Patriarchy and Pathology

Last night at dinner I asked Ira how one might productively analyze the Joseph Fritzl case in terms of systemic, rather than subjective, violence. (Yes, we do have dinner conversations like this. Whaddya expect? We're both PhDs in literature.) Ira's response: begin by looking at the way the Austrian State's patriarchal biases effectively enabled Fritzl to commit his crimes. The State, for instance, repeatedly ignored his daughter's attempts to run away from home, even though her father had a record as a sex offender. Ira's hypothesis is corroborated by "Joseph Fritzl's fictive forebears," a TLS essay, the gist of which is this: Symptomological analyses of Austrian literature, including Freud's case studies, suggest a systemic sociocultural tendency to indulge abusive patriarchs while disregarding patriarchy's victims, primarily women and children.

Puncturing the Pinhead Pundits (Who Promote Faux Patriotism)

Bill Maher mocks the ostentatious display of patriotic symbols on the grounds that these accessories simply provide cover to faux patriots, people eager to give the illusion that they're supporting the country, the troops, the military, etc. but who would prefer not to make an actual sacrifice.

Kudos to Maher for his spirited defense of Barack Obama's explanation for not wearing an American flag lapel pin (the pins have become a "substitute for true patriotism") and for calling the mainstream media, including ABC's Claire Shipman, for its blantant hypocrisy and for manufacturing faux news events. The punditocracy promotes the notion that political candidates should be judged according to nebulous and subjective criteria such as "authenticity" and "character" and candidates who don't spout the predictable platitudes the pundits and their handlers want to hear are quickly deemed "unelectable."

Thanks to Jim for e-mailing me this article. On the one hand, I'm glad to get some breathing room here in Sweden from the moronic press coverage of the US presidential race. The vacuousness of the discourse is especially apparent when you're outside looking in to the fishbowl. On the other hand, I'm fascinated by the techniques used to depoliticize the public sphere by diverting attention away from real problems that the government leaders need to confront, e.g., the rotting infrastructure, the health-care crisis, the declining standard of living, the rising debt, etc. And these are just a few of the domestic issues.

Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Language

Leading neocons exress despair at the Bush Administration's incompetence in Neo Culpa: Politics & Power.

As a literary critic with a keen interest in the relationship between affect and meaning, I'm intrigued by the implicit understanding of how language works in this quote by David Frum:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Notice how Frum avoids talking about trying to convince Bush to believe in a particular position. Instead of referring to reasons and arguments, he imagines a sort of understanding via osmosis. In this fantasy, ideas are objectified as the foundational substance of words, and these ideas, once spoken, get absorbed by the body, like lotion. Indeed, it's not even clear that "understanding" is the right term here, since Frum talks about a feeling - a committed feeling - towards ideas rather than a belief in them.

Thank you, Mr. Frum, for providing a textbook example of how a neo-Platonic, logocentric model of language can prove to be disastrous.

Walter Benn Michaels Weighs In at The Valve

Walter Benn Michaels responds to bloggers who've been debating the merits of The Trouble With Diversity. In my estimation, he does an excellent job of refuting the major arguments against made him, most of which turn out to miss his major point concerning the way the Left's efforts to combat economic inequality (the US once aspired to wage a War on Poverty, after all, though it ultimately decided to fight a war in Vietnam instead) have been eclipsed in the US, first by modes of identity politics and then by a more banal commitment to "diversity."

(Cue Luna's "Lost in Space.") "I've heard it all before" at various UIC forums, so what I found most intriuging in this exchange was Michaels' response to the University Diarist, a blogger who wonders why the dedication to The Trouble with Diversity made her "skin crawl."

Lately I've been researching about affect and literature, a project that I suspect Michaels would view as a dead end insofar as it would seem to privilege the subject's response to the stimuli produced by textual object over the author's intention. The critics and theorists I'm looking at try to posit a subjectless affect, and at this point, to be honest, I'm undecided about the viability of this model, at least when it comes to writing.

But to return to the topic at hand, the UD's rhetorical question could certainly serve as a example of the need to reason through our initial affective responses. The UD's visceral response to the dedication in TTWD that leads her to fantasize about Michaels and his wife dying while having sexual intercourse. I won't go into details. It's just a bit too gross, not least because Michaels and Jennifer Ashton are colleagues of mine at UIC. (Yes, my response is based partly on my subject position.)

