From Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Corner:
Please read this post by Garance Franke-Ruta over at Tapped on what “movement-building” demands of liberal bloggers. It certainly reads to me like she’s upset that liberal bloggers are being too intellectually honest. The upshot of Franke-Ruta’s position seems to be that deliberately distorting Bill Bennett’s intent and meaning is a small price to pay to villify him unfairly and for the added bonus of angering-up southern blacks in order to get limousine liberals like John Edwards elected. And if Matt Yglesias or Brad DeLong see it differently, they should just be quiet—for the sake of the movement.
I find this very illuminating. We get a lot of grief around here from time to time for supporting conservative politicians or figures—including Bennett—when liberals insist the only intellectually honest position is opposition and outrage. Therefore we must be operating in bad faith. And here we have someone at The American Prospect all but declaring that intellectual honesty is corrupting liberalism and its nakedly partisan ambition to attain political power.
Nice movement she’s working on.
The activist left has no problem launching disingenuous attacks. And why would they? We’ve shown a striking unwillingness to fight back, deciding instead to opt for a kind of linguistic “realism” that looks at the current state of affairs and throws up its hands in surrender.
Such a surrender allows for a “living Constitution” and the elevation of the judiciary to a superlegislature; it allows for “hate speech” legislation and “tolerance” training, and other incremental movements toward credentialing thought crime ; it allows identity politics to flourish and the individual’s rights to erode; it allows interest groups to seize control of the discourse and bully the “inauthentic” into silence. In short, it welcomes a kind of linguistic totalitarianism that will turn on power and will.
We’re rapidly approaching 1984 here. And the longer we bitch about the erosion of a coherent linguistic system without actively fighting back against it, the more difficult it will become to root out the entrenched ideas that allowed such a system to take hold in the first place.
(h/t Glenn)
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update: Relying on the kind of postmodern jargon that literary theorists in the latter half of the twentieth-century used to frighten away the uninitiated, the author of I cite [IC](like frameone before her) asserts with a daunting degree of confidence that my argument is “poor,” and explains why thusly:
[…] his argument, however, is interesting because of how poor it is (no doubt because he has only read a little Butler and so reentraps her argument within an intentionalist structure instead of recognizing how it relies on language and the Symbolic—or at least discourse given her critical distance toward the Lacanian symbolic). The major problem is the assumption that the attacks on Bennett’s words are targeted at Bennett as a subject rather than at Republican rhetoric and fantasies. The issue isn’t tainting Bennett specifically but drawing attention to the discourse out of which his words arise, the discourse and assumptions that inform and enable speech. Bennett is simply a figure: he is being spoken through by (in Lacanese) the big Other of the Symbolic Order and that is what is being pointed out. (Which is one of the reasons I spoke of fantasy as the imaginary order filling in/covering over/sustaining gaps in the Symbolic). Again, Bennett’s position as a ‘leader’ or voice among conservatives is what’s at stake, not Bennett the poor old gambling addict. So, interestingly, both the Goldstein and the donklephant ‘defenses’ (like Delong as well) emphasize the person in order to avoid politics.
[my emphasis]
Note what IC wishes us to buy here: Bennett himself is not important. What is important is what people like IC can do with “Bennett’s” rhetoric once they’ve concluded, in a self-delusional bout of begging the question, that his politics determine “his” utterances—and that (surprise!) it is they who control the description of his politics (though they pretend the description is disinterested). Had she wished to, she might have put her argument more simply: Bennett is a racist because “Republicans” (as “figures”) are, as a rule, racist, and “Bennett” speaks for Republicans (how convenient the loop!)—though “he” is really only giving voice to the web of Republican “rhetoric and fantasies” that has already inscribed him. In short, Bennett, insofar as he is the product of political beliefs that IC and her fellow travellers have concluded are objectively racist, can do nothing other than spew racism, even if it is not his intent to do so. His fate is determined by virtue of the worldview that “writes” “him.”
It isn’t difficult to see how, jargon aside, this is but another obvious attempt to wrest control of language from the individual. Bennett, the argument goes, is unimportant as a subject because his subjectivity is informed by his politics—which, happily, IC gets to describe as racist in order to prove that “Bennett,” too, is racist, whether he is racist or not.
But all this puffery about Bennett being a Symbolic Other inscribed by either a cultural dialogic or any other fantastical and convenient substructure IC wishes to use to rob him of his agency is a dodge, and a totally irrelevant dodge, at that—because, strictly speaking, it still emanates from him, and what sets it apart from all other inscribed emanations coming from all other potential inscribed “figures” is that it is his.
