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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Terry’s unwavering stereotypes
Terry Eagleton is, at least, a thought-provoking writer, even if the thought he increasingly provokes is ‘man but you’re rushing politically rightwards, Terry’. If his apparent conversion to Catholicism suggests to some (well, to me) a calcification of his dialectic intelligence, his recent LRB review of Ewen and Ewen’s Typecasting: On the Arts and the Sciences of Human Inequality evidences an on-the-road-to-Blimpishness that is worrying indeed. Ewen and Ewen (whose book I have not read) argue that stereotyping inevitably involves a process of caricature that cramps our abilities to interact with human individuals as human individuals by interposing a pre-existing template. Because they are limiting they always entail pejoratives, no matter how they are spun as positive. To stereotype black people as ‘natural sportspeople and entertainers’ is inevitably to stereotype them as physical at the expense of being intellectual, as emotional at the expense of being rational. This mode of thought has had the most catastrophically negative consequences for human history across the world. To praise women as homemakers, child-carers, emotionally skilled and so on, is also to say they are not public workers, politicians, military leaders or brilliant research scientists. When Harriet Beecher Stowe characterises negro slaves as spiritual and pure, she is also caricaturing and patronizing them as childlike and intellectually limited. I could go on, but you all know the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Terry Eagleton doesn’t think so; his review criticises Ewen and Ewen for criticising stereotype. His reasoning is that, whilst he concedes that some stereotypes are harmful (‘slit-eyed Japs and nigger minstrels’) he regards many as neutral (‘Swedes, for example, are very often tall, fair and blue eyed’) and many more are rooted in a positive truth. Of course this ‘no smoke without fire’ rationale is applied by stereotypers as much to the ‘slit-eyed Japs and nigger minstrels’ as to the carefree carousing Irish or the ‘hard-headed’ Scots (Terry’s preferred examples), but he doesn’t go into that. His version of ‘good’ stereotyping utilizes the—as it seems to me—weasel idiom of ‘not all X are Y’; which rhetoric (‘not all black Africans are rocket scientists’) is too often a transparent code for the expression of revoltingly racist sentiments. Here’s Terry’s version:
Ulster Protestants are not by and large dandyish aesthetes notable for their extravagant wordplay and surreal sense of humour. The English middle classes are for the most part less physically and emotionally expressive than Neapolitan dockers. It is unusual to meet a working-class Liverpudlian who dresses for dinner, other than in the sense of putting on a shirt.
The point of this idiom is to try and inoculate against counter-example. The racist who argues that black people are intellectually inferior to whites will not usually be persuaded by a list of black winners of the Nobel Prize. There are (he will doubtless concede) always ‘exceptions to the rule’, a fact which is conceded because it actually reinforces that there is a ‘rule’ in the first place – an essentialist conception of an entire people. In my life I have known more than one Northern Irish Protestant who was verbally dextrous, charming, nattily dressed: but if I presented the bigot with this counterexample, he (let’s call him ‘Terry’) might well reply ‘well, there are counter examples of course, but by and large …’ What is the sentence about Ulster Protestants quoted above other than a let’s-not-call-a-spade-a-spade way of saying that these people are dour, humourless stubborn pig-heads upon whom the possibilities of peace in Northern Ireland (for no statement exists independent of its context, and the contexts here are very thoroughly politicised) crash as upon a monstrous impediment? Terry seems to have converted to essentialism. Or, at the very least, he insists that ‘the belief that the malleable is always preferable to the immovable is a postmodern fable’.
Stereotypes are sometimes thought to be offensive because they are fixed and inflexible but the unfixed is not necessarily to be celebrated. Capitalism is endlessly fluid, whereas the demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians should be unwavering.
This is gobsmacking stuff; or at least it smacks my gob. Marx himself admired Capitalism for its energy and its capacity to create wealth; although he of course despised the way it also generates inequality and oppression. It means nothing to say that ‘Capitalism is endlessly fluid’. It is certainly more flexible and adaptable (two words that are not, however, synonyms for ‘fluid and malleable’) than command-economic models; but it also depends upon a series of non-negotiable inflexibilities, about (for instance) the nature of property, the primacy of profit, the unimpeded circulation of money. And the notion of an ‘unwavering’ demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians is almost dishonest in its refusal to think through the way this ‘unwaveringness’ manifests in actual politics. It conflates the idea that it is a good thing to insist that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians (which it clearly is), with a much more alarmingly essentialist way of reading the fundamentally mutable business of politics.
