Caricature Passing for Analysis

Last month, I chided Tom and Joe upbraiding Ann Althouse on her interpretive acumen.  Yesterday, she proved how wise I was to do so.  Her take on the Bill and Hillary Sopranos commercial:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

She later claims to be joking about something or other, but that's beside the point.  (Which, I'll add, has been hashed out by others.)  That she believes the above a "little casual Freudian interpretation" speaks to the vacuousness of a certain mode of psychoanalytic thinking.  To wit:

If so, aren't you the good little voter, accepting the message Senator Clinton hoped to insert in your receptacle of a brain? The famously controlled former First Lady is pleased there are people like you.  Me, I'm not so obedient. Even though I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and may very well vote for Hillary, I don't accept these things at face value. What's more I love a ripe opportunity for interpretation, including comic interpretation with sexual, Freudian content. What are you going to say: "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"? You simply cannot say that when Bill Clinton is in the picture. In the whole history of the world, if there is one person for whom a cigar was not just a cigar, it's Bill Clinton ... Here the context was Bill Clinton and the wife he has notoriously cheated on for years. He's saying he wants onion rings, and she's imposing carrots on him. That cries out for psycho-sexual interpretation. It's not the intent of the film's auteur—unless he's a traitor to Clinton but it's imagery that they should have noticed as they were writing the script.

She honestly believes herself engaged in some sort of "psycho-sexual interpretation" here.  As someone purported to be a scholar of some sort, she should know better than to pander in the anything-longer-than-it-is-wide mode of psychoanalytic criticism.  Properly speaking, it's less a mode of psychoanalytic thought than the punchline to a self-parodic Woody Allen joke from 1965.  For Althouse, however, this qualifies as insight, the sort of thing paid professionals should consider before scripting a commercial.  Why harp on Althouse for trafficking in vapidities?   

Because when people who don't read blogs hear her name, they think "academic blogger."  That she embodies the most perfidious blogging stereotypes makes it difficult for actual academic bloggers to bring some small quotient of respectability to the medium; a blog defined by its author's rampant narcissism does no justice to the genre.  That she does posts and comments at all hours of the day, seemingly in lieu of actual academic work, perpetuates the notion that blogging's the second most masturbatory means of procrastination. 

For example, she comments, frequently within minutes, on almost every single post anyone writes about her.  Her comments typically consist of little more than something about a vortex, then she disappears.  Or seems to.  When I checked my logs the day linked above, she continued to refresh that page three or four times an hour for a few hours, then again for a few hours the next day.*  She never left another comment, however, because communication was not her motivation. 

She wants to know what people are saying about her.  That's what this is about.  Her.  The hours she must spend scanning her site statistics?  Her.  The reloading of Technorati on the hour, every hour, in case she missed someone saying something about her?  Her.  The neologisms she coins to describe how people respond to her?  Her.  (Ironically, this post isn't about her.  People like her, yes, but not her.)  Little she writes concerns content, academic or otherwise.  Her posts are the written equivalent, grossly exaggerated, of a venerable summer tradition: the tourist photo.  For reference, this is a peer-reviewed, academic article:

The statue of liberty is clearly the subject.  Now, here's a typical academic blog:

Blogger and subject are equally framed.  Personal, but not too personal.  Now, here's Althouse:

Is the Statue of Liberty even behind her?  Doesn't matter.  What matters is that she's in the picture.  Content?  Who needs content?  Althouse cares less what people say, so long as they say it about her, which is why she writes solely to drawn attention to herself:

See that phrase "I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion"? That's an awfully cheap trick, a way to prod bloggers to write about the post.

In the comments to one of the above posts, she writes of her desire to "own onion rings."  Why?  Because she must own onion rings.  When people associate such sentiments with academic blogging, she does those of us who care about content a disservice.  So here I am, being swallowed by her beloved vortex—or am I?  She would insist I was, but that goes without saying.  I couldn't be detached and impersonal, using her as an example of a particular type of pseudo-academic blogger.  Because then this post wouldn't be a personal attack on her, which it isn't.  Her inflated self-importance may be exemplary, but it's by no means atypical.   

