I've been on this for weeks. Literally weeks. Sometimes I wonder why people still read Unfogged instead of The Weblog -- OH! I know! It's because people at The Weblog keep putting up mile-long posts about Agamben and theology.
I took a glance at that debate. I guess I'm supposed to be ensorcelled by the high literary style, or whatever. Instead, it made me tired. Unsurprisingly, I think Burke is right, and his opponents not just wrong but in a deep way clueless.
On substance, I hear two things a lot:
1. "We on the Left need to be meaner and wittier"
2. "We need to understand The Right (dark chords!) enters public debate propagandistically, not dialectically"
Nice pointers, Baa. Though one could respond to Captain Planet that maybe interests or activists on the left do propaganda badly but they could learn. I actually don't think they can learn, though, for a fairly complicated reason. It's a bit tied to my response to the concept of "social construction": it's been a very powerful but also subtly disabling tool in academic analysis, because it leaves us perpetually in the position of pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz pulling the levers, of being Alice saying, "You're nothing but a pack of cards". We're drawn to things that others take to be "natural", we pronounce them "constructed" (usually empirically accurately), we renounce any ambition to destroy or even criticize the thing we have revealed to be constructed, but then we're kind of dumbfounded when its "naturalness" just happily goes on being assumed. Once you get into that mode, you are always going to approach making propaganda clumsily--you're trying to fly across the rooftops with Peter Pan without wanting to believe you can fly. The propagandists on the right somehow manage a feat that the left for various reasons cannot (and should not) of holding their sincere beliefs and their utterly shameless manipulations in one sack. It reminds me a bit of one aspect of Shi'a theology, the concept of taqiya, the proposition that it is a perfectly holy thing to lie to people outside the Shi'a community in order to protect the community.
MASH is really to the point, though. A very well-done bit of humor in response to Vietnam (and interestingly based on a book which was much more right-wing in its sensibilities, a pre-South Park Republican Republicanism) and would you credit it with accomplishing something that other kinds of protest and critique did not?
In many ways, I think the whole discussion recapitulates the antagonism between the situationists or situationist-types like the Yippies and the "serious New Left" core of SDS (the ones who packed their bags and drifted away once the Weather Underground types were in the ascension). Nominating a pig for President only gets you so far.
baa, I think you kinda missed the point then. The Tutor's been around a while, as you know, and I followed Wealth Bondage for a while, but eventually, like you, just got tired of it. As a friend said about it, "Yeah yeah."
But I found it remarkable for two reasons. First, and quite the opposite of you, I thought the Tutor's post superficially clueless but deeply on target. Set aside the partisanship; what needs to be done is to reclaim some public space for sanity, but engaging the nutsos (like, you'll admit, Horowitz) in a "serious" way is a trap. Wit and humor are the appropriate response. (Of course, thinking that the shadow play of masks has anything to do with political wit and humor is the deeply clueless part.)
But, even more, I found it remarkable because even the Tutor/Phil couldn't maintain his pose. He adopted Tim's tone, not the other way around. Without having thought it through, I'd say there's a lesson there about the difficulty of engaging in the right kind of political humor, or, more along the lines of Tim's comment 8, engaging in political humor that is consisten with one's identity.
MASH worked not because the doctors were irreverent and funny, but because they were deeply earnest and competent. That's the source of the credibility that underwrites their irreverance. What's the source of the credibilty of liberals now? Damned if I can see one.
So, yeah, I found it remarkable, because the Tutor's suggestion is right, but also because his attempted execution serves as a diagnostic example.
I'd be surprised if most of the commenters of this site, and those others I read, didn't place themselves well inside your camp. Lovely phrases like "a liberal sack of garbage" aside, I, for one, am unwilling to read through thirteen fatted sentences to get something clear and clean. Moreover, most of the people who seem most deeply angry are (or were) moderates, and seem most angry because of a felt injury to the "thoughtful decision making process" agreed upon in the 1990s. What is so striking about the anti-Bush fervor is that it looks pretty coextensive with "the Establishment."
