Who Cares About the Floppy Hat?

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Listen to this segment of the NPR program “Here and Now” featuring two political reporters, Robert Draper and Peter Nicholas. Draper is fairly interesting, rather like his NY Times Magazine article on the McCain campaign. (I really wish NPR would drop the Real Audio standard posthaste. Why are they stuck on it?)

Nicholas was embarassing to listen to. He’s never really been on my radar before, so I don’t have a sense of what his published reportage is like. I have a bad feeling that he may be telling you more about many reporters on the campaign beat than he meant to, though. This isn’t the first time this year that we’ve heard the inside story about how political reporters spin stories based in part on whether they feel like the candidate is their pal and whether the perks on the bus or plane are sufficient.

Nicholas complains that Obama never really opened up personally to him or other reporters, that they didn’t get a good sense of his inner soul or underlying character. He tells an especially whiny little story that Obama didn’t ask him more about his family’s history of skin disease when Nicholas explained that this history was why he was wearing a big floppy hat. What narcissicism. The famous man is just a little too busy to shoot the shit with you about your fucking hat, maybe. You’re not his pal or his friend: you’re there to do a job, as a professional.

Some things for Nicholas to consider:

1. It could be that some people are what they appear to be: that Obama is just a methodical, controlled, relatively serene, somewhat intellectual, somewhat reserved person. Not everybody is eatin’ barbecue with the reporters and then screwing an intern ten minutes later, or has a thin veneer of uneven civility papering over a stew of psychological insecurities that go back to childhood slights experienced in a lower middle-class California shithole. Political reporters want there to be more to the story because it lets them claim to have insights that the rest of us simply can’t see without that access. Not the least of which because they’re desperate to prove that following a guy around is instantly value-added whether or not the reporter doing the following has any particular talent or insight. Otherwise: what’s the point of reportage? The thing is, some reporters do provide value-added, but that’s because they do more than just wait for the candidate to come back and pal around with them.

2. Why on earth should Obama have laid bare his inner thoughts, emotions or vulnerabilities to Nicholas or any other reporter on his plane? What would Nicholas do with that kind of information that would help Obama? If it’s not going to help him, why should he do it? If he has a private character which is dramatically at odds with the way he acts as a public figure, who cares? You could argue that Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon’s private character was already very visible in their style of public leadership: knowing more only helped you to understand those visible patterns in the way they governed. All that really matters in the end is what a public figure does in his public role, though. So if Obama controls himself in the presence of reporters, that is his private character, as far as we’re concerned. His control, discipline and maturity is what has made him politically successful so far, and I think it’s reasonable to suppose that will structure his leadership as President.

This all goes back to Janet Malcolm’s famous accusation that journalists often work hard to seduce people into revealing information by pretending to be their friends and then turning around and betraying that aura of confidence and sympathy. Nicholas is just peeved that he’s come up against someone who is smart enough to not fall for that trick. In that, he’s not much different than a con man who is pissed off that his mark is on to him.

#3: What insight has the public gained into the character of political leaders when reporters have had the kind of access that Nicholas demands? Did extensive journalistic access to John McCain fully illuminate the impulsiveness and twitchy irritability he displayed on the campaign trail? Sure, there were always vague whispers in past coverage of McCain about his temper, and McCain himself (via Mark Salter) has always been pretty frank about his impulsive inclinations. Did that lead to extensive reportage about McCain’s private character on the front pages of major dailies, where that information had the same factual status as claims about policy positions? No. To get at this kind of information, you had to dig deep into online troves, or read down to the 25th paragraph on page A23 of a news analysis. What this mostly led to was a bunch of man-crushes from reporters in 2000 and again in 2008 who didn’t turn their access to McCain into public knowledge in anything but the most oblique form.

#4: Nicholas complains that the Obama campaign has promised “transparency in governance”, and access to the public. Listen up: transparency in governance is not about showing reporters into your bedroom and letting them look through the underwear drawer. It’s not about having a beer and shooting the shit. Transparency in governance is about releasing budgets, transcripts, reports, communications. It’s about making the business of government accessible to all. Transparency is when I or any other member of the public can find out easily who the Vice-President consulted to help formulate a new energy policy. Transparency is when I or any other member of the public can find out the names of all people detained in Gitmo, find out who earmarked which expenditure in the federal budget, find out the tax records of public officials, find out who gave money to whose campaign, find out what deliberations an executive agency went through before announcing a new policy. Access is when press conferences aren’t treated as an occasional exercise in controlled public relations, but as a routine obligation of the President. Access is providing a window into the processes of governance.

Transparency and access are not Peter Nicholas getting to have a heart-to-heart with the President and learning his personal secrets. Neither does political reporting done right require such information.

To borrow one of Brad DeLong’s favorite recurrent themes, “why oh why can’t we have a better press corps”?

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 4 Comments

And I Want a Pony: Dissatisfied Academic Version

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Timothy Burke

On to other matters. I meant to respond earlier to the pseudonymous essay of a tenured faculty member who plans to leave academia published recently at Inside Higher Education.

