Neoliberal is an established term, but I don't associate it with identity politics. Maybe it could be associated with economic status-quoism. Not in DeLong's person, though.
Neoliberal in this context is a bit related to what was being called "left conservatism" a while back, though the irony is that people like Rorty and Benn Michaels were the ones being tagged "left conservatives" by people who were centrally involved in identity politics and poststructuralism of various flavors. But yes, the usage here by Benn Michaels is idiosyncratic, in that it's usually applied to large-scale doctrines on markets, globalization, finance capitalism and so on.
Really what it means here is, "I'M the REAL left, and the people I'm criticizing are NOT the REAL left."
I think there are better written or clearer versions of Benn Michaels' arguments in this book--it's a fundamental intramural fight among intellectuals on the left at this point, for or against some construction or conception of identity politics or "new social movements". Thomas Frank offers another version of the same argument, for example.
So all you have to do is post at this blog and people send you free stuff?
1. I'm glad someone has made that point about "classism" It is something I have thought for a long time. In fact, I can't really believe that anyone who has used the word "classism" has thought for a second about what they were saying. As if unemployed steelworkers are out of a job because of discriminatory hiring practices. "I couldn't get a job at the factory because the boss is prejudiced against poor people!"
2. How do I get people to send me free review books out of nowhere?
3: You'd know if you ever posted, wouldn't you?
3 -- I once got sent a free book to be blog-reviewed and nobody even reads my blog! It was natch a self-published epic fantasy which I did not read and can't even remember the title or author of. But still.
Back in the day, when it was just ogged and me, this blog was about the blogging. Now its gone corporate and its just about trying to get the occasional table scrap from your corporate masters.
3, 4: Actually, this is the second review book I've gotten. The first was lawyering related, and I didn't get around to reviewing it. And then the same publicist had my address, and this showed up -- presumably I'm filed under 'liberal bloggers'. But it does seem like a terribly inefficient way of publicising anything.
8: You wrote about it, didn't you?
The important question is, how many copies did they have to send out to get one blogger to write about it?
Neoliberalism generally means neo-classical-liberalism, i.e., promotion of free marketry. So, not status-quoism, but active promotion, i.e., through the IMF via what sometimes gets called the "Washington Consensus." Contrary to Wikipedia, I don't always see it in pejorative contexts, though it may have originated there.
I have no idea what Michaels means by neoliberalism and justice, therefore, but anyone who says there's such a think as a liberal consensus, paleo-, neo-, nouveau, or simpliciter, is not paying attention.
it does seem like a terribly inefficient way of publicising anything
It's madness. But it keeps the Strand in business.
Is Burke saying he's read this, or reacting to LB's presentation? I've followed this issue for a long time, and agree with Burke's general point about the number of good discussions of it. I also can't find anything of Michael's online to get a flavor from; LB's link doesn't have the excerpt that Amazon links often do.
>How do I get people to send me free review books out of nowhere?
Free books that aren't worth reading isn't such a good deal.
If you're cold and have no firewood they come in handy.
Academic blogging is the way to go...if what you're interested in is free books. (I'm getting two or three a week now.) Speaking of which, The Valve/Crooked Timber's going to be doing a book event on The Trouble With Diversity in the next few weeks (sometime before its official publication). That said:
First, it's kind of badly organized: it had the feeling of a bunch of essays that had been halfway edited into a continuous argument, and I think it would have been better off to have been either left more separate, or edited more smoothly.
What you're picking up on here is that the book is actually a popularization of his two latest academic works: The Shape of the Signifier and Our America. (His agent, a former graduate student, thought his ideas deserved a larger airing, and convinced him to condense his arguments in such a way that they could reach a popular audience.) I didn't think the book had that quality, but then again, I'm a student of his (once-removed), and I've been thinking of those arguments all of a piece for a couple of years now (basically, since he began insisting they were).
As for his argument: on the one hand, I think you're right to consider it a corrective; on the other, I don't think he believes it is. It's not that he dislikes liberals so much as he honestly believes that there's a fundamental disconnect between the goals they espouse and the means by which they try to reach them. He sees racial harmony as something that won't be created by identitarian politics, but by social justice blind to competing identitarian claims.
13 - Here's a link to an interview with him in the Chronicle. (If that doesn't work, send me an email and I'll send it to you.) Also, he recently posted an excerpt on The Huffington Post. (There was also an article about it and Survivor recently.)
