We, Myself and Them

One thing I’ve been thinking about in the last two days when I’ve taken a break from writing to catalog books is the academic moment of the early 1990s in the humanities. That’s when I was working on my dissertation, holding a postdoc at Rutgers, looking for an academic post. That doubtless strongly affects my sense of the discourse at that moment: it was when I was vulnerable, when I had a sinking private sense of having made a colossal mistake with my life, but also when I was projecting a kind of heedless intellectual arrogance that was one half my own weakness and one half a careerist necessity. It was the moment of theory that I was recalling while reading Theory’s Empire.

Looking at all my theory, cultural studies, and humanities books from the late 1980s to about 1994 or so is like Proust smelling a madeleine. As much as I can step outside of the physicality of that remembered moment and see it with alien eyes, I can’t help but notice a few things about the conversation between those books.

First, that it was intensely, headily self-confident and self-important in many ways, filled with the assurance of what was assumed to be a shared sense of legitimacy and urgency. At the exact same time, however, it was also intensely anxious about a perception that intellectuals had ceased to matter in the American public sphere, that intellectualism had been captured by academic professionalism or had “sold out” in some fashion.

Second, the shared conversation took for granted the committed nature of the academic enterprise in the humanities. I don’t think this quite equalled “leftism” in the more restricted sense much of the time. It was, at the lowest common denominator, more a notion that the humanities had a temporal, worldly, broadly political mission to perform. Still, a lot of scholars took that necessarily to be an oppositional mission, a mission that was in some sense progressive, leftist or radical. As a result, some of the evaluative claims in the discourse of that moment centered on who was entitled to claim progressivism both as a historical project and as a forward-looking practice. There was a lot of maneuvering to define oneself as a standard-carrier and to criticize one’s opponents as somehow outside betraying or breaking with the forward motion of progressive commitment. That criticism often stood as sufficient in and of itself. It’s what I call “spot the hegemon” in the context of Africanist historiography: all you need to do is identify a correspondence or resemblance between the reasoning of a scholar and the discourse of colonialism in order to feel that the scholarly position has been repudiated.

Third, a lot of the work at that point positioned itself as insistently public in its concerns, its self-image, its vision of its own importance, but at the same time, work outside the academy was addressed almost entirely as the subject of academic writing rather than in some kind of projected or imagined dialogue. There’s sometimes a desperate quality to the writing, a simultaneous howl of protest at perceived marginalization and a sneering disregard for journalists, policy wonks, political leaders, museum curators, novelists, scientists, for domains of professional activity not inside the academic humanities but potentially neighboring to them in some respect.

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This is about the point where I usually pipe up and object to someone else’s summarizing of a given zeitgeist, ask for specific evidence, complain of generalization.

It’s a fair cop. I couldn’t tell you in any simple way why I accept some people’s generalizations and subject others to the fifth degree. It’s not necessarily about whether the generalization is kind or malicious. There are malicious or self-interested descriptions of places, moments, communities, that I largely accept or find evocative. It isn’t necessarily that I agree with a generalization, or find it sympathetic to my own self-image. I’ve read descriptions that make me feel very personally uncomfortable or remorseful that I find valuable.

It isn’t that a generalizing description need be consistently accurate. I love Norman Rush’s Whites and Mating because I think he nails the expatriate scene of southern Africa, particularly the world of development. But I’d be the first to concede the point that many of my students make when they read Mating, which is that his representation of the interior mental landscape of a woman is utterly unconvincing.

It’s just that there needs to be something which is both emotionally and substantively true about such a representation, something that speaks both to the conscious and unconscious experience of a place and time. If it’s a place and time you’ve never been, then your sense what’s needed for the sensation of truth is a lot more plastic: it’s about general plausibilities, universal models, the empathetic imagination of the writer. If it’s a place you know, the sensation of truth becomes more demanding and difficult to achieve steadily as your own experience, your own memory, becomes more and more detailed.

When I rise to object, whether on general or specific grounds, it’s sometimes because a generalization has failed my own tests of general plausibility, my own overall understanding about human beings act. Sometimes it’s because I know what someone’s talking about, and it’s actually empirically, concretely wrong. Sometimes I know the world being described, and it just feels wrong to me. Hopefully I can explain why they fail, but it can be tricky to externalize what is sometimes a faint tingle to the limbic system, a disorienting sense that something just doesn’t add up. Reading some of the reviews of various books at LibraryThing, I was really struck by one critical review of a memoir about colonial Africa by someone who grew up right in the time and place described by the book, that there was just something wrong at the level of fine detail.

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I’m thinking about this problem partly to process my reaction to an entry at Michael Berube’s blog. Berube writes about listening to Daniel Lazare debate with David Horowitz on Michael Medved’s radio program.

For the first half, Lazare objects to Horowitz’s views of academia in ways that many of us have objected, but then in the second half, Lazare argues that the Iraqi insurgency is a courageous nationalist resistance to American imperialism to which the left owes “total solidarity, total sympathy”. He goes on to agree that the US invasion of Iraq was basically equivalent to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, and that the Soviet Union was right to invade Afghanistan.

Berube goes from that to Arundhati Roy, to make the argument that whomever Lazare and Roy represent, it’s not Michael Berube, nor is it appropriate for Lazare to claim some kind of simultaneity with all the millions of people who have protested publically against the Iraq War, as if his views and theirs are identical.