My reaction largely echoes what was said about the piece at IHE. “John Smith” doesn’t consider that maybe some of the problem is the beam in his own eye, in several respects. He plans to leave academia because he thinks his colleagues are too soft on students, because today’s students aren’t intellectually motivated or serious enough for his tastes, because he thinks current students “drink and smoke excessively”, that they don’t “read for pleasure”. In short, because they don’t conform tightly to what he envisions as the scholarly and monastic ideal.

I’m hoping for one that he’s not a historian, because he doesn’t seem to have a historical perspective on some of his complaints, with the humility that ought to follow from it. I know that when I find myself ranting away about how things are worse today than yesterday only to suddenly recognize that my rant could easily have been given with small amendations twenty, forty, sixty or eighty years ago, it’s bit of icewater to the face.

John Smith doesn’t seem to know how to argue on behalf of the pedagogy he believes to be the sole, solitary way to approach a liberal arts education. In that, he’s not alone: a lot of similar criticism is entirely reactive. These critics know what they don’t like, and they hold in their consciousness a kind of Rockwell-esque ideal, burnished and glowing in the fires of nostalgic amnesia. But why their ideal vision is the exclusive best, and how we might achieve it? That’s someone else’s problem. They want the magic administration fairy to sprinkle dust over academic culture, or maybe they’ll mutter sotto voce that the government should do something (but oh my no, we’re not suggesting regulation or government control…yet).

When I look around the institutions I know, I can see a number of faculty whose grading scale is considerably tougher than the average, who are much harsher and sharper in the demands they make of students, who march to a different pedagogical drum. And you know what? If they’re any good at what they do, they usually garner enormous respect for taking that approach, from both colleagues and students. They may not change the pedagogical practices of their colleagues simply by example, because those other practices also have their own integrity and deliberate character. John Smith thinks that his colleagues teach the way that they do because they’re lazy or cynical or resigned. Not that they teach another way on purpose, with a determination, out of equal conviction. John Smith thinks that contemporary students are just bad rather than different, that when they don’t conform to his ideal there is no reason except sloth and sleaze. No wonder he has a hard time convincing them to think otherwise: he doesn’t have any curiosity about the practices he observes, or any real interest in whether what he’s seeing is real or just his own prejudicial imagination and limited personal horizons speaking more loudly than they ought.

If you want to persuade people to act more the way you think they should act, you’ve got to be more genuinely interested in how they actually act, and why they act that way. If you don’t want to persuade, then honestly, don’t expect the world to be other than what it is, and settle for permanent disappointment and isolation as your lot in life. When John Smith writes, “perhaps for a career where deadlines are honored, ideas are exchanged and gimmicks and fads are routinely avoided because they distract from advancing the mission of gaining and sharing knowledge. Yes, it is time to find another line of work, where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor, even if I realize that the grass is grayer, if not greener, elsewhere”, I can’t help but laugh. Yeah, sure, buddy, let me know how that works out when you start looking at the want ads.

I’d suggest a sports car as a solution for John Smith’s mid-life crisis. It’ll save him money in the end and be a lot more fun than sending off cover letters to the imaginary sugarplum employment fairies.

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

You’re All Clear, Kid

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Stealing this theme from Rotwang at TPM Cafe, but this little bit of video captures my emotional reaction this morning pretty well.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Dear President Santa

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Here’s a Christmas wish list of stocking stuffers for the Obama transition team to consider. The big-ticket expenses, difficult decisions and intractable problems are one thing. Fixing the economic situation may be beyond anybody’s immediate reach. Undoing some of the damage the Bush Administration did abroad will take a while and there is going to be some suffering along the way.

But I think there are some small things to do in the early months of the Obama Administration which won’t cost much of anything but could return important benefits to the nation and the world. These are largely things that the new Administration can do on its own, without coordinating with Congress.

1. Quietly tell the Bush Administration that executive orders issued in the next two months will be immediately countermanded when Obama takes office unless those orders are mutually agreed upon (to deal with some crisis or immediate problem that arises during the transition period). Bill Clinton established a bad precedent with his misuse of departing executive orders: Obama needs to make it clear behind the scenes that he won’t be bound by similar attempts to lock in policies.

2. Thoroughly revive Freedom of Information Act commitments across the entire executive branch. Extensively declassify and release records from the last eight years. Hold Truth and Reconciliation style hearings on torture, extraordinary rendition and other Bush Administration security policies where the goal is not prosecution but just getting the record straight. Close Gitmo and any other secret detention facilities; prosecute any detainees in U.S. civilian courts if there is a reasonable case to be brought, release the rest.

3. Formally reject some of the claims about executive power made by the Bush Administration and reinforce this rejection at every possible legal and political juncture.

4. Strongly recommit to the principle of non-political hiring below the top level of political appointees throughout the executive branch. Issue strong directives to reinforce this commitment and ride herd on appointees to ensure that they live up to this commitment.

5. Make clear public demonstrations of a commitment to consultative process in which the views of constructive skeptics and critics will be sought as a part of that process. Show Americans what this looks like: model a new kind of political culture, a new kind of public sphere.

