i heart walter benn michaels
By shag carpet bomb • Nov 24th, 2009 • Category: Fuckstainery, Horseshittery, Shitheads, Trouble with DiversityAt lbo, Dennis Claxton dropped a link to something Michael Berube wrote at his blog. Basically, Berube read the same Michaels I did, not the one fantasized by Henwood. He wrote about it in his blog post, criticized him in similar ways to the ways I had. Only Berube is much funnier than moi.
When Doug claimed that it would be curious for someone like Michaels to be interested in ‘flushing’ history and culture, which I’d argued in the past debate, I quoted from Michaels’s intro where he describes the goal of chapter 4 in _The Trouble with Diversity_ as demonstrating that “history is bunk.” Plugging the search into Google to find the link in Google books, I happened to also see this result, which is an interview with Michaels in The Minnesota Review.
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns55/michaels.htm
It is Teh Arrrrrrsum. I love how honest WBM is. He totally admits that he’s an opportunist, that he writes things because he wants to “stick it to somebody,” that he wrote a book only because he wanted a certain photograph to be on the cover of a book, that he didn’t know as much as his TAs when he worked at Hopkins, that he lied to get a job at Hopkins, etc.
That last one was funny. He openly says that his work was on one approach to Henry James. When it became clear that Hopkins wanted someone doing another approach to Henry James, he just lied to get the job! LOL I guess that is what tenure is for! You can be honest about all your resume lies once you’ve got a job from which it’s hard to be fired.
Also, the part where the interviewer expresses surprise that Michaels didn’t have an Ivy background was fantastic! Michaels is admirably honest in pointing out that this lack of an Ivy background had nothing to do with being poor or anything. He wants to impress upon the interviewer that he was from a private school. He doesn’t want anyone to think he might be trying to play the poverty card or anything — because then they might think that he was trying to play the culture card — and oh my, couldn’t have that! Instead, he was just a flake who wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, went to universities based on whims, and makes it very clear that he had the help of academic stars along the way.
Whatever I think of his horrible and wrongheaded arguments? Gotta love someone who is so forthright and unashamed about what might otherwise look like atrocious behavior — like admitting that you are motivated by revenge when writing books. I mean, I’m mocking him here, but on a certain level I appreciate honesty. I also love how he picks and chooses when his personal, non-public, non-academic live matters and when it doesn’t. It’s OK to point out your class background, just so no one thinks you are working class or anything. It’s not OK any other time. And it’s not OK to wonder about Michaels’ political views — to see if the political views he appears to espouse in his writing are actually, well, convictions he acts on. But we’ll get to that later.
Putting this in the context of what he said at Harvard, where he shunned any identification as a “man of the left,” it makes a lot of sense. He says whatever he has to say to grind an axe — an axe, he points out, he’s been grinding for a long time. This is one thing that irritated me about Doug. Not only didn’t he bother to read _The Trouble With Diversity_, he continued to argue about it as if he could make guesses about it based on articles Michaels has written since. And, when things got heated, Doug couldn’t be bothered to have some humility and maybe do his homework. No. Just kept arguing away as if no one in the conversation needed to consult Michaels’ work.
Anyway, from reading that interview, it becomes clear that for Michaels, if he has to pretend to be a lefty or pretend to write on a certain approach to James, then it’s OK to lie — as long as you get the job, get the speaking engagement, get the article published, or use the posture as a way to attack your intellectual enemies.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I suspect that Berube was sandbagged. That is, I suspect that Michaels investigated what Berube was teaching and spoke to _Native Speaker_ precisely to “stick it” to Berube. Fortunately, Berube isn’t a dimwit.
I also totally love the part where Michaels refuses to discuss his politics — which I mentioned above. Basically, the interviewer wants to get him to say what his politics are. The interviewer keeps saying that people would be surprised to think of him as a Marxist or a leftist. His writings and reputation apparently haven’t suggested a commitment to such a politics. In fact the interviewer says, people think of you as an anti-Marxist.