Essentialism is, precisely, not flexible and adaptable. An essentialist demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians would be not a response to the current political situation in the Middle East, but rather an expression of belief in the fundamentally oppressive, villainous nature of Jews, and the fundamental victim-status of Arabs. The problem with stereotypical thinking is precisely that Eagleton’s insistent demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians cannot, by his own testimony, waver, even if faced with new circumstances. What happens as the Israelis withdraw from Palestinian territories? Does this alter or inflect ‘our’ demands? No, it cannot, because these demands ‘must be unwavering’. I daresay people who think this way would qualify their unwaveringness with statements like ‘Israel should pull out of Palestine, yes, but really pull out and interfere no longer in any Palestinian affairs’, or ‘pull out of all Palestinian land, including Jerusalem’ or perhaps ‘leave the region altogether’. But it is not only a valid but a necessary adjunct to this to ask: under what conditions would you permit your resolve to waver on this matter? ‘When the Jews stop oppressing the Arabs’ would be one way of answering the question, but if one’s view of the circumstances is essentialist this is tantamount to saying ‘when Jews stop being Jews’. Personally I don’t think there is anything essential about ‘Jews’, or any other group. But it’s not so much its untruthfulness of essentialism as the pragmatic short-sightedness of the way it signifies that seems to me wrongheaded here. If Israelis feel that literally no matter what they do they will continue to vilified as oppressors of Arabs, then what is their incentive to do anything at all? If they are faced with opposition that is literally unwavering, then the temptation will be to pull up their shutters and dig in.
In the 1980s Barclay’s Bank was fairly heavily invested in Apartheid South Africa. In common with a number of my young leftie friends I boycotted Barclays on this ground, taking part in such stunts as the mass opening accounts in order to close them the same day, sending letters to branch managers all over the country and so on. We all believed that opposition to Barclays complicity to Apartheid should be unwavering: which is to say, that no amount of (for instance) tempting introductory offers or free cinema vouchers should persuade us to change out minds. What happened next was that Barclays pulled their money out of Apartheid South Africa. What then? A friend of mine immediately opened an account and has banked with them ever since. His reasoning was that just as bad behaviour needed to be punished, good behaviour needed to be rewarded. Me, I didn’t open an account. For me Barclays were somehow tainted with Apartheid and t it went against the grain for me to do business with them. But I was wrong; I had erected a stereotypical essential Barclays in my mind (racist and deplorable) and I preferred not waver in that apperception. It made life simpler and more manageable, which is a large part of the business of stereotypes. That doesn’t mean it was right.
Unwaveringness, Eagleton implies, is commendable. But it’s precisely this notion of unwaveringness, and the reification of unwaveringness in the semiotics of human relations the ‘stereotype’, that have underpinned the greatest quantity of human suffering. Unwaveringness explains that belief-structures outlive their historically grounding circumstances as stereotypical ‘everybody knows’ consensus. Here’s an example that occurs to me in my ‘Emperor Nero’ mood. Once upon a time Christians were a minority faith, persecuted and oppressed. Christians now belong to the world’s largest faith; they control most of the world’s resources and wealth, they wield enormous influence and in many cases actual power. But the model of Christians as persecuted and oppressed lives on in the minds of many Christians, where it is more than a personal paranoia, for it informs things like the tacit ‘War on Islam’ conducted by Christian leaders. If such beliefs are at root essentialist that fact may well point to the fact that many Christians do, genuinely, believe in essences, absolute values of right and wrong grounded on an absolutely unwavering foundation called God. But this same strength of purpose also grounds a kind of conceptual inertia, where stories of saints and martyrs still determine the way Christians think about themselves today. It is the difference between truth and truthiness. It’s startling to find Eagleton espousing the latter. Isn’t the point of the dialectic that it realises thought as a process in continual motion, that it requires mental nimbleness, that it connects with the Weltanschauung that panta chorei kai ouden menei?
Comments
Cratylus misled Plato; that quote ("somewhere says") is a distortion. See Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, p. 195.
Adam, I think you’ve hit the Eagleton on the head. A stereotype is nothing more than what Hegelians call a universal concept, and the movement of thought should be a dialectical rhythm shifting between universal and particular, adapting the concept in the process.
