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Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Shape of Things To Come: On ‘Literary Thinking and the New Left’
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
What follows may appear to be a discussion of the 1960s in America; it is not. Reading through Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s indispensable essay “Do You Believe in Magic?“, cited and quoted by Scott Kaufman here and here (with follow-up in the comments by Sean), it is clear that more than the Sixties, McCann and Szalay are out to expose “a cherished and ultimately comforting folklore” that still commands respect today: the idea that “the analysis of [symbolic or cultural] forms itself constitutes significant political action, or that the ability to affect culture is, independent of other means, also therefore politically efficacious,” and that “to provide, as [C. Wright] Mills put it, ‘alternative definitions of reality’ could itself be the most radically political of acts.” McCann and Szalay identify this idea with almost the entire canon of postmodern thought, from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to Jean-Francois Lyotard and Susan Sontag.
McCann and Szalay’s essay splits down the middle. On the one hand, it is a legitimate attack on currents of fuzzy thinking and complacent libertarianism within the New Left and academia. On the other, it is part of a contemporary movement that seeks to deride what the Sixties accomplished, which was reviving society-wide conversation about the relationship of politics to the rest of life.
For my own part, this is the right occasion to explain what I believe “the analysis of symbolic or cultural forms” can accomplish, including through the academic work of scholars and teachers of literature. I hope it will become clear how I understand the political implications of what McCann and Szalay call “self-realization”—deliberately (and justly) echoing the wretched tide of self-help manuals—but which one might also call “self-fashioning.” I also hope to clarify the charges of defeatism that I leveled in my post “Look Back In Anger,” and to explore what alternatives exist: the shape of things to come.
While McCann and Szalay criticize academics who believe in the political efficacy of their symbolic labors, I would argue that most scholars working on culture now invoke “the political” in bad faith, with little hope of creating real change, out of a desire to seem compassionate and politically involved to hiring committees and their peers. The proof is in the pessimism: the message is that political change is impossible, even if an awareness of injustice is still praiseworthy. This idea has become so dominant that when even the most influential thinkers depart from it, their departures are unpersuasive to their devoted readers. Gayatri Spivak recently asserted that Derrida’s anti-imperialist, anti-American stance in the first essay of his late book Rogues actually violates the deconstructionist stricture of the “double bind,” the inescapable ambiguity of intentional action, including political action. Jodi Dean, in her post “Et tu, Zizek?“, wrote in bitter disappointment about Zizek’s own attempt to put forward an ideal of “inclusion”:
With this emphasis on inclusion, Zizek joins the ranks of the liberals, deconstructionists, and multiculturalists he’s been attacking for nearly 20 years. He repeats the key word of of democratic theory: inclusion. What really matters is making sure that everyone is included, that every voice is heard, that everyone is part of the process. Please. It’s the ultimate child’s version of politics: they aren’t letting me play!
Thus, “the political” has become both a stifling, prerequisite focus for literary readings and an absurdity. As a mode of critical discourse, it is marked by an oscillation between admissions of powerlessness ("there is no escape from late capitalism") and moments of earnest polemic ("Democracy must be inclusive!") that come off as lapses of rigor and do not reach whatever audience might benefit from them.
Some critical theorists try to avoid sounding corny or naïve by exiling their political optimism to a purely theoretical or ineffable realm, a move McCann and Szalay lampoon as “The art of the impossible.” To take one example, in uncomplicatedly’s excellent new post there is a description of the queer theory version of this:
This was particularly true of the queer theorists, at least two of whom focused on queer reading practice as something that draws on textual possibilities rather than textual actualities to move toward an imagined utopian future that is acknowledged as imagined, and yet still must be imagined.
Notice that this programmatic thesis still never moves beyond the imaginative act: it truly is magical thinking to believe that simply imagining something will eventually bring it about. It reads like a parody of Beckett: “I can’t go on. I’ll imagine I’m getting somewhere.”
One alternative to buzzwords, magical thinking, and sheer resignation is to look for the answer outside of literature. On its face, nothing could be more sensible: why turn to literature rather than political activism for political change? As a transition from culture to politics, McCann and Szalay favorably invoke “the notion that plays, poems, movies, and novels might change the world because they might lead to action in other more directly political contexts.” According to them, this was precisely what was lost when the focus shifted to “care of the self.” (As I will discuss later, there is an analogy here with the argument Walter Benn Michaels made in Against Diversity, where he accused American intellectuals of preserving oppressive class inequalities by focusing on the distractions of culture and heritage.)
Therefore, in order to accept McCann and Szalay’s argument, you have to accept two foundational claims. First, you have to distinguish between the analysis of symbolic or cultural forms (criticism, critical theory), and the symbolic or cultural forms themselves (e.g. plays, poems, movies, and novels). Second, you have to accept the opposition between “care of the self” and direct political action, which as a result acquires the sense of “caring for others.”