———-

One more stocking stuffer, as long as I’m at it. Harry Reid should treat Joe Lieberman like he’s a radioactive leper. There are going to be at least four and maybe more Republican senators who will vote for many reasonable Democratic legislative packages out of fear for their own seats. Even short of 60, they don’t need Lieberman for anything. I don’t say this just because of Lieberman’s political history of the last two years or so, either. My wife can tell you that I have hated that guy ever since he beat Lowell Weicker, who was a terrific political leader that deserved many more years in office. Lieberman’s perpetual culture war whining has always been loathsome. He is the quintessence of everything that the American majority rejected yesterday.

Also: Please don’t make Rahm Emanuel the Chief of Staff. I appreciate the appeal of an enforcer type who knows where the bodies are buried, but I also think we’ve had too many of those kinds of characters controlling the access gates to the Presidency in the last two decades.

Posted in Politics | 16 Comments

Election Liveblogging

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Ok, ok. I’m watching, might as well blog.

Voting this morning was easy. We waited until about 10 a.m., no lines, but there had apparently been some earlier in the day and I gather there were some long lines late in the day. A lot of interest and excitement in public spaces today, though. I did some shopping and everywhere I went I talked with other shoppers and clerks: everyone asked, “Did you vote yet?” Lots of very affable discussion, including from declared McCain voters. I don’t remember this kind of energy and engagement for any other election in my own life as a voter.

8:32 pm. Pennsylvania’s been called for Obama by several sources. That’s good, but not really definitive at all.

MSNBC just called the North Carolina Senate race for Kay Hagen over Elizabeth Dole. That’s an important event if that call holds true.

The races to watch in the next two hours: VA, NC, OH, IN, FL. If even one breaks definitively for Obama, it’s probably all over. If they all tip McCain, it’s not over necessarily, but it’s going to be a squeaker.

8:54 Lots of reports of exit poll data showing ticket-splitting in favor of Obama in Indiana. That’s a good sign.

9 pm. More projections, but all very much as expected, except a couple of projections calling North Dakota for McCain. I suppose the very fact that there was even any question about ND was telling.

MSNBC says Arizona is too close to call. That’s pretty amazing.

9:10 pm. I’m thinking that even if Obama ends up winning a significant electoral majority, it’s going to be really close when you look at the key swing states.

9:15 pm. Hard to keep track of all the county-by-county information coming in from a lot of sources about Florida, Virginia, Indiana. Some contradictory information or trends?

9:23 pm. NBC projecting Obama will win Ohio. I think that’s the ballgame unless the projection turns out wrong (we certainly know that can happen) or there are surprises later tonight.

9:34. One thing that pundits have been talking about in the last couple of weeks has to do with McCain’s handling of the financial crisis with his “suspension of his campaign”. I do think that was a key moment. When McCain says that he’s been “tested’ in a crisis and Obama hasn’t, I think that whatever truth there might have been in that statement evaporated in that week. McCain failed the test of that moment: he was anything but reassuring. I really agree with a lot of the people who’ve commented that had McCain run screaming towards the center from the day he had the Republican nomination sewn up and then had managed to keep the lid on his own temperment, he’d have looked a lot stronger at this point.

9:38. More sites and sources projecting Ohio for Obama.

9:48. If Obama wins, the only thing I’m really scared of is that it means an alien attack is probably imminent, as per the standing joke that if you see the U.S.A. with a black president, it means you’re watching a science-fiction film. But seriously, I’ve been anticipating and hoping and yet, wow, it is hard to bend your head around it being reality.

10:11. Interesting report that Christopher Shays has lost his House seat in CT. That’s the last of the “liberal Republicans” on the East Coast, I think. I know some older folks whose families were long-standing Republicans of that kind. I have to say that I think this is a loss of some kind for more than just the Republican Party. It’s hard for me to capture it exactly. They were often an important source of skeptical questions in governments dominated by Democrats. They had a lot of respect for process, and no truck at all with a lot of “Nixonland” politics as Rick Perlstein describes them. Maybe that’s why they’re now an extinct political species, I suppose.

10:24. Well, we’re going to be seeing lots of shots of Grant Park all night, obviously. Since we had to live with the goddamn Weather Underground being mentioned every five minutes, this is a nice counterpoint about the distance between 1968 and 2008.

10:29. My graduate advisor is one of the major experts on the history of the Luo people in Kenya. If I had said to him in 1988 that within 20 years, his expertise would have direct, specific relevance to the personal history of a U.S. President, we both would have laughed and then he would have asked me if maybe I had a substance abuse problem.

10:38. I’m thinking that some of the news sites are sitting on further projections about close states until after the polls close in the West.

10:38. Consistent spin from a lot of Democratic politicians is that this is a rejection of dirty, divisive politics. That would be nice. I doubt that the nastiness will go away, though.

10:56. Chris Matthews is being so bombastic (and American exceptionalist) that the other MSNBC commentators are looking at him with a kind of “yeah, yeah” expression. “No other country on Earth has done this!!!” Done what? I mean, ok, come on. Other democratic countries have elected people who come from an outsider or minority population. I grant that the history of the U.S. gives this particular election of this particular person an unprecedented, amazing nature, but democracy in general has permitted other kinds of reversals of fortune.

11. As I suspected, a lot of news sites are calling it for Obama at 11pm as the polls close in the West. But I’m really interested in the margin.

