On Being Laughably Correct; or, Eric Lott and a Befuddling Identitarian Critique

Academic advocacy has evolved little in decades since Joan Didion wrote The White Album.  Issues of grave import outside academia still become the occasion for "an amiable evasion of routine, of institutional anxiety, of the tedium of the academic calendar.  Meanwhile the white radicals [can] see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas" (39).  The more things change blah blah blah.  Page-by-damning-page, Eric Lott's The Disap    ing Liberal Intellectual reminds us of this self-aggrandizing insularity.  So low are the stakes of Lott's argument against the "centering" of academic politics that he can barely be bothered to muster any real sustained critique of centrist politics.  In its stead he flings superficial insults against those who practice what he considers Popular Front-style compromising.  He calls it "Boomer Liberalism" [.pdf]:

This powerful new liberalism, which fuses a newfound Popular Front sensibility to a crotchety dismissal of new social movements (particularly race-based ones), now confronts us as a force in dire need of an antiwhite, antistatist critique. 

Um, Eric?  Stop with the bitter click-click-clicking already.  I know that's unfair.  But I'm merely borrowing a page from Lott's book.  He dismisses a conference at at the University of Virginia—which with dated wit he dubs "Rortypalooza"—on the basis of the color of its attendees: "Women and people of color from across the country were, for all intents and purposes, represented in the singular person of Spivak, the conference's designated scourge."  Am I to be blamed for turning his own fine-tuned argument against him?  For someone who wrote so compellingly about blackface in Love and Theft—a man whose bullshit detector is second-to-none called it "one of those rare artifacts that is as meticulous a piece of historical scholarship as it is an intellectually fluent work of cultural theory"—the lack of nuance in this article is appalling.  An undergraduate could turn his arguments against him with ease.  (You've no doubt already nailed him for criticizing the logic of the Popular Front from a position predicated upon it.)

A quick look at his diction in "Boomer Liberalism"—the article doubles as the introduction to the new volume—betrays the same insecurities Didion diagnosed in '78.  Those who partake of the centrist groupthink are:

• "acolytes turned normative nationalists"
• "common dreamers who take center stage"
• "Robespierre-is-everywhere soothsayers"
• "superb if color-blind historians-cum-antimulticulturalists"
• "long-lost radical journalists"
• "backward-looking post-Situationalist conjurers"
• "lesser-evilist Clintonian historians of populism and communism"
• "New Democrat nostalgics"
• "undrooping denouncers of racial self-definition"
• "state romancers"

Not only are all those people all those things, all those people are those things in the same sentence.  With one sweep of his hand Lott dismisses all those who "in differing ways, lament the rise of identity politics and the decline of true populism, common dreams, or any other euphemism for class that can be conscripted to serve the interests of a white male cadre badly in need of a rationale."  As Robert Boynton writes in his review of The Disap    ring Liberal Intellectual and David S. Brown's excellent Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Lott's name-calling signals a deeper logic, a commitment to "an exercise in which any position that carries a whiff of compromise or complexity is banished to the gulag."  Boyton roundly characterizes the problem with Lott's argument: his "enemy is the 'right deviationist' tendency within the Left, and his goal is nothing less than a full-scale ideological purge." 

His strident dismissal of fellow leftists wouldn't bother me if he demonstrated some confidence in their necessity.  His discussion of Walter Benn Michaels' Our America is particularly disappointing in this regard:

Cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, often exhilarating to read, Michaels nonetheless comes on like the Allan Bakke of American literary criticism.  [snip]  It basically suggests that anyone still interested in talking about race or ethnicity is perpetuating racialist codes and discourses.  This is obviously a chillier version of Hollinger's skirting of race to get beyond racism, and as a political argument it's so dumb and received that one wonders why Michaels hasn't been laughed out of the box for making it.  In part the reason lies in the making of it—Our America is not boring, and it's not wrong about the perils of identity. (56)

Why hasn't Michaels' theory been "laughed out of the box"?  Because 1) it's "not boring" and 2) it's "not wrong."  Rearrange that paragraph a bit and it reads "We don't laugh you out of the box because your argument isn't wrong."  Why would an intellectual dismiss as laughable an argument he or she admits is correct?  Part of the reason for my earlier confusion stems from this sadly typical non-engagement with Michaelsian thought.  It is "correct but laughable and of no consequence."  The closest Lott comes to refuting it continues this pattern of dodging it entirely:

I sense a weakness in Our America . . . but as far as I can tell . . . he's probably right . . . which may also mean that . . . maybe we're just clearer about this now, but I don't know. (57, 58, 59, 161)

I quote selectively to hammer home the point that although Lott says "We shouldn't be cowed by Michaels' commitment to antiessentialism," I find it impossible to draw any conclusion other than "He certainly is."  This all has some bearing on the ongoing conversations below.  I leave it to my betters to explain what it is.