Which is apparently as confusing to people as it was to me. If you’re an anti-Marxist when trying to make one argument, but turn out to be ultra-worried about class and willing to use Marxism in other contexts, WTF?
Additionally, the interviewer is trying to get at this mess. Michaels says in the interview that he is on other academics’ cases for substituting their academic work for politics. This suggests that he’s criticizing them because they should be doing “real” political work. So, it would seem that the critic (Michaels) ought to, you know, be politically engaged himself.
Apparently, no such luck. Michaels keeps evading the question, insisting that what he does in his political life doesn’t matter. Well, if it is supposed to matter for other academics — who he is chastising for substituting theory for politics — then why shouldn’t it matter for him. Michaels is probably falling back on his favorite trope: that it’s logical fallacy. Whatever he does in his political life, it’s irrelevant to his argument about academics who substitute theory for politics.
OK. So this explains why he sneers at cultural marxists, who aren’t marxists at all on his view. It’s perfectly OK to call out other peoples’ supposed lack of Marxism — without subscribing to Marxism yourself. Thus, it turns out he doesn’t really care about Marxism. it is more a bludgeon with which to attack ideas with which he disagrees.
Okey Dokey.
This is what I suspected about Michaels all along. I’m glad the guy did an interview in which he confirmed that he is a sleazy opportunist who has no comittment to Marxism. Maybe not even to Liberalism. He doesn’t like cultural and historical treatments of race. Nuff said! He’ll pretend political alignment with Marxism or Liberalism regardless as to what his political ideals are, simply so he can attack cultural and historical treatments of race (and anything else).
I also love his self-serving argument about why the university should hire him as star professor at $170K a year. They wouldn’t be giving that money to the TAs anyway! And besides, if you’re going to be here, you might as well have stars like me who can do shit for you — because, as everyone knows, the non-stars couldn’t do shit for you. so here I am: doing shit for you. It is not a structural solution he says, so it’s OK to do what you have to do to help your particular grad students. But of course, it’s not OK for feminists to struggle for equal pay at Walmart or on Wall St. It’s not OK for feminists to say, quite rightly, that domestic violence happens to people from all walks of life in order to relieve the stigma of DV. It’s not OK for people to struggle for reparations. It’s not OK for people to pursue less than optimally structural solutions to social problems. Unless you are Walter Benn Michaels and need to justify why you make beaucoup bucks compared to other professors.
Hitch your star to mine baby, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
p.s. I have to say that Berube’s hilarious about the whole culture v society thing — I remember that distinction myself. And it is what is galling about Michaels’ work. In his zeal to engage in antagonistic polemics, he doesn’t care that he misrepresents the intellectual positions he’s attacking. He doesn’t care that he doesn’t actually attend to the varieties of actually existing approaches to, say, culture. Just as he didn’t care to attend to feminismS, or even quote feminists, but just quoted some christian religious leader on domestic violence. Whatever you have to do to get certain ideas in front of an audience, you do it, no compunctions.
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Didn’t you say somewhere that WBM tells a story about not being called brother by a homeless black man and his response was “why can’t I be brother too?” That’s pretty pathetic I think, not to mention clueless.
Yeah. He said it at his Harvard talk. What he was trying to say was that here he was with a black man in the same social class position — upper middle class. But the two men called each other brother and acted as if they shared a culture that somehow erased those differences in class position. Which is Michaels’s schtick: he doesn’t like culture and the use of history to talk about past injustices because he thinks they obscure present day injustices — namely class. The use of history is bad, on his view, because dredging up past history is a distraction. So, when Toni Morrison wants to understand the condition of blacks today by writing a novel, Beloved, which traces a connection between that past and the present day, Michaels thinks that is obfuscating the real situation: class inequality is more salient than race today. So, it’s not history in general that he rejects, it is a certain use of history — any time an oppressed group traces a shared history of oppression. Because, ultimately, history is a stand in for culture. Which is what Berube was saying in his blog article.
