<< Happy Stanley | Front Page | Dialectic - Enrich Your Word Power Edition >>
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Contra Contra
I’m wary of putting it like this, because it seems so pompous, but the fact of the matter is that I have been committed to the dialectic for a long time. There you are. Pompous but true. ‘Profoundly committed to the dialectic.’ That’s me.
In part this was a concept I took in with my adolescent socialism, part of the whole Marxism thang. But as I grew I found in other theorists and philosophers a re-establishment of the importance of the concept: Bakthin’s dialogism, the Socratic dialogue as a better way of ‘doing’ philosophy than assertion; Nietzsche’s love for aphorism as a briefly provocative statement that encouraged you to respond antithetically and thereby set in motion the process of working shit out for yourself. As a teacher, in stuff I publish, in discussions such as happen in fora like the V-lv-, I do not look for people to agree with me; I try to sound out the antithesis so that my own position gets properly tested, so that something better gets synthesised. I look at some of my fellow professors, who are committed to the authority model, whereby they pronounce vatically and students or colleagues take notes in respectful silence, and I pity them.
But here’s the thing. It may be symptomatic of nothing more than my advancing age, but I find myself beginning to doubt the dialectic. Three things:
1. The dialectic is discourteous, and arguably inherently so. There are perhaps times when courtesy is obfuscatory, I suppose; but it seems to me increasingly the case that ‘courtesy’ is actually the rubric of a proper mutually respectful intersubjectivity, the code of the Levinasian ethical exchange. Without it I’m not sure what stops antithesis becoming mere violence.
2. The contrarian position is egotistical, or at least it is liable to create in the contrarian himself a tendency to puff up his own belief in his ego-assertiveness. I’m thinking of, I don’t know, Christopher Hitchens. No matter how grand or brilliant your opponent, no matter how sophisticated or compelling the argument with which your faced, contrarianism licences you to say ‘No!’ in thunder, as if you’re on a level with the grandness or brilliance, as if your ‘No!’ expressed sophistication or compulsion. (It might do those things, of course, but it certainly need not).
3. The dialectic calcifies discourse. In the British House of Commons the government MPs make speeches and the Opposition MPs automatically contradict them. It really doesn’t matter what the Government say: they could be announcing the founding of Trust Hospitals, or reform to the Pension laws, or free apples for all, or a universal panacea, the Opposition are going to oppose it. In one sense that’s as it should be; it’s an opposition’s job to oppose things, to keep the government of their toes; and the alternative, I suppose, is a Totalitarian regime in which Comrade NeoStalin makes a five hour speech and then Comrade Leader-of-the-Opposition stands to applaud the solid patriotic wisdom of Comrade NeoStalin’s words. But the problem with the actual process of automatic-opposition is precisely that it loses antithetical and dialectic bite; we hear the Leader of the Opposition oppose but her/his words don’t sink in, because we recognise that he is only doing what he is expected to do.
But this is a personal contra, because, as I say, these three considerations used to seem to me small dust in the balance against the great power of the contrarian No. Something has changed. A little while ago the armed forces of Britain and America went to war in Iraq. It’s possible you saw something about this on the news. I had several discussions with a friend and colleague of mine about this war; and my first instincts were contrarian, anti-War, anti Bush-Blair. My friend disagreed. He thought (and, to be fair to him, this was before the war had been fought, and therefore before the current disastrous morass of violence and CIA-slush-fund corruption had engulfed the nation) that the war had justifications: not WMDs, perhaps, but certainly toppling a fascist dictator, bringing democracy and so on. His argument was that a morally two-tone response to something like the War was inapposite; that political affairs in the mid-East were all tangled up with stuff like the status of Israel, the class tensions (Iraq traditionally possessing a much more robust professional middle-class than many of its neighbours) and so on. My position was more straightforwardly anti. Bush and Blair were two enormously powerful men. This fact, I said, imposes in effect a duty upon citizens: to contend with power, not to acquiesce in it. To summarise my argument I quoted a favourite line of mine from contemporary philosophy: ‘You got to fight the power, fight the powers that be.’
My friend’s response was: ‘that’s a pretty adolescent philosophy of life.’
Mine, in turn, ‘what, adolescent like, say, Martin Luther King? Adolescent like Gandhi?’
But of course my friend was right. That my political instincts are contrarian (which circumstance I try and dignify by calling it dialectic) owes much more to the facts of my own adolescence than to any continuing process of hard-thought-through intellectual renewal. It’s bound up in being a middle-class kid in 1970s Britain; in things like Punk, and the valorisation of that whole ‘what are you rebelling against? Whaddaya got?’ lifestyle. This has made its mark deeply in my soul, somehow, and I’m now starting to wonder whether this mark, so far from being a cool tattoo, isn’t simply sclerosis.