But to the extent that HT is really saying, "Fuck being right and/or decent; let's win," I agree with him entirely. I blew past comfort with the potential results of the negotiated settlements that public reasoning yields just about the time I realized that voters weren't going to punish Bush for claiming the right to point at a citizen, declare him an enemy of the state, and throw him in jail indefinitely. (FWIW: the only two things I think are truly unforgivable in the last four odd years are the Padilla assertion and the torture memos (as opposed to the actual torture)). I lack sufficient trust that both sides are working from the same core principles – I'm not sure we can make a deal when their world view is orthogonal to ours.
Once you've reached that point, you look around, and it looks suspiciously like the Democrats have misunderstood the type of game they're in. Federal judge's husband and mother are murdered by (it's assumed) white racists; why don't we have a well-spoken bomb-thrower belling the Republicans with this act ("this is what you bought, American, when you re-elected George Bush")? Instead of worrying about winning the South (it's not happening folks) why aren't we turning it into the rest of the nation's bete noir ("don't let them ruin us" and cue the various social statistics)? Why don't we have a whole coded ideology that speaks to the worst in us and blames Southerners for our ills ("look at the federal money they suck up – they're the real welfare queens")? You want to win for a generation? Tell the nation that it's us against Alabama, and make'em pick.
Is any of this fair? Probably not. Is it right? Absolutely not – and it would hurt a lot of really good and really decent people if this strategy worked. (It should go without saying that if it worked we'd resettle Apo'er in the North or appoint him King of RTP). But here's the real point – I don't care. I want to win. I'll worry about being just later.
I agree that there's a tension between a certain kind of debunking skepticism and effective advocacy. You see it even in "the tutor's" post. Here's a thought experiment: if you were so committed to "side X " in some dispute that you intended to abandon the strictures of reasoned debate, would you announce this fact? This seems to me substantially less effective that publicizing one's intention to bluff frequently before sitting down at the poker table. Perhaps the stance was meant to give of the air of hard-edged pragmatism. To me, it signifies the exact opposite -- a weary (and perhaps elitist?) skepticism about the efficacy of action.
As it happens the left does not always approach issus with self-defeating skepticism and irony. Captain Planet -- well maybe not Captain Planet, but environmentalism broadly -- is a case of successful, sincere, issue advocacy (or propaganda, if we want to be pejorative). Children today want to be green; it's an accepted value. The environment was a non-issue in 1960, but now it exists as a real negative for Republicans (and pro-business ideologies generally). So it's not at all like the left always loses these battles, or always hinders itself with epistemic modesty.
Left-right politics aside, Let me veer for a moment into my own socio-philosophic polemic. I would not deny for a moment that the conception of social construction you describe has a powerful hold on anglo-american liberals. But isn't this the signal intellectual tradgedy of the past 50 years? This view of social constrution is just a daft, erroneous position. You wrote somewhere that you were tired of post-modernism, but couldn't stand the stupidity of anti-post modernism (excuse my clumsy paraphrase). Here's the thing: nothing is stupider than the breezy false inference that because practice X is socially constructed it is not also "natural." A person committed to this view in a strong way will have trouble influencing public debate, to be sure. I have trouble seeing how he'll tie his shoes in the morning.
Oh thank god for baa. I read that and thought, "god this is boring."
And I mean, really. Augustan satire is not boring. Nor is it all about bonhomie and hail-fellow-well-met. No, not Addison and Steele either. Not even close.
If I misread the post, my bad. So let me comfine myself to two brief points
One: Leftist/democrats/liberals/whatever designation have been plenty witty, plenty mean, and plenty propagandistic over the past 50 years. If members of that group think their team has erred tactically through excessive sincerity and deceny, and want to take the gloves off, just do it already. How many decades of failure can one blame on a reluctance to "get mean" before the excuse runs out?
Second -- yeah sure, engaging a nutcase seriously is a mistake. Excessive influence of Horowitz and Michael Moore, however, is like #234345 on the "problems with American democracy" list on my bedside table.
I readily grok that the Tutor is trying to carry forward Addison and Steele, but maybe that's one of the things sparking my disgruntlement. I don't think that's what he actually does, because the Augustan public sphere was in many ways completely earnest--it's practically the Habermasian dream in some respects. Yes, satire; yes, wit, but as Ogged points out about MASH (great observation) it works because the doctors (even in the film) are authentic. I read the Tutor as calling for a kind of conscious inauthencity, and I think in the end that's nothing more than a mutation of vanguardism. Moving ahead from the Augustan moment to another time and place, Oscar Wilde was what he was because that's what he really was, not because he'd made some tactical decision that his times required him to be a certain way. Be a wit if that's your calling: don't do it as a mask for something else.
