Monthly Archives: April 2018

Gossip, Rumor and the Arts of Domination

“Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews.”
— Theodor W. Adorno

Once I was passed over for a newsroom position I very much wanted. “We needed a woman,” an editor told me. I said nothing, although I seethed. In short order, I was made a columnist, so I didn’t even get a chance to cry. But the instant rush of utter unfairness lingers. The woman chosen was qualified, but her qualification had nothing to do with her sex. I was told she was just a needed statistic.
— Richard Cohen, “Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn’t disqualify me.”

A senior philosopher elsewhere writes: Just wanted to tell you that your latest CHE piece really resonated with me. Back when I was first on the job market I had an APA interview with my undergrad alma mater [University X]. Of course, I felt confident going in—I knew the school, the culture, the students, the area. As the end of the interview, the (sole) interviewer said, “Well, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. But I have to be honest. The Dean said we are hiring a woman or the position won’t exist. This was a courtesy interview because you are an alum.” They hired some woman whose name I now forget, although I know she left [University X].
–Brian Leiter, “Academic job searches with ‘hidden’ search criteria”

One of the things that keeps shocking me over and over is the number of interviews Amanda and TT Lady announce having. NINE first round interviews? Jesus. I’ve had fewer than that in three years on the market… I’ve had zero this year so far. None. Not a single first-round interview.The response I expect is ‘Well, Tim (no, not my real name), you really need to reexamine your materials then, or publish more or..’ Here’s the thing: I hired Kelsky to help with my materials. And I did some of the job-mentoring stuff offered elsewhere. And I (literally) have published almost twice the amount that is required for tenure at the institution where I currently have a temporary position. And no, not all of them are epicycle pubs. And there are several areas where I’m one of the `go to’ people to ask. Yet I’ve had zero first-round interviews. My application is not being taken seriously, it seems. I would love to explain this (this fact, the general one) by anything other than my being a white male. But it’s hard to come up with anything nearly as plausible.
–“Tim,” philosophy job-market candidate

With these perceptions of unfairness and with the social baggage we grew up with, University life was characterized by a clear boundary between Savarnas and Dalits. I remember with great regret referring to Dalit students with derogatory terms because of the perceived injustice that my own friends were unable to get into the university while less qualified Dalits were given “an easy route in. “ No doubt there were Dalits from well-to-do families who were able to avail of the Reservation system to get in, but what large social system doesn’t have such cases? The rich and privileged use “the system” to their advantage every day but when someone else uses the very system in the very same way, we blanch and invoke morality! In a curious inversion, we declared ourselves victims!
–Prashant Nema, “Upper Caste Privilege: From Catharsis To Change”

Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip—and here I have in mind malicious gossip—be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
— James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 142–43.

Virginia Woolf, Priya Gopal, and Thinking While a Woman in the University

George Steiner’s pining for a university without women should be a reminder of the rupture that women occasion by their very presence in the university. Here is Virginia Woolf’s evocative account of thinking while a woman and of a university that makes those thoughts fugitive:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please–it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on 
the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.
There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought–to call it by a prouder name than it deserved–had let its line down into 
the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind–put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting,
and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I
 could not now remember. The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts
and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning. Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind–Saint Charles, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they
 came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his
 essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning
 crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay–the name escapes me–about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here.
…
It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I
 put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the 
manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. … Here I was actually at
 the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a
 flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery,
kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its
 treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and
 will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep forever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

That Beadle, gesticulating wildly in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, his face contorted in horror and indignation, is George Steiner. I think we mustn’t underestimate the trauma, the disorientation, the sheer terror that clutches at Steiner and the male structures that he deputizes for when he chances upon women in the seminar room, at faculty talks, at high table. That’s what it’s often about, the deep grammar in the yowls about “political correctness,” the mewls about “free speech,” the sanctimony about “rigor,” standards,” “clarity,” “merit,” “real disciplines,” in the end often amounts to a recoil at the sheer presence of women — now increasingly black and brown women — in the university.

“What theorem out of Africa?”: What George Steiner’s Racist Rage Teaches Us About Conservative Ideology

There’s a certain kind of academic who likes to cite George Steiner to the effect that knowledge of Goethe, or a delight in Rilke doesn’t make a person any less likely to be barbaric. And yet the strongest argument for that position has always been Steiner himself, not least because his visceral racism and palpable misogyny have flourished in a historical milieu when the humanities have produced some of the most far-reaching, stringent inquiries into the relationship of high culture to moral sadism. In that sense, Steiner’s skepticism is no different from the gushing encomiums to intellectual supremacy espoused by most of his academic colleagues – “philosophers are skeptical and dangerous to the status quo!” “Those who graduate with English degrees are empathetic and cosmopolitan!” – for, despite their varying affective registers, they function as roundabout ways by which the speaker transitively, insidiously congratulates himself.

Consider, for example, Steiner’s space clearing remarks as he launches into his study of the rhetoric of philosophy in his book, The Poetry of Thought:

The incandescence of intellectual and poetic creativity in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote. So much has long been obvious. Yet the causes of this sunburst, the motives which brought it about in that time and place remain unclear. The penitential “political correctness” now prevalent, the remorse of postcolonialism make it awkward even to pose what may be the pertinent questions, to ask why the ardent wonder that is pure thought prevailed almost nowhere else (what theorem out of Africa?).

Manifold and complex factors must have been interactive, “implosive” to borrow a crucial concept from the packed collisions in atomic physics. Among these were a more or less benign climate and ease of maritime communication. Argument traveled fast; it was, in the ancient and figural sense, “Mercurial.” The availability of protein, cruelly denied to so much of the sub-Saharan world, may have been pivotal. Nutritionists speak of protein as “brain food.” Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit. There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility. It is, however, evident that for the privileged, and they were relatively numerous, the ownership of slaves comported leisure and dispensation from manual and domestic tasks. It bestowed time and space for the free play of intellect. This is an immense license. Neither Parmenides nor Plato needed to earn a living. Under temperate skies, a nourished man could proceed to argue or to listen in the agora, in the groves of the Academy.

The third element is the most difficult to evaluate. With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis. Some may have had access to higher education. But there is little evidence prior to Plotinus. Did this (enforced, traditional?) abstention contribute to the luxury and even arrogance of the speculative? Does it reach, via the arrestingly modest contribution to mathematics and metaphysics made by women, into our own, now metamorphic day? Protein, slavery, male prepotence: what was their cumulative causation in the Greek miracle? For let us be clear: a miracle it was.
— George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

What is notable here, I think, isn’t the vulgarity of the racism and sexism. As pointed out above, it shouldn’t by now be news to us (though it is no less appalling, of course) that the racism of intellectuals like Steiner proves to be the usual banal fare available from Fox News and the Daily Mail, a coagulation of folk science, modern myths and legends about ancient Greece, and a “Great Books + Classical Music” cultural fetish.

Rather, what I find striking here is how strenuously Steiner strives to pack in as many “politically incorrect” slurs as he can manage in two paragraphs. One would almost be forgiven for thinking this a Sokal-like, reverse hoax of what a cultural studies type imagines conservative thought to be like; so determined is he to check off every space in his bingo checklist of imagined “intersectional” foes of conservative thought. Racism: “what theorem out of Africa?” no doubt a deliberate echo of Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” Ableism: “Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit.” Class domination and brutality: “There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility.” Misogyny: “With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis.”

It is this breathless, flailing litany of invective that I think may tell us something useful about conservative thought. I mean here, specifically, not only the white rage that it bespeaks, the desperation and rancid resentment simmering to a boil just beneath Steiner’s rococo prose, but also how that rage is constituted by phantasms, visions, nightmares summoned precisely by their very telling. In other words, the phantasms generative of conservative rage and resentment are constitutive of – rather than only or primarily reactions to – observations made about an “objective,” “external” reality.

This carries certain implications not only for a hermeneutic adequate to understanding conservative thought, but also a praxis attentive to its energies. The political theorist Corey Robin has offered one of the most penetrating accounts of how we ought to understand conservativism’s unifying vision. And yet if what I have argued above is correct, one of the implications he has been at pains to draw out and elaborate about the Trump era increasingly appears questionable. In a review of Robin’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lily Geismer offers a particularly helpful distillation of this dimension of Robin’s thesis:

“In a somewhat counterintuitive argument, Robin argues that the weaknesses and instability of the Trump administration and the Republicans on Capitol Hill are a result of conservatism’s past successes, and proof that that it is on the decline. The decline of conservatism as an intellectual tradition — its increasing instability, incoherence, and irresponsibility — has occurred, in Robin’s opinion, less because of Trump’s furious tweet storms and doctrinal sloppiness and more because the right does not have a credible left to borrow from and react against. Over the last half-century, he argues, conservatives have been so successful at thwarting emancipatory movements that now it has nothing to unify it. Although Robin does acknowledge the achievements of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, he believes that none of these movements are strong enough to truly galvanize and discipline the right.”