Comments

[Brandon Gordon]

In my never-ending quest to find relevant articles on slate.com that relate to your blog posts, I present you with Stephen Metcalf's review of Lott's book. If you'd prefer to save the time, He agrees with you. http://www.slate.com/id/2140175/

[CR]

Betters? Do you really mean it?

Anyway, it sounds like a silly book.

But I'll say this: I can understand this WBM is right and wrong at the same time. As with the affirmative action issue. Sure, class-based is right, race-based is less right, more available for misuse. But, as I've said before, I think it is pragmatically unsound to make such arguments in the public sphere, as it is far more likely to register as an argument against affirmative action than as one for a class-based version of it.

Strategic essentialism, per Spivak, somewhere or other.

We need the Subaltern Studies group, we need their counter-history, even if we refuse to stop there, are ultimately unsatisfied with an "Indian" history of India. The Subaltern Studies group doesn't / didn't have the luxury of putting their work on hold while the deconstructive purging of identity ran its course.

Funny, isn't it. And this speaks to the contradiction that I've noted before in the conjunction of pragmatic politics and anti-identitarianism in yr arguments. In certain ways, it's WBM who is a fundamentalist. Or he could be at certain moments. Deploying the Spiv as an avatar of pragmatism torques us in weird directions, to be sure.

[ben wolfson]

Scott, that pop-up "nth most popular outgoing link" shit you've got going on is hella annoying, plus it obscures the destination of the link, resulting in much befuddlement.

[eb]

A man whose bullshit detector is second-to-none started up a discussion at the bottom of this post (which continued into comments) about Jacoby's review of Lott's new book. (You're probably aware of this, but just in case.)

Agreed with Wolfson about the outgoing link popularity counter. It also makes me worry that spyware is generating it.

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I think you've nailed Lott. His engagement with WBM has begun to seem like an attempt to out-WBM WBM himself, in a steel-cage "Cranky White Scholar" match.

At the same time, I think I know what Lott means when he calls *Our America* both laughable and correct. I wouldn't use the term "laughable" though. What amazes me about Benn Michaels is that, while I'm reading his work, I become an instant convert. I'm ready to fight tooth and nail against identity politics and the burtal resurgence of racial thinking in contemporary cultural criticism. But then I actually read contemporary cultural criticism, and Benn Michaels' take on it all seems so simplistic. His argument is true in the perfectly abstract, but when confronted by actual texts, the argument comes off as wrong-headed. I think this is why Benn Michaels' arguments rely on extremely brief snippets of others' writings for their support. (I've gone over and over his misreadings of texts like *Beloved* on Valve debates before.)

The same is true of WBM's insistance that we cannot think of race as operating in the same way as class or gender. Class and gender, for Benn Michaels, are material categories that exist in the real world. Race is a fiction. The problem here is that class and gender are no more "objective" than race. What's at stake is various forms of stigmatism, and all forms of generalized stigmatism are based in falsehood -- even if the grounds for stigmatism are actually existing (such as sexual organs or gross yearly income).

In order for class to trump race, WBM must continually turn to the category of the "more oppressed" -- nothing would be worse for WBM than for an activist to help a middle-class black victim of racism when that activist could be helping an indigent white guy. But of course, the notion of class-based social justice activism presupposed so much intellectual baggage, and WBM never explores this territory. He has never provided a sustained argument for the superiority of class-based struggles. He assumes that everyone *knows* a priori that the poor are victims.

He also pretends that he's the only scholar ever to see a problem with bourgie ethnic activists who neglect the plight of the really disadvantaged. As if the debates within, say, the Harlem Renaissance or NAACP or Black Power movements never occured.