To quote another contemporary thinker and poet.
“Will Smith aint got to cuss in his rap to sell records…”
Well I do. So fuck him, and fuck you too.
And do you know what, I still think that there is something exciting and rather noble about this attitude. I think, as I look back, that the main reason why the dialectic lodged itself in my head was that it is so often funny. Eminem is often brilliantly funny, precisely because he’s so oppositional. It’s the other Marx, Groucho, and his chirpy little song ‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.’ Or, actually, it’s more than that: it’s the core strategy of the comic. It’s saying the unexpected thing, a means of not agreeing that produces the laugh-bark. And comedy is, perhaps, disproportionately important for me as a life strategy.
So I ask myself. The dialectic has been important to me for a long time, fine. But is it, actually, enough to support a whole ethical, ideological and intellectual life? Does a consistent application of the contrarian, dialectic frame of mind actually, if I’m honest, boil down to nothing more than ‘a fuck you and the horse you rode in on’? Or, on less aggressive days, to a ‘You’ve got the brain of a four year old boy! And I bet he was glad to get rid of it.’ Maybe I should learn to get by without having to crack wise all the time? Maybe it’s time to chuck the contra series in the Valvebin?
Comments
I’m all for stopping the Contra series, of course. (I’ve been among its foremost opponents from the very beginning!)
They might have worked better if they had actually been funny—the Dante one in particular had this moral earnestness in it that was very disconcerting and in any case not conducive to humor. It’s true that the general concensus is in favor of Dante as Great Poet—but the general concensus really obviously isn’t in favor of basing one’s whole morality on Dante. Most people are in favor of liberal values (broadly conceived), so opposing Dante’s moral scheme with liberal values is hardly “contrarian” in the relevant sense.
With Dante, sarcasm seems to be called for: “So in this circle, we have counterfeiters, usurers, and—as you’ve probably already anticipated—sodomites.” (Sure, you’d want to tweak that somewhat.)
But anyway, if your biggest problem is that you opposed the Iraq War possibly for the wrong reasons, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, imagine if you’d supported it for the wrong reasons!
I think that Bakhtin, in particular, would offer a much less contrarian take on these questions. In fact, he actively despised dialectic for both this, and its abstractionist approach. Real dialogue, in his estimation, was a very different matter. Perhaps you ought to have another look at his work?
"It’s bound up in being a middle-class kid in 1970s Britain; in things like Punk, and the valorisation of that whole ‘what are you rebelling against? Whaddaya got?’ lifestyle.”
The worst part of punk was when reflexive contrarianism made it vulnerable to the same generic generational cliches as prior movements. The dislike of anything 60s is no different than anything, well, from the 60s. And the eventual tragicomic aftermath was inevitable. (Unsuccessful poem). But there’s an important difference between disagreeing with power, even reflexively, and just disagreeing reflexively. What went wrong with Hitchens was not discourtesy, egotism, or calcification (well, not *just* that), but that he went from being a gadfly to being a war booster.
The contra series was interesting, for its ideas in part, but also precisely because the general theme of insisting on a kind of radical consistency was so sure to be hilariously misinterpreted as being orthodox, not as being an attack on current orthodoxy. I think the style justifies itself.
I wonder if it’s a mistake to identify an oppositional sensibility (and specifically, the historically-specific oppositional project of the counterculture) with the dialectic. Christopher Hitchens, whatever else we may think about him, does not write in a dialectical mode. He doesn’t take the positive propositions of his opponents seriously enough to work through their paradoxes and contradictions. The dialectic isn’t saying No to X; it is rather a way of demonstrating how X entails not-X; and how thinking X and not-X together can bring us to a Y, which doesn’t resolve X and not-X but contains them both together. Now, this isn’t to say I recommend the dialectic, but only to suggest that it’s not the same as the urge to Fight the Man, noble as that project itself might be.
Adam K. ‘They might have worked better if they had actually been funny ...’ Ouch.
J. H. Calbanist. ‘Perhaps you ought to have another look at his work?’ Good advice, this. Actually I was planning, once the frenzy of marking (the maelstrom in which I currently live, occasioned by the belated settlement of the UK university industrial action) has abated, on going back to Adorno’s negative version of the concept. It might be interesting to read Adorno and Bakhtin together.
Rich. Hitchen’s warboosterism is an issue, obviously; but like the Pistols’ ‘filthy lucre’ tour (which managed to piss off a lot of punk purists) you could say that he is at least, well, managing to piss off a lot of people. Which is a Contrarian’s business, after all. Or as you put it, v. well I think, there’s a merit in ‘insisting on a kind of radical consistency’, as Hitchens, love him or loathe him, does. How else could the Pistols have managed to annoy so many? Telling their audiences that the Queen was a fascist regime wasn’t going to cut it anymore, after all.