11:11. The historic character of the election is really important, but I also really do hope that we don’t forget that this is about wanting a politics that is about looking for substantive solutions, building meaningful discussions about real choices, about an end to the bullshit–that this is both about history and about the future.

11:18. McCain’s concession. Classy in its direct address to the historical importance of the election. I wish the classy McCain had been out on the campaign trail from the beginning, but I’m very glad he showed up at the end.

11:28. Though there’s a handful of real assholes in the back at McCain’s speech.

11:29. Wow, the crowd outside the White House has a different feel to it than the Grant Park crowd. If this was 1789, I think it might be time to try and get out of Paris.

11:41. I almost typed a snarky comment about Hillary Clinton. No! We are all happy now.

11:46. There are a lot of differences between Obama and Gore & Kerry, and a lot of circumstances different in 2008 than 2004 and 2000. But surely one of the other differences is really just that Obama ran a fantastically good campaign and Gore & Kerry did not.

11:52. Fun to see the video feed from Kisumu. I think an interesting side effect of this election might be to call positive attention to communities of recent immigrants from Africa to the United States.

11:52. Olbermann is making a nice point, that familiarity and personal connection make it very difficult to retain a strong sense of prejudice, and that who is more familiar in an everyday sense than a President?

11:58. Obama’s going to speak. Am I a bad man for thinking that Michelle Obama’s dress is kind of ugly?

Midnight. “Here is your answer”. Yes.

12:05. “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office”. I think this is the thing that keeps coming back to me, and it’s really not about race at all: it’s about everything. His age. His profile. His name. His history as a person. This is a guy who wrote a (quite good) memoir where he was frank about his drug usage, something that never became an issue at all. Just amazing. And great.

12:08. I really wish that if he’s going to invoke King, he doesn’t invoke the “Promised Land” speech…

12:11. “Our stories are singular but our destinies are shared.” Nice.

12:12. Great historical framing of the election.

12:15. Obama has a great smile.

12:19. Any suggestions for the Obama puppy? I would give Boston terriers high marks, but based on recent experience, I might avoid basset hounds, much as I like ours the way you have to like your dog.

12:28. Obama sent a very clear message about “soft power” abroad. The only thing I worry about is that this is one of those things that’s very hard to get back once you’ve lost it.

Ok, that’s it for now. Good night and good will to all. Very happy night, tears blinked out a few times.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Cup Running Over

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’m trying really hard not to look at election-related news right now. I want to wait until it’s meaningful news rather than punditry, plus I’m feeling very burned out about national politics any way. So instead, a quick gaming round-up, for those of you with an interest in digital games. This is the wretchedly wonderful time of the year when game publishers are releasing their best stuff or their franchise sequels ostensibly to get ready for the Christmas season. I think sometimes this leads to perfectly good titles being overlooked because there isn’t any time to play more than a few of the best (not to mention $$$).

Mount and Blade
A lot of people played this independent title while it was in development, but I had never tried it before its commercial release. I’ll probably write about it a bit more in a Terra Nova post soon, because I’ve found it curiously enthralling. It’s a very simple game in many ways. You control a medieval-type character who starts with the shirt on his back and then decide what you want to do in a fairly generic semi-realistic medieval setting. (No elves or magic, etc.) It’s more or less open-ended. You can raise an army in service to your liege, play as a black-hearted mercenary captain, trade goods from town to town, or even if you want a real challenge, act as a lone wolf. Part of what I enjoy about it is the great design of combat, which is vivid and intense, the antithesis of the way you just press buttons and auto-attack in most massively-multiplayer online games. Part of it is a narrative version of the “uncanny valley”: because this game actually lacks a lot of the narrative content of many more expensive titles, I found myself generating stories in my head about events in the game. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of what’s been called “emergent narrative”. I also knew that the game had a big modding community, and I suspect that will be a continuing draw. It’s a boutique title in the sense that you have to be looking for certain kinds of experiences from gaming to enjoy it.

Fable II
I have a real love-hate relationship with Peter Molyneux’s games. The ideas are always so good, the ambitions so very much what I want developers to be striving for, and then somehow he always manages to wrap his one great idea with a sub-par game full of annoying design mechanics. Black & White was the worst offender. You played an off-screen deity who controls a creature who acts as your divine avatar. The creature grew and adapted to the personality The A.I. for the creature was often compelling: it had a dynamic, living feel to it. I even sort of enjoyed how intractable it could be sometimes (the creature had a bad habit of eating your followers when you wanted it to be nice to them, or occasionally flinging them out into the ocean for no obvious reason). But then the actual game, which you needed to pursue, was simply aggravating.

I always tell myself that this time is the last time and I usually end up buying his games anyway. This time I may not regret that decision: so far I’m actually liking Fable II. It’s a lot closer to what I had imagined the first one might be. It has its share of odd mechanics and bugs, sure, but also a lot of small touches that are really fun. It has the same premise as Fable: you are a fantasy hero (thankfully this time you can be female or male) whose moral choices transform the world around you as well as your own looks and powers. I’m playing as an upstanding citizen this time, but I’m inclined to play through a second time as a black-hearted fiend. I also appreciate how consistent the aesthetic of the game is: the humor, the visual design, the narrative, all align harmoniously.