In response to both claims, I want to invoke the Derridean idea that “there is nothing outside the text.” Rather than a plurality of different contexts—the personal, the political, the critical, the literary—there is a single (though not unified or homogeneous) political and cultural moment in which individuals make their way. The distinction between analysis of cultural and symbolic forms, which is not politically significant, and the forms themselves, which are, does not hold up. To think otherwise, you would have to believe that writers like Herbert Marcuse, Norman Mailer, and C. Wright Mills, who McCann and Szalay hold partly responsible for setting the agenda of the New Left, were not exerting their influence through “analysis of cultural and symbolic forms.” In fact, all we get of them is analysis: Mailer analyzing the Yippies, Mills analyzing “the cultural apparatus,” Marcuse analyzing the American political situation. To the extent that McCann and Szalay are trying to immunize us against the New Left’s alibis for action, they are also trying to produce critical work of political significance. Whether or not you agree with Marcuse, Mills and the rest, there is no question that what they thought about culture and art ended up mattering just as much as the things themselves. In some cases, the analysis mattered more than the original. It is doubtful that conceptual clusters like “the Dionysian” would have assumed such importance in the 1960s without Nietzsche’s original analysis in The Birth of Tragedy and its reception among philosophers and artists, including within American universities.
***
The second claim, about the difference between self-fashioning and political action, is more challenging and serious. Much of what McCann and Szalay write is beyond dispute. John Lennon’s angry “You better free your mind instead” can stand as well as anything for the disembodied project of turning on to a set of anti-Establishment higher truths instead of working for concrete reforms. It is very troubling that Jean-Francois Lyotard praises “temporary contracts” in his book The Postmodern Condition as though he does not know or does not care that temporary hiring has become an incredibly successful way of denying workers adequate wages, benefits, and representation. Finally, much more work should be done along lines McCann and Szalay suggest where they point out the relationship between the myth of the self-made American professional and the “magic” of the self. This is handled quite literally in recent films, serials, and books about magical heroes (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, etc.), most of which have a depressing “lesson” to teach about professional responsibility and the obligation to excel.
Granting all of that, in order to accept McCann and Szalay’s argument, you have to define direct political action and distinguish it from the symbolic. They never do this, but perhaps we can use as a guide the following lines from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s book Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture:
From the standpoint of social justice, the big gains that have been achieved in our society over the past half-century have all come from measured reform within the system. The civil rights movement and the feminist movement have both achieved tangible gains in the welfare of disadvantaged groups, while the social safety net provided by the welfare state has vastly improved the conditions of all citizens. But these gains have not been achieved by “unplugging” people from the web of illusions that governs their lives. They have been achieved through the laborious process of democratic political action—through people making arguments, conducting studies, assembling coalitions and legislating change. We would like to see more of this. Less fun perhaps, but potentially much more useful.
McCann and Szalay also mention feminism as among the “instances of highly significant political action during the sixties,” so perhaps it is worth starting there in our consideration of this split between “democratic political action” and self-fashioning/symbolic action. All along, feminists have taken on the tasks Heath and Potter endorse: making arguments, conducting studies, assembling coalitions and legislating change. However, they have also done the other kinds of work that McCann and Szalay associate with Michel Foucault and other postmodernists. Looking all the way back to 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, she found it necessary to devote fully one-fifth of that enormous and seminal volume to “Myths,” including countercurrent readings of literary works by Breton, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, and others. The rest of the book is concerned with the formative years and adult situation of women, and leads to the final section, entitled “Liberation,” where de Beauvoir writes like this:
Sometimes [the modern woman] gives up her independence entirely and becomes no more than an amoureuse; more often she essays a compromise; but idolatrous love, the love that means abdication, is devastating; it occupies every thought, every moment, it is obsessing, tyrannical.
If she meets with professional disappointments, the woman passionately seeks refuge in her love; then her frustrations are expressed in scenes and disappointments at her lover’s expense. [...] Thus the independent woman of today is torn between her professional interests and the problems of her sexual life; it is difficult for her to strike a balance between the two; if she does, it is at the price of concessions, sacrifices, acrobatics, which require her to be in a constant state of tension. Here, rather than in physiological data, must be sought the reason for the nervousness and the frailty often observed in her. (730-731)
Plainly, de Beauvoir is speaking here about care of the self, or rather the lack of care that follows from an impossible situation. She is articulating a set of problems that have complicated solutions, some of which are concrete, such as maternity leave, and some of which are not, such as overcoming in both genders a set of expectations about how “women in love” ought to behave. The either/or of political action or self-concern does not make sense here.
Fast-forwarding to the present, it is again impossible to draw any distinction between the selves of persons involved in the contemporary feminist movement, and the nuts-and-bolts political organizing and lobbying that feminist organizations perform. The feminist email lists, newsletters, blog networks and other print media that exist combine tactical organizing drives with conversations about what it is like to be a woman in Western society, and what it is like to be a feminist. They also function as support networks for survivors of sexual assault, people making difficult personal choices (e.g. becoming transgender), and others. These functions are integrated with each other; in terms of a given person’s interaction with the feminist movement, they can become involved with it for any one of many different reasons, find what they are specifically looking for, and then end up participating in the other work the community is doing.