As far as Punk goes, what got lost, as Greil Marcus argues in Lipstick Traces is that the moment in 1976 when Johnny Rotten could say ‘I am an antichrist’ and people could actually believe him has vanished, swallowed up by the logic of commodification, such that punk now means nothing more than Sum 41 larking around at a High School diving competition.
Incidentally, man, you shouldn’t automatically knock your poetry. Telling people they’re terrible writers is Adam K.’s job, after all, not yours. And your poem is not terrible at all.
Lee K: ‘...it’s a mistake to identify an oppositional sensibility (and specifically, the historically-specific oppositional project of the counterculture) with the dialectic.’ Of course it is. The relationship is not identity, although there is a relationship for all that, I think. And, yes, there are a number of degrees of dialectical thinking, some very subtle indeed. Although there is a point at which the subtlety undermines the ‘anti’ portion of the antithetical process.
I’m naturally inclined to learn through vigorous contention, a trait which helped me survive adolescence but which I had to painfully leash in my early twenties after I noticed it losing me too many friends in my new upper-middle-class surroundings. (It kept firmly in place when dealing with teachers, though, which may help explain my iffy grades.) (Speaking of which, and speaking as a lower-class-kid in 1970s America: Johnny Rotten was always a poser.)
However, long before going to college, when I made the switch from skimming and pure rationalism to slow literary reading, I realized (inchoately) that aesthetics is not the realm of logic, and criticism which holds too tightly to “detached analysis” devolves into the narcissim of minor differences. It can make good sense to argue with the statements of critics—and those were my favorite parts of what you wrote—but taste, one’s experience of an artifact, is not an argument—it’s evidence.
And so my problem with your “Contra” series was that it seemed to present itself as a category mistake. “I don’t like this. Prove I’m wrong!” Well, no—I can’t prove you’re wrong about your own likes and dislikes, and faced with a challenge like that I’m not even inclined to respond politely. I could, at most, if I like the artifact, explain why the aspects that bother you don’t bother me as much, or describe other aspects which attract me. But all it comes down to is providing evidence that some other seemingly rational person feels differently than you. What you do with that evidence is up to you. (I think my essay on Delany’s porn was pretty successful at reducing the incidence of certain critical commonplaces which were getting on my nerves, but I don’t flatter myself so much as to think that it actually talked many readers out of their visceral revulsion.)
Neither can we really argue someone out of liking something. We can certainly ruin their enjoyment by associating it with embarrassment or boredom or fear, as we hear so many grad students lament. But that’s logic as social bullying, not logic as logic.
As I’ve admitted before, mistaking art for argument is almost always a great formula for humor, and sometimes it even provides critical insights. But, maybe because of context, the burlesque aspect of Contra didn’t register strongly on me.
Dialectical thinking is not contrarian thinking. Hegel was not dealing with oppositions per se in his vision of a dialectic of history. (I can’t speak to the Logic, tho.)
Perhaps I’m too much of a Benjamin convert, but I’ve always understood modern dialectical thought backwards from him. Thus, for Hegel, history doesn’t progress because of the conflict of opposites. Instead, every historical moment is dialectical insofar as it is a misrecognition of the true (or just or beautiful). If there is an opposition, it exists *within* a historical phenomenon as the opposition between an abstract and universal Spirit and a particular and localized manifestation of Spirit. For Hegel, history is the back and forth calibration of these two dynamics, as what occurs in history gradually brings forth the total and universal manifestation of Spirit (and the total and universal Spirit no longer blurs local differences and conflicts). The dialectic isn’t “Black + White = Gray.” Nor is idealism some simple, universal like “I = I” or “All is Spirit.” The Hegelian dialectic, in his own terms, is the identity of identity and difference. The force of negation never subsides.
In concrete terms, this leads Hegel to look at historical moments for their moments of truth and moments of misrecognition. Again, there is no simple conflict of opposites. To take a non-historical example, consider the Master/Slave dialectic. Hegel isn’t interested in the simple opposition of freedom and servitude as such. Instead, both the master and the slave embody different sides of freedom and servitude. The truth of the master exists in his failure to recognize a difference between himself and the outside world. But the master relies on a slave for this truth—his union with the exterior world rests on the supplement of something that must always remain exterior: the slave. Meanwhile, the slave’s truth is that he too fails to see an absolute difference between himself and the world. In order to meet the master’s demands, he must shape the materials of nature into something human. But the slave fears death (at the hands of the master), and remains a slave until he can see that what he fears—the negation of his self—is under his own control—the force of negation he uses to transform nature.