My basic reaction is like Berube’s. That usually sets off all sorts of cross-blog spats, accusations that one is somehow fronting for neoconservatives. Look, the first and foremost thing is I fundamentally and substantively disagree with Daniel Lazare and anyone who takes ideological positions proximate to his. Before I worry at all about the strategic implications of what I think, or for that matter, the strategic implications of what it means for him to go on Michael Medved’s program and say what he thinks, all that matters to me is that that’s not me, that I’m not in any “we” that includes anything like his views. I’m not his keeper, he’s not responsible to me, he can do what he likes. As long as he doesn’t say that he’s speaking for me, or Michael Berube, or millions of other people.

Or if he is, then I’m not in those millions. If that’s the left, I’m not left. More, I’m not really interested in fighting for the label, for constructing Lazare as the “radical” position, with myself as squarely within some mainstream left. All I care about is that it’s not me, from the propositional foundations right up to the specific readings of specific situations. Call me whatever you like: liberal hawk, mainstream lackey of capitalism, neoliberal running dog, progressive, leftist, liberal, independent.

I’m not saying anything to please David Horowitz, or plead that I be accepted as mainstream by some bouncer guarding the door of the normal. I’m saying what I say about Iraq and the war the way I say anything argumentative: because I think I’m right, because I think someone else is wrong, and because I’d like to persuade both the person I think is wrong and anyone else reading on to think and act differently.

I think if a neoconservative fails to understand that there are other objections to the Iraq War besides Third World romanticism, revolutionary nihilism, stalwart old guard New Leftism or what have you, then the neoconservative is just hurting himself, cutting himself off from the meaningful conduct of democratic debate and thoughtful policy-making. I’m not saying that hypothetically: this is exactly what went wrong with the process as the United States planned for the invasion of Iraq. There was a process failure inside the Administration and a process failure in the public sphere. Most of the proponents of the war basically chose to envision their critics as Daniel Lazare, and stuck their fingers in their ears when they were confronted with any other kind of objection. The same thing happened among many antiwar thinkers, but then, they aren’t responsible for the war and all that has befallen since.

In a democracy–or even in a boardroom where a decision has to be made–you owe anyone you disagree with some kind of ethnographic and philosophical curiosity. You need to know what they say they believe, and why they believe it, in order to know whether what they’re saying is related to what you’re saying, whether there’s a conversation to be had, whether your argument is challenged.

So I’m not on my knees praying that David Horowitz not lump me in with Daniel Lazare. That’s his mistake if he does, his failure, his flaw, and it will have consequences for the world he lives in and the world he wants to come to pass.

I suppose the question is, where does the generalization come down? How many American academics in the humanities, of whatever stripe, come down somewhere proximate to Lazare, and how many proximate to me? Would I be right to say, “Look, the typical person is me, Lazare’s the outlier”. On one level, I don’t want to play that game, because it concedes too much. It’s like earnestly answering the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife lately,” a chump’s game.

On another level, I also think that whatever the answer is, I want something more evocative, more true to the world I know and live in than a diagrammatic reading-out of a political position, a simple “Are you for or against?”. Re-reading the works of the early 1990s, I may be critical of that moment, but a lot of very thoughtful, interesting, sensitive authors were struggling to do the best job they knew how to do, to say things that mattered to them and that they hoped mattered to others. They weren’t unconscious of the problems and contradictions that many of us have later worked through more acutely and resentfully.

Re-reading Bruce Robbins’ 1993 book Secular Vocations, for example, you find sympathetic and thoughtful versions of almost all of the criticisms I mentioned at the beginning of this post, even while Robbins takes more or less for granted that the project of the academic humanities is necessarily both political and radical, the same way that Richard Rorty at a later date took the intramural disagreements of the American left to be the only debate worthy of having (e.g., that the left need not imagine itself in dialogue or debate with conservatism).

You can’t just leave it there, because this is about the concrete business of political struggle. Lazare drapes himself in the mantle of the antiwar movement because that’s a strategy for power, the same way it is for ANSWER to sponsor rallies under a broad popular banner and then claim the stage, the way it is for Sparticists or vanguardists to try and grab the resources and capacities of larger groups–or the way David Horowitz, who knows this playbook, now tries to claim to speak on behalf of a much wider array of often perfectly reasonable criticisms of the academy, to conflate his own strident and aggressively partisan agenda with a more amorphous and pluralistic skepticism.

So it’s not enough to just say, “Look, that’s not me”. I really do think it’s not most of the people I know and work with, that even identifiably “left” scholars in the humanities typically have a much more complex, nuanced view of the world and all the things within it, and that many scholars aren’t even identifiably “left”. That when some academics say stupid, morally reprehensible or politically simple-minded things, they’re outliers. I don’t want to say that in such a way that I have to paper over or misdescribe the institutional cultures I know and inhabit. There are a lot of things in both memory and in the here and now to regret, to criticize, to reform. There are a lot of arguments to be had, some of which we’ve been pushing out to the margins for far too long.

I can only hope that as I go along writing in this space and in other places, what I describe has that sensation of truth to it, rather than “truthiness”, to quote Stephen Colbert. Some criticisms of academia are more “truthy” than true, hailed and repeated simply because they confirm pre-existing hallucinations, because they grind well-honed axes.