Baa is also quite right about the absolutely fatal, destructive feature of "social construction": the inability to accept that a thing which is constructed is not also natural. The funny thing is that almost every academic I know will agree with that proposition--that something which as a history, which is "constructed", is also effectively "natural" to people living in the here and now. Can you choose to live without a modern conception of individuality? Uh, no. Does it mean that Og the Caveman thought of himself as a sovereign rights-bearing individual? No, no he didn't. It's a way of thinking and being that didn't exist at some moment in human history but which exists now. Good to know that, sure, but it doesn't cancel out the thing which is now said to have a history. It doesn't even make clear whether that thing is good or bad or none of the above: it's not a moral or ethical opinion, just an empirical assessment.
If you want an embodiment of where this goes so badly wrong, I think it's in Foucault and in scholarly work that descends from him. Foucault treats the historicity of the things he's interested in (mental illness, medicine, knowledge, sexuality, crime and punishment) as a moral discovery. His writings quiver with a kind of angry revelation: "Ah! I have found you out! You are not what you say you are! You have a history!" But then confronted with the fact of that j'accuse, Foucault was always too hip to cop to it. "Did I say that? Non, non! You fool! I pass no judgement." Because of course what's the alternative? You can't suddenly shift your entire paradigm and conceptualize mental illness the way that late medieval Europeans did. More importantly, why should you want to? You could only call for that if you had a moral assessment of late medieval European conceptions of mental illness that underlined why that would be preferable. And of course, thinking that way (about what subjectivity we'd rather inhabit) is a very modern and totalizing thing itself, non? Ah-hah, Mr. Bond, you have wandered into my trap! Release the crocodiles!
Weariness is precisely the emotion I feel at all this. So many very valid insights wrapped up in so many layers of denial and deferral, so many fairly ordinary empirical observations made out to be grand philosophical premises. So many labryrinths proudly constructed with no exits, and so much pride at the shit piling up in the dead-end passageways from the people who've locked themselves in the maze.
Thanks, Tim (Burke). And with all due respect to the so-called Tim, I don't think the issue is that we should be nastier and play to win; the important question is, "Why aren't we funny?" As unimportant as the question seems, I think it tells us a lot about the fact that liberals have no real identity in the current political landscape, and what I hope is that in someone trying to be funny and witty, and succeeding, we unfunny ones can find what it is that resonates, and that can be our "clue" to who we think we are.
And Tim B., I'm a lot more sympathetic to Foucault, probably because I've read very little of the scholarship "descended" from him. It's not quite fair to say that Foucault is "too hip" to "cop" to his anger; I'd say he's too smart to fall into the trap of advocating that we shift an entire paradigm. If he can be said to advocate any kind of action, it's precisely the small, local chipping away that Atrios, for example, recognizes is where the power of the citizen lies.
Finally, on natural vs. socially constructed: I have read enough post-Heideggerian stuff to know that you're right that this is a common (utopian) mistake and makes a complete hash of Heidegger (that's my frame of reference, anyway). Heidegger's "thrownness" is his term for our "always already" historical situation, like the impossibility of just deciding to do without the modern conception of individuality that you describe. The impossibility of escape, or of a truly fresh start, is behind his (semi) famous remark that the goal is not to get out of the hermeneutic circle, but to get into it in the right way (which is, again, what I take Foucault to be trying to do: to review the history so as to find the spots susceptible to action and change).
It's most often the American followers who "moralize" a continental thinker's conclusions. I think you're right to see a certain "moralism" in Foucault, but it gets grossly exaggerated in the followers. To a certain extent, making an apparently "moral" choice to prefer some previous era over our own could be a rhetorical lever to make the comparison sharper -- rather than judge previous eras by the modern structures they lacked or anticipated, it is a way of stripping modernity of its self-evident desirability. It's that tedious American earnestness that turns that little trick into an actual moral valuation.
