'I came to reinterpret the silences I had taken to be philosophical and the gaze I had thought meditative as expressions of his mental disarray. It's one of the great mysteries of the French intellectual scene how this man of unbridled insanity could have taught us rigour and rationality.'
In response to William Deresiewicz's dire prognosis in The Nation for criticism's future in the academy—'the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline'—Jonathan Gottschall has offered what we might call a more 'diagnostic' response in the Boston Globe. In what is by now a familiar refrain, Gottschall claims to have found criticism's salvation in 'the sciences,' and, specifically, as he later elaborates, in the fertile scene of geneticism.
'Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism.'
The precise solution Gottschall offers has been oft-repeated: Literary theory, to survive in an age where students are evidently turning in increasing numbers away from the humanities, must accept the methodology of the 'sciences' and, specifically, operate upon the exciting and fertile predications of evolutionary biology. In the latter, it is claimed, lie the answers to Theory's originary preoccupations with signification and universality: For every human behavior is physically instantiated by a genetic 'site,' and signification is a universal process coextensive with the 'nature' of the mind. Hence Gottschall claims that the purported 'blank slate' theory of mind upon which Theory is predicated is done away with by the discovery that the tropics of sexism are not particular to 'Western culture.' Rather, the manner in which women's bodies are understood is a universal movement and is located, then, on one level, in culture, but in the final instance on a more or less unchanging 'nature.'
Evolutionism has simply replaced the base with 'nature.' The same troubles with economism, then, are apposite, but perhaps more radically in this case: 'Nature' can only be contemplated within brackets, despite the ambition on the part of the category's proponents to naturalize the concept, as it were...to place it simultaneously outside of signification and yet fix it within a system of nameability. Are we to ignore the fashion in which the limits between 'nature' and non-'nature' have hardly remained fixed since the seventeenth century? Are we to overlook 'nature's' always shifting political significance?
The final irony is that geneticism is itself the scene most wanting in terms of skepticism, restraint, and an awareness of meaning's production. Geneticism and its proponents operate on a sleight-of-hand in which cultural practice is deployed to schematize human behavior, in a movement that claims to be at one with the 'nature' to which it appeals, but which finally is always caught within culture. It can't get past language. It can't get past the abuse of metonymy necessitated by the locating of behavior in 'genetic material'—when precisely the behavior which evolutionary biologists attempt to explain is a culturally specific category in the first instance. Nor can they get past the throbbing and obfuscating will to knowledge—whether manifested in the search for an originary, non-figurative point of genesis for all manner of human activity and its correlates, from moral aptitude to cigarette smoking to masculinity—that inheres in the always also retroactive discovery of a 'genetic' location to explain those precise cultural practices (out of which appeals to nature necessarily emanate, at once at present and in history).
Gottschall offers another appalling preview of 'science's' power of incision in criticism's endeavors. He asks readers to 'consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead,' which he proceeds to incorrectly translate as meaning 'that authors have no power over their readers' and to incorrectly read as suggesting 'there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean.' He then excitedly announces that the author's figured 'death' is 'also testable'!
'Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.'
We can only hope that the next time Gottschall and colleagues subject an independent variable to the rigors of 'science' that they would, at the very least, correctly define the 'dependent variables.' The figure of the author's 'demise' suggests neither the impossibility of 'shared understanding' nor the author's lack of 'control' over the reader: Rather, the figure draws from a contemporaneous renewed interest in psychoanalysis to suggest intentional multiplicity. Reader-side, meanwhile, it is rather odd to infer the irrelevance of universality from the author's figured death. After all, Barthes was himself among the most ambitious in making efforts to schematize the structures of narrativity and the processes of semiosis. The findings of Gottschall and colleagues then do not even speak to the author's 'death,' but rather belong firmly within the history and possibilities of structuralism.
Ah, the marital dyad remains a curiously durable structure. I would also say that part of the durability here is that the production of what is designated dominant and submissive—for the boys as well—is formed in anticipation of the structure (regardless of the permissibility of legal initiation into marriage). That is, the dyadic division of sexual labor is an effect of the marital structure both before and independent of the union itself. Hypothetically, were we to desist from recognizing marriage as a legal matter—and, were social convention (i.e., religious organizations) to simultaneously desist—we would still be forced to face this division for a substantial period.