Anyway, here's Michaels' reply, which provides an example of how to respond with dignity to a pretty outrageous remark:

All this is put a lot more provokingly in the chapter itself, and because it’s put provokingly, I am not surprised that people are provoked. UD’s also being provoked by the dedication, however, I can’t explain. Maybe it’s because she literally misread it (she says it’s to “my wife” but it never mentions “my wife”). Maybe it’s because she doesn’t recognize that “so necessary” is an allusion and hence doesn’t see that it involves a certain amount of irony. But as to where her coital death fantasies come from, I’ve got nothing.

Coital death fantasies. Where's Zizek when we need him? I'm sure he'd have plenty to say on this topic, particularly within the context of a - ahem scholarly discussion. More importantly, I'd like to hear Zizek and Michaels debate the claim that the truth of a claim has "nothing to do" with the speaker's subject position. As I've suggested in an ebr essay discussing Zizek's account of Christianity's pervese core both Michaels and Zizek insist upon a universalist notion of the truth against varieties of postmodern pluralism or relativism. They also agree that multiculturalism, particularly academic multiculturalism, is a strategy for eliding class-based inequality. However, what I didn't address properly in my ebr essay was how differently Zizek and Michaels understand the truth.

The difference, in short, has to do with Zizek's commitment to a universally divided subject and his model of ideology, two factors that lead him to insist that a speaker's motives (both conscious and unconscious) matter greatly when it comes to assessing the validity of his or her claims. For instance, it might be true that Sadam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but when VP Cheney was making this claim in the buildup to the Iraq war, what mattered was the deeper truth concerning the motives for repeating this assertion publically from a position of great authority. Michaels would argue that Zizek's position is based on notions of authenticity that he finds irrelevent. I should work all this out rigorously at some point, but there's work to be done...

First, one pressing question: What is the ironic reference to "so necessary" that Michaels suggests the UD misses? My guess: Jay-Z's "Change Clothes, lyrics by Pharrell. If Walter is at today's colloquium, I'll have to ask him.

Commodify your Dissent and Conformity

Here's an informal, but effective analysis of the convoluted ideological messages conveyed in the current "This is Our Country" Chevy Truck. I'd refrain from describing it as a work of deconstruction, but I do want my American Literature and American Culture students, who read a piece by Rosa Parks earlier in the semester and are currently in the process of learning about various conceptions of ideology, to ask themselves "Can Rosa Parks Sell Pickup Trucks?"

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Kundera on his novel:

This story is not allegory. But my book is a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other. The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children. All totalitarianisms do this. And perhaps our entire technical age does this, with its cult of the future, its cult of youth and childhood, its indifference to the past and mistrust of thought. In the midst of a relentlessly juvenile society, an adult equipped with memory and irony feels like Tamina on the isle of children.

Much to consider here, but what grabbed my attention was the analogy Kundera makes between totalitarianism and postmodern technocratic society. He sees the two forces as similar in that they work to infantilize the population by denying people a sense of history. Memory and irony are presented as two potential counterforces. I may want to bring Kundera's views - and the literary aesthetic that they imply - to bear on the American postmodernists about whom I'm writing.

First question: How durable is the link Kundera makes between totalitarianism and technocracy? At what point does the comparison break down and why?

Second question: How do Kundera's remarks about totalitarianism, made, I believe, in the mid 1980s and based on his first-hand experience of living under Soviet rule, apply to the world today: a neoliberal world order of global networks in which the U.S. is said to be the sole superpower?

File Under Posthistoricism

The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic Party in which Moulitsas calls the shots would cater to every whim of its liberal base. But though he can match Michael Moore for shrillness, the most salient thing about Moulitsas's politics is not where he falls on the left-right spectrum (he's actually not very far left). It's his relentless competitiveness, founded not on any particular set of political principles, but on an obsession with tactics - and in particular, with the tactics of a besieged minority, struggling for survival: stand up for your principles, stay united, and never back down from a fight. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas told me, "I'm just all about winning."

This quote comes from a profile of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, described as "the world's biggest political blogger." I found the piece frustrating. While I'm all for Democrats toughening up 'their game,' i.e., developing plans to thwart the Republican's Rove-style tactics, I am dubious about an ostensible political leader who claims to be beyond ideology - if that is supposed to mean an abandonment of political principles.

On the one hand, it's a mistake to frame political debates exclusively in terms of overly abstract - what a Hegelian would dub "empty" - principles such as "freedom" or whatever. On the other hand, I don't want a political party (Democrats or otherwise) where winning elections is all that matters. I want to see a truly progressive political party in the United States - one that is concerned about real-world results - reducing material inequalities and improving living conditions for all Americans, not just the those in the top 20% or whatever of the income bracket.