Thanks -- I tossed your links up to the main post.
Given that you know him on some level, do you think Michaels would like a link to the post, and if so have you got an email address?
Finally, to fully kill this thread--sorry, LB!--if anyone wants a copy of the first chapter, send an email to acephalous (at) gmail (dot) com.
At my university, we often get the self-published natterings of self-described philosophers delivered in large boxes. These are placed in the lounge and we giggle at them.
Karma of course will have these guys being read in 200 years, but they're still giggleworthy.
I once got sent a free book to be blog-reviewed and nobody even reads my blog!
Same here. The book I got was awful as well. I've had some other offers of free stuff but declined them for one reason or another. Unfortunately, blogging about art means that, instead of being offered stuff, which might in fact be valuable or interesting, people email asking me to do things for them: Come see my show! No, thanks, I'm going to lie on the couch and watch football instead. Then there are the invitations to press openings at museums on the other side of the country--yeah, sign me up.
Doing even infrequent book and music reviews has greatly increased the amount of free books I'm receiving in the mail, but not the free music. I suppose labels only really need to send stuff to Pitchfork.
There are just too many people who have spent too many years expertly angling for the free music, Armsmasher. The ones who are pros, tho', are buried in the stuff and have to have extra rooms in their house.
I've been convinced for some time that Eric Alterman's (really bad and annoying!) writing about music is all about the free stuff. Watching him angle for free tickets confirms this.
20, 22:
I try not to giggle at the self published amature philosophy, on the grounds that this sort of activity, even when done badly, should be encouraged, much the same way it is always good to encourage local music on local labels. It is just nice to see people interested in philosophy and actually trying to do something.
LB, shoot me an email when you get the chance. (I can't seem to find one here, which means it's somewhere completely obvious and I look like a thread-clogging buffoon.)
I'm currently reading a novel (In The Shadow of the Law) which someone sent to the NYU Law Review to be reviewed. I don't know that we've ever reviewed a novel, and review scholarly law books only when somone working for the law review sees a book they're interested in and decides to take on an extra project, which is at most once a year. I also know the publicist for the book, and could have gotten it that way.
which someone sent to the NYU Law Review to be reviewed
...namely the publicist whom you know? Or am I missing something?
25: Does it help if I only giggle at them behind their backs?
The academic bloggers should start handing off the books they won't read to other, less read bloggers, kind of like how Jessica Simpson unloads her extra Swarovski-studded cell phones on her assistants. Everybody wins!
I'm somewhat bemused by the kind of mind that thinks sending review copies to pseudonymous lawyers who blog about cake is a useful way of garnering publicity for a new book
I bought Eric Rauchway's book largely due to your post on it. So there's that.
Yes, but her sending it to the law review has nothing to do with her knowing of me, and I didn't want to phrase it to suggest that it did. She thought one way to market the book would be to send it to law reviews (also law blogs).
I bought Eric Rauchway's book
I've really been enjoying his stuff at Jacob Levy's new blog.
LB, shoot me an email when you get the chance. (I can't seem to find one here, which means it's somewhere completely obvious and I look like a thread-clogging buffoon.)
lizardbreath@unfogged.com, or you could, like, mouseover her name in any of her comments (elizardb@hotmail.com).
If you want to read Micheals' argument about race, you're better off buying Our America, which is the book-length version, done up in full lit-crit regalia. Not to name-drop or anything, but my wife studied with him in grad school, and got to hear that particular argument straight from the horse's mouth.
34 - Pour it on, ben, pour it on ...
I guess I don't get the argument. People have always managed to juggle multiple identities or affiliations without huge difficulty. Citizens were autoworkers, residents of Detroit, Michigan, Democrats, Americans. Perhaps also black and a NAACP member, and also female and belonging to NOW. The aims of these groups far more often overlap than conflict, and create increased opportunites for resource collection and concentration.
If anything, I would say left has inadequate identity outlets. It does need better networking, communication, sharing of resources.
Could we play with this with the blogosphere metaphor? We would be better off if we were all at DKos? We could be, easily, including Burke and Kaufmann. Diaries are easy. Is this what Benn Michaels is saying?
20: Yeah, I used to do that too back in grad school.