Warhammer Online
Another game I’ll be writing about more at Terra Nova shortly. Here I’ll just say that I found it very disappointing after a brief enthusiastic two weeks of play. As with a lot of massively-multiplayer virtual worlds, too much attention was lavished on the initial player experience and not enough thought given to what the long-term, renewable attractions of playing the game might be. Devotees of this form of game can rip through the initial content within a few days. If a developer hasn’t thought about what will keep people wanting to play in a persistent world, they might as well leave the whole form alone. In this case, the developer (Mythic Entertainment) is well on the way to repeating some of the mistakes they made in their previous product in terms of how they respond to player dissatisfaction. The game’s basic design hook revolves around player versus player combat, which is a solid niche in the marketplace. A lot of Warhammer’s actual design doesn’t service that objective very well, however, or it herds players into a narrow range of intensely repetitive experiences.

The Witcher
I’ve been waiting for the “enhanced” (meaning fixed) version of this game from a Polish developer. It’s based on a series of novels by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. I’m not very far into the game so far, but I like it. The combat mechanics are clumsy, and some of the “mature” content is presented in a very geek-male, adolescent manner. The fantasy setting and story are a big cut above the usual genre reprises found in many computer games, however. It’s an interesting contrast with Mount & Blade: the story is very “fixed”, but it’s laid out within a compelling setting, with some more interesting characters than the norm.

Fallout 3
If I’m not very far into The Witcher (or Fable II), this is the reason. The original Fallout is pretty much my favorite game of all time. (See the introductory visual sequence for an inkling of how great a game it was.) A lot of Fallout fans were worried about this sequel because it changes quite a few of the game mechanics. I didn’t have the same apprehensions, and I feel quite vindicated. This is easily my favorite digital game of the past year, and very much in my all-time pantheon. It hits all of my buttons. The post-apocalyptic landscape it offers is dripping with detail which is both consistent with the aesthetic of earlier entries in the series and extends those visuals in all sorts of new ways. You can go almost anywhere you want within the gameworld, when you want. You can improvise actions within the world in all sorts of ways: there isn’t a single sequence that you have to execute letter-perfect in order to beat a boss or get through a tough level. There are all sorts of amazing emotional hooks to draw you into the world and they’re remarkably adaptable to the decisions you’ve already made. (Fallout 3 is a vastly better implementation of a lot of the design ambitions of Fable II, in terms of a world that responds dynamically to your moral choices.) I’ve giggled with pleasure at some of the unexpected consequences following from my combat actions interacting with the AI, in a good way. I’ve also been more genuinely startled at some events than in any survival-horror game. (Last night, I turned away for a minute to talk to my wife and when I looked back, several mutant mole rats were about to rip my face off. I yelped with genuine surprise and horror.) This is the game of the year, as I see it..

Posted in Games and Gaming | 2 Comments

The Problem With ‘Social Construction’

Posted on November 3, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’ve just been chatting in email with a friend who asked me to boil down my critique of the concept of social construction as it has appeared in history, cultural criticism, anthropology and so on over the last 25 years or so. The term itself now produces a kind of thoughtless, reactive sneer from many outsiders (rather like “relativism”) that I’m almost tempted instead to write a sympathetic exploration of where the idea came from and why it was an important and useful idea before it became a banal shorthand. I took the time to collect my thoughts on the issue, and once I was done, it struck me as worth reproducing as a blog post.

My critique is a bit narrower than what you’d find in a work like Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What?, which is a smart response to the version of the debate over “social construction” that pertains to scientific research.

There are four prongs to my critique.

The first is that the social construction argument as it appears in work like Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition is far too casual in its understanding of the historical processes through which inventions or constructions are assembled and become socially powerful or widely distributed. In this sense, arguing that something was “socially constructed” was a rephrasing of the claim that a belief or practice was ideological, e.g., created for narrowly and consciously instrumental purposes to advance the interests of a particular social or institutional group. In this use of “social construction”, saying something is constructed is very much also saying something is a tool of ruling or oppressive interests–it piggybacks on a loosely Marxist concept of ideology or hegemony. As a consequence, the “invention of tradition” scholarship tended to completely overlook the organically historical roots of “constructions”, the ways in which they are built up out of real experiences, real memories (collective and personal), authentic knowledge. The authenticity or power of constructions in the Hobsbawm/Ranger sense is seen as being secured through domination.

Carolyn Hamilton’s book on the “construction” of the Zulu monarch Shaka, Terrific Majesty, is a good critique of this kind of argument–Hamilton argues instead that embedded inside successive “constructions” of Shaka was also always an organic, authentic, “real” series of historical experiences, that these constructions weren’t arbitrary, that they aren’t made in a simple instrumental fashion, and that people engaged in the act of construction don’t themselves have a clear bird’s eye view of what they’re trying to do or why they want to do it. The act of “social construction” is constrained by what history really has been, both what really happened and how people really understood and interpreted what happened.

