kiss me quick, i’m a liberal. no maybe it’s lefty. it’s whatever will get me laid ok?
By shag carpet bomb • Oct 8th, 2009 • Category: Books & Book Reviews, Culture Wars, Fuckstainery, Identity Politics, Politics, Trouble with DiversityOK., so LOBsters know about my ranting about Walter Benn Michaels. What I bitched about early on was his use of leftist and radical language — class, exploitation, and referring to “the left” — to advance what is merely a reformist Welfare liberal position in opposition to Neo-Liberalism.
Henwood, of course, challenged me, arguing that I was delusional! He couldn’t believe someone who Adolph Reed recommended might be wrong about something… So, I did what I normally do: I just dropped the quotes on the fuckers. Jeez. I love it how, because a lot of folks, themselves, voice opinions about shit they do not read carefully or even at all, they are then convinced that everyone else is the same way. Well, not me fuckers.
Henwood did the attempt at fancy swordfighting thing where he plucks out one sentence and tries to get the topic off on some tagent, but I been to that rodeo before.
And really, he should have known better. I don’t keep at something if I have even an inkling of doubt that I’m not absolutely correct. And when I say I read a book, I read it. I may read fast, but I actually retain what I read. No shit.
I also hope Carrol Cox was paying attention and learned a lesson. ha ha ha!
Anyway, what I’m thinking about now, as I was cleaning the kitchen, is why in the world, if Walter Benn MIchaels is as keen as he is to dissociate himself from the left, as he reveals himself in this video, what the fuck? then why the hell does he do what he can to appear lefty?
In The Trouble with Diversity he never calls himself a Liberal, and with all the talk of class and exploitation (if it weren’t bound up with talk of “money” and “income”) you’d think you were dealing with a true, blue red leftist. But in this video, Walter Benn Michaels finally reveals himself as a Liberal and makes common cause with the quite obviously anti-socialist, anti-leftist Liberal crowd at Harvard by doing what? engaging in the wonderful tradition of, what do you call it? some kind of version of redbaiting? Mebbe.
I’m not sure what you call it but whatever it is, it’s bonding over the fact that we can all breath a sigh of relief that we are god’s honest LIBERALS and *not*, heaven forfend, dirty stinky radicals or even leftists — as in Marxists and stuph. And don’t even anyone get started on the smelly anarchists.
So where does this guy get off in turning around and writing an entire book where he uses the phrase “the left” constantly. is it really just what I thought at first? That’s he’s just sloppy? That he’s just using “the left” the way the conservatives forced it on us in the last decade, where to call people “left” is to lump the entire bunch of democrats, neo-liberals, welfare liberals, progressive, democratic socialists, marxists, communists into one great pile.
Why? How did this happen that, on the one hand most of the people called “left” by the cons end up *snerking* at the idea that anyone would call them lefties — much as Michaels does in the video. And yet, then they turn around and use the phrase anyway, calling themselves members of “the left”?
Because they don’t dare call themselves Liberals any more? they don’t like the term Democrat?
And then you have to wonder about the guy’s sincerity anyway. I mean, why should Doug or Adolph Reed any of us want a guy around who will go sit in a room with a buncho f Harvardites and make common cause with their Liberalness by, what amounts to, making dismissive jokes about dirty lefties.
Oh god no, darling. I’m not a man of the left. I’m only a man of the left if you are a crazy conservative blogger. No darling. I’m a Liberal.
And Doug and Adolph Reed want us to make common cause with the guy because he has a critique of neo-liberalism and antiracism and they are all fierce opponents of Oblama?
it makes me almost want to become an Obamafan!
shag carpet bomb is
Email this author | All posts by shag carpet bomb
k, i can’t even get through the idiot introducing Walter Benn Michaels. AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
everytime i walk into a room and notice that everyone has different hair types and the folks have different skin colors, the first thing I do as a leftist is congratulate myself.
then i find a liberal and pee in his drink.
do i have to read this book? because it sounds like he doesn’t know what identity is. Well, Mr 3 Names knows what tagging is, that’s for sure. I’m quite sure he’s a guy who tags everything he sees, records, and stores.
and what is the five minute talk about how far we have come with our radical anti-racist agenda? Really? He must be a conservative hanging with liberals. Does he believe what he’s saying?