Shorter this thread: liberals need to be earnest about their beliefs, but have a sense of humor. Satire is good, too, if it's funny and has a point. Also we need to talk the ordinary language of ordinary men (or, to stick with the theme at hand, we need to exercise the middle style).
[Does anyone besides me actually know much about the Augustans?]
Liberals are plenty funny, even on purpose lots of times.
I kid! Seriously though, whatever you want to say about Franken and Moore, they aren't humorless. Kinsley isn't humorless. And that Peter Beinart is a laugh riot.
Thanks, Tim (Burke). And with all due respect to the so-called Tim, I don't think the issue is that we should be nastier and play to win; the important question is, "Why aren't we funny?" As unimportant as the question seems, I think it tells us a lot about the fact that liberals have no real identity in the current political landscape, and what I hope is that in someone trying to be funny and witty, and succeeding, we unfunny ones can find what it is that resonates, and that can be our "clue" to who we think we are.
It would take years to unwind the three original posts in question. Feh.
Anyways. Do you not KNOW who you are? (Not absolutely literally, duh.)
Ah! Excellent. Ok, well, this: the Augustan public sphere was in many ways completely earnest--it's practically the Habermasian dream in some respects.
In some ways, sure. But in other ways, it was actually *incredibly* partisan and personal, and the "earnestness" of Addison and Steele (more Addison, anyway; Steele was not always so earnest) was often a rhetorical tool to advance political interests. No? Not to mention which, "the" Augustan public sphere is kind of a retroactive construction. Pope and Swift may have hung with Addison and Steele, but they sure as hell didn't write the same way.
And anyway, that's all the old-boys-club-canonical Augustans. There was plenty of bitchy bilious hackery going on, and the boys participated in it too, even if Hazlitt and his buddies pretended all was civility and high-minded public spirit.
Yes, good points. But it fits the Habermasian idealization in that they were all writing to and for each other, without the intervening layers of a media industry--that it was a kind of civic communication that was both public (available for any reader, even given how limited the class of "readers" was at that moment) and between relative peers. I don't necessarily buy the Habermasian idealization but I see what he finds interesting about that historical moment.
As far as earnestness as a rhetorical tool, well, absolutely. I think that's been my central point in this whole metadiscussion, that it's a mode of speaking that I think is to be preferred not merely because honesty is the best policy but because I take it to be a better way of operating rhetorically in relationship to the audiences that I think most need persuading or mobilizing. The public sphere is a kind of pretense, yes: so are the rules to any game.
Earnestness is for sure important, but I don't think there's this huge divide between "us" and "them." The audience clearly likes bile and venom, too. I think the point is honesty. Earnestness is honest; frankly, bile and venom are sometimes honest too. But talking about rhetoric *as* rhetoric all the damn time, without any sense of content, is boring and ineffective, yeah. Steele and Addison never did that. :)
Thanks, that helps. I definitely mean "honesty" instead of "earnestness", and I think that's one of the major issues that prompted my intervention over at Happy Tutor. I think if you're a wit by instinct and inclination, then bombs away. But if that's not you, if you're trying to carry out some rhetorical strategy that someone else has devised *for you*, I think it'll come across badly. The Augustans seem to me to have had a kind of authenticity in their public writings even when they were actually lying, manipulating or cheating.
Possibly. I'd have to think about that one. They were certainly very, very worried about authenticity in print--that's what all that Dunciad stuff was about. I agree commpletely, though, that it's ridicuous to strategize about how to deliver a message when there's no damn message to deliver.
What's the line I'm thinking of about a joke being the best weapon against totalitarianism?
My dog has no nose.
How does he smell?
Awful!
Posted by Walter Sobchak | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 5:27 PM
For some reason, at least for me, that Happy Tutor page is full of hieroglyphics now. Also, Tim Burke has a piece on the exchange on his site.
Posted by Mitch Mills | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 5:36 PM
Also, from John's post: "pee wee hermeneutics".
Solid gold.