Here, both the slave and the master need to come to a true recongition—not through opposition but by separating what is true from what is false in their particular situations. This is Benjamin’s approach in The Arcades Project. While he rejects the progressive and teleological aspect of Hegelian dialectic, he preserves the dialectic itself (thus, he thinks through the dialectic dialectically). For Benjamin, the goal of the historian is to return to the past in order to (a) criticize what was toxic while (b) preserving or recuperating what was potentially useful. It’s historical trash-picking.
We can see a related approach in the novels and essays of Wilson Harris (as I argue in my soon to be finished dissertation!!!). There is no contrarian spirit in Harris. He doesn’t simply shock our sensibilities by saying “imperialism was good” or “the West was bad.” Instead, he reads the moment of cross-cultural contact in the Caribbean dialectically. In explorers’ tales, Harris sees the Renaissance spirit of synthesis, the desire to make connections. This is the utopian truth of that moment. But he also sees the brutal materialism and violence that deforms the desire for connection into exploitation. For Harris, dialectic is didactic: in *Palace of the Peacock*, history is frozen so that all sides of the debate over empire can “work through” this dialectic, slowly recuperating their desire for connection while shedding their desire for power, dominance, mastery, etc. Thus, Harris is one of the few thinkers about empire who doesn’t ultimately flip the master/slave distinction as a binary, claiming the master’s rights for the slave.
Adam: “Of course it is. The relationship is not identity, although there is a relationship for all that, I think. And, yes, there are a number of degrees of dialectical thinking, some very subtle indeed. Although there is a point at which the subtlety undermines the ‘anti’ portion of the antithetical process.”
I agree that there is a relationship between (let’s call it) counterculturalism and the dialectic. I think that the relationship is something like an accident of history. Different philosophical and oppositional traditions seem to have come together on the anglo-american scene in the early ‘60s and to have been associated with one another by the New Left/early counterculture. And identification (rather than association) is a tempting move given the semantics of the situation--"anti-," “contra-,” “oppose” are lexical links that bind the two complexes of thought together. That’s why I think it’s important to make the initial conceptual distinction between counterculturalism and the dialectic, because it’s easy to slip into confusing a contingent association with an identity.
Ray: “my problem with your “Contra” series was that it seemed to present itself as a category mistake. “I don’t like this. Prove I’m wrong!” Well, no—I can’t prove you’re wrong about your own likes and dislikes, and faced with a challenge like that I’m not even inclined to respond politely.”
But this is interesting, because I didn’t think that was what I was doing with the Contra series (of course, I could easily be wrong; I’m not well placed to judge how each piece came over). There would, I think, simply be no point in pitching a contra piece at something over which people, in the main, disagree ... Delany’s porn, for instance (there’s stretches of Delany’s porn I quite like incidentally). The Contra only takes force when applied to a subject upon which there is, by and large, cultural consensus. Contra Shakespeare would work, for instance; Contra Douglas Coupland not (and not necessarily because Shakespeare is a ‘better’ writer than Coupland, either; whatever that might mean).
I started with Proust. One of the things that struck me reading a little of the criticism of Proust was not only that critics were united in the extravagance of their praise for Proust, but that a strawperson ‘contra Proust’ was sometimes invoked precisely to emphasise just how beyond-brilliant Proust is. That strawperson might be, for instance, one of those foolish publishers-readers and reviewers who responded to the initial publication by saying ‘but nothing happens in these novels! He goes on and on for pages after page about notihng at all! What rubbish!’ Or it might be a nameless student the academic author has encountered who’s response to the text does not go beyond ‘Proust is bo-ring‘ These figures are brought in precisely to innoculate Proust against negative criticism. The discourse being constructed is that Proust is unlike other novelists, that he is difficult, challenging, subtle, and that therefore we, who appreciate Proust (and unlike those other clodhoppers) share those qualities Consensus works so as to squeeze out even the possibility of contradiction.
Something similar happens with, I don’t know: Van Gogh, and the fact that he only sold one painting in his life (’those fools! they were too blinkered to recognise genius when they saw it! But we’re not too blinkered ... we’re cleverer than those old fogies’). Doesn’t that discursive strategy bring out the contrarian in you? Doesn’t it strike you as unpleasantly condescending, or insulting, to people purely on the grounds that they were born in a prior historical period to yourself? (And because they don’t share your tastes?)
You say my argument was ‘I don’t like this. Prove I’m wrong!’ But I love Proust; I love Dante. There’d be no point in stating the contrary case otherwise. If you can’t be bothered to respond to my stuff then I certainly can’t blame you; I have no doubt that most people have better ways to spend their time. But I’m wondering about the underlying cultual camber that means stating a contrary position to certain figures is inevitably perceived as pissing against the leg of their giganic and noble statue.