Oh, i see solving the problem of racism makes us happy. so we have to keep racism around. it’s so common sensical of him. wow. i should of had a V8.
“different races from us want respect” huh?
me no like.
you pee in their drink? or are you characterizing michaels as someone who pisses in their drinks?
in either case, good metaphor - gary patrick norris. :)
I wouldn’t read it, were I you. I read it because a guy I respect recommended the book. I read a review of the book and it didn’t sound half bad. There is something to be said for his basic premise — that multiculturalism and diversity were readily adopted by government, universities, businesses and so forth and, as such, they’re initiatives that don’t actually challenge capitalism.
E.g., you might remember years ago when I wrote to LBO to say that the promotion of multicultural hiring up and down the corporate late slicks the gears for globalization. Bright shiney faces of people of color in management positions motivates the worker-cogs to bend their noses to the grindstone in the hopes of advancement.
Walter Been Michaels, though, fancies himself a master of the use of logic as a method of persuasion. He also attempts this really bad approach to using literary analysis AND social science data to make points. It’s really painful to read someone try to convince you by dropping statistics, and then go on for pages about Phillip Roths’ obsession with anti-semitism since, Roths’ work is supposed to illustrate something meaningful about u.s. society.
He does the same thing with his argument against the use of cultural understandings of class. His primary illustration? Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Seriously, as an English Lit Critter, Gary Patrick Norris, could you explain to me what exactly is illustrated by using examples from a novel? How does this tell us something about the way things are working on college campuses?
I have never really quite grasped how literary analysis is a stand in for social theory. I got an inkling once, reading the book French Theory, but I remain mostly stumped about it.
Another blog I occasionally glance at was just dismssing the days of ‘Theory’ and how people seems to have swallowed the line that writing ‘theoretical’ books about literaature advanced the overthrow of bad things. Then Wednesday night the new book shelf offered up, I’ve forgotten the exact title, but basically Queering Marxism. Which I grabbed. Only to discover it’s about novels and movies. I suppose novels have been subsumes into the spectacle, and these guys believe those things *are* their real life. Particularly easy mistake for a professor.
I meant to mention too. I was struck by how much the ‘exploitation’ turns up in liberal opining right now. Meaning ‘unfair’ wages or ‘harsh’ conditions. I try to think of it as a point of entry for a discussion of the ‘other’ exploitation.
>Seriously, as an English Lit Critter, Gary Patrick Norris, could you explain to me what exactly is >illustrated by using examples from a novel? How does this tell us something about the way >things are working on college campuses?
The way you describe what Michaels does with an example from a novel I’d say not much. But I don’t think that means it can’t be done. It depends on what novel you’re using and, more important I think, how many novels you’re using. An example from one book doesn’t illustrate anything except one book.
I think it’s even more possible to use movies this way.
This makes me want to ask you a question though. Do you think your own reading habits have something to do with your puzzlement here? I mean, do you read much fiction now? I ask because I have some friends who read almost exclusively social science and political economy stuff and when I throw out something about Zizek they’ll either grin at me or start moaning. ;)
Dennis — I mostly read non-fiction. But if I find a fiction author I like, I will read anything they write obsessively. Alice Munro and anything written by someone who thinks she’s da bomb is one such author. The problem is, it’s really hard to trust recommendations and reviews of fiction, for me. I’ve never had very good experiences with it. Recently, I read Map of Ireland. It was about a lesbian from a poor family, set in Boston during the busing crisis. Found a review in Women’s Review of Books a couple of years ago. I read half of it and couldn’t get into it because the character was made to say things that just didn’t ring true — far too sophisticated. Currently, I’m trying to find time to read Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs which is about a young, working class college student who gets a job as a nanny.
Barbara Ehrenreich uses fiction sometimes in order to illustrate what she sees as general trends in society. I can’t recall the fiction she drew on in Hearts of Men. Fear of Falling looked at films, the one I remember is Saturday Night Fever to illustrate her thesis about men’s identity changing _first_ before feminism came along and challenged gender roles. and where men’s identity was changing first, her ultimate argument is that this change was a response to the structural changes in u.s. capitalism.