In short, I haven’t reentrapped Butler in anything. Truth is, she’s never gotten out of “the intentionalist structure.” Because it is impossible to do so and still be engaging in a linguistic practice. And throwing around a bunch of Lacanian jargon doesn’t change that fact.
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update 2: Baldilocks weighs in.
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update 3: Hadn’t thought about this. Which could mean that, as a “figure,” I’m racist. But I’ll risk it.
I have been thinking of this since ODub’s rant about “articulate”. Anthem by Ayn Rand, I always thought, was a reductio ad absurdum argument about the individual conceding to the collective, in both thought and deed. It might as well be about conceding linguistic honesty.
Nothing surprising there. This is simply a latter day extension of Lenin’s tactic of “lying for the truth.” How Orwellian is that?
An important difference is that we have an ostensibly free society, and that our academy—which is supposedly the bastion of free ideas—is largely responsible for granting these linguistic phantoms their imprimatur of seriousness.
Supposedly is correct. Free only to the extent that they are in agreement with those that instruct.
Uncle Joe Gandleman has an intersting take. To paraphrase, we know he’s not a racist, we know he explained himself completely and validly, but we should still excoriate the statments as racist, cause you know it’s false but accurate.
TW “Picture” yah I get it.
Leftism is, at its core, statist and totalitarian. The free exchange of ideas is anathema to this ideology. Therefore, while ostensibly supporting free speech they must create boundaries (racism, sexism, etc.) that limit the range of acceptable comments to those that support their views.
Look at the institutions that the left has gained control of—the academy, the MSM, labor unions. None of these are very tolerant of dissension to the prevailing wisdom. Universities have their speech codes based upon the concept that avoiding offense is more important than fostering the free exchange of ideas. The MSM supports legislation such as campaign finance reform that restricts the speech rights of those outside its fraternity. It is dismissive of non-traditional outlets such as talk radio, the blogosphere, and Fox News. Even those within its ranks that dissent from the accepted narrative are brutally attacked. (See Mark Yost.) Labor unions are notorious for severely limiting the rights of the rank-and-file to utter even the most innocuous criticism of their leadership.
So while the left talks a good game with respect to freedom of speech, the truth is that they invariably attempt to place restrictions to the extent that anything that does not support they beliefs is rendered out of bounds.
That is amazing. Clever won’t work on southern blacks, we have to outrage them with the right’s racism. It doesn’t surprise me they think that way, I just can’t believe someone said it out loud.
You know how deeply corrupt a philosophy is when it can’t rely on the truth to get it over the goal line.
True. All true.
…but they did the same thing to Sen. Santorum, turning a discussion of legal ramifications into an attack on gays. The interviewer even inserted the word “gay” (which he didn’t use) before they Dowdified his quote to make it worse.
And thousands of “moderate” conservatives cut him loose, or even piled on. And now Sen. Santorum can’t say 2+2=4 without his words being vilified because liberals have successfully established the deliberate misquote as homophobia.
Where was everyone then?
Still, Jeff G., this is the right battle. Thanks for leading the fight.
Between Glenn leading the unwinnable war against pork and you making a last stand against “linguistic tolitarianism” I feel like I’m watching the last scene in Angel.
My First Conversation with Jeff’s Past Life Regression Therapist
Me: So, Doctor, Jeff was at the Battle of Hastings in 1066?
Therapist: Yes, he claims he was. And after the Norman Conquest, Jeff was lying on the couch screaming to his past-life Anglo neighbors: “Steak! You fools it’s steak, cow flesh that we eat, not ‘beef’ Stop calling it ‘boeuf’ Can’t you see? This is only the beginning of linguistic anarchy!!!
It’s steak, STEAK,
You fools!
Me: And then …..
Therapist: Well, they killed him. As best Jeff can recall he was beaten to death with a roasted shank of mutton.
Then there was The Great Vowel Shift
Me: The Great Vowel Shift?
Therapist: Yes, The Great Vowel Shift … 15th Century, the Soul of Jeff was against that, too.
Me: Jeff opposed the great vowel shift?
Therapist: In a past life, yes.
Jeff lost that struggle, though he, I must admit, Jeff does have a residual tendency to resist contemporaneous changes, especially with regard to matters semiotic or linguistic.
There are other past-life instances of Jeff being a Stick-in-the-Mudder. For example, under hypnosis Jeff will say ‘in-port’ rather than ‘import’. It’s his way of rebelling.
Me: In-port?
Therapist: Well, think about it, what the hell does a prefix ‘im’ mean anyway? The word was ‘in-port’ but ‘import’ is more easily vocalized, so what are you gonna do, keep a population from taking the more easily trodden path?
Me: Oh, I see
Therapist: Well, apparently Jeff did try and so they tossed him out of a window and into the port.
Me: And that killed him?
