering, the product of our alienation from our own labors, and the suffering of the other. Doesn’t a coherent worldview require a response to this choice? Rather than mourning the lack of opportunities to abolishes the self in the moment of the ethical act (spiderman’s self-sacrifice to save 1000) aren’t we forced to “return to the idiocy of the everyday when heroism turns out to be [our] inescapable job.”
Pingback: the oh zone » Blog Archive » Kugelmass Ethics Post III, being a sham, and I don’t have a life anymore
A couple of things, quickly, in response to Matt’s excellent comment. Matt, if you find your way to this, do feel free to note additional, explanatory questions or concerns. I want to be sure to have responded in full.
I’m not sure that I understand, right now, the distinction you’re making between the “ethical burden” of self-construction, and self-construction as an “ethical objective.”
A note to other readers: Matt is aware that I am currently working on a large project on “self-fashioning” in the Renaissance and Modernist periods. Some of his comments reflect an awareness of this source for my thinking.
In any case, I completely agree with you that a confusion of the ethical with any sort of apparition of feeling (including the claustrophobic feeling of helplessness) threatens to turn ethics into nothing more than an avenue for narcissism. We can all think of writers who have not stopped finding their own writing awful, despite great success with the public — if they thought success would cure them, and prove the validity of their vision, they were disappointed. Furthermore, the strength of their writing may reside in the tonic effect of those same “unjustified” doubts. This is analogous to the sense of the unfinished ethical task, and your claim that “even in those situations when it does help to alleviate the burden of the other, it may do little to eliminate our claustrophobic feeling of helplessness because the fruits of our labors, when they exist, may be abstract and unavailable to our experience.”
That said, I would like to respond to the questions you raise at the end.
First of all, at the risk of repeating myself, there is a deliberate effort in works of art like Spider-Man to make the vicarious participation in exceptionality palatable by eventually making it identical with drudgery. In other words, the fact that it’s so hard to be Spider-Man, or James Bond, or etc., consoles us for the fact that we’re not them, even though the whole reason for seeing the film is to escape into that desire.
In the real world, I’m not sure that the most valuable acts of service are as alienating as all that — I’ve personally worked several jobs where making photocopies was exciting because of the larger task at hand. I certainly wouldn’t say that teaching is drudgery, and my impression is that friends working at nonprofits are much better able to handle the downsides (low pay, clerical obligations) than any of us trying to deal with “temping.”
Why is self-fashioning an ethical objective? Let me answer in a couple of different ways.
1. The liberal subject (self-fashioning as education)
Blogs probably enable us to revisit the old ideal of liberal education in a remarkable way. Political blogs, academic blogs, and all the various other kinds of blogs that do intellectual work still tend to be maintained by an individual, or group of individuals, who are expected to be knowledgeable on a variety of subjects, ranging from electoral politics, to popular culture, to personal questions of family and community. Any consideration of what makes a particular blogger credible is eventually going to move inductively from their set of specific positions to the “self” that gives rise to these positions. Of course, blogging selves are fictional, and I’m talking about more than blogging here — but it’s a good model for the ethically valuable state of “readiness” or “educatedness” that ends up implicating the self.
2. Dirty hippies, or fashion as barrier to discourse
What are we going to do about the Marxists and the vegans? I’m fairly convinced that people who can commit to veganism are doing a great deal of good, and I’m also a strong supporter of leftist politics. However, at every institution I’ve associated with, the far lefties and the vegans have been a very distinct social group, more or less in exile (though they don’t always mind). Interestingly, this seems to have as much to do with personal style (say, hemp clothing or dreadlocks) as with ideological difference. I interpret this as something worth overcoming, though I’m not yet sure how (certainly not through some kind of assimilation) — in the meantime, it is reducing the cultural capital of these valuable political philosophies.
3. Exemplarity
Let us divide charitable action into two categories, both of which are necessary and can be satisfying: contributory, and exemplary. A contributory action is something like helping build a house with Habitat for Humanity, donating money, or walking a precinct. All of these things are done the same way, regardless of the person involved.
The other kind of ethical action is exemplary. For example, the life of Mary Wollstonecraft or Anton Chekhov might be worth trying to equal, especially with the caveat that a person can be inspired by them to do something that doesn’t involve any writing at all. This is terribly at risk of sliding into banality, but the fact is that most of us take the lives and success of others as models for our own projects, and this involves the other not as a mere producer of “good works,” but as the consistent source of those works.
There are sites (particularly blogs and news sites) that transmit a great deal of information, all of which is urgent, without ever making it clear how the individual is supposed to act on this information. There are also sites that do explain what to do, but force the reader into a position of intellectual passivity: I was told to write to Congress, so I did. Exemplarity happens when we observe someone taking effective action, and read or discuss with them their reasoning, and thus acquire a greater degree of independent agency ourselves. This seems to me to be the most promising avenue for political change, and by creating activities with more potential for personal agency (such as thousands of very small fundraising dinners), sites like MoveOn.org are already taking advantage of it.
Thanks Joe, this is much more satisfying to me, mainly because I think it achieves the shift in focus I was aiming for: namely, while you maintain an investment in heroism and self-fashioning, these investments move from being ends in themselves (something that can be mourned as such) to be provisional necessities subordinated to genuine altruism. Correct me if you don’t see it that way, but in arguing that:
1) In the real world, valuable acts of service are not necessarily alienating [which I generally agree with, especially re: teaching, though the process of, as I put it in an earlier response, becoming worthy of educating certainly has its alienating moments, especially when I think about the number of books I need to read in the next year; as long as the ethical commitment withstands those opportunities that are in fact alienating, I agree]
and
2) Self-fashioning is an ethical obligation because of its contribution to ethical behavior (that of the self or, indirectly, that of those we influence through cultural capital or examplarity)
…you are reconciling our positions by operating within my demand that the other be the first term in ethics, indeed even, in a sense, the first term in self-fashioning.