"But I love Proust; I love Dante. There’d be no point in stating the contrary case otherwise. If you can’t be bothered to respond to my stuff then I certainly can’t blame you; I have no doubt that most people have better ways to spend their time. But I’m wondering about the underlying cultual camber that means stating a contrary position to certain figures is inevitably perceived as pissing against the leg of their giganic and noble statue.”
We’ve been over this ground before, Adam, and the issue is that we’ve lived (and live) on different grounds. In my worlds my neighbors have had no problem dismissing Dante and Proust as wastes of time. Attacking them isn’t pissing against a gigantic statue: it’s pissing against a pile of trash in the corner of a ruin. Similarly in certain academic environs my curmudgeonly remarks on Fight Club and L.A. Confidential would count as hail-fellow-well-met instead of corrective.
At age ten, I thought Isaac Asimov’s superiority to William Shakespeare was self-evident: Shakespeare knew no science. You can see, I hope, why I might then be particularly taken aback by your Dante argument.
In short I agree with your expressed motives, but was unable to derive them from the essays themselves. To what extent this is due to my perversity as a reader, I’m in no position to say. But I hope you agree with me that it’s an interesting situation.
I’m going to have to second Ray here—I didn’t intend the remark about the posts not being funny as an insult, because it had not occurred to me that you were trying to be funny.
’My neighbors have had no problem dismissing Dante and Proust as wastes of time. Attacking them isn’t pissing against a gigantic statue: it’s pissing against a pile of trash in the corner of a ruin.’
I concede, Ray. How right you are: these are exactly the people who should be permitted the set the terms of critical discussion.
Nothing but egregious praise of the classics from me from here on in, I promise.
Adam K. Maybe English ‘funny’ is something that, like the violet in the crucible, doesn’t survive translation into e-zine format; or maybe it’s an Anglo-American differend; or maybe I’m just a bit crap as a writer. I daresay it’s the last of those three.
Personally, I think you’re hilarious. I think what Adam and Ray point to is the serious structure of your posts overall, not individually funny moments within. I’ve commonplaced a number of things you’ve written precisely because they were funny--I recognize now, however, that they’re funnier in the somber context from which they unexpectedly emerge. Also, if you’re crap as a writer, I daresay I don’t want to know what I am. (Can crap crap? Is this even a conversation we should be having here?)
Check: “That they’re even funnier in the somber context...” Sans “even,” it sounds like a backhanded compliment.
"I concede, Ray. How right you are: these are exactly the people who should be permitted the set the terms of critical discussion.”
I’m nobody’s rulebook, and I’m not interested in sarcasm playoffs. People who experiment can’t expect to achieve instant and universal communication. Some people got what you were after right away and enjoyed it. Some others didn’t. Since you seemed interested in the meta-question of contra technique, I explained the context from which I misread you. There’s no need to pretend that it’s a context that especially matters to you past the explanation—if that far.
Although I finally understood (thanks to the Dante discussion) that you were motivated by the foolish things that other critics write, your essays instead explicitly targeted the authors themselves. That’s as big an error as transferring intellectual and emotional investment in a work into overstating the mastery of its authors and the contemptibility of non-fans. In fact, it’s pretty much the same error—dialectic as teeter-totter, right? “I support liberating Iraq because I hate those stupid signs the demonstrators carry.” “I’m against invading Iraq because I don’t support anything those pigs do.” Never need to leave the neighborhood.
The Cantor post made a fun finish because it brought the underlying problem of misapplied context into such clear focus. (At least to a math major.)
More contexts: “Teeter-totter” = “see-saw”.
"And so my problem with your “Contra” series was that it seemed to present itself as a category mistake. “I don’t like this. Prove I’m wrong!””
Adam’s already been over this at length. But I think that this “category mistake” “prove I’m wrong” bit shows that you’ve allowed your reaction to be subsumed into a common narrative that has very little to do with what Adam wrote.
The rhetoric of the Contra posts appears to me to address three audiences at three levels:
For the people for whom Dante and Proust are wastes of time, it says that they should be taken seriously.
For the aestheticians for whom Dante and Proust are gigantic, admired statues, it says that they shouldn’t be taken unquestioningly.
For the theorists for whom an aesthetic appeal to Dante and Proust is somewhat moldy old hat, it mocks the orthodoxy of the endlessly interpretable text, in which no one interpretation means much, and in which interpretations can not possibly be made to clash in any important way.
And the second and third meet, of course. “Interpretations can’t really be contradicted” is the other side of the coin from “an aesthetic experience is simply evidence.” No matter which direction you approach it from, incontrovertability tends to act in the same way; that’s one of the underlying answers to Scott’s question about why people think that a belief in intention must be conservative. The humor at pointing this out is indeed sort of a punk thing, at least a British punk one; those punks were always moralists. In the unsuccessful poem linked to above (unsuccessful because it didn’t really do what I wanted it to do; I guess I should be happy with a verdict of “not terrible"), the lines about sin, God, and retribution are all original.