Therapis: Sure, Jeff’s a Joooooooooooooooooooo, Jews can’t swim.
In the end, it’s going to take more than words to win this battle. It’s going to take deeds. The playing field is clear and among the many goals should be credibility with black voters. The Democrats are experts at providing rhetorical satisfaction to political fantasies of the rank and file black voter, but they are quite incapable of delivering. So who is serious about making those inroads, about engaging the battle for real?
It seems to me that there has to be a two pronged attack. The first is going to have to be based in rhetoric, which is to say that a very strongly principled statement and commitment to anti-racism must be made by the GOP. It has to rise to the level of ‘ownership society’ and ‘compassionate conservatism’. And those who follow these matters should echo and hammer the principle home as current affairs dictate.
Secondly, the GOP has to make concrete gains in attracting black voters, by any means necessary, in order to derail the phony spin around racism from being the primary weapon of the Democrats in reaching black voters. So long as it is reasonable to say that the overwhelming majority of blacks… xyz… for the Democrats, the presumption against the GOP will be that it is racist. All one needs is one cockeyed statement a year to keep that perception alive indefinitely – whether or not Democrats lie and cheat.
Cobb, as long as the primary and accepted method (even among blacks) of “attracting” them is to shower them with taxpayer funds and as many other goodies as can be dreamed up, the Republicans will be – or ought to be – unsuited to wage that particular battle. A further example: Bush ceding the borders to illegal immigrants may be a way to attract Mexispanic votes, but it isn’t a way Republicans should be using.
Jeff, just to let you know, I’m considerably more combative in my refusal to let others impose the signifiers than David is, whether it’s Bennett, or, as you also mention, crescents.
But people are sick and tired of being just angry–and that’s all the progressives offer. After so many bombings (and Okla’s may very well turn out be jihad), their effort to portray us the Ultimate Baddies is wearing thin. I think.
We have to support efforts to de-PC officialdom. Maybe write to the FDNY and indicate support for any effort to screen Muslim imams, after the latest outrage. (see lgf for story about hiring of radical/stupid imam.) They think no one but the radicals is listening.
Look at how illegal immigration is finally being discussed, after the Minutemen, for instance.
The academy will take another decade, but we’re getting there. I think.
David is a brilliant guy. We need to convince him that, even if advocacy is a losing cause, it’s the right thing to do.
Personally, I think it’s winnable, because the examination of how language is working can now take place outside of the academy and reach a wider audience—particularly if it’s done in an interesting way. I wish I could find my Curious George lesson plans…
’Any means necessary’ means just that. The implication being that if at first you don’t succeed, then try another strategy. The assumption that ‘spending’ is what black voters want may make sense rhetorically, because that’s how you attack Democrats. But what emprical evidence does the GOP have that African American voters want ‘spending’ in order to foster party loyalty.
In what think tank did the idea of the appeal of the Christian Right would integrate black and white voters from the South into the GOP. None. Nobody dreamed that up, it was an unintended consequence of a strategy the GOP has been pursuing since the days of Ralph Reed. When all the benefits of gaining black voters to the GOP comes as an unintended consequence, that indicates a lack of thought.
And now for some gross over simplification.
Pomo epistemology is nothing more than a naked power play. Within the academy, it allowed untalented and unlearned hacks to become tenured. Outside the academy, it’s largely viewed as bullshit–the last refuge of liars and propaghandists.
That’s really the nub of it, I think, and a conclusion that takes pomo bullshit out of the realm of theory and back into the realm of bare knuckle politics. The theorists can dress up their crap, but they can’t disguise the smell.
The good news, I think, is that most lefties aren’t very clever liars or propaghandists, but they are prolific, and I think that’s where Jeff, and other rational commenters are proving invaluable. Most of us can recognize a lying bastard when we have the data.
Don’t underestimate the ability of the left. They’ve managed to make their view of language the status quo, and it’s insinuated itself into law and public policy. Which is why to a lot of us, Bush’s SCOTUS appointments are crucial.
But I really do think—well, hope, really—that we can change the culture by addressing the structural errors that are driving it in a particular direction.
But it will take a willingness not to do so, and not to play tit-for-tat on these sorts of things.
Good point. I have heard a few southern politicoes commenting on the fact that alot of blacks are disgusted with the education system and want school vouchers, and suggest this would be a great recruiting tool, but it is not getting much traction.
It seems Bushco’s minority strategy is just to outspend the Dems.
Wow. Up to now, when I talked about tin-foil hats I was only joking. Up to now.
By the way, is Lacan the name of the planet that the Lacanese come from?
There is no post #007875 over on Tapped. I’m guessing Garance Franke-Ruta has deleted it.
I really, really hope you’re right. My fear is that it’s too late.
