Month: March 2006

Russell Jacoby is in fine form.

If you missed the 1995 CUNY “Question of Identity” conference, the issue of October magazine devoted to it, the “remarkable” essay on the same subject in Diacritics or – even worse – you are unaware you have missed these, don’t despair. Help is on the way. Eric Lott, who teaches English and American studies at the University of Virginia, will bring you up to speed. His book The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual is to stay-at-home tenured radicals what the television remote is to couch potatoes. Without parking hassles or library bottlenecks, you get the latest on unforgettable conferences and pathbreaking journal articles. Did you know, for instance, that Gene Wise’s “famous” essay “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies” was “intriguingly revised” in Pease and Wiegman’s anthology The Future of American Studies? No?

No, I don’t think I did, but I’m terrifically interested to know, because I have that book! (Someone sent it to me – as a joke, I think.) I made ruthless fun of it here a long time ago. I can even find the fun again, thanks to dear Google. Quite astonishing, to be able to type ‘Wiegman notes comment’ into the box and find links to posts of mine from two and a half years ago. How the two passages quoted in the first comment bring it all back – that combination of mirth and suffocation.

Like most founding gestures, this one gave monumental status to an origin retrospectively invoked, thereby giving the past authority over the present in a management strategy that seemed aimed to contextualize, if not override, the present threat of rupture and incoherence. In so doing, Wise sought to repair the conceptual ground of a field whose fissuring into multiple programs and subfields at once reflected and gave expression to the aspirations of social movements that had exceeded the ‘founding’ field’s epistemological grasp.

That’s just part of one passage – do read the rest if you want to laugh and smother at the same time. Anyway, it amuses me a good deal that Jacoby mentions that appalling book right at the beginning, and it also tells me where we are and what’s up. (I love the bit about the ‘famous’ essay. That is so typical. Famous? Famous where? Well, in the same places that Judith Butler is a ‘household name,’ of course.)

In an era of pallid Democrats and furtive leftists, Lott comes out shouting his revolutionary loyalties. He marches with real working people. So far, so good. Unfortunately, he marches only from the podium to the speaker’s table. Sometimes he gets to the library or logs on to hiptheory.com to check out what Etienne Balibar, a French post-Marxist, has written. His radical commitments amount to promoting leftist colleagues in American studies departments and a few European Marxists.

Dude, those are as radical as commitments can get, don’t you know that? Course you do.

Throughout this tract Lott charges boomer liberals with reformist politics and theoretical simplicity. Even if one grants these points, what does he offer to replace them? He claims the high political ground, but he cannot formulate a single coherent sentence about politics as seen from there. He tosses off phrases about “intersectionality” and “the praxis potential of antinormativity,” but politics hardly enters this political book.

Yeah but dude the praxis potential of antinormativity is as politics as – oh never mind.

Consider Lott’s criticism of Mark Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon, a collection and analysis of Bush’s malapropisms. Miller’s critique of Bush is apparently limited by his “own boomer investments” and his simple-minded theory of propaganda. “You don’t have to be a media specialist,” sniffs Professor Lott, “to recognize how crusty this apparatus seems in an age of post-Althusserian, post-poststructuralist, and post-Lacanian cultural studies.” Imagine that! Miller does not refer to post-poststructuralism or post-Lacanian cultural studies! Where has he been?

Well exactly! Not browsing hiptheory.com, that’s obvious. Dang fool – dang crusty fool. Dang crusty unhip out of touch clueless old uncool unfashionable (did I mention unhip?) fool geezer old bastard. Fashion! Fashion is everything! If you don’t keep up with the fashions, you’re selling out the workers!

A hundred pages later, however, Lott rolls up his sleeves and tells us about these widely debated theorists and their purchase on reality. First place belongs to Laclau, an Argentine post-Marxist theorist who teaches in England. While Gitlin and other old fogies yearn for a universal left, Laclau provides the essential key as to how to push ahead. Oh, no! In a bad piece of luck, just as Lott turns to Laclau, the bell rings and he is forced to close with a few hasty remarks. “I haven’t the space to lay out the intricate conceptual elegance of Laclau’s discussion,” apologizes Lott…

Good one! Doncha just love it when they do that? It just cracks me up (along with slightly suffocating me). Andrew Ross does that in Strange Weather – makes wild speculative claims and then bashfully says it’s ‘beyond the scope’ of the book to go into detail. I give him a hard time for it in Why Truth Matters – I wish I’d thought of ‘the bell rings’ though; that’s hilarious.

Lott briefly summarizes Laclau’s discussion for us:

Its most important move is to argue that the only acceptable political notion of the universal – and therefore of the organizational imperative – is that of the empty signifier, not a present, given, or essential fullness waiting for troops but an impossible ideal whose very emptiness and lack create a pluralized, difference-based competition on the part of various particularisms in a democratic social-symbolic field to assume the position of the universal organization.

Well you can see why he’s so pleased with himself. Besides, he went on this march once, to support the service workers…

After 200 pages of hyping antinormative intersectionality and dismissing boomer liberals for their reform politics, Lott steps out of his classroom to support service workers who seek several bucks more an hour–living wages, plain and simple. Good for him, but nothing here about subversive egalitarianism. Not a word about postidentity politics….Lott and his allies, 150 strong, brush past the mounted police. “Juiced,” they rush the maw of state power: the Lawn. “We were not stopped…We were a movement now, and we couldn’t lose.” Their march lasts all of five minutes – but Lott has lost interest, and tells us nothing more. Presumably another conference beckons.

Crusty, dude.

I’ve been thinking about preferences, and what matters to us, and what we put first – how we rank what matters to us; and about freedom. I’ve been thinking about the fact that freedom of certain kinds seems to matter to me very profoundly indeed, and about why that is, and what flows from it.

I won’t bore you with the why that is part (and I have only guesses anyway), but I will talk about one thing that I think flows from it. It offers one reason I dislike religion so much. Why I’m not just indifferent or uninterested but actively hostile, especially when religion comes out of its churches and mosques and isolated farmhouses to engage in public discussion. It’s because religion is not a free way to think, and since that’s one of those kinds of freedom that matter to me (and, I think it’s fair to assume, to a lot of people) more than most things, religion makes me bristle mentally like a cat seeing a dog. I dislike religion because it’s not a free way to think.

Granted, for determined people it can be made to be that way, but typically and averagely, it isn’t. Religion has a body of doctrine, a dogma, which is given, and which is not empirical or rationally arrived at – it is a mental prison house. I mean that somewhat literally as well as figuratively – in the sense that it feels prison-like. It feels imprisoning and also desperately stale; and the two feelings are related. Ideas that seem fresh (alive, adaptable, open) don’t feel prison-like; ideas that feel confining and rigid don’t feel fresh or open.

And dogmatically religious people give that impression themselves – that they are inmates, and that their thoughts are unpleasantly stereotyped and unfree. ‘God says.’ ‘What Allah wants.’ ‘Peace be upon him.’ ‘It is a sin’ – it’s all so many walls, bars of a cage, locks; barriers to thought. Unthought, the opposite of thought, the prevention of thought – like that brilliant phrase at the end of ‘The Dunciad’: ‘light dies at thy uncreating word.’

This is also, obviously enough, why I hate all those conscriptive words like community and respect: because they are intended to balk and prevent free thinking. They are intended to compel us to want various groupthink virtues more than we want the ability to let our minds dart around unimpeded, and I think we ought not to want that and ought not to be manipulated into wanting that.