African-American economist Glenn Loury, in *The Anatomy of Racial Inequality*, discusses stereotypes in an interesting way. He uses the example of cab drivers who won’t stop for blacks, arguing that, for the cab drivers, the stereotype of the black criminal is their way of weighing risk. A cab driver might very well know that not all blacks are criminals; but he may have a concept that most criminals involved in cabbie hold-ups are black. In an interesting thought experiment, Loury shows how this concept/stereotype actually produces the reality:
“[S]uppose most taxi drivers refuse to stop for young black men after a certain hour because they fear being robbed, though a few drivers will stop for anyone. Let there be two types of young men—those merely trying to get home late at night and those intent on robbery—and let us suppose that the relative number of the two types does not depend on race. Now, for most young men, anticipating a long wait will discourage dependence on taxi transportation. They may arrange to ride with friends, take public transport, or bring a car, and this is especially so if a young man is simply trying to get home. But a person bent on robbery will not be so easily deterred. Even though he knows most cabs are unlikely to stop, he only needs one to do so to get in his night’s work. Given that taxi drivers treat blacks differently, stopping less frequently for them, and that robbers are less easily deterred than are the law abiding, the drivers’ reluctance to stop will discourage relatively more of the law abiding than of the robbers among blacks from relying on taxi transportation. This effect will not be present for nonblacks, since drivers are quite willing to stop for them. Hence, through a process that economists call ‘adverse selection,’ the set of young black men actually seen to be hailing taxis after dark may well come to contain a noticeably larger than average fraction of robbers, precisely the circumstance presumed by the drivers in the first place” (30-31).
Jonathan,
I’m not trying to play gotcha, but doesn’t your initial sentiment that Mr. Eagleton’s conversion to Catholicism suggests intellectual calcification exemplify the sort of attitudes you are excoriating in this post? In other words, doesn’t political engagement require such types of ideological stereotyping—there is no class struggle if you deny classes after all—while political conservatism, essentially an essentialist belief in a non-maleable human nature, rejects it.
Adam,
I’m really confused by this quotation from Eagleton:
Stereotypes are sometimes thought to be offensive because they are fixed and inflexible but the fixed is not necessarily to be celebrated. Capitalism is endlessly fluid, whereas the demand that the Israelis stop mistreating the Palestinians should be unwavering.
Shouldn’t the second iteration of the word “fixed” actually be a word like “flexible”? I’m not saying you misquoted Eagleton, I’m saying that otherwise the next sentence doesn’t follow. Clearly, in the first sentence, Eagleton is setting up a revaluation of stereotype, which he substantiates in the second sentence by contrasting flexible capitalism (bad) with inflexible demands for the fair treatment of Palestinians (good). So to write that “the fixed is not necessarily to be celebrated” undermines everything he’s trying to do.
Eagleton seems to overlook the obvious point that stereotypes essentialise what are often historically contingent features. The English stereotype of the lawless Irish (under colonial rule)overlooked that it was this foreign and imposed law that was being resisted or disavowed. Likewise, with stereotypes of ‘lazy’ colonised peoples etc - they don’t want to work for you etc. Stereotyping is de-historicising, edits out context/ relations of power and so on. does eagleton adequately draw the distinction between stereotype and generalisation??
In the Amazon promotional materials for *Typecasting*, we’re presented with this as an example of stereotyping:
“In 2005, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University suggested ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude’ were to account for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences and mathematics.”
I would seriously reconsider Summers ideas an instance of stereotyping. Biological differences between the sexes needs more research. At the same time, I would also want to examine the possibility that the absence of women at top-level research positions in science departments is another instance of “adverse selection” (as is, no doubt, the absence of Republicans in most literature departments).
Joseph: my mistake, not Terry’s. It should be ‘unfixed’. I’ve corrected.
Herr Z:
Jonathan,
I’m not trying to play gotcha, but doesn’t your initial sentiment that Mr. Eagleton’s conversion to Catholicism suggests intellectual calcification exemplify the sort of attitudes you are excoriating in this post? In other words, doesn’t political engagement require such types of ideological stereotyping—there is no class struggle if you deny classes after all—while political conservatism, essentially an essentialist belief in a non-maleable human nature, rejects it.
But of course. It’s a good point, and one I could either answer by reverting at tedious length to various quotations from Deleuze, or more concisely by saying I’m not sure I accept the idea that in order to talk about ‘class’ one has to reify it into an unwavering monolith. It’s proven very adaptable and changeable over the years, after all.