Posted by Mitch Mills | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 5:38 PM
I've been on this for weeks. Literally weeks. Sometimes I wonder why people still read Unfogged instead of The Weblog -- OH! I know! It's because people at The Weblog keep putting up mile-long posts about Agamben and theology.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 8:21 PM
Fewer cock jokes at the Weblog, too, IIRC.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 8:34 PM
I don't know about that -- Kamala the Ugandan Giant may have just caught us up for the past two years of Unfogged cock jokes.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03- 9-05 11:25 PM
I took a glance at that debate. I guess I'm supposed to be ensorcelled by the high literary style, or whatever. Instead, it made me tired. Unsurprisingly, I think Burke is right, and his opponents not just wrong but in a deep way clueless.
On substance, I hear two things a lot:
1. "We on the Left need to be meaner and wittier"
2. "We need to understand The Right (dark chords!) enters public debate propagandistically, not dialectically"
Spare me.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 5:27 AM
Nice pointers, Baa. Though one could respond to Captain Planet that maybe interests or activists on the left do propaganda badly but they could learn. I actually don't think they can learn, though, for a fairly complicated reason. It's a bit tied to my response to the concept of "social construction": it's been a very powerful but also subtly disabling tool in academic analysis, because it leaves us perpetually in the position of pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz pulling the levers, of being Alice saying, "You're nothing but a pack of cards". We're drawn to things that others take to be "natural", we pronounce them "constructed" (usually empirically accurately), we renounce any ambition to destroy or even criticize the thing we have revealed to be constructed, but then we're kind of dumbfounded when its "naturalness" just happily goes on being assumed. Once you get into that mode, you are always going to approach making propaganda clumsily--you're trying to fly across the rooftops with Peter Pan without wanting to believe you can fly. The propagandists on the right somehow manage a feat that the left for various reasons cannot (and should not) of holding their sincere beliefs and their utterly shameless manipulations in one sack. It reminds me a bit of one aspect of Shi'a theology, the concept of taqiya, the proposition that it is a perfectly holy thing to lie to people outside the Shi'a community in order to protect the community.
MASH is really to the point, though. A very well-done bit of humor in response to Vietnam (and interestingly based on a book which was much more right-wing in its sensibilities, a pre-South Park Republican Republicanism) and would you credit it with accomplishing something that other kinds of protest and critique did not?
In many ways, I think the whole discussion recapitulates the antagonism between the situationists or situationist-types like the Yippies and the "serious New Left" core of SDS (the ones who packed their bags and drifted away once the Weather Underground types were in the ascension). Nominating a pig for President only gets you so far.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 5:55 AM
baa, I think you kinda missed the point then. The Tutor's been around a while, as you know, and I followed Wealth Bondage for a while, but eventually, like you, just got tired of it. As a friend said about it, "Yeah yeah."
But I found it remarkable for two reasons. First, and quite the opposite of you, I thought the Tutor's post superficially clueless but deeply on target. Set aside the partisanship; what needs to be done is to reclaim some public space for sanity, but engaging the nutsos (like, you'll admit, Horowitz) in a "serious" way is a trap. Wit and humor are the appropriate response. (Of course, thinking that the shadow play of masks has anything to do with political wit and humor is the deeply clueless part.)
But, even more, I found it remarkable because even the Tutor/Phil couldn't maintain his pose. He adopted Tim's tone, not the other way around. Without having thought it through, I'd say there's a lesson there about the difficulty of engaging in the right kind of political humor, or, more along the lines of Tim's comment 8, engaging in political humor that is consisten with one's identity.
MASH worked not because the doctors were irreverent and funny, but because they were deeply earnest and competent. That's the source of the credibility that underwrites their irreverance. What's the source of the credibilty of liberals now? Damned if I can see one.
So, yeah, I found it remarkable, because the Tutor's suggestion is right, but also because his attempted execution serves as a diagnostic example.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 7:57 AM
TB:
I'd be surprised if most of the commenters of this site, and those others I read, didn't place themselves well inside your camp. Lovely phrases like "a liberal sack of garbage" aside, I, for one, am unwilling to read through thirteen fatted sentences to get something clear and clean. Moreover, most of the people who seem most deeply angry are (or were) moderates, and seem most angry because of a felt injury to the "thoughtful decision making process" agreed upon in the 1990s. What is so striking about the anti-Bush fervor is that it looks pretty coextensive with "the Establishment."