When I taught, I’d use movies all the time. In sociology of culture, I used the Lethal Weapon series to talk about the way buddy flicks like that set up the crazier (and usually white) buddy as the lone hero who bucks the system (smashes all the rules of the police force) inorder to save the day. This is an illustration of the way we think that the problem is a moral problem of individuals being better behaved, that our enemy are social institutions and society more generally. The way Mel Gibson’s character, as usual, lost the love of his life because of his heroism. This means he’s afraid to love again, so he lives alone with no family, but ends up using Danny Glover’s family as a way to have one. Thus, he goes to their house to do his laundry and drink o.j. from the carton while standing in front of the fridge. he gets to have family, without really have to do with the complications of really having family.
Or, I’d use Working Girl to talk about how moving up the ladder of middle class success is represented in film as changing your appearance, speech, clothing in order to fit in. But then talk about how Mike Nichols dicks with you at the end. You are happy, along with the characters, that she finally “makes it”. You see her at the desk, legs propped up on the window sill, looking out over NYC, talking on the phone to Harrison Ford’s character. She’s made it! The camera keeps moving outward, Carly Simon belting away an anthem of freedom and redemption, until you finally see that she merely has an office on the middle floor of a tall building but that isn’t even the tallest building in the city.
fun stuff.
Michaels uses Roth as an example of a book that plays into identity politics by imagingin a world where anti-semitism might have gotten so bad in the u.s. that we would have had our own holocaust. (IIRC — the detailso f his analysis of the book were boring because I hadn’t read it so I just got to the part where he makes his argument. So take what I say with grain of salt.) I am Charlotte Simmons is used to illustrate how ridiculous it is to think that there are any issues involved for working class students who go to elite universities. He also seems to be obsessed by the fact that Tom Wolfe is George Bush’s favorite author. Apparently, to find Wolfe’s discussion of the cultural issues involved in class identity interesting is to make common cause with George Bush and, thus, neoliberalism.
This, I find utterly idiotic.
I did read about 1/5 of I am Charlotte Simmons but when I was hhorribly sick so I couldn’t finish it before it was due back at the library and then I had to move so getting books out of the library and potentially losing them during the move — bad idea.
As for Zizek, I never have a problem with what he does in his analysis of film.
On the old pulp culture list, I used to get berated by an english lit prof because he said that my sociological analysis of film and books was less than worthless. That I didn’t evidence an appreciation for the film and merely used it to illustrate sociology. *shrug* He was a student of Bloom.
i can’t speak for all social science types and it depends on their discipline, but the problem with Zizek, for me, is that he used to be a sociologist. What is irritating — or used to be — is that sociological ideas from Durkheim, etc. actually undergird a lot of what Zizek says. I used to think, so why can’t he be bothered to point that out? I got over that; it’s logical fallacy. And also, see my comments to Eric on another thread about enjoying locating the places in their text where, when it seems like they are saying the same thing as another author, it turns out there’s often theoretical commitments that give it just the slightest twist. E.g., the difference between a Butler who illustrates the work of Erving Goffman, but where Butler sees a “subject” and Goffman sees a “self.” Rather different concepts which signals commitment to very different theoretical frameworks, which means while they appear to be illustrating similar social phenom, their work forks from each other in important ways.
look i don’t want to get into this too much. i think people are silly to think that fictional narratives shouldn’t be used to discuss our world and i think people are silly who use novels to make points about social science.
lit critters typically abuse theory. i used to get most upset about folks who would use somebody else’s quotes of a popular theorist rather than actually reading the theory for themselves. it’s never hard to spot in a colloquium, conference, or lecture: the intellectual fraud who has read everything by their favorite author but nothing about the theory they use. and i think it’s even worse to use fiction to talk about social sciences. mark twain’s and faulkner’s mississippis are not mississippi. whereas i think that most of the rednecks i grew up with in oklahoma are a lot like faulkner’s snopeses, it would be ridiculous for me to use my interpretation of the snopeses of yuknapatawpha county to speak about the sooners of my youth.
nevertheless, it would do us all well to remember that fiction (not novels)–how it works in our everyday lives and informs our speech and thinking–operates in the cultivation of science.
most of a sentence is missing in my last para. but you’ll get my point.