So it is that the magazine which rarely fails to deliver the latest from the cast of the administration has released upon us all a piece by Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University, arguing that 'ethnonationalism' emanates—yes—'from the human spirit' and is therefore ineradicable. In 'The Clash of Peoples' or 'Us and Them' (have your iteration: cover or 'in-book'), the conclusion that Muller conjures from this notion of the 'nature' of the human is that international policymakers should basically accommodate 'ethnonational' claims, because to deny them is to risk exciting a bloodbath between nationalists and the minorities or polities which they hope to do without. 'Partition,' Muller assures us, 'is often the least bad answer.' He later asserts that with it comes finality and a lower price tag in terms of international peacekeeping.
The allusion to Huntington's 1993 'Clash' is more than titular: The magazine is hoping to make a similarly spectacular provocation by employing a seemingly different thesis that, on consideration, seems (if we can steal Muller's unfortunate appropriation of terms with Hegelian baggage) to emanate from the precise spirit that animated 'Clash' fifteen years ago. While Huntington, by his own avowals, was setting forth a bold and provocative description of affairs as they were and would be, it became gradually apparent that he was more deeply implicated and invested in the conclusions than he may have wanted critics to believe.
So forgive me for experiencing a tad of déjà vu with 'Us and Them' and the case at hand:
'But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When French textbooks began with "Our ancestors the Gauls" or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of "this island race," they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be complementary.
One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.'
The retroactive fallacy upon which nationalism is necessarily built—we must, for virtually the entirety of Western Europe, speak of the precession of the state—is at the same time concealed (he presents the European 'nation state' synchronically, as it were) and summoned forth by Muller: The ethnic project arouses, as the above passage makes clear, the author's sympathy, by virtue of its continuing powers of cohesion. And here we see that Muller's piece is also a lesson in understanding Theory's burden in the social sciences. The most basic insights into the dissemination of culture will receive acknowledgment only, by way of that precise acknowledgment, to then receive summary dismissal. 'Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity,' Muller offers near the end of the essay. 'It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim.' And yet: 'They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power.'
Does this disclaimer near the conclusion of the essay acquit Muller of the work's persistent treatment of ethnonationalism as entirely superstructural? And what of the fact that, with few exceptions, the majority of any given populace remains ambivalent to indigenous nationalisms? Would not partitioning merely defer to those with the biggest guns and largest printing presses? Does Muller's determination that 'partition is the least bad answer' simply happen to coincide with his recognition of ethnonationalism's social benefits? And, if, as is more likely, nationalism 'emanates' not from the 'human spirit' but from configurations among economic strata, would partition solve a problem likely to reiterate itself despite new lines on a map? Nationalism's empire—an absurdity that manages to approach the object—knows no limits so long as the basic fissures of which it is an effect (and thus also an affect) are extant. Its work will complete itself neither of its own accord nor by a simple rearrangement of decidedly novel linguistic categories. Sort of like Theory's.
Theoretical moribundity makes me think of International Relations—the academic field, that is—with awkward pretensions that find its practitioners caught between the 'hard science' pressure to identify independent variables (that language!) sufficiently robust to survive localized controls (i.e., that are sensible across circumstances unfortunate enough to be deemed [ahem, and produced] 'case studies'), on the one hand, and to grandly pronounce sonorous and significant theoretic narratives on the other. The IR impulse is what brought us some of those eccentric and entertaining 200-level course debates over such creations as 'rational actors' and other bewildering anthropomorphizations of the state, generally pilfered from economists and adorned with some strung out Enlightenment gestures toward 'human nature.'
These debates are so broad and therefore vulgar that one can but sympathize with the recent clamoring among IR faculty over 'game theory,' which, one supposes, is sonorous and clever enough, but which, at the same time, might remind one of set theory's deployment in early Kristeva. These fads—which may, in another context, bear a vague semblance to some Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New York Times Magazine—tend to take hold of a discipline desiring more precise-sounding adornments to explanatory powers whose capacity does not much change. Perhaps I am, after all, also writing of Political Science on the whole. Who cares? Slaking the desire for a topping of the gram with the matheme has generally produced unattractive results. The question must become: Just how many metaphoric layers must one be forced to lick to reach the center after all?