One of my profs got paid $10K or so to write a review of a work by a rich amateur metaphysician. There was an article about it in Lingua Franca.
JWP, having read both The Trouble With Diversity and Our America, I can say that I don't think reading the latter's necessarily a good way to understand Michaels' argument. I mean, unless you think the "average" highly-intelligent, hyper-educated person knows enough about Thomas Dixon's fiction to follow Our America's argument. Plus, he only broadens his horizons--which, there, are concerned with the nativist fads in the '20s--to address the larger issues about identity and class in the last chapter, whereas in this one, he addresses it exclusively.
Granted, I'm all for more people reading more literary criticism; but I'm also a realist who knows my interests don't necessarily reflect those of the general public or the general academic audience. (Like, w-lfs-n, he would totally not dig it.)
Berube Theory Tuesday ...Raymond Williams in three long essays. I read this very carefully, even understanding a little. Names like Gramsci were cited, words like hegemony were used.
Nowhere did I see any interest in translating Theory into street politics and social justice. Let me go get the exact words from the Valve:
"Wet, noodly” was a sloppy shorthand. Upon being called on it, I’m having a hard time identifying the exact referent. Something like enthusiasm. For example, an interest in pop music, with its higher affect content, as a legitimate art form, as a way to make the world better. The stuff Bob talks about above. I would consider this wet in comparison to the High Modernist’s dry, more ironic relation to popular culture."
Lawrence La Riviere White. Substitute politics for "pop culture" and you see the problem. Whatever is new and useful in Marxism is not being transmitted to the masses by those who should take the responsibility.
There is a failure of the intellectual elite, but blaming the workers for having the wrong identities is only a symptom of that failure.
Where's Emerson?
Nowhere did I see any interest in translating Theory into street politics and social justice.
Nor will you. That's the motivation behind this kerfuffle (to which the summoned Emerson has already arrived) and this (typically) brilliant post by Timothy. Walter's doing something different in this book, extracting some of the conclusions drawn about 1920's nativism and theories of identity and applying them to contemporary American society.
Dear rich amateur metaphysicians,
I am extremely sympathetic to all forms of amateur philosophy, and will gladly review any of your work in any forum for much less that 10K. Your exact cost may vary, but you could spend as little as $1,000 to have a real Visiting Assistant Professor of philosophy with a real Ph.D. discuss your self published book in a prominent, public space. Honesty is cheap. Fawning will cost you.
And I promise to use spell check, so there won’t be any embarrassing mistakes like my creative spelling of “amateur” in 25.
43:Speeling rooles are part of the paetryarkal toetallitee, and I admyre your opozishinal theeter.
(Halfway thru that fucking January thread/kerfuffle. Gone to get coffee.)
I've got a serious backlog of books I'm supposed to review at my place. I should start soliciting ppl to send them to in exchange for guest review/blog posts.
Send me anything you think I'd be interested in, if you don't mind it taking a while for me to get around to it. This one's been sitting since July sometime, I think.
But I love random books.
I couldn't find the original article, since Lingua Franca no longer exists, but the Internet Wayback Machine has a copy.
That article made me queasy in a hypocritical way; I don't see what purpose is served by revealing Monius's identity after he asked the author not to. (Hypocritical because I read it through.)
Okay, LB, you're on. It'll take a while until I get moved, probably, unless I hit an extraordinary vein of motivation in the next couple days, but I'll be happy to do it!
Expect anything relating to technical points of literary or other cultural theory to be reviewed with a charming naivete. I've got no idea what I'm taking about in that realm.
For Kaufmann, and anyone else bothering to read that thread, two things seem to be importantly missing in most 60s discussion. There are people in that thread who were there, and aren't mentioning them.
1)As far as street theater and symbolic politics, I mention Freedom Summer. Black activists were trying to register blacks to vote in Mississippi, and several were being killed a month. Without consequences or publicity. So the blacks went to Northern campuses to get white volunteers. They knew what would happen, and warned the kids what would happen. Lo & behold, three whites got killed in Mississippi, and LBJ was able to use the nationalized story to get past J E Hoover and get the FBI into Mississippi.
Politics in the sixties was a literal blood sport, someone got killed every fucking day for a decade. I am not exaggerating.
