Vulnerability

Today, Judith Butler mocked me in front of 600 intellectuals.

Butler delivered a talk to a packed West Road Concert Hall on the body, vulnerability, street politics, and performativity. In it, she told the story of a hotel employee who came to check her minibar and kept confusedly addressing her as “Sir…Madam…Sir…Madam.” Butler pointed out to him that her gender was probably not relevant to the checking of the minibar. Butler did not argue this explicitly, but the story also showed – I thought – how attached to gender binaries and categorization most people are.

Then there came a time for questions. Two members of the audience gave speeches that did not end with a question mark. Butler seemed nonplussed. A third asked a question. Butler answered. I raised my hand, and they called on me.

I noted that “in the performance we’ve just witnessed,” Butler had given agency and concreteness to abstractions such as “the body” and “vulnerability.” I asked whether she could comment upon this practice, and what it did for “your rhetoric.”

It had seemed to me that Butler was perhaps attempting to challenge the clean break between the abstract concept and the concrete instances thereof. Conceiving of a person’s “body” as “a body” changes how you relate to it. I wondered whether she had refused to use the term “individual” – preferring “body” – because she thought the very term lent legitimacy to a neoliberal political vision. I wanted to know whether Butler saw these things in the same way, but in the interest of not seeming pretentious or speechifying like the people who had preceded me, I left my question open-ended, without offering my theory.

“Would you like to check my minibar?” Butler asked me.

I should have known this would happen. I am an intellectual historian of the culture wars. How, with the culture wars only in the recent past, could an apparently white male Cambridge student asking an eminent female post-structuralist a question about “abstractions” in her “rhetoric” be perceived as anything but a Sokal/Searle-like attack?

That I didn’t realize that this was how it would be perceived is perhaps an indication of how, as a white male who writes intellectual history, I am typically safer from culture warring attacks – and typically less at risk of having my arguments attributed a political expression of my gender – than a female post-structuralist like Butler. No wonder I didn’t think that that was how she would hear my comment; I would never receive a comment with that aggressive intent, so I could not hear the potential aggression present in mine.

How Butler responded was illuminating. Her rejoinder, and the laughter that surrounded me, made me feel humiliated. Small. Vulnerable. Whether or not Butler meant to do it, she forced me to attempt to imagine what it might have felt like to weather culture wars attacks. I was in a space in which the markers of my privilege did not work quite as much to my advantage as they do most spaces in which I move. I wish to make clear my understanding that, even in the moment of being humiliated by Butler, I remained deeply privileged. But given where Butler and I found ourselves, she was able to make me feel vulnerable, just for an instant. And that was itself instructive.

Obama and necessary evils

Why does the Obama administration make policy choices that are both arguably immoral and also arguably inexpedient, from the very major (detention policies) to the more minor (abuse of IRS power)?[1] Immoral and expedient – now that would make sense, though it would also be condemnable. But immoral and inexpedient? Huh?

I’ve got a theory that I admit is irritatingly psychoanalytic in the way that much TV political commentary is. I hope it’s also philosophically interesting enough to make the TV-style punditry tolerable.

Obama does not display a bleeding heart. He has proved himself willing to commit “necessary evils” if the alternative is a greater evil. I worry that he has begun to let the evilness an action cause him to overrate the necessity of that action. After all, surely cheating works better than following the rules! And cheating is transgressive and therefore fun.

But cheating isn’t always the winning strategy. Herein lies the problem, perhaps, with encouraging people to conceive of themselves as what some of my geekier friends might call “Chaotic Good.”

If you break the rules, ostensibly for the sake of the greater good, you may become desensitized. You then no longer hesitate before breaking the rules to check whether it’s really “worth it.” You perhaps come to enjoy breaking the rules and to enjoy thinking of yourself as a pragmatic, manipulative operator. You perhaps even begin to commit, without thinking, a logical error: because you “know” that you only allow yourself to take evil actions when they are necessary, any evil action you consider taking must therefore be the only means of achieving something necessary. The more any of these things happen, the more likely you become to commit unnecessary evils.

[1] I do not have time and space here to justify the assertions of immorality and inexpediency. Grant me them and some interesting conclusions follow.

What squelchtoad does say

I would like to nominate “What ______ Don’t Say” for the most consistently unfunny meme of 2013. It’s significantly worse than the meme of six-square “What _____ think(s) I do” image macros, which I believe deserved the 2012 crown.

(Yes, I am a crotchety internet slang traditionalist. Each individual instance of “What _____ think(s) I do” is an “image macro,” only the general concept of “What _____ think(s) I do” macros counts as a “meme.”)

Digital Humanities 2.0

An expanded version of an earlier post, cross-posted from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History facebook group, where I posted it as a comment.

I’ve seen a lot of silly “digital humanities” work, but then I’ve seen a lot of silly analog humanities work too. People may not truly believe that quantitative methods are inherently inimical to the spirit of humanistic inquiry, but they tend to talk as if that’s true. We raise the specter of “scientism” all the time, but, I would argue, a language of “humanitism” may be developing.

That is, we develop a theory of what “numbers,” “science,” or, most often “computers” — all typically caricatured — cannot do. We then mock as “missing the point” any efforts to do those things with those tools. This saves us the effort of engaging with — let alone refuting — the truth claims of such efforts.

This isn’t new. Anxiety about the status and funding of the humanities relative to the sciences has long been an animating idea for those who have shaped the academic humanities in America. In the 1930s we got a whiff of it from the perennialist vs. pragmatist debates. It arrived full force in the post-war period. I’m not making the vulgar argument that increasingly frequent and ham-handed attempts to sell the humanities as in the national interest (“forming the good democratic citizen” etc.) were directly caused by the Bomb and later by Sputnik, but there’s some truth in that. This same anxiety was alive and well in the Culture Wars; see for instance the section of The Closing of the American Mind about the three disciplines. See also, for that matter, “Speaking for the Humanities.”

Of course, if anxiety about the sciences has inspired science-bashing, it has also inspired science-envy and humanistic scientism. This very same history may be partially to blame for the worst excesses of the digital humanities. Tim Lacy might have come across the newspaper clipping (from the sixties, if I recall correctly) in which Mortimer Adler and an IBM engineer had a rather superficial argument about whether computers could eventually become conscious. And yet even Adler, loather of scientism that he was, signed to a promotional scheme whereby the Syntopicon was digitized. People could then name a topic, and “The UNIVAC Computer will research the works of 74 authors below and print 4 authors’ quotations on a subject you select.” Note the anthropomorphizing language: the computer “will research.” In reality, the UNIVAC setup was nothing more than a computerized index, but it was dressed up as AI in order to sell Great Books.

What this intellectual history reminds us, I hope, is that anxious attempts to justify the humanities have tended to lead to visions of the humanities that most humanists today find misguided, vulgar, or point-missing. I am leery of how we talk about the digital humanities today because I fear that we are falling into the same trap. We historians should be particularly careful. History is at least in part an empirical discipline; there is nothing in principle wrong with numerical empiricism in history — even in intellectual history. We tend to get mad (or is it anxious?) when digital humanists substitute a mound of data for the implications of that data. Perhaps instead of complaining about the medium, we should show them what searching for the message actually looks like.

“First principles”

Cambridge jello-wrestling debate-induced realization: many students at Cambridge speak in a way that suggests a deeply libertarian understanding of speech, power, and coercion. Many of these same students are horrified by American unwillingness to introduce gun control or universal healthcare. A useful reminder that while it may be fun to talk about “first principles” and “political vernaculars,” our[1] political beliefs tend to be incompletely theorized.

[1] Yes, *our*.

-ism-ism

Over at Leah’s blog, they’re chatting about “postmodernism.” Rant time:

-ism-ism is a problem both in the academic humanities and in the internet (blago-blag) humanities. Tossing around abstractions can make for bad intellectual history and worse philosophical criticism. By all means critique Derrida, Foucault, or Deleuze. Even talk about how they are related, or about how American literature professors lumped them together.

If you say something like “postmodernism leads to relativism,” though, it’s not clear what you actually mean. Are you using “postmodernism” as a technical philosophical term, where postmodernism equals “the belief that X, Y, and Z” for some X, Y, and Z, in the same way that, for instance, the term “consequentialism” can mean “the belief that the moral status of an action is determined by assessing the consequences of that action in some way”? Or are you using it to describe a class of theories or ideas that have a shared history and are associated with one another in our cultural memory, but need not necessarily share any single specific quality?

Statements such as “postmodernism leads to relativism” often arrive without clarification as to which of these two kinds of abstraction the author believes “postmodernism” to be. Moreover, they often arrive without any definition of the term at all. This makes it much easier to strawman postmodernists (or any -ists). Once you’ve put, say, Derrida in an -ism-ist box (“Derrida was a ‘postmodernist’”), you’ve spared yourself the trouble of actually engaging with what, if any, actual arguments he may have made that could distinguish him from other postmodernist thinkers. You can then just engage with what you take to be “postmodernist” arguments, whether or not Derrida himself did make them or would have endorsed them.

If you are going to argue with a diffuse movement rather than with a specific philosophical claim, do the legwork to explain why the movement deserves to be considered as a cultural and intellectual historical unit.

Rant over.

Postscript 1: Yes, this was a rant about attacks on postmodernism grounded in analytic philosophy. Yes, -ism-ism is an -ism. Must say something about irony or self-undermining.

Postscript 2: No, this doesn’t mean we can’t say things like “racism is bad.”

Postscript 3: This applies equally on the other side of the political aisle. Please talk more coherently about “neoconservatism” as well.

British Irony

My three favorite forms of British – particularly English – self-congratulation, in ascending order: jokes with punch lines that amount to “the Welsh fuck sheep,” jokes with punch lines that amount to “the Americans are gun-toting Bible-thumpers,” and assertions that “non-Brits don’t understand British humour because it’s so subtle, understated, and ironic.”