***
In response to this glance at feminism, one might protest that feminism, like the civil rights and gay rights movements, combines political organizing with personal concerns because it is bound up with the matter of identity: women experience certain things, above all oppression, in their daily lives because they were born women. According to this theory, the New Left has been relatively good at securing what we might call “equal rights under capitalism” for women, homosexuals, African-Americans, and the like, while continuing to be totally unsuccessful at altering the class structure. In fact, capitalism has encouraged people to become obsessed with the rights and experiences that pertain to their particular identities, since this prevents them from conceiving of broader alliances.
This is basically the argument that Walter Benn Michaels made in The Trouble With Diversity. It is also related to the argument that Kenneth Warren makes in So Black and Blue, where he suggests that the racism that originally made Invisible Man so compelling is no longer enough of a pandemic to justify the novel’s structure and argument. In other words, books about racism, such as Invisible Man, are becoming something of a historical curiosity thanks to the gains of the civil rights movement and etc. Thus Michaels: race is less of a real problem than it is a distraction from class.
I won’t attempt to touch the issue of whether the historical need for a book like Invisible Man or an ideological cluster like feminism has passed, except to say that very few people involved in social justice movements outside academia would agree with these literary critics. I will, however, point out that the success of these movements depended greatly on the symbolic construction or appropriation of apparently “inborn” identities. It is very easy to point out how tricky and unreliable a category like “femaleness” or “blackness” is; we now have a word, essentialism, for wrongly projecting certain qualities of person or appearance onto a given social group. Nonetheless, because blackness was a marker of inferiority in American culture, it could be transformed into the symbol of a great injustice. Because women experienced a certain kind of patriarchal oppression, they could organize. Identification is thus not a peculiar side effect of political organizing. It is the very condition of possibility for political movements. Universality, which must always remain something of an empty category, has to be realized dialectically through its relationship with the concrete formations of solidarity—the movement from the specificity of personal experience to the awareness that, for example, men can be feminists, or that there is an analogy between oppression based on race and oppression based on sexual orientation.
An excellent example of the political power of symbolic identifications—a positive example, rather than the obvious-but-still-relevant negative example of Nazism—is the environmental movement. The huge sea change in American attitudes towards the environment had to do with a shift in identity categories: at the movement’s peak, 70% of Americans identified themselves as “environmentalists.” This meant that they developed a certain picture of a healthily functioning world in which human beings are caretakers who receive physical health and spiritual nourishment from unspoiled wildernesses and functioning ecosystems. Furthermore, they saw this effort as a collective enterprise, involving everybody who lived “on Earth,” now understood (roughly speaking) as a sort of shared dwelling. We have by now spent so many decades around such artifacts as pictures of the little earth taken from space that we have forgotten how they gradually came to predominate over other space pictures, especially pictures of astronauts and the American flag taken on the moon. Support for the protection of endangered species was hugely dependent on the imaginative investment in a rapport with other living things based on the model of pet ownership—not only winsome pictures of cute wild animals, but also the difference between new, ecological fictions (like the young adult books My Side of the Mountain, The Sign of the Beaver, or The Island of the Blue Dolphins) and older “zoo” fictions, such as The Swiss Family Robinson. The environmental movement was a movement of laws, recycling drives, and petitions. It was (and is) also a symbolic project meant to create new identifications and identity categories through which “self-realization” could come to mean realizing in daily practice, and perhaps through a newly created vocation like “environmental law,” one’s responsibility to a fragile Earth.
***
Through their readings of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, several texts by Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo’s The Names, McCann and Szalay try to enumerate and connect various threads in the counterculture. They discover a strange merging of spirituality, especially LeGuin’s Taoism, with modern versions of Dada. They correctly point out the Dadaist emphasis on “babbling” as a form of “purer” speech (DeLillo), as well as the counterculture interest in spontaneity and spectacle, which Heath and Potter link to Guy Debord and the Situationists. Existing side by side with the idea that we should “let things be,” abandoning our rational impulse to order and “correct” reality through government, is the idea that we should act spontaneously and provocatively in order to be ourselves and awaken others. McCann and Szalay weave the magic of babbling or incantatory speech, the magic of Taoist nonaction, and the magic of spontaneous behavior together with New Age paganism and the Yippies’ levitation of the Pentagon. So much of what passed for radicalism in the Sixties was incompetent and impractical that McCann and Szalay are often on firm ground, dispatching their antagonists with ease. It is absurd for progressives to think of the Right as a source of libertarian allies, as William Domhoff did, or to proclaim that radical politics has to proceed without an agenda and without organized strategy, as Tom Hayden did. It is frustrating to see “mystery” invoked as a way around imagining what forms political change ought to take.