Meanwhile, I have no trouble heaping the blame for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Consensus magazine with, I suppose, a rather severe case of journal anxiety, at the door of the IR department. I will refrain from hammering home the point that virtually the entirety of Foreign Affairs looks to be ghostwritten, an observation charitable neither to the magazine nor to the would be foreign-service members sidelining for celebrity authors. The entire thing could be produced by the human relations department in the basement of State. In any event, Foreign Affairs is always given top-shelf treatment—yes, that's it, just to the right of US Weekly, the not-necessarily-less-worthwhile magazine celebrating celebrities of another variety—and it seems to give its readers the feeling of reading some thorough academic research of some sort. One can rarely be fully certain of a publication's constituency, but I would venture that the chap most likely to be impressed by Foreign Affairs would be what Christopher Guest might call 'of the catalogue generation,' replete with latte and chinos and Borders on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, the image is too much already.
As far as unfortunate book reviews go, Stanley Kurtz's Weekly Standard treatment of Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Philip Carl Salzman's rather oddly abbreviated 224-page manifesto, is 'up there.' That said, when we search for faults in a book review bearing a subheading that reads, 'Tribalism may offer a clearer view of our enemies' motivations,' perhaps we have found too easy a target. In Salzman's words, the book asks 'Why, in the Middle East, [do] we so reliably find relentless partisanship, unending conflict, and conscienceless repression of those not holding power'? Let us ignore for a moment the question's rather grand predications.
Drawing on his ethnographic work on the Yarahmadzai of Iranian Baluchistan in the 1970s, Salzman finds his answer in 'Arab culture, grounded in Bedouin culture.' While serving its subjects well in 'segmentary tribal settings,' this culture is, in Salzman's estimation, 'uncongenial to inclusive polities and universalistic legal regimes.' Here we find once again the proverbial 'tribal mentality' about which we have all heard a great deal; and yet its continued espousal never fails to surprise those of us actually, as it were, 'on the ground.' Salzman's work is structured around the argument that 'Arab tribalism' is a long-suffering and presently unfashionable category that just happens to hold greater explanatory power for the region's current travails than any other consideration.
Judging by Salzman's synthesis, this already-reaching notion holds up about as well as one could expect for a thesis developed out of and plucked from the author's personal work with a discrete and insular grouping in the southeast of Iran and then spread—without much regard for, say, linguistic, sectarian, geographic, and ethnic categories (the less said about temporal considerations the better)—to present-day Arab politics. The author attempts to do away with concerns over this disjuncture by pointing out that social science is a collaborative affair and that the secondary literature just happens to corroborate his empirical work. Let us be assured that this is an admission that under more rigorous circumstances, Salzman's empirical work would bear the most tendentious relationship with the book's scope. And then there's that title.
In any event, this all proves too much for Kurtz, who writes throughout the laudatory review as though—and, no, I do not exaggerate and, yes, it pains me to write this—there were no differences (not even cleavages!) among the categories 'Arab,' 'Iranian,' and 'Muslim.' Kurtz is thrilled with the fashionably unfashionable appearance of the book and immediately takes its conclusions out for a stroll:
Arab tribesmen are preoccupied with maintaining deterrence and prepared to use force preemptively, if necessary--rather like über neocons. The ironic but very real parallel is a function of the de facto stateless anarchy in which Arab Bedouin live--and the de facto global anarchy that hawkish conservatives rightly believe to be the underlying reality of the international system. Saddam Hus-sein's interest in being taken to possess WMDs, whether or not he actually had them, makes sense in light of the link between deterrence and reputation. The emboldening effects of America's pre-9/11 retreats in Somalia, Lebanon, and elsewhere show the reverse of the medal. Although this is a familiar litany, I'd argue that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the rage against the Muhammad cartoons, the killing of Theo van Gogh, and a host of related acts of intimidation ought to be placed under the heading of pro-active deterrence as well.
And there you have it. Moroccan-born militants in northern Europe (van Gogh's killer was, after all, Moroccan), Iranian clerics, secular-left Arab dictators—the appearance and behavior of these personages and phenomena can be explained by a simple referral back to 'Arabs' segmentary tribalism.' Finally, that meddlesome region has found the explanatory variable that has long eluded us. In the end, one can hardly be certain of how to respond appropriately to Salzman's posture and the inevitable hand-maiden's role it will play among certain crowds. Certainly, one could be bewildered, and certainly one could be perturbed. At least concerning the hawkish cheerleaders already cheering the book's release—as though Salzman's work constituted some sort academic validation—I am perfectly satisfied to simply consider the source. (Also, check out that advanced praise.)