But Rich, should we really take seriously people who think about art in terms of “wastes of time”? I don’t think so. I can take someone seriously who thinks that Proust’s novel(s) is/are flawed by repetition, poor paragraph transition, a tendency to over-extend ideas and scenes. I can take someone seriously who thinks Dante’s work is ethically flawed. But I cannot take someone seriously who concludes that reading either writer is a waste of time.
Nor do I think there are too many of these so-called aestheticians out there who treat artists as flawless “statues.” The introduction to my new translation of *In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower* criticizes Proust, for godsake.
Finally, I don’t think many critics believe that “no one interpretation means much” or that “interpretations can not [sic] be made to clash in any important way.” Here’s the catch-22 of literary critics: if they get into huge interpretive debates, they are mocked for taking themselves too seriously. If they don’t get into huge debates, they are mocked for not being serious intellectuals. Notice that when Walter Benn Michaels, in *The Shape of the Signifier*, accuses theorists or adherents of identity politics of not taking differences of interpretation seriously, he offers not a single example. Attend any reading group or lecture or job talk in an English department and you’ll see quite quickly how differences of interpretation often clash drastically and publically.
Clashes are the meat and potatoes of academic reputation. But everyone understands that there is no way of resolving these clashes. That’s what was so funny about Adam’s suggestions that e.g. Heidegger perhaps should have read Einstein; they were regarded as a faux pas. Saying that Dante’s artistic effect relies on a seamless garment of truth-claims that we now know not to be true was bound to bring a nervous “dude, that’s just not funny. Lighten up already.” But contrary to what Ray mentions, I didn’t get the impression that these were simply veiled criticisms of critics. It’s a double effect. Knowing how people are going to react to “Anarchy in the U.K.” is compatible with actually favoring anarchy in the u.k.
Quote: I’m wary of putting it like this, because it seems so pompous, but the fact of the matter is that I have been committed to the dialectic for a long time. There you are. Pompous but true. ‘Profoundly committed to the dialectic.’ That’s me.
Translation: I like talking with folks, discussing this and that.
Note how much shorter, more concise the tranlation is. The original is wordy, the phrasing strained. This thanks to the long tradition of verbosity maintained by the academic community. Writing in academia is long, involved, and uses big words inappropriately because academics have a tendency to insecurity, and so see a need to pose as important people. Thus the over-explaining.
This acting as a barrier to non-academics, which serves to further isolate academia from the outside world. Which results in the three cultures, academia, science, and the common man.
Adam...It’s “Calvinist” (ironically, I insist), not “Calbanist” - although “Calibanist” would’ve been nice - still, not to worry: it’s only a pen-name, after all… And, yes, I’m glad you could see my point re Bakhtin…
Personally, I feel he overestimated the dialogue in Plato, and underestimated the richness of ancient novels, amongst other faults - see Margaret Anne Doody’s “The True Story of the Novel” for evidence on the ancient novel bit (albeit skip the trope-mongering at the end) - but his fundamental perspective re dialogue/development/individuation is more & more garnering support in developmental scientific circles...a genuine example of consilience, if you ask me…
And - as a generational compatriot (albeit I am an Australian...still, remember the Saints?) - I can see why you’ve been particularly attracted to oppositional stances...but, I’d also have to say that this is something that is well-worth getting over, as you appear to agree. Sure, sometimes what we need is same but, most of the time, Bakhtin (I’d say, contra-Adorno) is a much, much better guide… And - re Adorno, again - SURELY, by now, we should have better sources of ideas than yet another old Marxist?
The main problem w/Bakhtin’s reception has been, in fact, that people keep trying to align him w/the regular Humanities mix of late - Marx/Freud, as re-figured by post-Saussurean cultural theory (w/some Nietzschean spice for leavening). Fact is, he flatly rejected the first three - albeit learning from the questions they raised - and, although he was silent (from memory) re Nietzsche, I suspect the same applied on that front, too…
Morson & Emerson’s “Mikhail Bakhtin: the creation of a prosaics” is still (sadly, after over 15 years) the closest thing we have to a decent overview: perhaps you ought to give it a chance w/out roping in an (entirely unrelated) Adorno?
And...I (entirely!) meant what I just said re consilience. Fact is, I don’t take ANY cultural theorist seriously whose fundamental assumptions are genuinely falsified by science: which, by the way (of course), includes the historical sciences. So...Marx & Freud’re dead (aside from some possibly interesting speculations), Saussure is now undoubtedly a mere formalist whose work - at best - “might” just help illuminate certain subsidary aspects of language (but who badly misread the foundations of same, and whose dodgy heirs are basically building castles in the air)...and, Nietzsche? Well, I’d see him as a highly-useful (in parts) anti-moralist gadfly philosopher...but, certainly nothing you could genuinely build upon.