Which is to say: WBM's critique of identity politics is right. But the problem is that we rarely encounter identity politics in the pure, abstract form he describes, and he provides little intellectual rationale for a class-centered politics.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR: "I think it is pragmatically unsound to make such arguments in the public sphere"

I do agree with a lot of what CR writes, but I'm not sure if I'd put it quite this way. It's the same "don't worry about what you can't stop" principle -- there is always some academic making an argument for essentialism and someone against it, so getting any individual to stop wouldn't make much overall difference.

As an activist, I think that Lott's analysis is poor. Sure, he's annoyed by Rorty's denunciations, but replying with a denunciation means that he's no better. Assuming that you're working within the U.S., you have to decide whether you're interested in anything affected by electoral politics or not. If you are, then the U.S. political system is set up to determine that there really can only be two parties -- this is a mathematical, not really an ideological, fact. That means that Popular Frontism vs essentialism is beside the point; people are going to be effectively forced together. I don't really care whether someone is an essentialist or not, or whether they think that class or race/sex is most important; I'm going to be working with them.

Of course that doesn't mean that differences don't exist. The minute that some success is achieved, intramural arguments about what to do with it restart. But essentialism vs universalism makes a poor proxy for leftist vs liberal, I think.

Some people can say that they aren't interested in electoral politics at all, of course. But there really are very few of them.

A lot of this is the typical leftist academic's politics problem. The leftist academic wants to influence politics, but it's difficult these days to have much political effect unless you work on it for a large amount of your time. Some people get by with local volunteerism, but the academic generally has a feeling that since they deal with ideas, they should try for something more global. So combining politics with their work seems ideal; they write essays based on their subject but branching out into political analysis or manifesto.

This rarely works.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Quick response to eb and Ben before I leave to meet with students:

I don't know how to make that nth shit disappear, as I'm not sure how it arrived. It's a TypePad thing. I'll try and figure out how to make it go away when I get home.

[CR]

Luther sez:

In order for class to trump race, WBM must continually turn to the category of the "more oppressed" -- nothing would be worse for WBM than for an activist to help a middle-class black victim of racism when that activist could be helping an indigent white guy.

And this, yet again, is where I see the contradiction in Scott's conjunction of pragmatism and Michaelsian anti-essentialism. WBM's argument on affirmative action is NOT, first and foremost, a shit-swimming embrace of compromise. Compromise is what we've got. His is the argument for purity - the purity of the most cleanly oppressed.

In other words, Scott, I'm the one shit-swimming when I a) acknowledge that race-essentialism is dubious but b) bite my tongue because I'm happy that the few under priviledged black students that I have are in my class room, rather than c) attacking this system on the very-off chance that it is immmediately replaced with a system that brings the underpriviledged whites and blacks to my door.

In short: WBM's AA argument isn't Third Way, it's Leninist. The partial reform that is race AA is only a screen that hides the true nature of the problem. To call for the end of race-based affirmative action, in the current climate, can only be a "heighten the contradictions!" gesture. And that's exactly what it is, in my reading of WBM.

And the bigger problem, your problem, is: it only becomes Third Way (works in your argument about pragmatism) when you extrinsically bring into it "and many voters don't like to hear about blacks, gays, women..." WBM's argument isn't about the propaganda value of the change he suggests, it's about getting beyond self-serving propaganda to do what what he sees to be pure and right.

One other way to put it: YOUR WBM opposes Affirmative Action because it is an unpopular, idealistic program, hurts us with the center. MY WBM opposes Affirmative Action because it's popular, makes everyone a little more comfortable (save poor whites) without bringing the big problems of inequality home to roost.

Do you see the problem here? Thanks to Luther and Rich for the very helpful comments. I think, with their help, I've finally said what I've been trying to say all along.

[Rambling Thomas]

"Some people can say that they aren't interested in electoral politics at all, of course. But there really are very few of them."

I don't know how much this contributes to the discussion but, for what it's worth, Eric Lott made just this kind of argument when he came last year to Chicago to discuss this book -- his repeated justification for his anti-expediency stance was that, for the left to gain ground in the present moment, it was entirely irrelevant whether or not the Democrats controlled the political administration -- leftist political work had to be done on a grass-roots, small-scale level in order to have meaningful impact.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

CR:

Betters? Do you really mean it?