At certain points, the trouble with the essay is that it grants too much authority to figures who were visible but not necessarily central to the counterculture and the New Left. For example, while many people have heard of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, they were not leaders of the New Left; rather, they just occasionally commanded media attention for their incoherent attempts at performative satire. From the standpoint of the enormous anti-war movement and other social justice movements, they were marginal and a joke.
In other cases, the essay tries to collapse the distinction between literature and polemic, at the expense of more complex, less literal interpretations. For example, The Crying of Lot 49 gets reduced at one point to an “anarchist complaint against the state monopoly on the mail.” While it is true that the novel partly concerns an alternative postal system used by an underground movement, the implications of this system (called W.A.S.T.E. and carried through the trash) have more to do with interest in alternative communities and ideas than with some plan to privatize shipping. For example, the W.A.S.T.E. system is highly resonant in the present moment, when a totalitarian country like China can work in partnership with corporations like Google to regulate how 20% of the world’s population uses the Internet.
In Toni Morrison’s book Sula, Morrison writes about the hope that keeps poor African-Americans “convinced that some magic ‘government’ was going to lift them up.” McCann and Szalay comment that “It says a good deal about Morrison’s perspective that in an oeuvre where ghosts and omens are ordinary, government and the other mundane modes of protecting one’s interests appear magical.” In fact, the quotation only says a good deal about Morrison’s characters, for whom, as for the overwhelming majority of Americans, the world is still haunted (or “enchanted,” to use Charles Taylor’s term). These are people who do not have friendly or frequent contact with government officials, and who understand that at present the government only rarely works on their behalf. While in theory the government could protect their interests, in practice it does not, and since they don’t understand its workings, their hopeless hope in it really is, for them, a sort of superstition. It is hard to understand why this should be characterized as irrationality on Morrison’s part, when it is in fact a cry of protest against a condition of ignorance and neglect.
The treatment of Ken Kesey brings up another difficulty: writers are simply not consistent in their meanings or value systems. It is true that both One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion have unsettling features. Cuckoo’s Nest casts African-Americans and one powerful woman (Nurse Ratched) as villains. This evidence of racism and misogyny, while deplorable, does not make Cuckoo’s Nest identical to Sometimes A Great Notion, which (as McCann and Szalay point out) is an awful, baggy paean to American business against all odds (and labor unions) that could have been written by Ayn Rand. One cannot simply read Notion back into Cuckoo’s Nest and make Cuckoo’s Nest into “a thinly veiled assault on the New Deal.” (Notice how Pynchon is treated in an absolutely literal fashion, while Kesey is turned into a massively indirect but specific allegorist.) The New Deal was not primarily concerned with founding mental health institutions, and the novel’s anti-institutional message is clearly applicable to private institutions and the corporate exercise of power.
But the biggest problem with “Do You Believe In Magic?” is that it will not truck with the fuzzy, expansive, holistic thinking that constitutes our symbolic identities. It will not examine the way that somewhat unrelated things, such as the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the decriminalization of narcotics, and the anti-consumerist movement become connected in people’s minds as part of an arbitrary but coherent set of beliefs about themselves-in-the-world (Martin Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world"). In fact, we are all quite familiar with the political implications of a fuzzy ideological Weltanschauung, since we are easily able to distinguish the politics of the Quakers or the Unitarians from the politics of most Southern Baptist or Mormon churches, or the general political differences between reform and conservative Jewish congregations. But we have less experience with secular narratives, and tend to take them less seriously.
The fact is that everywhere the counterculture has lost ground, the result has been disturbing, reactionary regression. For example, the gradual decline of the myth of the “natural” man and woman, wearing loose clothing or none at all, has been accompanied by the ferocious retrenchment of dress codes, school uniforms, and the consumerist renascence of endless discourse about high fashion as well as the invention of “metrosexuality.” The body itself has been colonized by gym culture and plastic surgery, which is to say that it has also been permeated by consumer anxieties. The height of the backlash against “free love” coincided with calls for teaching abstinence in schools, the revitalization of the anti-abortion movement, and the sudden visibility of patriarchal chastity vows. Manufactured hysteria about new synthetic drugs, particularly MDMA ("ecstasy"), helped to shut down for years any serious discussion about decriminalization. With gas prices being what they currently are, after years of reckless over-consumption by Americans driving SUVs, it is nauseating to think of Trey Parker and Matt Stone congratulating themselves for their South Park parody of smug San Franciscans in hybrid cars.