Jeff,
Wrote, “Don’t underestimate the ability of the left. They’ve managed to make their view of language the status quo, and it’s insinuated itself into law and public policy. Which is why to a lot of us, Bush’s SCOTUS appointments are crucial.”
Agree that “misunderestimating” is bad. Disagree that pomo language theory is the status quo; probably among the intellectual elites, but not among we the people. A test poll question: “The logos is always already merely a trace of the signifier.” Strongly agree….etc.
Strongly agree that the SCOTUS nominations are crucial. To that end, I wish the President were better able to argue for an originalist judge. My sense is that a strong majority of Americans would support originalism if it were effectively argued. Short of that, the idea of a “living Constituion,” sells modestly well, however, vapid.
Oops, I found the post on Tapped.
Tapped’s archive was down, and the posts on the main page aren’t in numerical order.
But the post is there.
I’m not saying pomo terminology is the status quo. I’m saying the assumptions behind it is—particularly, the idea that interpretations that don’t appeal to authorial intent are valid extensions of the meaning of the original utterance—or, to put it more concretely, that because Bennett’s words can be seen as racist they are in fact racist, whether he intended them that way or not.
Bill Kristol just got done saying Bennett should have avoided this kind of thought experiment, though it is clear he isn’t racist and that his argument suggested the very opposite. Which means that Kristol—hardly someone you’d expect would cotton to pomo ideas—is saying that, though Bennett isn’t a racist, and his argument wasn’t racist, he should nevertheless refrain from making it because somebody might insist it’s racist, and express outrage, and start a fight, and make the case that Republicans are racist.
I understand the impulse, don’t get me wrong: so afraid are Republicans of the racist charge that they have become quick to condemn things they fear others might conceivably find racist.
Instead, they should do the hard work of arguing their case that what is being said is not in fact racist—and refuse to cede the point out of fear that others won’t understand the argument.
Spike Lee said it: do the right thing.
Do.
She’s all wet. Bennett cannot be considered an “other” because Bennett the man exists within a specific discourse–to her, gambling addict, holier-than-thou Rethuglican. What she is doing is attacking Bennett the man to taint all Republicans. She has chosen to continue the action of his words– by twisting them to her intent. There’s nothing unintentional about that at all. That’s everyday politics, as moral or amoral as ever.
I have concluded that I am no longer smart enough to understand your posts, Jeff.
You probably came to that realization several months ago.
Scott —
I really want this stuff to be clear. So please tell me what you’re not getting so I can work on explaining it more clearly. It really is important to me.
Now that I’ve read Franke-Ruta’s post, I’d like to defend her intentions if not her position.
I see no sign that Garance understood what Bennett said, even or especially after it was explained.
When Brad DeLong pointed out that Bennett was making a reductio ad absurdum argument, and that taken out of context, his phase could be construed as if he was supported the horrible absurdity that his arguement was meant to reject, Garance dismismissed this as a superfluous puffery proving only that DeLong “studied Latin and philosophy.”
Philosophy? If “Franke-Ruta” had made it though a reasonably good high school, she would have recognized that DeLong was talking about rhetoric, not philosophy and she would have known that he was using Latin phrases only because all of the topics in rhetoric are named in Latin.
In other words, she doesn’t know anything about rhetoric, doesn’t know what a “reductio ad absurdum argument” is, doesn’t know what DeLong was talking about, and still doesn’t understand what Bennett was on about.
So she isn’t saying “black people are too stupid to follow a reductio ad absurdum argument, so lets take one out of context and misrepresent it for political gain,” no, rather, she is completely incapable of following understanding any arguments herself and is pleading for people to restrict themselves to a discourse that a dimwit like herself can follow.
The problem isn’t dishonesty, it’s stupidity and the pride of a person who doesn’t know enough about rhetoric and isn’t bright enough to follow an arguement.
Jeff, this is a constant with you – holding idiots to the same standards as intelligent people. I’m beginning to think that you can’t recognize an idiot when you see one.
Oh Christ on a Crutch! When someone starts lecturing the unwashed masses by peppering his/her speech with slick insider jargon, either cover your wallet or count your fingers cause the fix is on.
Excuse my language, Jeff, but FUCK the Lacanese and the Mothership they flew in on. The reaction to Bennett falls into four camps:
Those that have only heard the “abort black babies” snippet and are outrages (the ignorant)
Those that know the full context of the Bennett snippet and are still outraged (the linguistic totalitarians protecting their hegemony)
Those that know the full context of the Bennett snippet but who wring their hands that Bennett should have known better or been more sensative (the pussies)
Those that know the full context of the Bennett snippet and are fucking tired of the grotesque attacks on Bennett and are ready and willing to go to the mat with the other groups (the rest of us)
I am fed up to HERE with reading vile attacks that Glenn Reynolds is ‘taking it up the ass’ from the “right” for linking to sites like YOURS, Jeff, defending Bennett because
This pure, unadulterated BULLSHIT. There’s no argument there, there’s not even a pathetic attempt to substantiate the assertion. We of the 4th camp are nothing but lunatics and racists for no other reason then we are joining the mob to lynch Bennett.
Any mother worth her salt would have an immediate reaction if her own kid lied to her in such a selfserving, baldfaced manner in an effort to get the other kid in trouble.
And right now, I’d like to take a belt to the bare asses of the asses still after Bennett’s scalp.
Ah, I was missing some context myself. I hadn’t read down the blog as far as “Morning in (racist Rethuglican) America: an intentionalist perspective”
Jeff said:
“Kristolâ€â€hardly someone you’d expect would cotton to pomo ideasâ€â€is saying that, though Bennett isn’t a racist, and his argument wasn’t racist, he should nevertheless refrain from making it because somebody might insist it’s racist, and express outrage, and start a fight, and make the case that Republicans are racist.”
In a niggardly way, Kristol is right. Your average race-baiting lefty will easily pick up on Bennett’s off the cuff clumbsiness and trumpet it to high heaven. On the other hand, Bennett is certainly right, too. For God’s sake, who in hell expects Shakespeare from a morning talk show host? Hell, Buckley in transcript of a live broadcast is practically illiterate.
What’s needed is satire. Mark Steyn is wickedly funny and wickedly good, and the internet has several very sharp pens (this site included), but a Mark Twain is needed. A Will Rogers would do. Your average Bill Maher smart ass is too smarmy. Your fake folksy Don Imuses of the world are in bed with Howard Fineman. No, we need a smart ass who can speak for the people.
I nominate you.
I’m (Politechnical) not giving up on the ‘words mean things’ debate, it’s just been fought for such a long time without success that I am not confident that the right can win the fight.
My arguments have been from the political-tactical angle, not the pure theoretical realm. Clearly the situation the right finds itself in is far from ideal.
The bright side is that most of the American public knows the Bill Bennett witchhunt is feigned outrage. It’s part of what is driving folks away from the MSM.
The fact the Bush administration chooses not to weigh in heavily makes me think that the Orweillian architecture wrought by left-leaners and race baiters is weakening. Let’s hope so.
But I still have yet to see a viable active strategy for reversing the situation.
Darleen wrote:
Do you mean NOT joining the lynch mob going after Bennet?
Yeah, what fribblehead over there said.
And yer contra-rotating framistan’s outta alignment too, pal. I can probably fix it for ya, but it’ll cost…
The Political Teen has the verbal exchange between Mara Liasson, Bill Kristol, Juan Williams, and Britt Hume.
Williams either never bothered to understand Bennett’s argument in the first place, or willfully casts his own reconstruction upon it to taint Bennett with the racist slur.
I see a couple of forces at work here:
1-) Politically correct thought-speak has already gained a lot of influence in how we are allowed to frame conversations as witnessed by Kristol’s hedging his support for Bennett.
2-) The left is only too happy to work with its allies in the media to recast political discourse into terms it can control/manipulate and thereby control the debate.
I’d really like to say, Jeff, that I greatly appreciate your work to put all the recent linguistic-related debates into understandable terms.
IC’s post is so full of jargon and insider phrases that I would just walk away without the benefit of your analysis. Unless IC fully intends to write for the ivory tower set then the whole thing seems inappropriate. I shouldn’t have to google 20-30% of his post and then attempt to reassemble it into something I can read.
FWIW: I am a computer proffesional used to coming from IC’s point of view. The difference being that I see no usefulness in obfuscating my meaning by talking over the heads of my audience.
As my mother always said, if you have to lie to make a point, you HAVE no point.
This whole episode has turned me from a “why-bother-to-reason-with-an-idiot” sort of guy, to an in your face, pissed off MoFo. The ignorance – often willful – of the libs I know is infuriating. If they weren’t so arrogant about it, it probably wouldn’t bother me so much. I mean, Jayzziss! This hyphenated bim (What was her name? Garance Bim-Bo?) comes right out and says “We have to lie to win”? Well, screw that.
I’ve been too willing to let others haul the load while I just sniggered (UH-OH! Nope. It stays.) to myself. Even though it is too often like beating my head on a stone wall, I will not be letting this bullshit pass anymore.
Thanks for the kick in the butt, Jeff. You are, as usual, absolutely right. It’s time to stand up again. These socialist morons do not own the English language, and I will be sure to let them know – every chance I get.