Who's the guy with tenure and who's the despairing graduate student? I kid, I kid. I mean pretty much what you say down below, i.e. that I've found these conversations incredibly productive, even if they do demonstrate the myriad ways in which I'm wrong. For example:

But, as I've said before, I think it is pragmatically unsound to make such arguments in the public sphere, as it is far more likely to register as an argument against affirmative action than as one for a class-based version of it.

Yes. Could you expand on this:

And this speaks to the contradiction that I've noted before in the conjunction of pragmatic politics and anti-identitarianism in yr arguments. In certain ways, it's WBM who is a fundamentalist. Or he could be at certain moments. Deploying the Spiv as an avatar of pragmatism torques us in weird directions, to be sure.

LB:

But then I actually read contemporary cultural criticism, and Benn Michaels' take on it all seems so simplistic. His argument is true in the perfectly abstract, but when confronted by actual texts, the argument comes off as wrong-headed. I think this is why Benn Michaels' arguments rely on extremely brief snippets of others' writings for their support.

I'm still struggling to come to terms with this. It may be our relative exposure to idiotic arguments: I seem to hear the worst, whereas you seem to read the best. I listen to and have my inbox cluttered by idiocy of the sort Lott sells on a daily basis. You don't. What we need is our own Moretti, someone to verify that one of the other of us has the better sense of the field. I want, and sometimes even believe, that your version's more accurate. Then I leave the house and am quickly convinced mine is.

I need to think about all this some more, so Rich and CR II will have to wait until after I've written something silly to wind down. Because I desperately need to wind down. But before I do:

Thomas, Lott can be incredibly engaging in person. I went out drinking with him at the MLA and we talked for, I don't now, three or four hours about the state of the field. I say this only because I think he's one of those savvy intellectuals who knows how to sell his thought differently to different crowds. His ideas don't change, but his presentation and/or posited implementation of them do. While this may sound like faint praise or a sly knock on his careerist concerns, I don't mean it to be. The man struck me as genuinely intelligent, way out of my league, but in the months since I've come to believe that he uses his charm and intelligence as a crutch, as a way to avoid thinking through the implications of his statements by focusing on the rhetoric in which they're couched. But again, I must make with the silly before my sentences implode. More tomorrow.

[CR]

Tenure-track, tenure-track, Scott. I don't have tenure. It's an important distinction.

CR II is an elaboration of CR I. So I'll wait for you to get there.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

How about we compromise: "Successful, and deservedly so." Happy?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Rambling Thomas, I thought about replying once before, and ended up deleting it because there are too many different possible ways to answer and I'm not sure which one is most useful given that I'm only hearing the argument at second or third hand. But in short, it doesn't sound right.

First, the pressures towards coalition at a small scale are enormous. When you have only a few people, you don't want to turn someone away for anything but core disagreement. If Lott is arguing for organizing based on essentialism, perhaps he thinks that there can't be disagreement because those organized "naturally just are" part of the group. Whatever the dubious merits of this proposition, politically active people with this kind of belief tend to have already been approached by national-level organizations, or know enough about them to join if they do become politically active. So the small scale element goes away.

Second, the pressures towards growth to a larger scale are also very strong. Successful local groups either coast and decline, rarely declare victory and disband -- not what Lott wants, I think -- or they become regional, and then national. And the process of starting to care about who is in power is almost inevitable. They start to work with other groups that do care, and are drawn back in -- mostly because it's true, for all but the most stringent ideologues, that who is in power matters. I don't know of any national organization that could be described as essentialist that really doesn't care about who is in power, although most of them are officially nonpartisan.

The prominent historical models for small-scale organizing that is indifferent to current political power are the vanguard party and the commune. I think that there are real questions about the viability of those models. In any case, I think that the number of people involved in them is, as I described, very small, and unlikely to increase.

[Adam Roberts]

CR: "Tenure-track, tenure-track, Scott. I don't have tenure."

Hey, not to brag, but I've got tenure. So how can I help you gentlemen?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

CR:

And this, yet again, is where I see the contradiction in Scott's conjunction of pragmatism and Michaelsian anti-essentialism. WBM's argument on affirmative action is NOT, first and foremost, a shit-swimming embrace of compromise. Compromise is what we've got. His is the argument for purity - the purity of the most cleanly oppressed.