The same goes for counterculture paranoia and resistance to over-planning. The biggest planners in America are not government officials, but rather corporations like the Irvine Corporation, which enforce segregation by class and ethnicity through planned communities, gated communities, toll roads, and shopping districts. The countercultural spirit of a work like The Death and Life of Great American Cities is utterly relevant to conversations about spontaneity and “letting things be,” in the sense of the organic evolution of integrated, dense, functional urban communities as opposed to barricaded suburbs. When George Bush and Colin Powell announced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as well as ties to al-Qaeda, the people who immediately and sensibly disbelieved them were on the Left, drawing their skepticism from a general mistrust of government hawks. Libertarians and moderate conservatives, for all their vaunted, cranky independence of mind, took a very long time to reach the conclusion that these particular pieces of information were faulty. Countercultural ideas about self-expression and self-realization are bulwarks against the right-wing drive to falsify learning and exacerbate inequality by making standardized tests and graduation benchmarks more important in American classrooms than individualized instruction and self-directed work (as well as more important than conversations about increasing funding for education).
Thus, while the large ideological syntheses of the counterculture have to be taken with a grain of salt, particularly its bombastic Freudian opposition between Life/Love and Death/Fascism, the cultural artifacts of the Sixties did express something with implications for almost every major social and political issue of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The New Deal was as much an effort to stave off more radical political reforms as it was an earnest attempt to break with 1920s laissez-faire policies; as Roosevelt himself said at the 1932 Democratic Convention, “the failure of Republican leaders to solve our troubles may degenerate into unreasoning radicalism.” Thus it is not surprising that the miseries of the Cold War and then the justifications for invading Vietnam all took place under Democratic leadership: ameliorating the Depression was a strategy of containment, and so was re-taking Saigon. Intuitively, the New Left understood that New Deal progressivism—which becomes, by default, the gold standard for McCann and Szalay—was a tenuous compromise between popular and corporate interests in a time of crisis, not a first step on the path towards realizing lasting equality and justice. “Magic” was, of course, the New Age umbrella term for recycled superstitions, but it was also a metaphor for the holistic way that politics happens in the lives of individuals and societies. Their opinions about a whole number of different issues were formed and changed by a process that might begin with one issue, one conversation, one protest march: qualitative leaps are as real and politically significant as gradual change. The New Deal itself was one such leap, following as it did Coolidge and Hoover’s refusal to take an activist approach to regulating and stimulating the economy.
The smallest incidents of our lives, the most mundane habits of thought and practice, are preparation for the unexpected moments when we have to commit ourselves openly, amidst controversy. In that sense Martin Heidegger’s whole early life as a young existentialist philosopher prepared him for the rise of the Nazi party, and the moment when he would publicly endorse Hitler and put himself to work for fascism. It was also preparation for his decision to cut himself off from the world, to distance himself from his humiliating collaboration, and to write against modernity from the shelter of his hut in the Black Forest. Gandhi’s experiences and resolutions as a young student in England, and then as a young barrister in South Africa, were preparation not only for the Indian struggle for independence, but also made inevitable his positions before and after the Partition. But it remains mysterious to us, as artists of ourselves, what exactly the consequences of that perpetual making will be. We do not pick up Invisible Man with the intention of voting against a new anti-immigration law, nor do we study medicine in order to support stem cell research, but that is what happens. Our political lives are mediated by the communities to which we belong, the culture we seek out, and the concept of ourselves we care to uphold.
McCann and Szalay are deeply critical of the turn towards professionalism as the ultimate meaning of self-fashioning, but in fact they leave academics with very few options besides the supposedly apolitical practice of cultural criticism. In the Sixties, a large number of people tried to forge a culture that would address the political issues of the day through a set of broad concepts, such as individual freedom, intellectual curiosity, expressive spontaneity, equality of persons, harmony with nature, syncretic religious practice, and non-hierarchical communities of mutual aid. Concrete political positions and collective action would flow from these general principles. This effort was something of a failure. The threat of the Vietnam War and the draft were essential to the efficacy of the New Left, and the end of the war saw the dismantlement of the progressive effort to promote a comprehensive radicalism. But that is only to say that the work remains unfinished. We are still called to articulate a way of living justly in the world, and to constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.
Comments
A good post, Joseph. I’m a little bit—itchy, or something—about the treatment of the environmental movement, though. On the one hand, you’re right that the environmental movement, as movement, focussed on changing how people thought of themselves, as well as on changes in practice. On the other, to some extent it’s no longer a movement in this sense. When the rulers of China are planning the next twenty years of growth of that country with global environmental constraints as one of the key factors, whether people in the U.S. think of themselves in a particular way or not isn’t really the point.
The important public intellectuals for environmentalists have generally been scientists, not literary types—from Rachel Carson to Jared Diamond (who is, I think, the most important public intellectual right now). It’s the best guess of scientists that the next decade is going to be critical. That makes this still a political problem, of course, but it’s an existential political problem at the societal level, not at the individual level.
The problem with literary self-fashioning, if I can use that as a sort of shorthand, is that its boundaries don’t correspond to real-world boundaries. Cultural movements lead naturally to culture war, and really, that’s not a helpful model for helping people to understand that one “side” is right and the other “side” is deluded, incorrect, not merely culturally different.
A point your post doesn’t necessarily exclude: if there is a sharp distinction between (useless) symbolic formations and (useful, real) political activism, why is it that “real” political events always carry with them their own symbolism? It wasn’t just the New Left that was trying to change symbolic forms, etc.—the right has done so with aplomb, from the extreme example of Nazism down to our present-day attempts to manufacture a John Wayne president.
Perhaps it is the very separation between the two moments that hobbles the Left—the exercise of power is always also a symbolic operation and vice versa. A symbolic operation that is unaccompanied by explicit political strategizing isn’t something other than an attempt at exercising political power—it’s just an ineffective attempt. (I’m kind of getting this from my recent Agamben reading, though Agamben would obviously take the analysis more in the direction of his distinctive “messianic nihilism” rather than prescribing some type of positive strategy to the Left.)
Joe: Great post, but like Rich I have a quibble. I think there may be some confusion of cause and effect here:
We do not pick up Invisible Man with the intention of voting against a new anti-immigration law, nor do we study medicine in order to support stem cell research, but that is what happens. Our political lives are mediated by the communities to which we belong, the culture we seek out, and the concept of ourselves we care to uphold.
Isn’t it your experience that people tend to either avoid culture that doesn’t fit their political worldview, or else adapt it to that worldview? To take the obvious example, I know left-wing people who think Atlas Shrugged is well-written, but found it had no effect on their political philosophy. Other leftists simply won’t read it, and the people who think it’s a Great Book universally agree with its political philosophy. Or take another example: I’m about to start teaching The Merchant of Venice to undergrads, and all the criticism I’ve read on the character of Shylock aims to either reframe the presentation of Shylock to fit modern liberal principles of tolerance, or to explain and mitigate Shakespeare’s lack of adherence to those principles. In both cases, it seems like the rightness of our political beliefs is the assumption on which the reception of the work rests. Heck, even anti-multicultural, anti-affirmative action conservatives were able to co-opt King’s “content of their character” speech.
None of this is to say that literature and culture don’t play a role in our political self-fashioning. But I’m curious to know how you see people using literature to form our political selves, rather than as rhetorical examples of something we’ve already decided to believe.
Adam,
I think you’re right, and I think part of the problem is that many people on the Left associate symbolic appeals with Fascism, a type of thinking that leads to the uninspiring “vote for us because we’re smarter and better informed” approach to losing elections.
Rich,
By suggesting that the environmental movement was partly a symbolic enterprise, I was in no way suggesting that the creators of those symbolic frameworks were litterateurs. A book like Silent Spring was what we might call “symbolically efficacious” (with apologies to the Lacanians) because, in addition to being a good scientist, Carson could write. Likewise Jared Diamond.
It’s also true that the conversation about environmental protection has become more straightforwardly analytical with respect to certain issues, global warming most of all. However, issues like fuel consumption (i.e. buying a hot rod or tank versus buying a Prius) and food (eating organic/vegan/vegetarian) are still affected by culture, and there’s no way to avoid cultural clashes and tensions. These wars are fought not with facts, but with rhetoric; where I grew up, in Northern California, the divide between environmentalists and pro-logging, pro-development types was a matter of culture, not a matter of facts.
You might say that people should not become irrational about something like their choice of car, but should simply choose a hybrid car because it is the best thing to do for the environment. But all that does is hide a whole series of assumptions about enlightened self-interest, rationality, and one’s place in the world.
tomemos,
I absolutely see what you’re saying, and my response would be, “One swallow does not make a summer,” but a lot of swallows do, assuming that a large number of swallows could change global weather patterns.
Atlas Shrugged, by itself, is not going to make a huge difference in your life. It only reinforces a certain direction you might take (what it reinforces depends, for example, on whether you like it or hate it). It plays its part in conjunction with a lot of other, similar interactions (as Hegel would put it, at a certain magnitude a change in quantity becomes a change in quality). Patterns, not exceptional instances, are significant, in self-fashioning as in (for example) diet.
People usually won’t make a lot of noise about the ways that they gradually change while interacting with culture they find sympathetic. They’ll go quiet about an issue for a while, and then later, if asked about how they’ve changed, will talk about an old self ("I used to...") and a new self.
Finally, a lot of people on the Left are drawn to certain pieces of reactionary culture; also, a lot of people on the Left aren’t nearly as progressive (or radical) as they like to believe.
tomemos,
I should say something more about your discussion of adapting a text to fit one’s idea of the world. This falls out a lot of different ways, and is a fascinating topic. I’ll suggest some of the ways this can happen:
1) A person is just wrong about a text. They think they agree with it, but they don’t. In this case, if they are seriously challenged, they will drop it and take up a different text.
2) A person is using a text cynically because a lot of people like it (for example a MLK speech). Again, these sorts of appropriations don’t stand up well to challenges, and tend to flame out.