The second problem, as I see it, is what Michael Taussig complained about in Mimesis and Alterity: that for a lengthy time, many monographs were written where the sum total of the argument was, “X was socially constructed”. Taussig says that this is silly because this isn’t an argument, it’s a given. He goes on to argue that instead what should we should be doing is construction ourselves. This I don’t necessarily buy–this is what leads Taussig to some of his later performative excesses, playacting at being a shaman and so on.

In fact, I think this is the problem with the entire concept. Once you think of the process of social creation as a “construction”, you’re always going to be a phony when you participate in what you imagine to be social creation, because you’re going to have a vanguardist or manipulative sensibility about what you’re doing. (For example, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Spivak’s talk about ‘strategic essentialism’–a notion that we will know that we’re not ‘really’ essential identities, but maybe the proles will not know and will be mobilized usefully by our strategic deployment of identities.) In any event, I think Taussig is right that spending a lot of time just to demonstrate that a particular identity or phenomenon is a social construction is a waste of effort.

My third objection follows on the second. The fact that for a long time scholars spent considerable effort to demonstrate that a given identity, institution, etc., simply was a social construction, tells you something about the intent of that argument. It was designed to undercut or demolish practices being described as such. The problem is that many scholars also recognized the “reality” of such constructions–that once constructed, they were social reality, that there wasn’t any ontological, Platonic human “real” being concealed by constructions. If you said something like “modern subjectivities built around liberal individualism, around rights-bearing sovereign selves are a construction”, you also had to say, “But no less real for that”. A lot of Foucauldian work (including by Foucault himself) had this sort of coy double-gesture: madness, sexuality, criminality, etc., were “constructed”, but also “real”–and thus if you said, “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” you would hear “Oh, my no, there isn’t anything but these constructions, there is nothing outside, nothing more ‘real’ beyond them”.

But in Foucault and many aligned works, there’s also this sense of expose, that in seeing something as construction, you were seeing its inauthenticity, you had discovered its hidden truth, you had caught it in flagrante delicto. This coy double-gesture got old real fast. If everything is “construction”, then all we’re doing is describing process of change over time, e.g., writing history. If some things are more constructed than other things, then we need some kind of foundationalist account of real identities, psychologies, social formations, etc. If some constructions are good and others bad, then we need some kind of normative ethical or political theory about the good and the bad. (This is something Lynn Hunt supplies nicely in her recent history of ‘human rights’: she says both ‘They are constructions arising out of post-1789 global history AND they are desirable constructions’.) A lot of that leads us back away from “social construction” as cliche, but most people who used the trope too enthusiastically couldn’t be weaned away from it.

My final complaint is a bit less grandiose: I just think that the promiscuous overuse of “social construction” led to a lot of methodologically shitty work in which scholars sat in a big library, called up a few novels and then argued that common images, tropes, metaphors and so on in those novels were “social constructions” which had wide constitutive power and general distribution in the “real world” that the novels sought to represent. This is kind of the methodological practice that got built up out of Said’s Orientalism, maybe in its argumentative apex in something like Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt. Mitchell says something like, “The way Egypt is represented in metropolitan texts IS Egypt; the desire to find a ‘real Egypt’ beyond its representation is a part of colonial discourse, not the antidote to it”. Gyan Prakash has a fairly similar gesture in some of his work–that we can’t know what the non-West was, that the only historical knowledge we can hope to have was what the West constructed the non-West as. I think their arguments have some integrity to them even if I really disagree with the epistemological despair behind them.

Nevertheless, there has been a lot of work along these lines that doesn’t have that integrity–that just slaps together a couple of metropolitan texts and says, “Voila! colonial discourse, and colonial discourse is colonial reality, ergo this is not just a book about ‘fictions of the empire’ but about the empire as it actually was”. If we’re really serious about “social construction”, we have to deal with the intensely complicated terrain of how representation travels, circulates, becomes more or less powerful as it iterates, etc.. This point a bit of what’s behind John Tomlinson’s critique of “cultural imperialism” or Nicolas Thomas is getting at in Colonialism’s Culture–that some ‘social constructionist’ argument as applied to colonialism and empire is both epistemologically and methodologically suspect. You can really see the latter in one vein of work from the 1990s, when lots of folks just whipped off monographs that made enormous claims from slender readings.

Posted in Academia, Books, Production of History | 9 Comments

Another Way for Mr. Lincoln

Posted on October 30, 2008 by Timothy Burke

The old mantra on the American right used to be that “conservatives have ideas”. I think even when that might have been said by conservatives with some degree of authentic confidence, it wasn’t always a statement about ideas, it was a belief that American conservatism was unafraid of dealing with and describing the world as it actually is. The contrast was to a view that thinkers on the left believed that they needed to represent the world as they wanted it to be, that representation was an instrumental tool for remaking social consciousness and thus social reality.

So, for example, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a conservative of a certain sort could argue against desegregation through busing not just on formal legal grounds, but on the grounds that busing advocates misunderstood the morally complex, organically historical landscape of racial consciousness, residential choices, community formation, and so on. Or conservatives could argue that liberals did not understand the moral nature of some foreign governments, and so on. This is one way in which writers like V.S. Naipaul came to be read as ‘conservative’, through a declared commitment to seeing the world with harsh clarity, without a self-censoring need to overlook unwanted truths and facts.

