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

[Rich Puchalsky]

Re-reading the above, I see that I'm sleepy and my spelling has suffered. Hopefully it's still coherent.

[mythusmage]

On "...the white radicals [can] see themselves..."

The "[can]" is erroneous, Joan Didion's meaning is quite clear. It is not a matter of white radicals being able to see themselves, but of white radicals seeing themselves. A matter of action rather than ability.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Not quite. The original sentence reads "the white radicals could see themselves," so all I did with the brackets there was shift the verb "can" from the past to present tense so it worked in my updated context. I see your point, but your issue's with Didion, not me.

[UVAGradStudent]

Sorry for wanting to maintain anonymity, but I haven't finished my degree yet. I'd like to say though, having recently picked up Eric Lott's book that perhaps its comments on WBM are indeed best applied to it. DLI is laughable: snide, repetitive, heavy on opinion, light on argument; it's not wrong, though, only no good. Despite his critiques of Senior Citizen Rorty, haha, perhaps Lott would be better off learning something from pragmatism's political interest in material conditions and its view that academic work is, at root, edifying. Perhaps a pragmatist critique of Lott would state that he has confused the two, and has mistaken the "juiced" feeling of participating in a rally and writing out impracticable notions with social change. I get the feeling this is not a book intended to change minds, but only affirm pre-existing positions.