Patrick Chester
Yeah. I was so pissed I didn’t preview. We won’t join the Kill Bill circus and covered supper spectacular so not only OUR arguments are dismissed out of hand, WE are dismissed, too.
Darleen wrote:
I doubt that “Snicker” troll on your blog looks anything like Uma Thurman.
Jeff said:
This has been going on for ages. The media and to a leeser extent the public are fascinated by the way the left string their words together, and adopt their phrasings/vocabulary as a way of appearing more intelligent. Once one adopts the phrasings, belief in what was said often follows.
Saint Augustine understood how this works when he passed on this advice for converting the pagan:
IC reminds me of this dude that lived next to me in the college dorm. He was into all kinds of drugs. I saw him eat a handful of acid hits one night. He swore up and down he was a Rhodes Scholar, and mind you he could yap circles around many, but I think that was just the psychotropic breakfast of champions talking.
Part of the problem, too, is that people like poor Whats-her-name and her so-called Lacanian argument is functionally illiterate. For all we know, four years of college have left her prepared to do little more than work at Starbucks.
Nevertheless, she has been rewarded with the odd A or B–and a degree–by the mediocre, self-selecting and socially isolated university hacks who’ve purchased their Volvos and sent their kids to Harvard on her parents’ well-meaning, hard-earned, tuition money.
In truth, if she’s studied the humanities or social sciences, most of what she’s learned is very likely bullshit, but the professors have managed to convince her–and even themselves–that it’s not. I mean, how can you look at yourself in the mirror when you collect $100,000 a year for teaching bullshit? You can’t. It’s indefensible. Something’s got to give.
You develop an over-inflated sense of your intellectual specialty. Your class on Hip hop as it affects Gender Studies is the last word on the subject.
You forget–if the thought has ever occurred to you–that real intelligence is so rare it’s debatable you possess it yourself. Virtually anyone can memorize the byzantine signs and code words required to be recognized as an intellectual elite. And most of them are just as idiotic as they were in Swift’s day.
“Big Other of the Symbolic Order”
OOooooh, that sounds so sinister. Does the Symbolic Order have secret handshakes and decoder rings? Midnight ritualistic orgies? (sign me up!)
The Left has to lie; it has nothing else to offer. Pleasing lies to soothe the outrage of the easily offended masses. Their whole ediface is built on their Original Lie, the denial of human nature. Humans, and thus society, can be formed with the right ideology and a sufficently dedicated cadre willing to follow their Prime Directive, the ends justify the means.
Lacan’s the guy who, as I recall, likened his penis to the square root of -1.
And maybe the guy has a point–speaking personally, I know I can’t solve for the roots of a polynomial without surreptitiously touching myself.
Postmodernism’s a gas, folks–to this day, my critical theory of architecture readings remain some of my favorite porn.
Pity so many people actually take it seriously.
This recalls the scientist who submitted nonsensical research to deconstructionist literature journals and was published.
My solution: all science majors must have a minor in liberal arts…and vice versa…yes, this means lots more math…oh well.
My eyes were starting to glaze over as I attempted to make sense out of
In a blinding flash the truth struck me (thanks to Karl Maher/Jeff)- IC you are so full of shit.
For future reference perhaps we can bookmark this as the postmodern rantâ„¢, and file it alongside the trademark leftwing rantâ„¢.
Alan Sokal, yeah. Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. A classic.
At my university all science and engineering majors had to take “general studies”, essentially a liberal arts minor. The arts students weren’t required to take any science or engineering at all, mainly because they’d all fail.
I would have passed.
I want to add that neither Lacan nor Žižek, both big influences on Jodi Deanâ€â€the author at I Citeâ€â€are “postmodern” unless we paint postmodernity with a very wide and inconsistent brush.
Look, no doubt there are nuances and uses of “jargon” that cause one discipline to stand out from others, but I’ve never really seen anyone argue that Brouwer was a pompous ass because he rather thought of canonical proofs in the forms of spreads and trees or that Feynman was an arrogant elitist because he rather thought of paths as integrals over infinite histories. The attendant complexity of the technical expressions used by Feynman or Brouwer should not and reasonably will not be used to discount what they have written and said, and the person who says Feynman and Brouwer were full of hokum and wrote bogus works because he cannot understand either the place or the use of these technical expressions in the arguments and writings of these people is, usually, dismissed.
But when it comes to works in the “humanities”, people find it easy and unregrettable to say that the technicality of a work of philosophy is grounds to say it has no content whatsoever, in that it uses words and expressions that make no sense to either the undoctrinated or uneducated readerâ€â€I guess on the premise that it should make sense to them. Why don’t we say this about mathematics or the “hard sciences”, though? Why is there no similar distrust and uncharitable insulting of a physicist who starts talking about Weyl transformations or the Dirac sea, or of a mathematician who starts talking about the Riesz-Fischer Theorem or the Kronecker Decomposition Theorem?