That rhetoric still ghosts around some self-declared conservatism, but it’s nothing but a bad joke most of the time now. There is a lot of Kool-Aid under the bridge.

On the other hand, the didacticism of liberal imagination does still linger in some well-meaning projects. This may be worth remembering in the months to come if Obama is elected. Obama himself mostly has been very clear about the need to think clearly about the complex, organic, historically produced character of American racial and social identity. However, some of the conventional ways authorities manage and arbitrate identity in civic institutions is still about as subtle as a ten-ton weight dropped on the head.

Exhibit A: Mr. Lincoln’s Way, a children’s book I read with my daughter recently.

The basic premise of the story is that a well-liked African-American school principal has to deal with a recalcitrant racist bully, one “Mean Gene”. The principal is convinced that the bully is basically a good kid.

Sure enough, in relatively short order he has determined that the boy:

a) Has an angry racist father whom he has recently come to live with after formerly being raised by his kindly non-racist grandfather whom he would much prefer to live with.
b) Really likes and knows a lot about birds.

The author is a bit delicate about the home situation, but I read the story as suggesting some kind of custody issues in a broken home. By the end of the story, the principal has somehow managed to get the boy back with his grandfather through off-stage social-services ledgerdemain. The principal has also tamed the boy’s racism and bullying by involving him in a project to attract birds to the school’s new atrium through extensive re-landscaping. (If nothing else, I was impressed by the principal’s ability to freely spend tons of money on this project, although he and Mean Gene do almost all of the manual labor themselves.)

At 48 pages, this is a concentrated dose of genuinely well-meaning but annoying liberal didacticism, and as good an example as any of how counterproductive the approach can be, whether aimed at children or adults.

Who is this book aimed at? Is it bullies and racists? In what communities might you find a lone child expressing racist sentiments which are viewed with disdain and anger by all other students and community members?” Because that’s about the only racist bully who might pick up this book and say, “Wow, that’s kind of like my situation”. Pretty much everywhere else, racism openly expressed is going to come from a social group, and align with some portion or fraction of the surrounding community.

Add to that the proposition in the story that inside a racist bully lies a sensitive person who can be liberated from racism through the expression of his hidden cultural or artistic passion. This is a classic sentimental trope in moralistic liberal narratives, where inner talents or desires create the possibility of secular salvation. Again, I doubt a child who was commonly given to racist expression in school is going to read this and think, “Yes, that’s it: all I’ve ever wanted is to do interior decoratiing!”

The audience is not the racist protagonist, but the child (and parent) who want to be anti-racist. The narrative is tailor-made to flatter them and suggest simple, comforting avenues of social action. Racism in the story is interpersonal sin and without social force. The cause goes no deeper than a bad parent, who is ultimately put in check by a government official quietly managing the problem family’s affairs so that the child lives happily ever after. The racist child is restored to harmony with his community through the development of his individual talents and sensitivity.

A lot of this aligns with what Hazel Carby once called Official Multiculturalism, which is less an ideological product of liberal politics and more a managerial dogma adopted for ease of use by civic and cultural institutions. Ideas about race which are more subtly interwoven into everyday life, or which align with social formations, aren’t tractable to didactic projects, and they can’t be overcome simply by discovering a hidden vocation for pressing flowers or playing lacrosse.

I can hear already the protest that this is a book for young children, and thus, the message needs to be simplified. Good children’s literature, even work that has a legitimate aim to moral instruction or reinforcement of positive behavior, doesn’t have to be simple in the situations it describes or the emotions it allows to its protagonists. The language has to be age-appropriate, and the circumstances need to feel real and immediate to young readers.

Eight-year olds are working through all sorts of interesting, complicated ethical questions about friendship and sociality: they don’t live in a world of simple resolutions any more than adults do. My daughter has been asking about what to do if a friend of hers says something mean to another person, or what it means when one group of friends tries to exclude another group from playing. She has a friend her age who is (to adult ears) brutally matter-of-fact about how she describes the circumstances of her adoption. The variety of family circumstances and family cultures are becoming far more visible to kids her age as they begin to spend more time playing independently at other households. Racism, if and when it appears in their world, is nothing like Mean Gene and Mr. Lincoln.

Kids are as alert as adults to the more uncomfortable possibilities: that some people are simply cruel or bad or broken, that some people that we regard as doing wrong see that wrongness instead as a kindness or necessity, that some pain comes from messy misunderstandings that can’t be fixed with wise advice or a generous word.

Nor is there anything wrong with some of the messages the book wants to convey about how people, even as children, can rise towards fulfillment or happiness. But if you want an example of how rich the idea of finding a haven from family and circumstance through fantasy can be, look at A Bridge to Terebithia. My wife suggested that the message of the book is that you don’t have to believe what your family believes, that if what your father or mother says makes you embarassed or you know it’s wrong, you don’t have to repeat it. Sure, and again, there’s a lot of good work in children’s literature, even short and pictorial work, that gets that message across, but usually with much more awareness of how sly and subversive that idea really is.

Thinking our way to a new civic language about community and transformation, pluralism and connection, change and stability, is a good job for everyone to undertake in the years ahead: it is precisely one of the tasks that political leaders and authorities, whomever they might be, cannot do for us.