I think you're building off LB's point too much. Yes, WBM could be construed as saying that it's more important to help lower-class white people than middle-class black, but you could also say he's more concerned with the fate of lower-class Asian-Americans than middle-class Chicano-Americans; that strikes me as an empty rhetorical move, since his point is fundamentally class-oriented. I could make him look really, really terrible by saying he's more concerned with the fate of homophobic, misogynistic, racist, fundamentalist poor straight white males than progressive, pro-choice, queer African-American women. I could do that, but that would be a wee manipulative.

In other words, Scott, I'm the one shit-swimming when I a) acknowledge that race-essentialism is dubious but b) bite my tongue because I'm happy that the few under priviledged black students that I have are in my class room, rather than c) attacking this system on the very-off chance that it is immmediately replaced with a system that brings the underpriviledged whites and blacks to my door.

This strikes me as a strange statement, and one predicated on a bad faith reading of WBM's anti-essentialism. What strikes me as strange about your account here is that it ignores the fact that minorities are disproportionately represented in the lower-classes. Why would increased attention to class bleach classrooms? What am I missing here?

In short: WBM's AA argument isn't Third Way, it's Leninist. The partial reform that is race AA is only a screen that hides the true nature of the problem. To call for the end of race-based affirmative action, in the current climate, can only be a "heighten the contradictions!" gesture. And that's exactly what it is, in my reading of WBM.

[snip]

YOUR WBM opposes Affirmative Action because it is an unpopular, idealistic program, hurts us with the center. MY WBM opposes Affirmative Action because it's popular, makes everyone a little more comfortable (save poor whites) without bringing the big problems of inequality home to roost.

This makes no sense to me. It doesn't resonate with what WBM's has written, nor is it consonant with any argument he or I have made. I'm dense today, it seems, as I can't unpack your Point A to Point B up there.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Duh. You're both building off his off-the-cuff comment about worrying about the skin color of your upper-middle class students. Point made and taken. But I still think my analysis is correct, only that it even extends to WBM's remark. (See? I wasn't kidding. I am dense today.)

[CR]

Scott,

In the NYT piece and the n+1 piece, does WBM argue that race-based affirmative action is a popular program, popular in large part because it permits us not to address the real issue of class? Yes or no?

And, if yes, how does this argument (against the popular, in favor of the greater social benefit of class based AA) accord with your appropriation of WBM as an avatar of pragmatic compromise? This is the contradiction.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Not quite. He says "Affirmative-Action—designed to convince all white kids that they didn't get in just because they were white—plays a somehwat bigger role (hence the passionate support for it among upper-middle-class white students; every black face they see on campus makes them feel better about themselves)" (73). What I understand him to be saying there is: "AA is popular among children of wealth because it allows them to believe they have earned their place in an egalitarian society, when that is manifestly not the case." He sees AA as an anti-progressive program, as one which makes white people feel better about themselves without ameliorating the injustices built into the system. That said, it doesn't necessarily follow that he believes a more class-sensitive admissions system would result in a whiter campus, does it?

[CR]

Scott,

You may or may not be right about the net black enrollment in the wake of Michaels's putative reforms. Obviously, it depends on implementation...

But that's not what I'm most interested in right now. What I'm interested in is your sense that this is a politically pragmatic strategy, a position of compromise, when I think WBM is being rather idealist here. He is not saying we have to swim in the river of shit, play nice with our enemies, etc. This is not, at least as he presents it in these pieces, designed to win back votes. This is not a cynical plan.

But you keep acting like it is. You keep affiliating WBM with your pragmatic turn vs. the idealistic professoriate. Your willingness to compromise. WBM's position is not one of compromise.

As I indicated above, what I am most interested in here is what I see as a contradiction between your pragmatism and WBM's hard-line approach.

If you answer one question, answer this: how is WBM's position on AA in any way a shit swimming situation, per your description above?

Per Luther's comment above, your leftism is one of pragmatic compromise. WBM's is a ne plus ultra leftism, turning the table on the secret sentimental liberalism of affirmative action.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"this is a politically pragmatic strategy, a position of compromise"

A side note: pragmatism seems to have acquired this association with compromise. But sometimes it's pragmatic not to compromise, to hold fast in order to reestablish the basic values of toughness (without which no one will respect you) or loyality (without which no one will trust you). And a strong belief in procedural liberalism can lead to an idealistic attachment to compromise that I beleive can be un-pragmatic.