In (direct) contrast, Bakhtin’s actual foundational approach, today, looks more & more like something we could really USE...particularly given the fact that his counterpart in psychology - Vygotsky - is (via Luria, his key collaborator) one of the key foundational influences on the modern neurosciences.
Certainly Oliver Sacks - and many others - appear to think so…
Let’s see...can any other influential figure in the Humanities theory canon muster ANYTHING at all approaching this kind of link w/the really relevant sciences?
Nope...and, it’s a no-brainer of a question, what’s more - which makes it even more damning…
So, just (perhaps?) it’s well-overdue that we stopped trying to align Bakhtin w/schools of thought he was violently-opposed to...and started taking the poor devil seriously, for a change?
all the best
Ray: ‘I’m not interested in sarcasm playoffs.’ You’re right; I apologise for the sarcastic tone. A cheap shot. ‘Since you seemed interested in the meta-question of contra technique, I explained the context from which I misread you. There’s no need to pretend that it’s a context that especially matters to you past the explanation—if that far.’ But it does indeed matter to me; I wouldn’t have quick-drawn the sarcasm pistol otherwise. I very much take the force of much of what you say (don’t agree with everything, but then you wouldn’t expect me to). ‘Take the force’ rather than just nodding and smiling and carrying on thinking exactly what I thought before, which is I suppose often what happens when people debate things.
That said, I like very much the way Rich puts it: the three audiences thing is certainly what I was trying for, even if not necessarily succeeding in. And ‘the humor at pointing this out is indeed sort of a punk thing, at least a British punk one; those punks were always moralists’ … this is spot-on about the core of the British punk thing. I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms, but of course that’s right; and that’s what’s different between the Pistols/Clash and American bands like Sum 41 (and why so many people have been plain puzzled by Green Day’s latterday conversion to moralist-Punk). In the British instance I think it wasn’t just a serious-minded moralism, but a sort of outraged surprise that so few people recognised it as moralistic. Something like this was behind Johnny R.’s famous parting shot, as he marched off the stage on the American tour, ‘ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Or, in this tinier context, it’s Adam K.’s surprise above at what he calls ‘this moral earnestness’ in the posts, which he calls ‘very disconcerting’.
Luther: ‘Nor do I think there are too many of these so-called aestheticians out there who treat artists as flawless “statues.” The introduction to my new translation of *In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower* criticizes Proust, for godsake.’ The James Grieve translation, you mean? He does have a go, you’re right, although it’s more, I’d say, in order to prevent readers from starting with the wrong idea about what they’re about to read. Grieve says that if we pick up the book expecting Balzacian realism we’ll be disappointed (P. couldn’t do what Balzac did because ‘he was a cosseted Parisian whose Right-bank world was narrow, who preferred to live in the past, in bed, in a cork-lined room, who rarely travelled and who never did a day’s work’). But isn’t this a rhetorical strategy to set up, precisely, Proust’s great strengths, his close anatomisation of ‘love, art, society, friendship’?
Sorry, John Henry, for the typo that meant the key immediately to the right of the ‘v’-key got pushed instead of the ‘v’-key when I was picking out ‘Calvanist’ on my keyboard. I am a clumsy typist.
Scott: I v. much appreciate your kind words. Indeed, I begin to believe that you actually are English, you know. Only there is, I think, a big difference between being ‘crap as a writer’ and being ‘a bit crap as a writer.’ I don’t think I’m crap as a writer, actually. On the fascinating philosophical question ‘Can crap crap?’, I can only quote Swift’s ‘To Prunes’: ‘Big craps crap little craps, with prunes to expedite ‘em; and little craps crap littler craps and so ad infinitum.’ Which, now that I look at it, is actually more authentically Swiftian than the flea couplet.
Mythusmage: Personally I agree with your general point that academic discourse is too jargon-y, and that as a whole my profession has done a worrying amount to alienate ordinary people who just like reading books. But having said that, I’m not sure your translation (’I like talking with folks, discussing this and that’) actually does translate what I said; nor do I think, apart from the jargon-term ‘dialectics’ (which is the whole point of the piece) that my original sentence was that impenetrable, however much ‘wordy strained verbosity’ it exhibits. The dialectic really is more than just ‘discussing this and that’ I think.
You say: ‘writing in academia ... uses big words because academics have a tendency to insecurity, and so see a need to pose as important people.’