Posted in Miscellany, Politics | 2 Comments

Nationalism, in Passing

Posted on October 29, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Early in my career, I went to a presentation by a well-known anthropologist whose work I liked a lot. It was a good presentation, but the last quarter of it or so was devoted to a very loose, speculative argument that current structures of globalization had already effectively made nations obsolete in a great many ways. This wasn’t the conservative version of this argument, about the supranational authority of a “new world order”, but instead an argument that the movement of goods, people, media, money and so on across borders had already undercut the underlying pretenses of Westphalian sovereignty, just like the existence of borderlands, refugees, cosmopolitan enclaves, shadow states, NGOs, MNCs, and other non-national constructs with considerable social power in the contemporary world. The presenter argued that it would take some time before that reality became explicit and visible at the conceptual level, however. In a way, his presentation reminded me of the picture Neal Stephenson draws in Snow Crash, in which the vestigal apparatus of the nation-state has been reduced to something to nothing more than a flag of convenience, a commodified service used when needed.

My response at the time was that this was a bit like concluding that because the social and intellectual authority of Christianity over temporal life had been seriously eroded by the end of the 19th Century, religion itself would soon follow. “God is dead”, ran the argument, “so religion will soon die”. “Sovereignty is dead”, so too the nation? The first supposition was wrong, and I expect that the second is as well.

On the other hand, it has never been more clear than right now that many social mobilizations carried out in the name of the nation do not cut deeply into the identities or consciousness of those social actors. Official elites in many postcolonial African nations speak on behalf of the nation, but very little of what they concretely do when they invoke the nation has anything to do with the classic conception of sovereign national interest. Many social and political movements across the world which now compete with national governments for authority or influence scarcely even bother to invoke national interest any longer. They do not try to formulate themselves as a loyally national alternative to the party or group presently in power. And just as the presentation I heard some years ago suggested, more and more people live in places or communities where the nation holds little sway, or where it is openly understood to be a paper tiger, a farce.

I’m thinking about this terrain partly because I’m still struggling with the concluding chapter of a manuscript in which I want to talk about sovereignty and nation-making in post-1960 Africanist scholarship as well as on the ground in Zimbabwe.

However, I’m also thinking about it the past few weeks in the context of reportage about the presidential race in the United States. One of the narratives that has really come together in the past month from reporters is about undercurrents of racism, xenophobia, and exclusivist ideas about “real America” swirling around inside the McCain campaign.

Keeping in mind that it is very hard to know just how typical or widespread these kinds of views actually are, it’s still interesting to think about the way many of these views basically kick over the traces of anything remotely resembling conventional loyalty to the nation as an abstract institution. In this view, the American nation is only “real America” if it is governed by people who closely correspond to the religious, ethnic, political, social and moral character of one group of Americans. The institutions of the United States hold no residual legitimacy in this view, so if the wrong kind of person with the wrong kinds of views or identity is elected to national office, there isn’t any need to acknowledge that person’s authority as an expression of national will or imbued with national power, as acting on behalf of a nationally-defined “people”.

What we end up with is social actors whose primary point of commitment is to local community, to civic organization, to religious congregation, to a highly particular belief system, who paper over that commitment with a thin veneer of rhetoric about Americanness but with no particular loyalty to national institutions if they are not narrowly aligned to some sectarian project. For example, the kind of fringe sentiment on the religious right that Obama is the anti-Christ, which may speak about loyalty to the United States of America in passing, but which is really about a commitment to some post-national or non-national form of social identity.

It may be that contemporary nations do not need strongly felt loyalties that cut deep into the selfhood of national citizens in order to mobilize power on behalf of the nation. Maybe in fact they never needed that kind of subjectivity on a constant or regular basis, just as religion as an institution turns out to have had far less need for constant temporal enforcement of theological doctrine than secular European thinkers at the end of the 19th Century sometimes assumed.

Posted in Politics | 8 Comments

Debate Notes

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’ll leave calling the horse race to other writers, but I had two small, specific reactions to the chunk of the debate that I watched.

1. When McCain brought up John Lewis’ remarks, here’s what I would have said back if this was a conversation and not a political performance. “Senator, if you respect and admire John Lewis, shouldn’t you care a bit more about what he said about you? What does ‘respect and admire’ mean to you if the first time someone says something you’re bothered by, you want to repudiate that person? If I respect someone, then I take his disagreements with me more seriously rather than less so.”

2. McCain’s emotional demeanor for most of the debate looked like a really bad combination of rage and a desperate need to go take a piss.

Debates of this kind are always performances: they’re really not a good source of information about substantive policy positions that candidates are likely to pursue. Like almost everyone, I pay more attention to affect and mood. McCain comes off like the quintessential cranky old bastard senior professor who comes to talks and says something disproportionately mean and angry to the speaker, who is choleric and petty to grad students, who has that feeling of entitlement to being unpleasant that crops up in academia at times.

Basically, he came off like an asshole whenever he wasn’t speaking, and sometimes when he was speaking. Assholes can be useful in organizations, but not at the top of the org chart: then they’re one-person wrecking crews.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments