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Class, socio-economics, education, liberalism and identity politics.

  
 
Lurid Archive
08:09 / 02.11.05
One the of the myths of the right, I'd say, is that the free market organises society in a way which is just. Its ok to have elitism, if it is the *best* people who become the elite. This is part of the subject of Walter Benn Michaels’s essay, “The Neoliberal Imagination” (free registration) which I think is an excellent read (btw, does anyone have access to the full n+1 version?):

Schools loom larger in the neoliberal imagination than they did in the liberal imagination because where the old liberalism was interested in mitigating the inequalities produced by the free market, neoliberalism-with its complete faith in the beneficence of the free market-is interested instead in justifying them. And our schools have a crucial role to play in this. They have become our primary mechanism for convincing ourselves that poor people deserve their poverty, or, to put the point the other way around, they have become our primary mechanism for convincing rich people that we deserve our wealth.

So far, so good, and I don't expect that'll rise many objections. Though I should probably say that Ido wonder the extent to which the myth of the underserving poor gets tacitly accepted. For instance, I was intrigued that that the main objection to Bush's handling of Katrina was that he is racist and I wondered this was because ignoring the plight of the poor just isn't that big a deal. This leads back into Michael's essay and the respect for diversity:

But of course it’s not really true that there are rich people and poor people at Harvard – there are very few poor people at Harvard or, for that matter, at any of the 146 colleges that count as “selective”: 3 per cent of the students in these institutions come from … the lowest socio-economic quarter of American society; 74 per cent come from the highest. And from this standpoint, we can see that the purpose of objecting to conspicuous displays of wealth at school is not so much to avoid offending the poor people at Harvard as it is to pretend that there are enough poor people at Harvard to offend. …

But he isn't only concerned in criticising the right, he also saves some ammunition for the left:

On this model, then, class is turned into clique and, once the advantages of class are redescribed as the advantages of status, we get the recipe for what we might call right-wing egalitarianism: Respect the poor. Which is also, as it turns out, the recipe for left-wing egalitarianism.

If in 1950 Trilling thought there were no conservatives or reactionaries, we might say today that there are only conservatives and reactionaries. Where the neoliberal right likes status instead of class, the neoliberal ''left" likes cultural identity, and its version of ''respect the poor" is ''respect the Other." That's why multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management technology in about 10 minutes.

So what do we think about this? Is education a neo-liberal scam? And is a respect for the "Other", really a avoidance of the key issues of inequality? Or is Michaels just an old marxist winbag whose own emphasis on class would ignore just as much - racism, sexism and homophobia - as he accuses others of ignoring?
 
 
multitude.tv
17:22 / 11.12.05
Thanks for the link and the article. I can obviously see the label of "old Marxist" applied to this line of thought, but I think that there is something valuable in this Marxism that should not be thrown out. Namely, the radical empiricism of this kind of Marxism, the attitude that all positions, all arguments, need to in some desperate sense hold onto a notion of materiality as really experience. This is a radical phenomenological empiricism; what Deleuze calls at some point a radical empiricism. I find it only a verification of this position, a position that more or less accuses both the left and the right of at least placid acceptance of the refusal to name poverty (if not a strategic knowledge), that such main stream political figures as John Edwards have been trying to get folks (particularly the media and the legal community) to frame a discourse in this country (the US) around poverty, the issues of the poor; regardless of "status or race or diversity standing. The other dominant political discourses at this moment are exchanges about race (and citizenship) and terrorism. Both the left and the right can take their respective polemical positions in these debates, simultaneously respecting and building a mutual rationale for one another, without speaking a word on poverty. Furthermore, these discourses are "security" discourses, rather than social or even ethical discourses.
 
 
alterity
18:25 / 11.12.05
Let me say first that I think WBM is very, very smart. He's an amazing reader of texts and his political project is, IMHO, a worthwhile one. Namely, Michaels wants to oversome what Habermas once called neoconservativism, which in form or another runs rampant in current US politics. (See Michaels' argument in The Shape of the Signifier: From 1967 to the End of History.) Anyway, what neoconservativism has going for it is an anything goes attitude: black is dog, down is right, white is mushroom. Say anything. Any weapon to hand. Plato's philsosopher king run amok and renamed Karl Rove. See for example this quote from an NYT's Magazine article by Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

The attitude there is no objective measure of truth is exactly what Michaels fears, as do I. And that's why he comes back to class difference as the only difference that matters.

When the cold war ended, ideology went by the wayside, according to cold warriors like Francis Fukuyama, with whom Michaels agrees on this limited point. Since, according to Michaels, ideology is the only difference that matters, we are at a loss for showing why Bush is wrong. Michael's argues that the left is just as culpable for this issue as the right, as he claims that Judith Butler's claims about gender (for example) derive from exactly the same problem as Bush's politics.

Thus in the present article I see Michaels doing the same song and dance, only replacing "ideology" with "class", two terms that always go well together in any case. Michaels is against the sort of multiculturalism that he claims the left purveys these days, which folds all difference into differences of identity. Since we on the left preach tolerance we cannot find conflict in these differences.