Eyes might glaze over, but which of you then says, “You are so full of shit!” or “You just memorized that to be among the intellectual elite!”?
Have a little bit of charity, along with a recognition of one’s own shortcomings. Jodi Dean is not writing an entry on I Cite for absolutely every English reading person who lives. I Cite, for the most part, has as its intended audience people who are already familiar with Lacan, or at least people who are already familiar with Dean’s thoughts on the intersections of political events with philosophical investigations. Of course people unfamiliar with either will not immediately grasp and intuitively understand the technical expressions she uses, just as someone unfamiliar with discrete analysis can get easily lost and confused in a course of graduate mathematics or someone unfamiliar with organic chemistry can get easily lost and confused in a graduate course on molecular biologyâ€â€this does not mean that the technical expressions she uses can have no meaning whatsoever. If you’ve not read and studied Lacan or Žižek, then of course her language borrowing from them will be incomprehensible in the same way that the arcane symbols one finds in graduate mathematics and graduate physics will be incomprehensible. Accept that you just aren’t as educated or as knowledgeable as you would like to believe you are.
Even then, it seems bizarre that it is perfectly acceptable to make insulting and incriminatory statements about Dean on the basis of someone else’s selective quote in the midst of a discussion claiming how Bennett’s comment is being used to further someone’s political and social agenda by trashing him and anyone associated with him. Again, if we should have charitable readings of Bennett, why should we not have charitable readings of Dean?
Lacan, when deployed in linguistic studies, is most certainly considered pomo—he does, after all, separate the signifier from the signified and insist that all is a chain of signifiers with no anchor (or Derridean “center”)—though I suppose because he is a psychoanalyst you can make the case that the he’s more a Phenomenologist.
And I didn’t dismiss IC’s argument because of the jargon; I just noted that the heavy use of jargon disguised the simplicity of the thinking.
And I suspect that people were uncharitable to Dean because of the uncharitable way she decided to engage me in the first place.
Once division by zero is allowed you can arrive at all sorts of astounding results. 1 = 0, and stuff like that.
Ms. Dean allows herself to rhetorically divide by zero when she asks us to ignore Bennett’s plainly stated intent, and instead adopt her own translation which is clearly not what Bennett said.
You can engage in a long winded rationalization of why it is proper for Dean to distort what Bennett said, but “You’re so full of shit†is much shorter and to the point.
Perhaps that is how Lacan is taken in some departments of linguistic studiesâ€â€is that Lacan being taken by Dean, or by departments of philosophy interested in philosophy’s encounter with psychoanalysis? I’m not a linguist, nor studying linguistics; I reckon you are, at least, studying linguistics alongside your teaching of literary theory. I’ll take your word for it, but I think that, if that (what follows the ‘afterall’
is how Lacan is handled in linguistics, that’s not Lacan. There may be a separation of signifiers and signified (insofar as things get separated by their function in a structure), but Lacan’s famous example of the insertion of the use of ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ into the meaning of a set of two doors, I think, works against there being some hard and fast separation in Lacan between signifiers and signified. As well, the idea of the buttonhook, the point de capiton, I think shows that it can’t be said of Lacan that he thinks that ‘all is a chain of signifiers with no anchor’: the anchoring of a meaning is an affair of our reliance upon time to determine meanings. The slippage of the signified in Lacan does end retroactively, and this anchoring of meaning is what makes both the languages of poetry and of knowledge possible. This is very different from the différance of Derrida, where there is both difference and deferral being pushed forward (or away) from the signification process in a kind of hesitancy of meaning. I think it’s different because Lacan, although accepting play as a given within language due to the slippage, doesn’t consign language only to this play but also gives a structural account of how meaning in language gets hooked, anchored, nailed down. Not that I think Derrida argued that language is only this play, either, but it seems to me from your brief comment that where Derrida and Lacan have their similarity is in this ‘chain of signifiers with no anchor’, and this is what typifies postmodernity.
But, let’s be clear on this. Is it your suggestion that Lacan is postmodern because he is considered postmodern by people who deploy him in linguistics? Is it your suggestion that Lacan, as you have seen him deployed in linguistics, is postmodern?