What Robin’s argument appears to presuppose is that the right is animated by a more or less realistic judgment of the balance of forces arrayed against it; that conservativism gains its coherence and discipline from the pressure exerted by an actually existing vibrant, credible left. This fails to account for the fantastical visions that have often galvanized and unified the right – terrors of conspiracy plotting by the enslaved, moral panics around sexuality and gender, Islamophobic fever dreams of Dhimmitude and Sharia. Even more crucially, Robin’s account does not register the extent to which the very marrow of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” really, the very marrow of politics, economics, and culture, are significantly – though of course not completely – constituted by fantasy and myth (“witchcraft” and “racecraft”).

Following the Argument Where It Leads, Or What does Conservative Ideology Have to do with Professional Philosophy?

It is striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”
— Omedi Ochieng, “Analytic Moral Philosophy and the Affect of Masculine Reason”

Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when — particularly when — it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded — too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it… A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules — leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative — but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence — and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility — some might say masochism — and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind

I’ve long admired Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s internalized Michael Kinsley’s warning that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, taking his arguments to thought frontiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone service and sometimes barely enough air to breathe. For examples of the Williamson oeuvre, see these National Review pieces arguing against reparations, decrying the mainstreaming of transgender rights, critiquing the “white working class” and dismissing the idea of “white supremacy.”

Every Williamson article contains strong meat, which has led his detractors to dismiss him as a troll. But that’s not who he is. He’s really more of an ogre who loves to take arguments to the breaking point in hopes of shocking readers with his cold, unbound logic. Where other writers might serve 7 percent alcohol in their brew, Williamson likes to up his percentage to 20. Where other writers might stop at mean, Williamson keeps going all the way to cruel.

I never read Williamson in hopes of seeking agreement. And on that score, he has almost never failed me. He’s not interested in building consensus or in gentle persuasion. He reduces all the grays to their black-and-white components. He pushes boundaries and doesn’t stop until he’s gone too far. In a 2014 piece about transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, he dropped bombs when a sling-shot would have sufficed: “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.”

— Jack Shafer, “Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson,” Politico Magazine, April 06, 2018

Professional Philosophy as Ambush

Adrian Piper:

It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership among the privileged few, the intellectual elite, this country’s real aristocracy, my parents told me; full of confidence in our intellectual ability to prevail, to fashion original and powerful views about some topic we represented to ourselves only vaguely. I was a bit late, and noticed that many turned to look at – no, scrutinize me as I entered the room. I congratulated myself on having selected for wear my black velvet, bell-bottomed pants suit (yes, it was that long ago) with the cream silk blouse and crimson vest. One of the secretaries who’d earlier helped me find an apartment came forward to greet me and proceeded to introduce me to various members of the faculty, eminent and honorable faculty, with names I knew from books I’d studied intensely and heard discussed with awe and reverence by my undergraduate teachers. To be in the presence of these men and attach faces to names was delirium enough. But actually to enter into casual social conversation with them took every bit of poise I had. As often happens in such situations, I went on automatic pilot. I don’t remember what I said; I suppose I managed not to make a fool of myself. The most famous and highly respected member of the faculty observed me for awhile from a distance and then came forward. Without introduction or preamble he said to me with a triumphant smirk, “Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.”

One of the benefits of automatic pilot in social situations is that insults take longer to make themselves felt. The meaning of the words simply don’t register right away, particularly if the person who utters them is smiling. You reflexively respond to the social context and the smile rather than to the words. And so I automatically returned the smile and said something like, “Really? I hadn’t known that about you.” – something that sounded both innocent and impertinent, even though that was not what I felt. What I felt was numb, and then shocked and terrified, disoriented, as though I’d been awakened from a sweet dream of unconditional support and approval and plunged into a nightmare of jeering contempt. Later those feelings turned into wrenching grief and anger that one of my intellectual heroes had sullied himself in my presence and destroyed my illusion that these privileged surroundings were benevolent and safe; then guilt and remorse at having provided him the occasion for doing so.

— Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Essays in Meta-Art 1968-1992

George Yancy:

It is so easy to hide behind antiracist rhetoric when one limits oneself to predictable social encounters that are already predicated upon social transactions that do not challenge or complicate the white self. However, in social transactions that do challenge the white self, conditions obtain that are ripe for ambush. As Richards warns, “That’s what happens when you interrupt a white man, don’t you know?” While being ambushed by one’s whiteness can occur in the absence of people of color, as when one deems oneself an antiracist white and yet laughs hysterically at a racist joke while bonding with one’s white friends, actually transacting with flesh and blood bodies of color can function as a powerful catalyst that can trigger an ambush. “You’re a prolific Black philosopher.” And yet, there is the mantra: “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.”

— George Yancy, “Whiteness as Ambush and the Transformative Power of Vigilance.”