3) A text is ambiguous in meaning and so seems to fit every case. For example, a movie that urges people to follow their dreams could work for all different kinds of persons and politics. In my experience, these “one size fit all” myths have almost zero effect other than providing comfort.
4) A person claims to only have a particular interest in a text, but in fact has a much more complex relationship to it, knowingly or not. This is, I think, most common of all. In my experience, most entertainment happens through a symbolic and indirect conversation about ideology, but most conversations about entertainment treat it as a somatic phenomenon—a passing thrill that has nothing whatsoever to do with values and beliefs. It’s also common for people to give us complex and perhaps convincing reasons for why they like something, only to later prove to us that we should have stuck with Occam’s Razor.
"where I grew up, in Northern California, the divide between environmentalists and pro-logging, pro-development types was a matter of culture, not a matter of facts”
Which shows that that dispute was at an early stage. I’m trying to move the focus away from “should” statements, even those like “one should act towards rational self interest”, and towards more of a sense of limits. The people who want unrestrained petroleum fuel consumption have a window of time during which they can treat it as a cultural issue, yes. But after that, they’re going to lose. It could happen in all sorts of ways, such as through governmental fiat, ever-steepening economic cost, or societal breakdown, but it’s going to happen.
An emphasis on individual self-fashioning is all very well. But the problems that are going to absorb people in the near term aren’t really individual. All that was part of a historical era that is now almost over.
Joseph,
I’m interested in your critique of Walter Benn Michaels, which I think is very well aimed. For him, identity is the end of the line. If we are talking about identity, then we are not talking about class and if we are not talking about class then we are not really doing politics. Hardt and Negri, in contrast, try to build an idea of identity on class, on labor (something that some would argue has been going on in academic marxism for quite some time), in order to get the ball rolling for a kind of radical class politics. Identity as a new kind of worker becomes the precondition for a latter-day politics of class. This politics, in turn, could become a new kind of universalism that is able to be conscious of its own constructedness. But just when this starts sounding good to me, we are back among the pitfalls of the old version of identity (something Michaels doesn’t hesitate to point out) or the “strategic essentialism” now repudiated by Spivak. The critique of postmodernist thinking that the “queer” excerpt above points to, that politics can only now be imagined in terms of possibility, would seem to obtain in your conclusion. The claim that our experience (that is, the concrete) necessarily must prepare us for some future radical action would seem to restate the postmodern politics of possibility problem. Politics can never be seen as concrete, and art is forever simply pointing the way toward some inarticulable new form of politics. The same would seem to be the case for the concluding “call” to a more courageous and competent being. Why not say what that being is and does? It seems to me that the difference between sixties radicalism and postmodern progressivism is that the sixties version was at least to some extent proscriptive. The postmodern version (too often described as ‘anything goes’) refuses to imagine what its ideal agent looks like (albeit out of absolutely good intentions) but in so doing is never able to settle on a concrete politics of its own.
marmorea,
For more on Walter Benn Michaels, you might want to look at my post “The Man In Black,” which discusses efforts to build an American version of Hardt and Negri’s constructed universalism (the “men in black"), though certainly not in a way congruent with their “multitude.”
Let’s not overstate the aphasic or indeterminate element in the process of forming one’s political identity. What we are doing is important in itself as well as being preparation for some future moment of crisis; while it is true that we do not know exactly what new circumstances will emerge to try us, we are at every moment responsible beings. By putting the realization of his philosophical project completely out of reach (exiling it to the inaccessible, “ontological” realm), Heidegger was already interpreting himself in an unethical fashion. The collaboration with Hitler was only a greater step under more radical circumstances. Likewise, when Gandhi protested the treatment of Indians in South Africa, he was already doing something ethically valuable, even if it wasn’t on the same scale as the movement for Indian home rule.
The very end of the post is meant somewhat playfully, since the second part of the last sentence is taken verbatim from Roosevelt’s speech announcing the New Deal. I wanted to show that Roosevelt himself moves between invoking the personal, as he does here, and talking pragmatically about solving domestic problems through federal policy. That said, I do agree that the ending remains somewhat vague. The difference is the reason for it—I have to be vague here because the medium does not permit a book. That said, I hope it is clear enough that I consider Simone de Beauvoir and Ken Kesey (specifically in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) to be doing the kind of courageous, valuable cultural work towards which I’m looking at the end of the post. I would add that Herbert Marcuse, something of a villain in “Do You Believe In Magic?,” takes on the difficult task of concrete prophecy in Eros and Civilization.
“Strategic essentialism” is the kind of term that floats around in the abstract, airless world of academic debate but never acquires much relevance to the real world. Every person I know has some kind of relationship to both their gender and their race. These relationships may be utterly different from the way other people relate to their identity categories, but they’re not simply absent. If, in the parlance of our times, somebody “relates” to what we are saying and identifies with it, it is simple defeatism to turn the screw again and fret about whether we can approve of their identification.