Well, that’s certainly a possibility. But there are other possibilities: for instance, that academics use terms from a specialised vocabularly as a means of invoking specific theoretical debates, to be precise, to avoid flabby or generalised meanings. Most professional idioms have specialised technical terms after all. If you pick up the British Medical Journal and encounter something like:
“The patient presented with itchy papules and vesicles. A skin biopsy and direct immunofluorescence test of the skin were performed, as was a biopsy of the intestines, but dermatitis herpetiformis was ruled out."
... do you then say ‘those doctors only use big words because they’re so insecure, and so need to pose as important people.’
I will add that if you’d recorded one of those posts, I’m sure your English accent would have made it significantly funnier to my American ears—or else significantly more convincing.
Adam Roberts,
There are two types of jargon, that devised for a purpose, and that devised to confuse. Medical jargon, once you’ve learned it, serves to inform. It refers to real things, to real conditions and treatments. Academic jargon in contrast illustrates nothing and all too often refers to nothing in particular. About the only thing the two have in common is that they are both ripe for parody.
Then too there is the fact that academic jargon attempts to take the place of perfectly good vocabulary. With similes trying to pass as metaphors, and metaphors confusing themselves with a good turn of phrase.
Really, it’s a good example of what people mean when they say, “If you can’t dazzle with brilliance, baffle with bull.”
In short, academic speak over explains. Instead of answer yes or no questions yes or no, it tries to explain the yes or no response. Especially when explication would be counterproductive. Academic speak is to intelligent discourse what mecha are to civil engineering.
All I can say is, if you can’t come up with 500 words in plain English on a subject, maybe you really don’t have all that much to say on it.
Mythusmage: Quote: I’m wary of putting it like this, because it seems so pompous, but the fact of the matter is that I have been committed to the dialectic for a long time. There you are. Pompous but true. ‘Profoundly committed to the dialectic.’ That’s me.
Translation: I like talking with folks, discussing this and that.
Well, actually, if Adam had been using “dialectic” in its specific, jargon-y sense (as he initially seems to gesture toward but then doesn’t)this “translation” would be totally wrong. As some have already pointed out, “dialectic” refers to quite specific theories of history and is not interchangeable with “contrarianism” or “dialogue”—the mistake is like using “deconstruct” as a synonym for “take apart.”
The fact that Adam’s misusing the jargon in this way is a rather large problem, of course. But you’ll be doing yourself a favour by staying away from the old “acadmeic jargon doesn’t refer to anything” saw. If jargon abusers are a problem, it’s no less a problem that so many self-styled critics of the jargon appear not to have made even a cursory effort to familiarize themselves with what they’re criticizing.
Doctor Slack,
Correction: Academic jargon doesn’t refer to anything that isn’t already covered by pre-existing vocabulary.
As an example let’s take “dialectic” vs “dialogue”. Isn’t the discussion of any subject a dialogue? Doesn’t matter what subject you’re talking about, when you’re talking about it with others you are engaged in a dialogue. A conversation in other words. Frankly, I just don’t see “dialectic” as having any real use what so ever.
I must ask; who invented the term “dialectic” in the first place?
BTW, deconstruction is about taking something apart, in order to learn how it was put together in the first place. Deconstruction’s great failure is that its practitioners chose to ignore what properly applied deconstruction could reveal in favor of reinforcing their prior beliefs.
"Dialectic” as used by Hegel and later thinkers does not mean simply conversation and does not have a normal-language equivalent.
John Holbo had a post just recently about the origin of the term “dialectic.”
Your account of “deconstruction” is also somewhat inadequate—it’s also about how things take themselves apart, for instance. Again, I don’t think there is a normal-language equivalent here.
Mythusmage: Correction: Academic jargon doesn’t refer to anything that isn’t already covered by pre-existing vocabulary.
You go on to demonstrate that you don’t know the first thing about what the “academic jargon” you’re talking about refers to. Since it is indeed possible to know this with a little basic reading, I have to conclude that you simply can’t be bothered to do your homework on the subject, but want your pronouncements on it to be taken seriously anyway.
Can you think of any context in which that kind of behaviour wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be considered silly and boorish? Because I can’t.
I have read enough to know that most academic jargon comes about because somebody doesn’t have the vocabulary to adequately express himself. Either that, or because he thinks he has to impress on his readers how important what he’s written is.
“Dialectic” is one such word. It is a word created because the creator thought words such as “conversation”, “dialogue”, and “chatting” weren’t important enough. It’s an attempt to separate the blathering class from the common man, and I say it stinks.
Then I go over to Wikipedia to look up “dialectic” and learn that I’m wrong. Blorg, as the old saying goes.
I’m still convinced academia could turn down the blather. It is, after all, not a matter of impressing your audience, but of informing your audience. By using words inappropriately, or inventing words that aren’t really needed, you run the risk of not only not informing them, but of not impressing them as well.
"I’m still convinced academia could turn down the blather.”
This much I agree with you.