As much as the blogger-as-narcissist stereotype she perpetuates bothers me, in the end it is the emptiness of her claims (and her labeling of them "interpretation") which bothers me more.  Any photograph of Bill Clinton warrants an examination of its "psycho-sexual" content.  What would her Freudian caricature make of, say, this photograph:

Or this one:

Or this one:

Or, God forbid, this one:

Comments

[Alex]

Wow. Just goes to show that the Internet will make you stupid. I now feel just a little more intellectually fatigued trying to figure out just how someone can be that looney tunes.

[Sisyphus]

Scott, sometimes a muppet is just a muppet.

[SEK]

The Vortex, Alex, the Vortex!

Sisyphus, call me crazy, but if there isn't a castration complex manifesting itself mighty strongly in that second shot, then I don't know that there's ever been anyone with a castration complex in the entire history of the whole world.

[Karl Steel]

I do seem to remember reading an article (this in 1992) that suggested that Molly's reference to L. Boom [sic] in the last chapter of Ulysses was a quasi-castration, because, you know, the phallic l.

Swear to God.

[Luther Blissett]

I'm sort of freaked about about your attention to things like Ann Althouse refreshing a website. It's bad enough that Althouse, like too many of us, obsesses over blog-related things. It's even worse when bloggers monitor the nose-picking and crotch-scratching of their readership. I say this will all due respect.

[SEK]

Luther, this one's easy to explain. It's not narcissism (not that I'm not narcissistic, mind you, I am a blogger). When I link to Althouse, a link to my post automatically appears on the bottom of the page I linked to. Because of her traffic, this means many, many spammers see my site, and then the comment-spam-deluge begins. When I went back through my stats to see which IP addresses to ban, I saw one from Madison, WI, over and over again. Maybe it's not her, but since it never went to the comments page (where you type the capture), I knew it was merely refreshing, not spamming.

Anyway, if I cared about my site stats, I wouldn't have written another post about Althouse anyway, as my readers are clearly tired of her insanity. I mean, where's Rich?

[Rich Puchalsky]

I tried to comment on the Michael Moore thread, but something went wrong. On this one, yes, easy target, fish in barrel etc.

Let's see, is there anything to be salvaged from this? I think that this is an implicit criticism of Berube's What's Liberal, the part in which he assures his readers that he wishes that there were more smart conservatives in academia. There are many conservative academic bloggers, but I haven't yet run across a smart one. Mostly they are people like Volokh, say, who was completely unable to understand a judge's sarcasm when it was directed at Scooter Libby's defenders, or like Jeff G. (sorry, Scott) -- if I had his blog, I would close it immediately rather than suffer through reading any more of his commenters. I think that if there were more conservatives in academia, they would just dumb it down.

[Jonathan Dresner]

You're a stronger man than I, SEK.

I don't care how "influential" or "important" they are in the blogosphere, I can't read stuff like that on more than an ocassional basis.

I'm grateful for your willingness to step into the breach. But not for the muppets, which are going to trouble me for the rest of the day. I like muppets, but they are kind of creepy in conjunction with real-live people, particularly without context.

[SEK]

No need to apologize, Rich. I like Jeff as a person, disagree with him as a FUCKING CRAZY-ASS REPRESENTATIVE OF EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA TODAY ... but since I grew up in the South, I'm an expert in this charitable bit of cognitive dissonance. (Others aren't, I know, but what can I say, I mean, sometimes "alternatives" amount to nothing.)

Jonathan, I have a head-cold best described as "debilitating," so reading Althouse was like a breath of fresh air. I mean, sure, it's like watching Ghost Dog and rooting for the chumps, but I can't help it. I've a sinus-pressure-induced hair-trigger, and I'm going to responsibly depress it given my degree of abject annoyance. Sure, I should just stop posting, but I parsed the above for tenure-denying in-the-moment insanity, so I think I'm alright.

[The Constructivist]

Hey, it's summer, so enough with the roughhousing, already. How about taking your blog to the course for next week's U.S. Women's Open?

[Ginger Yellow]

Don't you understand? Althouse is engaged in a new kind of academic blogging - academic blogging as performance art. You just don't get it, do you?

Anyway, isn't it interesting that whenever Althouse lists the mean things other bloggers are calling her, she never includes the most pertinent and common one: rampant narcissist?

[Alex]

Doubtless Althouse will be around these parts in a flash to spy on what we are saying. Here's what I am saying - Technorati is for los3rs yeah?

[Karl Steel]

I like Jeff as a person

Huh? this and this

Conservative academics? What about Mark Bauerlein? Oh, wait.

[JPool]

It seems to me that the most effective and easiest way to make a post not be about a particular individual but about a type of individual would be to include other examples of such individuals (or was this a some kind of embedded satire in which you recreate some Althouse tick where she claims not to be writing a post about a particular person despite the fact that she very clearly is?).
I don't spend a lot of time around Althouse's site, really only visiting it when others have flagged some nutty thing, but I wonder if she's really an example of what you're saying she is and whether you aren't being unfair, if not to her then to the intelligence of the people who read her. On the one hand, she's clearly nuts. Anyone who reads her comments enough to witness her angry shouting at her commentators can see this. On the other hand, while she is an academic who blogs, her blog is not, as far as I can tell, an academic blog. So it seems like either you're saying that readers are incapable of making this distinction, or that all academics (including ones existing under the freedoms provided by tenure) are required to behave professionally on line at all times (which seems to be a favored tack of her on-site critical commentators, needling her as "Professor" and such), lest they lower the standing of other academic bloggers. She should certainly behave much better than she does, because that's what we expect of people in society, but if the public estimation or future of academic blogging is seriously affected by people like her, then you're just screwed.

[SEK]

Karl:

This was hashed out in a particularly vicious thread (which I lurked on but declined to participate) on Unfogged the other day. I call it cognitive dissonance for a reason, and it's something easier for people who grew up "the good one." One of my best friends was unthinkingly antisemitic (his father, not so much). When you're the only Jew in your high school, you learn to deal.

JPool:

while she is an academic who blogs, her blog is not, as far as I can tell, an academic blog. So it seems like either you're saying that readers are incapable of making this distinction, or that all academics (including ones existing under the freedoms provided by tenure) are required to behave professionally on line at all times (which seems to be a favored tack of her on-site critical commentators, needling her as "Professor" and such), lest they lower the standing of other academic bloggers.

I don't think that anyone who readers her will make this mistake, but one of the problems with the perception of academic blogging is that it's judged largely by people who don't them, but do see Althouse and Reynolds in The New York Times. In other words, I think it's non-readers who make this mistake. That said, yes, I do believe academics should adhere to some higher standard when writing under their own name. It's one thing to do something your peers would consider "frivolous" -- cat-blogging, say -- another entirely to embarrass yourself with sad displays of "analysis," when your value to your institution is ostensibly intellectual cache.

Ginger Yellow:

Performance, I can see, but art? No, I think not.

Alex:

Technorati is for los3rs yeah?

But but but, what else will I do with my time? You want me to work? Heaven forfend!

The Constructivist:

How about taking your blog to the course for next week's U.S. Women's Open?

One day I'll understand your obsession with the LPGA. Wait, scratch that, I probably won't. There's just something about golf; it's appeal fundamentally escapes me.

[Scott Lemieux]

And let us not forget that she was given a month long slot at the New York Times, fer Chrissakes...

[Karl Steel]

Scott, I suppose I don't know your history with Jeff G. My reactions to him are all the obvious ones: even bracketing off his politics, I'm repulsed by his violent masculinist fantasies and his tendency to misogyny, and so far as I've looked at it, I find his focus on "intent" monomaniacal and indefensible (simple question: which version of Piers Plowman represents Langland's "intent"? And then the obvious stuff about the problems of being able to isolate intent given our Freudian and Marxist intellectual inheritance). But this is almost too obvious to say.

Re Cognitive D: If you're able to maintain a soft spot in your heart for him, more power to you, I suppose.

[Page]

... the notion that blogging's the second most masturbatory means of procrastination.

It isn't ?

[Jonathan Dresner]

It's one thing to do something your peers would consider "frivolous" -- cat-blogging, say -- another entirely to embarrass yourself with sad displays of "analysis," when your value to your institution is ostensibly intellectual cache.

I've yet to see any evidence that the vast majority of academics draw this sort of distinction, and I'd include high quality academic blogging as something they don't distinguish from cat-blogging or LiveJournaling the LPGA.

[SEK]

I've yet to see any evidence that the vast majority of academics draw this sort of distinction, and I'd include high quality academic blogging as something they don't distinguish from cat-blogging or LiveJournaling the LPGA.

I have, somewhat, but that's because I keep being on panels in which I slowly explain this to them. My problem is that Althouse gives us a bad name partly because, as Scott mentions above, she's got publicity (as does Reynolds). I'm not too worried, though we'll see how I feel when I hit the job market year after next.