If your point is less the specific one about eg class, and more the general anti-relativist point, ‘how can you say anything unless some of the things you say are fixed and determined?’, then that’s the start of a much longer discussion, I think.
Was Eagleton ever formally not a Catholic? He was certainly in with the Slant current forty years ago, and has never disguised his intellectual debt to Herbert McCabe. Not that you’re wrong here - McCabe would certainly have taken him down in much the same terms as you, if he were still around.
Chris: my understanding (which could well be wrong) is that he was lapsed, and that he’s now, more-or-less, de-lapsed.
I’m still thinking about Luther’s cab-driver’s thought-experiment. A notional ‘rational’ racism? It’s a mind bender.
After he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind Spielberg was asked whether he believed in UFOs. His answer was: ‘no, but I believe in people who believe in UFOs’. And mutatis-mutandi, there’s an inescapabilty about the empirical reality and material effects of racist and stereotypical thinking, of course. Hmm.
Adam, it’s not so much a rational racism as a racism that has real effects in constructing social realities. The end result of the cab driver experiment might be that cab drivers really should avoid picking up young black men at night, but that end result has been caused by the drivers’ racism in the first place.
Mark’s comment above gets at this phenomenon. We see it in the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew. One of the few professions open to European Jews was often money-lending, because good Christians saw usury as a sin but needed usury to ship goods, build armies, etc. Likewise, we have James Baldwin’s exploration of the stereotype of the exploitative Jew among inner-city black Americans, a reality caused by the anti-semitism that made it far easier for Jews to open businesses in the ghetto than in the WASPy neighborhoods. As Mark wrote, the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are “wrong” but that they are dehistoricized—what Barthes called “myths.”
As Lacan writes somewhere, that your wife is in fact cheating on you is not proof that your paranoid fear of her adultery is right.
This is why the Larry Summers issue was so tangled. Summers would have been right to bring up research on biological differences between the sexes. But to use the slight research done to date as evidence that women are naturally not cut out for research positions in science at universities was foolish, because we still have to wonder: even *if* fewer women are “naturally” cut out for advanced science work, to what degree is sexism keeping some women from the profession? That is to say, even if genetics tells us there will never be a 50/50 sex split, how many fully capable women decide that the battle against sexism in the sciences isn’t worth it?
Luther, Glenn Loury’s argument presupposes our already knowing that the stereotype is false (’let us suppose that the relative number of the two types does not depend on race’). If the stereotype is true--if the percentage of the two types does depend on race--the reluctance of cabdrivers will have the same result. But it will be justifiable.
Douglas, you’ve got a point. But as with my take on Larry Summers above, even *if* the percentages are racially skewed, the behavior of the cabbies will skew them even further.
The only way the stereotype is a simple empirical reality is if we could turn back time and always pick up black and white young men equally. But once cabbies start acting as if black young men will inevitably rob them, then Loury’s thought experiment holds true: black young men who actually need a cab will find alternate transport, leaving only black robbers waiting on the corner.
Is this justifiable? Dunno. That’s an ethical question, not an evaluation of the truth or falsehood of a concept. Loury argues that it *is* justifiable—that is, a cab driver doesn’t have to be racist to avoid young black men precisely because the statistics in certain areas of certain cities are racially skewed (just like a young woman isn’t a man-hater just because she crosses to the other side of the street from a man when walking home late at night). The question he raises is, instead, to what degree does the image of black men as criminal create the reality (I mean, regardless of racial statistics, you have more of a chance being the victim of a white criminal than a black criminal, simply because whites outnumber blacks so vastly).
“Essentialism is, precisely, not flexible and adaptable.”
“... the movement of thought should be a dialectical rhythm shifting between universal and particular, adapting the concept in the process”; and, as a consequence, adapting reality too.
Life is change. Concepts and essences change; people too. Being changes.
To be or not to be can hardly be the question. Be and not to be, probably.
Or, to place this within the context of the Green Knight, clothe and unclothe, dress and undress; and once people are given the clothes, they often grow into them. Concepts produce reality.
But between all this clothing and unclothing, isn’t there an element of continuity, isn’t there something that is ... essentially you?
“Essentialism is, precisely, not flexible and adaptable.”
According to your definition, isn’t atheism a kind of (negative) essentialism too?
To be ... or not to be ...