But to the extent that HT is really saying, "Fuck being right and/or decent; let's win," I agree with him entirely. I blew past comfort with the potential results of the negotiated settlements that public reasoning yields just about the time I realized that voters weren't going to punish Bush for claiming the right to point at a citizen, declare him an enemy of the state, and throw him in jail indefinitely. (FWIW: the only two things I think are truly unforgivable in the last four odd years are the Padilla assertion and the torture memos (as opposed to the actual torture)). I lack sufficient trust that both sides are working from the same core principles – I'm not sure we can make a deal when their world view is orthogonal to ours.
Once you've reached that point, you look around, and it looks suspiciously like the Democrats have misunderstood the type of game they're in. Federal judge's husband and mother are murdered by (it's assumed) white racists; why don't we have a well-spoken bomb-thrower belling the Republicans with this act ("this is what you bought, American, when you re-elected George Bush")? Instead of worrying about winning the South (it's not happening folks) why aren't we turning it into the rest of the nation's bete noir ("don't let them ruin us" and cue the various social statistics)? Why don't we have a whole coded ideology that speaks to the worst in us and blames Southerners for our ills ("look at the federal money they suck up – they're the real welfare queens")? You want to win for a generation? Tell the nation that it's us against Alabama, and make'em pick.
Is any of this fair? Probably not. Is it right? Absolutely not – and it would hurt a lot of really good and really decent people if this strategy worked. (It should go without saying that if it worked we'd resettle Apo'er in the North or appoint him King of RTP). But here's the real point – I don't care. I want to win. I'll worry about being just later.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 7:58 AM
Tim,
I agree that there's a tension between a certain kind of debunking skepticism and effective advocacy. You see it even in "the tutor's" post. Here's a thought experiment: if you were so committed to "side X " in some dispute that you intended to abandon the strictures of reasoned debate, would you announce this fact? This seems to me substantially less effective that publicizing one's intention to bluff frequently before sitting down at the poker table. Perhaps the stance was meant to give of the air of hard-edged pragmatism. To me, it signifies the exact opposite -- a weary (and perhaps elitist?) skepticism about the efficacy of action.
As it happens the left does not always approach issus with self-defeating skepticism and irony. Captain Planet -- well maybe not Captain Planet, but environmentalism broadly -- is a case of successful, sincere, issue advocacy (or propaganda, if we want to be pejorative). Children today want to be green; it's an accepted value. The environment was a non-issue in 1960, but now it exists as a real negative for Republicans (and pro-business ideologies generally). So it's not at all like the left always loses these battles, or always hinders itself with epistemic modesty.
Left-right politics aside, Let me veer for a moment into my own socio-philosophic polemic. I would not deny for a moment that the conception of social construction you describe has a powerful hold on anglo-american liberals. But isn't this the signal intellectual tradgedy of the past 50 years? This view of social constrution is just a daft, erroneous position. You wrote somewhere that you were tired of post-modernism, but couldn't stand the stupidity of anti-post modernism (excuse my clumsy paraphrase). Here's the thing: nothing is stupider than the breezy false inference that because practice X is socially constructed it is not also "natural." A person committed to this view in a strong way will have trouble influencing public debate, to be sure. I have trouble seeing how he'll tie his shoes in the morning.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 8:12 AM
Oh thank god for baa. I read that and thought, "god this is boring."
And I mean, really. Augustan satire is not boring. Nor is it all about bonhomie and hail-fellow-well-met. No, not Addison and Steele either. Not even close.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 8:23 AM
Sorry, ogged, cross posted.
If I misread the post, my bad. So let me comfine myself to two brief points
One: Leftist/democrats/liberals/whatever designation have been plenty witty, plenty mean, and plenty propagandistic over the past 50 years. If members of that group think their team has erred tactically through excessive sincerity and deceny, and want to take the gloves off, just do it already. How many decades of failure can one blame on a reluctance to "get mean" before the excuse runs out?
Second -- yeah sure, engaging a nutcase seriously is a mistake. Excessive influence of Horowitz and Michael Moore, however, is like #234345 on the "problems with American democracy" list on my bedside table.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 8:31 AM
I readily grok that the Tutor is trying to carry forward Addison and Steele, but maybe that's one of the things sparking my disgruntlement. I don't think that's what he actually does, because the Augustan public sphere was in many ways completely earnest--it's practically the Habermasian dream in some respects. Yes, satire; yes, wit, but as Ogged points out about MASH (great observation) it works because the doctors (even in the film) are authentic. I read the Tutor as calling for a kind of conscious inauthencity, and I think in the end that's nothing more than a mutation of vanguardism. Moving ahead from the Augustan moment to another time and place, Oscar Wilde was what he was because that's what he really was, not because he'd made some tactical decision that his times required him to be a certain way. Be a wit if that's your calling: don't do it as a mask for something else.