Benn Michaels hopes to exorcize the demon of identity politics from these discussions, but the demon reemerges once you attempt to convince people to theme selves as part of a certain class and all the symbolic, narrative, and historical framework that entails. No true attention to class can continue until Americans who are severely hurt by the tanking economy see themselves as poor.
It’s not like the powers that be don’t use identity to woo you away from the truth of your life. My Mastercard always tells me, “Sure, son, you have no money, but you’re well educated, and don’t you deserve to identify not with all those poor schmucks around you but rather with those lucky bastards over you. And with Mastercard, you still can be laid off and buy the clothes, the vacations, the Whole Foods shopping, the Mini, and all the accoutrements of living outside of your “true” class.
Getting rid of any sense of identity might be helpful, if impossible. But the rich and powerful seem to find identity thinking quite effective. So why should others use identity thinking to their own ends.
Identity politics also have to do with levels of literacy and often an elite education. The resentment towards academia in the mainstream media (and in much of the society as a whole) has much to do with the perception that leftist academics might preach progress, social and economic justice, but when it comes to their own careers and privileges, might as well be using Ayn Rand’s (or Milton Friedman’s or Niccolo Machiavelli’s or some combination thereof) playbook. The Sixties, for all its radicalism, made the individualist and consumerist tendencies of American society unimaginably more powerful than before.
In that sense, the hostility towards academia can also be regarded as a revolt of the people against an elite (whom we have met and have discovered to be us). We’re an elite that does not behave as an elite, which, when its authority was respected by society, did not forget to pay tribute to virtue (instead we rail against the oppressiveness of the moral law, ridicule as a baleful historical construction the importance of living a virtuous life), and it’s understandable that folks find this quite confusing if not infuriating. We can jabber endlessly about the importance of equality, but our words will never persuade the uninitiated unless we do one of two deeply democratic things:
1. recognize the importance of virtue and personal restraint - on the basis that sexual fulfillment cannot be granted to everyone on an equal basis, but that it can be prohibited equally (see the argument of Dupuy via Zizek in _The Truth of Zizek_)
2. refuse to exercise our intelligence, bringing us on the same level with what is average (Vonnegut’s idea of a more advanced equality, which entails the deliberate curtailment of one’s natural advantages).
Stanley Rosen’s definition of an intellectual is helpful here - he is someone who “wishes neither to rule directly nor to conceal his wisdom.”
Or consider Gabriel Kolko’s point in _After Socialism_: “Marxism in the hands of professors finding clinching arguments in the texts made it far more opaque and it was inevitable that their confusion of Marxist discourse in an isolated academic environment with the realm world would only further delegitimize socialism… A segment of the professorate, not the proletariat, now plays the role of Marxism’s social base and audience. For them, ideas define reality almost wholly and Marxist theory lives on as an abstraction… The working classes and oppressed of humanity who ostensibly have the most to gain from social transformation have no interest whatsoever in this Marxist litany, and any attempt to comprehend such a huge difference in perceptions must also include a materialist interpretation of the Marxist professorate.”
Political Atheist,
I hate to begin this way, but one does end up wishing for greater engagement with the content of the actual post.
but when it comes to their own careers and privileges, might as well be using Ayn Rand’s (or Milton Friedman’s or Niccolo Machiavelli’s or some combination thereof) playbook
Not really. If that was their mindset, they’d just go to law school instead. Academia is a playground of privilege for very few of its members.
The Sixties, for all its radicalism, made the individualist and consumerist tendencies of American society unimaginably more powerful than before.
Again, no; the Sixties are really supposed to have done more for consumerism than the 20s or the digital media boom?
As for individualism, it isn’t the same thing as consumerism, except via a certain interpretation of Marx which I consider both wrong about Marx and wrong period.
Stanley Rosen’s definition of an intellectual is awfully power-hungry; he protests too much.
1) Chastity is not a virtue; it is a lifestyle choice. Sexual fulfillment does not mean the same thing to all people, and so does not have to be “granted” to everyone “on an equal basis.” (Neither does good conversation, for that matter.)
2) Vonnegut was being satiric, of course. “Our intelligence”? It is not something others lack.
Hostility towards academia is not a revolutionary impulse against elitism; it is the transference of rage that would be more legimitately directed towards the actual power elite who control wealth and political power.
Kolko isn’t exactly wrong, but his invocation of “materialism” at the end is an empty gesture.
Rich:
An emphasis on individual self-fashioning is all very well. But the problems that are going to absorb people in the near term aren’t really individual. All that was part of a historical era that is now almost over.
Legislation limiting fuel consumption would be nothing more (or less) than the legislative victory of a certain cultural mindset. It can’t be distinguished from culture wars. If vegans were doing as well in their culture war as the green energy crowd, we’d be talking about legislating limits on the consumption of meat.
Furthermore, China is a totalitarian country, and so useless as a model. The balance we have to preserve between social necessity and individual liberty can never be easily struck.