2) Probably the most important event(s) in the sixties were the race riots of 67-68-69. In the year of Abbie Hoffman in Chicago, in March in Chicago there was a race riots with many killed. After MLK was assassinated, there were 800 cities with violent riots in two weeks. Just two weeks of 1968. Not only are these events forgotten, but I suspect the very scale of them and the emotional reaction is inconcievable to a person who wasn't there. I remember as a kid, listening to a police scanner three times in 1968, my white neighborhood in the street keeping watch. Population:100,000.
The most important bloc in 1968 tilting the election to Nixon: not ethnics of any sort, they went Dem overwhelmingly. Not rural:what didn't go Wallace went Humphrey. The key demographic:upper - to - middle class urban whites. Look it up. Why?:it wasn't fucking Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies.
Rollo Here is a comment I liked, from way down in thread.
Creds to SEK for linking:his commenters were uniformly critical.
No props required. If I was really invested in improving people's opinion of me, I'd hire someone smarter to post under my name.
"Anyone over 16 and under 35 in 1968 who was anything like aware of anything beyond their own basic needs-meeting was freaked totally by what still seems to have been the consistent and conspired murdering of viable mainstream liberal leadership.
I was living in Baltimore when MLK was assassinated. There were riots. And martial law was declared. You had to be off the street by 4PM, even if you were living far from the district where the rioting was happening. I lived in the penumbra of the Homewook campus of Johns Hopkins, pretty far from the rioting. But I had to be off the street by 4PM. There were national guardsmen all over the place.
A sobering experience." ...Bill Benzon, from the Valve thread. 800 cities.
I am not blaming the blacks for the fall of the Left, at least not the way some blame hippies. The 60s were a full classic tragedy in many ways, a Revolution of idealism and disillusionment for a lot of people. But considering that so many scholars think American's resistance to the social welfare policies of Europe are based in racism, it could be useful for a fair scholar to look at the actual history of race in the sixties. Instead of seeing the source of Bush in the Port Huron Statement.
The analysis of what happened to liberal economic policies in the late sixties, and why, will be left to the reader.
Sorry i wasn't here, but I was there anyway on Scott's thread.
I think that the race factor was enormous. The way drugs deviated the new left was enormous. And finally, I'm not sure that there's been a time since 1941 when it would have been possible to resist the military / intelligence / foreign affairs establishment.
no one never sends me nothing. humph.
I keep coming back to this thread, mostly to reach Kaufman's links. I may have it all very badly, morally wrong.
50: It's mostly chick lit and popular political stuff, actually. No one trusts me to review real academic books. Nor should they.
57: Want a political protest Americana CD to review? Someone offered to send me one this weekend, and I haven't responded yet.
59: Excellent. I love popular political stuff, and I often like chick lit.
LB: If Alameida doesn't take the CD, I will. I have a backlog of books to read, but would love CDs to review.
58 - What do you mean, bob?
59 - Dr. B., if you're interested in the academic books, I occasionally get offered stuff up your alley. More than happy to pass them along to you.
That goes for pretty much everyone else, too. Drop me a line, tell me what you like, and if I see anything, I'll pass it along. Better to help virtual strangers than actual ones, I always say ...
Awesome! Send me the interesting stuff. Same caveat; nothing new is going to happen blog-wise for a couple weeks. But yes, I'm all up for joining Scott's virtual internet book review copies swap.
63:Don't worry about it, Scott. I vote, contribute knock doors, good stuff. You didn't think I only took one view out of those comments, did you? I hang with klein and yglesias and hilzoy and other perniciously moderating influences.
That I worry that admiring Emma Goldman and reading about Syndicalism will lead me to evil ways of thinking is my problem. And speech is action, and I say extreme stuff. Daily. Emerson did it to me. I used to be a libertarian
More links here. I've only read the first two, plus the expanded version of the second linked article published in N+1 (not online, I don't think), which I thought much better than the shorter pieces.
I will now return to hiding.
51, 54: Taylor Branch (in At Canaan's Edge) sees '65 as the crucial year for the black civil rights movement. After the splits then, as I read his argument, many things in 67-68 were very close to inevitable. In '65, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veers off in directions such that three years later, none of those adjectives apply. Bob Moses steps back, the slogan "black power" electrifies people in Alabama, Johnson's big bill gets through but the Promised Land fails to arrive, urban riots in Watts provide a preview, and King begins to take his campaign north.
What do you think?