Baa is also quite right about the absolutely fatal, destructive feature of "social construction": the inability to accept that a thing which is constructed is not also natural. The funny thing is that almost every academic I know will agree with that proposition--that something which as a history, which is "constructed", is also effectively "natural" to people living in the here and now. Can you choose to live without a modern conception of individuality? Uh, no. Does it mean that Og the Caveman thought of himself as a sovereign rights-bearing individual? No, no he didn't. It's a way of thinking and being that didn't exist at some moment in human history but which exists now. Good to know that, sure, but it doesn't cancel out the thing which is now said to have a history. It doesn't even make clear whether that thing is good or bad or none of the above: it's not a moral or ethical opinion, just an empirical assessment.
If you want an embodiment of where this goes so badly wrong, I think it's in Foucault and in scholarly work that descends from him. Foucault treats the historicity of the things he's interested in (mental illness, medicine, knowledge, sexuality, crime and punishment) as a moral discovery. His writings quiver with a kind of angry revelation: "Ah! I have found you out! You are not what you say you are! You have a history!" But then confronted with the fact of that j'accuse, Foucault was always too hip to cop to it. "Did I say that? Non, non! You fool! I pass no judgement." Because of course what's the alternative? You can't suddenly shift your entire paradigm and conceptualize mental illness the way that late medieval Europeans did. More importantly, why should you want to? You could only call for that if you had a moral assessment of late medieval European conceptions of mental illness that underlined why that would be preferable. And of course, thinking that way (about what subjectivity we'd rather inhabit) is a very modern and totalizing thing itself, non? Ah-hah, Mr. Bond, you have wandered into my trap! Release the crocodiles!
Weariness is precisely the emotion I feel at all this. So many very valid insights wrapped up in so many layers of denial and deferral, so many fairly ordinary empirical observations made out to be grand philosophical premises. So many labryrinths proudly constructed with no exits, and so much pride at the shit piling up in the dead-end passageways from the people who've locked themselves in the maze.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 8:44 AM
Thanks, Tim (Burke). And with all due respect to the so-called Tim, I don't think the issue is that we should be nastier and play to win; the important question is, "Why aren't we funny?" As unimportant as the question seems, I think it tells us a lot about the fact that liberals have no real identity in the current political landscape, and what I hope is that in someone trying to be funny and witty, and succeeding, we unfunny ones can find what it is that resonates, and that can be our "clue" to who we think we are.
And Tim B., I'm a lot more sympathetic to Foucault, probably because I've read very little of the scholarship "descended" from him. It's not quite fair to say that Foucault is "too hip" to "cop" to his anger; I'd say he's too smart to fall into the trap of advocating that we shift an entire paradigm. If he can be said to advocate any kind of action, it's precisely the small, local chipping away that Atrios, for example, recognizes is where the power of the citizen lies.
Finally, on natural vs. socially constructed: I have read enough post-Heideggerian stuff to know that you're right that this is a common (utopian) mistake and makes a complete hash of Heidegger (that's my frame of reference, anyway). Heidegger's "thrownness" is his term for our "always already" historical situation, like the impossibility of just deciding to do without the modern conception of individuality that you describe. The impossibility of escape, or of a truly fresh start, is behind his (semi) famous remark that the goal is not to get out of the hermeneutic circle, but to get into it in the right way (which is, again, what I take Foucault to be trying to do: to review the history so as to find the spots susceptible to action and change).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 9:21 AM
It's most often the American followers who "moralize" a continental thinker's conclusions. I think you're right to see a certain "moralism" in Foucault, but it gets grossly exaggerated in the followers. To a certain extent, making an apparently "moral" choice to prefer some previous era over our own could be a rhetorical lever to make the comparison sharper -- rather than judge previous eras by the modern structures they lacked or anticipated, it is a way of stripping modernity of its self-evident desirability. It's that tedious American earnestness that turns that little trick into an actual moral valuation.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 9:37 AM
Shorter this thread: liberals need to be earnest about their beliefs, but have a sense of humor. Satire is good, too, if it's funny and has a point. Also we need to talk the ordinary language of ordinary men (or, to stick with the theme at hand, we need to exercise the middle style).