We can, of course, see the ugly upshot to this trend in Bill O'Reilly's recent claim that Christmas is under attack. If we are left in Michaels' sense we have to defend O'Reilly's claims as they are based on identity. O'Reilly isn't wrong in any objective sense (because there is no objectivity), he is simply different, having a different identity which by defintion can never be wrong. If we just had ideology or class to use as conceptual tools, Michaels feels we would be able to ffind our way out of the identitarian trap.

Personally, as much as I like Michaels as a thinker, I believe he's full of it on this count. I am no believer in identity politics or neoconservativism of any color. However, Michaels leaves a true understanding of materiality entirely out of the picture. I will save that for another post, however, if anyone is interested.
 
 
alas
20:28 / 11.12.05
However, Michaels leaves a true understanding of materiality entirely out of the picture. I will save that for another post, however, if anyone is interested.

I'm interested, alterity. Please do share.

I read the article and am still mulling it over, and now I am convinced I must read the WBM book you mentioned, The Shape of the Signifier (I've only read his worthwhile early study, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism).

In reading alterity's description of Michaels's project, and the single reader-review on Amazon, I'm interested in wrestling with his ideas about authorial intent, which is perhaps a little to the side of this question but I think it is also relevant, because he's castigating all the major actors in the social scene as failing to recognize that their actions have material consequences.

My knee-jerk reaction, then, is that he's on to something worth repeating, esp. in the US context--and it's something that I think many more accessible thinkers have started to address over the last decade. E.g. Naomi Klein's No Logo asserts that the identity politics, which seemed so powerful and subversive in the 1980s/90s, ultimately turned out to be something very assimilable to the current globalized economic system and left us blind to and unable to critique things like the exploitation of third world workers on which, ironically, Western "lifestyles," i.e., these very "identities," depend. And, to top it off, meanwhile, "identity" itself increasingly became cast as a commodity by marketing firms and, increasingly, the general public.

I want to explore some other issues here, but would like to hear from others first.
 
 
alterity
13:44 / 16.12.05
I'm interested in wrestling with his ideas about authorial intent, which is perhaps a little to the side of this question but I think it is also relevant, because he's castigating all the major actors in the social scene as failing to recognize that their actions have material consequences.

The issue of materiality, with which I ended my last post, is directly tied to Michaels' discussion of authorial intent. It has to do with interpretation.

As someone involved with the university (i.e. the production and dissemination of knowledge), Michaels is concerned with how texts that he and others cast out into the world will be read. The end of ideology (for him) means that people simply fall back on identity to found interpretive practice. If you've ever been in a literature class with someone whose only claim is that s/he doesn't "relate" to Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon or Frederick Douglass or anyone else, yo will understand the concern Michaels articulates: namely that these interpretations can never be "wrong". They are based on identity, which multiculturalism and other practices that embrace difference for the sake of difference teach us is sacrosanct and must be respected. Again, this is all on Michaels' argument; however, up until this point I am very much with him, as I am am when he explains the upshot to this trend: namely, that postmodernism as described by thinkers like Lyotard (and worried over by Habermas), creates a situation in which anything goes. All interpretations are equally valid, so long as we fall back on identity. Anyone who watches the Christian Right in the US successfully decry the fact that they are under attack, will understand the concern here. There is no way to prove them wrong, because they are basing their statements on the "facts" of their identity. In other words (stretching it a bit), they form arguments entirely based on unsubstantiated and "unsubstantiatable" opinions that do not require substantiation.

To counter the problems of leaving interpretation entirely in the hands of the reader, Michaels wants to turn to authorial intent to guide interpretation. Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, Michaels does not offer an understanding of authorial intent beyond the problematic notion we've inherited from certain brands of the New Criticism. I can't really say very much about it, except that I don't see how it works.

What is more interesting to me is the manner in which Michaels dismisses materiality (in the SF novels of Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson, in the criticism of Susan Howe, and in novels by Leslie Marmon Silko and others [funny that he does not take on Charles Olson, who would prove an interesting study in this context, as Olson is a seminal figure for Language poets such as Howe and Charles Bernstein, the latter of whom Michaels hates]). Anyway, Michaels finds that recourse to the body and other material signifiers is a load of crap, as in the attempts of Robinson's Mars colonists to read the red planet in order to discover "Mars' name for itself." However, Michaels considers this act of interpretation to be exactly the same as the act of reading and therefore subject to the same problems described above. However, in at least the case of Octavia Butler, nothing could be further from the truth.

Michaels focuses his critique on her Xenogenesis trilogy. However, anyone who has read Dawn, Imago, or Adulthood Rites, or Butler's earlier novels Kindred or Wild Seed, understands that when we interpret our bodies--or more precisely, our bodies interpret the world--we are not simply reading in the sense of a person reading a novel or a newspaper. There may not be any intention behind a stone--Michaels' issue with interpreting materiality. Regardless, we can interpret the stone in an embodied manner. If I throw it at your head and hit you, your body will interpret that event as pain. This is a non-linguistic interpretation to be sure, and one that is not easily assimilable to a political project such as the one Michaels proposes. However, the interpretation by the body of the event "being-hit-by-rock-in-the-head" as pain is irrefutable. There is no ideology involved, nor is there identity involved (even if we enjoy pain, as masochists claim to, enough blows to the head will kill them). As such, I find Michaels' dismissal of the material to be highly suspect, especially given his alternative (authorial intent).
 
  
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