Big Benn sounds self-consistent when he criticizes MArxist scholars who equate their scholarship with activism. Since he views the academic enterprise as sheer careerism through expedient means, a prof who represents his expedient means as an actiivity of some other kind is kidding themselves or kidding their peers. In contrast to Wally’s admitted venality.
A footnote to one digression in that discussion. The ‘no exit from ideology.’ The label ’speech act’ itself premises it’s pragmatics of language on the notion of the ‘actor,’ the ideologival construct of the bourgeois individual. Dialectical materialists suggested that speech activity’ provides a more adequate perspective. Not that the many scholars who took up the ’speech act’ ever thought it through and often attempted something different. But that’s the point.
damn it. i had a fairly long response and i managed to evaporate it. the gist of it was: excellent point! i also wanted to talk about how leftists sometimes use this same tactic when arguing with conservatives.
like, as a leftists, you can be all critical of the institution of the family and marriage, only when you are arguing with a conservative, you might stipulate that the family and marriage are fantastic institutions, so all you’re interested in is making sure everyone can participate in family and marriage. you ignore your own more critical positions on the topic in order to try to get conservatives to see how they’re wrong. whatever.
you can see michaels doing this in his section on equality of opportunity where it’s not really clear if he buys it. he’s just using it. this weirdness in his text, where he tends to use grammatical constructions that distance him from the ideas his advancing (can’t think of the name for it - like third person interrogative is an example, “Let Chuckie defend his proposition that…” it’s a certain rhetorical construction that makes it appear as if the command is coming from the big guy in the sky or something….)
anyway, this distancing is explained where he says this: “My interest in Marxism has never been in Marxist literary criticism or theory. I do have a strong interest in certain Marxist ideas about class, about the irrelevance of identity categories like race, and about the ways in which class is not really an identity category. And I definitely am interested in deploying Marxist arguments against so-called post-Marxism and its interest in cultural identities.”
Here, he’s not attached to the ideas he’s advancing. He portrays Marxism as something he conveniently uses. In this case, he explains what appears to be his anti-marxism by saying, well yes, in litcri, I’m not interested in Marxist ideas about litcrit. But, I am interested in *certain* Marxist ideas about class — which are specifically Marxists ideas about the irrelevance of identity categories. Whatever the rest Marxists are interested in, he’s making clear that it is only certain ideas that he wants to *use*.
And then he says that he’s interested in Marxist arguments….. but strictly as a weapon in a particular context. Thus, he’s unlikely to use other Marxist arguments in another context. If it’s about culture, Duder is ON!
as for angela’s use of “speech acts” she may have only been deploying that at the time because she was talking to Ken MacKendrick who was/is a big Habermasian. At the time, what Ken had said was something like, “We shouldn’t talk about racism or sexism at all. It’s censored.” The reason why Ken though was because, since oppression is structural, no need to even worry our heads about individual level concerns about someone’s racist or sexist comments.
but otherwise, good point.
one thing i had trouble understanding was this passage:
“Think of the attack on the World Trade Center—I’m writing about it now for Radical History Review—in which the function of the word “terrorist” is to get everyone to believe that these guys are bad without actually being interested in what they believe. Think how different it would have been if communists had done this twenty years ago. The Cold War was imagined as a war between two different conceptions of what was right, whereas the discourse of terrorism is precisely the discourse which imagines the irrelevance of different conceptions of the right. It turns these guys not even into Muslims, but into perversions of Islam or in Bush’s inimitable phrase, “evil,” precisely because we want to think of political actions as having been somehow separated from the beliefs that produced them. They don’t have an ideological position. And that’s true on the left and on the right. The enemies of liberal capitalism don’t have an alternative ideological position; they’re just criminals and they should be tried as criminals.”
anyone want to take a shot at it for me?