[Does anyone besides me actually know much about the Augustans?]
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 9:38 AM
Liberals are plenty funny, even on purpose lots of times.
I kid! Seriously though, whatever you want to say about Franken and Moore, they aren't humorless. Kinsley isn't humorless. And that Peter Beinart is a laugh riot.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 9:55 AM
Thanks, Tim (Burke). And with all due respect to the so-called Tim, I don't think the issue is that we should be nastier and play to win; the important question is, "Why aren't we funny?" As unimportant as the question seems, I think it tells us a lot about the fact that liberals have no real identity in the current political landscape, and what I hope is that in someone trying to be funny and witty, and succeeding, we unfunny ones can find what it is that resonates, and that can be our "clue" to who we think we are.
It would take years to unwind the three original posts in question. Feh.
Anyways. Do you not KNOW who you are? (Not absolutely literally, duh.)
ash
['You have a bigger problem than elections.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 10:15 AM
BitchPhD: yeah. What is it about them that you want to bring out here?
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 10:20 AM
I'll just quietly note that this morning has been the saga of me trying to get the "Captain Planet" theme out of my head. Share my joy:
Captain Planet, he's a hero
Gonna take pollution down to zero
He's our powers, magnified,
And he's fighting on the planet's side
(repeat)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 12:03 PM
Ah! Excellent. Ok, well, this: the Augustan public sphere was in many ways completely earnest--it's practically the Habermasian dream in some respects.
In some ways, sure. But in other ways, it was actually *incredibly* partisan and personal, and the "earnestness" of Addison and Steele (more Addison, anyway; Steele was not always so earnest) was often a rhetorical tool to advance political interests. No? Not to mention which, "the" Augustan public sphere is kind of a retroactive construction. Pope and Swift may have hung with Addison and Steele, but they sure as hell didn't write the same way.
And anyway, that's all the old-boys-club-canonical Augustans. There was plenty of bitchy bilious hackery going on, and the boys participated in it too, even if Hazlitt and his buddies pretended all was civility and high-minded public spirit.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 12:34 PM
Yes, good points. But it fits the Habermasian idealization in that they were all writing to and for each other, without the intervening layers of a media industry--that it was a kind of civic communication that was both public (available for any reader, even given how limited the class of "readers" was at that moment) and between relative peers. I don't necessarily buy the Habermasian idealization but I see what he finds interesting about that historical moment.
As far as earnestness as a rhetorical tool, well, absolutely. I think that's been my central point in this whole metadiscussion, that it's a mode of speaking that I think is to be preferred not merely because honesty is the best policy but because I take it to be a better way of operating rhetorically in relationship to the audiences that I think most need persuading or mobilizing. The public sphere is a kind of pretense, yes: so are the rules to any game.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 1:29 PM
Earnestness is for sure important, but I don't think there's this huge divide between "us" and "them." The audience clearly likes bile and venom, too. I think the point is honesty. Earnestness is honest; frankly, bile and venom are sometimes honest too. But talking about rhetoric *as* rhetoric all the damn time, without any sense of content, is boring and ineffective, yeah. Steele and Addison never did that. :)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 1:34 PM
Thanks, that helps. I definitely mean "honesty" instead of "earnestness", and I think that's one of the major issues that prompted my intervention over at Happy Tutor. I think if you're a wit by instinct and inclination, then bombs away. But if that's not you, if you're trying to carry out some rhetorical strategy that someone else has devised *for you*, I think it'll come across badly. The Augustans seem to me to have had a kind of authenticity in their public writings even when they were actually lying, manipulating or cheating.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 2:41 PM
Possibly. I'd have to think about that one. They were certainly very, very worried about authenticity in print--that's what all that Dunciad stuff was about. I agree commpletely, though, that it's ridicuous to strategize about how to deliver a message when there's no damn message to deliver.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-10-05 2:53 PM