A prominent feature of opposition to the US occupation of Iraq supposes that the invasion and its aftermath, quite to the contrary of chief among the adventure's stated aims, have indeed bred anti-US sentiment and even created a fresh complaint that will, in turn, spur recruitment efforts by groups like al-Qa'ida. This concern tends to be stated like so (taking the following, for an instance, from Paglia's latest Salon column):
'We have not defeated the "Islamo-fascists" in Iraq; we have simply created more of them around the world by radicalizing an entire generation of young Muslims.'
The trouble with this statement is not that it fails to present an important phenomenon. Certainly, the Iraq adventure has bred ill-will toward the US. And yet, underlying this statement is the same predicated homogeneity that instantiates utterances such as 'the Middle East.' We need hardly mention that the categorical treatment out of which the signifier 'Muslim' is deployed in Anglophone discourse is less than fully coherent, refusing as it does the most basic contemplation of geographic, sectarian, or socioeconomic categories. Significantly, there is no analogue signified in Arabic: One simply does not hear 'the Christians,' 'the Christians.' Nationality tends to be the salient category in the Arabic media. Moreover, the notion of an entire and entirely 'radicalized' generation—a concept that never makes itself entirely known, as 'radical' is a radically emptied signifier—supposes profound credulity on the part of 'young Muslims.'
As I've learned during my time in Muslim-majority states, particularly in Syria, to suppose such credulity on the part of 'young Muslims' is to commit a serious error. While certainly—in Damascus, Beirut, Kuwait, and elsewhere—I have met Muslim students antipathetic to the US—an antipathy surely aggravated or ratified by the Iraq War—I have also met students sympathetic to the effort. I've had taxi drivers in Damascus hold forth on Israel's 'right' to use aggressive tactics against less conciliatory Palestinian factions and have heard students express Rumsfeldian confidence in the certainty that Syrians would take to the streets in celebration of a reenactment in Damascus of the Iraq adventure.
Broad antipathy toward and approval of the US is, in my experience, rare. Most often, much like students in the US, the youths whom I've met or befriended (or who are in the classes for which I'm a TA), express a wariness toward 'American power' and its more unfortunate manifestations. Where aspects of American domination often considered 'purely cultural'—films and music, for instance—are rejected, this rejection can stem from social conservatism—in other words it emanates from a permutation of the same drive motivating Christianist concern over 'family values.'
Finally, let us do away with the notion that an 'entire generation' can be so easily 'radicalized.' It is highly unlikely that the Iraq War has substantially changed the structure of high-risk group recruitment and initiation. The pool of potential recruits for groups like al-Qa'ida—with which the relatively mainstream and hence low-risk Hamas and Hizb Allah cannot be compared—will generally consist of youths with weak social ties, a factor that can indeed be simultaneously effected and affected by economic crises (which wars can certainly precipitate). The substance of the group's configuration of ideals, it should be added, is not a primary concern and will, in any event, be made by recruiters to align with already existing woes. These groups at the margin come into existence through their supposed opposition to the center/'mainstream' and are always and already part of the structure of society. They (in addition to those who seek their eradication) are mutually contingent and can never be universalized completely. The appeal tends to lie in the social, financial (and, then, of course, psychic) security justifiably promised by high-risk, high-reward groups. The point is that there's barely a text in that class.
Obama is receiving the 'elite liberal' treatment by Clinton and McCain after audio of the would-be nominee's remarks, recorded last week at a San Francisco fundraiser, surfaced Friday. The contested comments—which you can listen to here—were as follows:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Two-part question: Why should Obama apologize for off-the-cuff remarks that happen to (1) lay out incisively the rather obvious relationship between perceived economic disadvantage and bigotry (can a stratified system function apart from the satiation of each stratum's desire for relative significance over the 'next one down'? The discourse simply gets less attractive the 'further' vertically one goes.), and (2) reflect his actual beliefs on the matter? We should further note the significance of these remarks' extempore nature—they were made in San Francisco at a press-free event—and the extent to which they are at odds with the more 'populist' message he is trotting out at official campaign stops. The comments may also be understood in the context of serious doubts over the sincerity of the candidate's anti-NAFTA posture. Let us hope that Obama follows the Henry Ford school of apology, while, meanwhile, we seek consolation in the success of a gentleman who, at least by Scheiber's account in The New Republic, is the least principle-bound candidate of our time. And I mean that in the best sense.
UPDATE: The inevitable.
