Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I’ve been using up crap in the cupboards and fridge. I had this tube of crescent rolls and some turkey sausage, so i just made some dicks ‘n’ dough. I was chuckling to myself, wrapping the meat in the dough, watching as the dough starting expanding ever so slightly as it hit the warm air. With my hand gripped around these tubes of meat and dough I thought, dayum, look like the uncut variety to me.

they are safely baking in the oven now, banished from my slatternly mind. you, readers, are not.

Meanwhile, I came across this awesome analysis of Michaels essay, Going Boom, posted at Book Forum earlier this year.
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3274

First, the author of the essay maintains that Michaels has a functionalist account of society, imported from his functionalist approach to literary criticism. Apparently, Michaels’s literary criticism analyzes texts by asking what their function in society is. As the author of the blog post argues, you don’t have to actually examine the substance of the text; rather, you just have to read the meaning of the text off the functional role it performs. Thus, the Sopranos are important to Michaels because the show performs the function of depoliticizing social life reducing everything to men, women, and their families — which is the only thing that exists for Margaret Thatcher who famously said that there was no society — no social structure — there was only individuals and families.

So, if you’ve been following what I’ve been saying at LBO and on the blog, one of my criticisms has been that Michaels doesn’t actually examine the work of scholars, intellectuals, and activists in struggles against oppression. When he does, he either doesn’t get it right or he pretends to engage but doesn’t (e.g., using a non-feminist male to represent feminist claims about domestic violence).

For Michaels, these charges aren’t devastating. it’s the way he analyzes literary texts, so this is the way he approaches social analysis. It’s called functionalism. While I know what functionalism is in social theory, I’m not exactly clear on what they mean in litcrit. Still, from reading the blog post, it seems to me that the concepts are very similar. So, I suspect that reading such criticisms (other reviewers make them) would elicit a big fat yawn from Michaels.

I didn’t have time to read the blog post carefully the other day, but I read it last night. In this passage, the Aaron Bady makes a most excellent point :

“while a functionalist imagines capitalism only by reference to a particular telos (the “primacy of markets” as Michaels puts it), Giddens’ (and The Wire’s) structuralism is able to theorize social reproduction as something distinct from the fantasy of the free market.

From: http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/

But thinking about this, it’s at the heart of my bafflement at Doug’s support for Michaels. Sure, he’s a friend. But what I don’t grasp is, since Michaels is well-known as having a fucntionalist and superstructuralist account of social life, the unqualified support seems odd given that Doug has always been opposed to such views.

For instance, the introduction to this list on www.leftbusinessobserver.com calls structuralist and functionalist accounts into question. Doug constantly derides Carrol for his superstructuralist account of social life. Doug continues to challenge folks like Miles whenever Miles offers up his structuralist accounts of social life: such as his argument that you must change institutions, first, not individuals. Doug objects to Miles on the ground that social structures operate in and through individuals, and consciousness still matters when it comes to things like racism, sexism, and so forth.

But as folks who’re more familiar with Michaels work in literary criticism can attest, this structuralist and functionalist approach is long-standing for Michaels. Indeed, others have pointed out that The Trouble With Diversity is an attempt to popularize MIchaels’ acacemic texts into a peppy, polemical intervention into contemporary u.s. academic political life.

Doug has always been example of a position that understood that “social reproduction” is “distinct from the fantasy of the free market.” He’s steadfastly refused to reduce social and cultural reproduction to the forces of the market. He’s always been a firm opponent of anyone who has tried to argue that culture is merely epiphenomenal to the economy.

I hope that recent support for Michaels’ book and his refusal to consider criticisms of Michaels’ work does not signal a radical shift in Doug’s thinking here. But who knows. Alan Wolfe said that his book Whose Keeper would probably be criticized and would be attributed to his falling in love, marrying and having children. Wolfe said in the preface that, if someone were to say that, they’d probably be right. Maybe Doug is having his own turning point, his own Whose Keeper moment.

a pity.

point of order re Wolfe. Doug argued in his review of One Nation that Wolfe criticizes the Swedish system because it was hard on families. This is a reallyl snide remark. What Wolfe did was argue that an overreliance on the state to solve all social issues sapped people of their sense of obligations to one another. Whereas Sweden’s socialism was founded on a moral vision of a just society in whcich people recognized their obligations to others whom they don’t know and may never know, and this socialism was advanced on the basis of moral stories Swedes told one another about the importance of being good people, Wolfe argued that the consequence of relying so heavily on the state was an erosion of that very moral commitment.

As an example, Wolfe looks at the way Swedes try to get out of paying their taxes.