also, i think if intimated this before, but this attitude michaels articulates here? i see it as a giant cop out. i am so utterly tired of the critics who cop out and say that they don’t get involved and do anything because it’s not their thing, that they hate people too much to get involved, can’t stand to be around most people, or are just not very good at it….. WTF. no one said you had to lift a mountain or anything. there are plenty of things to be done in any social movement or organization that would keep you away from people, keep you out of endless committee meetings. but these fuckstains can’t be bothered to even find out. they sit around and make claims about what they think they will encounter because they have never even tried to get involved in anything in their life.
just thought i’d make that irritation of mine REALLY clear. here’s what Michaels said which I’ve heard time and again from people who have nothing but criticisms and mostly then they’re half assed, uninvolved, made solely on some listserve:
“mean, I’m interested in the political consequences of these ideas, but I have no idea of how you go about making the world more consonant with my ideas. Somebody who can actually make things I imagine happen would be a far better person than I am.”
like i said; no one asked that michaels has the answer. and his little copout about being too lacking in imagination to know the answer or know how to make things happen irritates the living crap out of me. because it’s the typical answer given by people who have lots to babble about on an email list but zippo to say about their actual engagement in an organization trying to advance radical social change.
correction: michaels did not have a photo he loved in mind for his book. rather, what he wanted was $1000 to commission a photograph to be made for the cover.
that really is a laff riot.
it reminds me of this discussion in Chris Anderson’s book Free. Anderson points out that people sometimes actually spend more money on stuff because they *perceive* they are getting something for free or at a bargain. If you actually run the numbers, though, they aren’t getting anything at a bargain or free.
it is sometimes the same idea behind bonuses. at work, if we are on-call for a week, we get an extra $100. when we were interviewing a candidate last week, one of my fellow lead devs said, “yeah, and you get a bonus, $100!” He acted as if that was a big deal — and to be fair it is if you consider we used to get zippo. I laughed and looked at the candidate and said, “well, if you figure you have to devote 16×5 + 24×2 hrs to work, then it’s like .17 cents an hour.” I winked and then we all laughed. It’s something we know, as people who get bonuses, just not something we think very much about.
anyway, what cracked me up was: why didn’t he just freaking ask for a $1000 or the equivalent of that? it could only be obtained by asking the publisher to commission a photograph? He could have taken his $1000 and told the guy, “here’s $1000. make a photo for me.”
p.s. i think his interpr of sister carrie and dreiser is hilarious. he superimposes his fantasies on everything so much it’s kind of amazing he gets away with it.
Dear Shag,
Have you seen _Brothers_? Lefties are raving about it. This critique of the film maybe gets at what I think you’re asking wrt the World Trade Center comment:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/117291-brothers/
The bad guys are cartoon straw men, evil-doers, enemies– not formidable ideological opponents to be taken seriously on the grounds of their convictions, their beliefs.
But I’m not sure that I agree that this is so very different from treatment of/characterization of communists. Although perhaps there was more interest in winning over communists to capitalism than in winning over terrorists to…capitalism?
Penelope — ahhh. i read it again and see what he’s saying. what I couldn’t grasp, though, was this: One thing we know Walter Benn Michaels is big on is his assumption that there is right and there is wrong. Abortion is either right or wrong;being gay is either right or wrong — at least according to religion. So, having sex with members of the same sex is either right or wrong according to religious doctrine, if you can show that, for example, people don’t follow the dictum “don’t trim the corners of your beard” so therefore it’s silly to follow the dictum “don’t have sex with men if you’re a man, women if you’re a woman.” (this is kinda goofy since his argument uses logical fallacy which he’s generally opposed to)
So, what he seems more keyed on is the idea that we are skirting the real issue: their religious reasons — which to Michaels is really just as significant as political ideology — are either right or wrong when it comes to their actions.
Not for a minute, I don’t think, would Michaels worry about whether a film was racist. It’s just not his thing. He doesn’t really think it matters — racism.