What is particularly appealing to me about this formulation is that I suspect (and I’ll have to think through this more carefully) that the way you talk about self-fashioning starts to sound like something which really requires no concept of the self. I’m going to leave you hanging on an explanation there, because I have final exams to grade, but I promise I’ll add a follow-up shortly. I’m also excited to read your comments on de Man, and you can pretty much guarantee I’ll have something to say on that subject…
Dear Matt,
I think a truly rigorous reading of the texts in question will show that I never thought of ethics purely as a means to narcissistic satisfaction, but I too am glad to see us moving towards agreement here.
I’m not sure whether I’m misreading “altruism” here, but I would point out that pure altruism gets immediately ensnared in a logical contradiction, because it means treating other people as though they actually had more being than oneself. In my response to Bérubé, I wrote about “the realization that I am one among many, but no less than that,” and I would still hold fast to that formation. Through an initial movement outwards, into altruism, one eventually re-discovers oneself as the other of others.
Another way of putting this is that I’ve always believed that people must define a minimum standard of living; depending on how scarce resources are, some inequality may be necessary to the continuance for anyone of the possibility of well-being. This is absolutely not the same as a defense of the current state of things.
It has not been essential, up to this point, to raise the question of authenticity, because service is performative and therefore it doesn’t matter, in the course of performing one’s duties and devoting one’s time, whether or not one is “sincere.”
Still, the world we live in is not merely one of physical needs, and any ethicist who treats it as such must be very shallow indeed (I’m not identifying this with your position). It is a world of inclinations, passions, desires, and one where people need communities around them and the right of self-determination. Once again, in orienting ourselves outward, towards the thinking and feeling being of the other, we eventually discover ourselves again — and wherever there is disjunction with social norms, there is a problem of recognizing and preserving authenticity. Lastly, without authenticity, exemplarity becomes either imitation, or the doomed (and all too frequent) attempt to suss out the “greatest need of the historical moment.”
Whether any of this returns us to an old-fashioned notion of self, or prevents us from reaching the kind of non-self towards which you are gesturing, I can’t be sure without hearing more. What do you think?
Still deferring the promised comment about the non-self, some quick hits in the interest of sewing things up:
re: altruism, I’m assuming the rather simplistic definition I got in an evolutionary biology class as a undergrad–an altruistic action is one in which the benefit to others is positive and the benefit to the self (even in the long term) is neutral or negative (in the context of an evolutionary biology debate on whether truly altruism is possible in nature, which seems mostly irrelevant to this post). Altruism in this sense wouldn’t necessarily require valuing the other MORE than the self, since it would still include actions that benefitted the other more than it cost the self, which would be recommendable even if the self and the other were held as equal values. Of course, I’m not necessarily proposing that we adopt this sort of utilitarian calculus as the basis of ethics. My point is simply to clarify that, even though I use the word altruism, I think I identify with your “one among many, but no less than that” formulation.
re: truly rigorous readings, I must apologize and confess that I probably didn’t attempt anything of the sort; however, I will note that our increasing reconciliation hasn’t overcome my hesitance about what you initially call your “frustration with the lack of the heroic possibility,” since even inside of the terms of your defense of self-fashioning, I still can’t see the void left by the lack of heroic possibility, except in terms of self-fashioning as an end in itself. Though perhaps I can see a glimpse of it in the idea of exemplarity. Maybe you could elaborate this a bit if you get a chance.
Of course I was kidding about the rigorous reading.
It seems to me that, tentatively and courteously, you’re offering a critique of a sort of ethical stance that might be a screen for self-aggrandizement. You distinguish between the heroic and the ethical largely on the basis of this concern that the desire for the “heroic” is really the desire to make headlines.
Without wishing to elide any real conflict, let me suggest that perhaps there is a slippage here between my definition of the heroic, which has to do with radical change, and heroism as something achieved through public recognition. It is quite possible to have massive public recognition without being a hero in the radical sense; I am thinking not only of people like Donald Trump or Bill Gates, who receive a good share of admiration, but even of people like Mother Teresa. I admire Mother Teresa’s self-discipline, but I do not consider her a “hero” because her project of extreme charity did not change the structure of society. In other words, working with the poor of many countries is still different from fighting colonialism, as Gandhi did, or fighting racism and militarism like MLK.
It is certainly a good thing to help a neighbor out, or to recycle the newspaper. The everyday is a continual test of our generosity. But it is a fact that the work of ethics — the lifelong project of philosophers, academics, and social activists — does transcend the “quiet” realm of daily kindnesses. Of course, hypothetically, it is better to die unremembered and to have done great good than to be well-known and etc. But that is a hypothetical, and furthermore the kind of hypothetical that I think does more to confuse people than to help them.
The truth is that the most important ethical figures will be just that — figures — because ethical decisions are lived (i.e. because of exemplarity), and because change takes place largely thanks to inquiries directed at someone who appears knowledgeable. Even if the ethicist is merely an author, such as Derrida or Proust, the benefit of collating their works, interviews, etc. under a single name is immense. Alain Badiou (merely because he’s one of the most recent people to write a book entitled Ethics), Gandhi, and the rest will continue to garner name recognition. Where they succeed to an unexpected degree, they will continue to potentially be labeled heroes.