Now, I don’t think that you did discount Dean’s argument because of the jargon: clearly other people commenting here did that. But, I am not sure that the summation of her argument that you provided as the claims-without-jargon in their simplicity is her own argument, or one she recognizes as her argument. I think there is a simplicity in her thinking, but I think of this simplicity along the lines of the simplicity of the proof for the Bar Theorem (I’m sorry, but I’m in the midst of writing a paper on Brouwer’s intuitionism so it’s on my mind): simplicity should not be used as a way of insinuating something as facile so as to say its stupid or incompetent. Her argument is simple in that in it the inductive inferences to make are informed by the position of the person speaking within the political and philosophical conventions of that person’s discursive community. That this is simple is evidenced enough by what I was alluding to above: mathematicians and physicists speak and write what they do within the contexts of communities of mathematicians and physicistsâ€â€and we intuitively and “simply” enough recognize this. Saying this, though, hardly ‘wrests control of language from the individual’. Individuals are not only individuals: we engage in communication with other people, and we intend our meanings to be meant in the communities we wish to share or enclose. I don’t think it is charitable to read Dean as arguing within the context of a tradition that she is not, but this practice is already a part of language in its ability to define communities through its use. But, again, this doesn’t say anything about language being ripped (or whatever metaphor we should use) apart from individuals to set language on its way, it’s more a cautionary note that we should not use language flippantly, especially in calling down the wrath of insults and invectives, because we can hurt more people than we intend to do so, if we ever intend to hurt at all.
Is Dean saying that ‘Bennett himself is not important’? What do you take to be the significance of ‘Republican rhetoric and fantasies’, especially given what you acknowledge is her Lacanian reading of the correct way to think through the problem of what Bennett said? As it stands, fantasy has a special role in Lacanian pyschoanalysis, and it’s not here just code words and signs for saying that Republicans want black people dead.
As for whether Dean was uncharitable with you “in the first place”, I can see that. She took a section of your argument, acknowledging that it wasn’t your whole argument, and said that this section of it was poor. It was poor, she indicates, because you may have not read as much of Butler to use Butler in the way that you did (which is to say that you used Butler incorrectly), but didn’t fully detail how you had misappropriated Butlerâ€â€in the later comments Dean, as I read her, acknowledges that she may have misunderstood what you meant to do with Butler and should have taken that differently. She then, instead of providing that detail of where you go wrong with respect to Butler, uses jargon “heavily” to say that you think the arguments are about Bennett when really the arguments are about the use of language among conservatives. I think that what can be considered uncharitable in this is probably how little detailed refutation she gave, instead opting to address her comments in a format with a language intended for her specific readers. But, would you agree with me that that is a very different sort of uncharitable behavior from the ones engaged in by your commentators in this thread?
Dean acknowledges that your post is interesting, which I take to mean worth interest for its usefulness and help in reading more about the Bennett affair, for its links to other sites. She said your argument is poor, but there is nothing there saying that you are an elitist, or you actually have nothing to say because its all in codes and pet cliché, or the likes of what has been said, without any respect, here. It might be a form of justification to allow one uncharitable thing to follow another, but if your goal is to restore language to what is intended by people, then why not also take to task the irresponsible uses people have with it?
As I see it, you had a very powerful means to respond to Dean if you thought she was just another postmodern literary critical theory type who “obviously” (but only obviously after paying attention to how you recast her argument, which isn’t so obvious) is attempting to wrest control of language from the individual, but you didn’t take itâ€â€my thought is that it was because you weren’t interested in the consistency and coherency of her argument but rather interested where to place her entry in your already engaged criticisms of postmodern literary theory. What response am I thinking of? It is the simple response in noticing that Dean, by saying you had not read enough of Butler, can only say this if she has in mind a certain core constituency of what Butler is saying, of what Butler has said and intends to say. Thus, so this hypothetical argument goes, you went wrong because what you said didn’t match that intended core. But, this is a conclusion that cannot be advanced if Dean actually is the sort of postmodern literary type who thinks that there are intentions within language existing apart from a specific subject’s intentions. Afterall, if this were true about Dean, what you said about Butler is what can be done with her writings, and that is what is important about what Butler wrote, not what she intended to write, and so Dean would be inconsistent to argue that you didn’t get Butler right. But, this is not who Dean is, and this is not what she does argue, and so it’s unconvincing to say that all that she is saying is just another example of postmodernity amuck.
Dean does intend to say that you read Butler wrong, this is my point, and from this, it should be clear that she is not the sort of person whose arguments fit the model of postmodern literary criticism you’re mainly attacking through her. And this is the irony, then: what Dean is saying is happening actually to Bennett through people criticizing him and his position as a spokesperson for conservative virtues is actually what you are doing to Dean as your example (and, in effect, is happening to all of the commentators who use her as example to talk about the “leftist academy” and “intellectual elitists”). Rather than be interested in Dean as the person and political philosopher she is, by taking the time to work through her writings and detail the precise ways in which she uses her jargon within the technical discipline of political philosophy (and as I mentioned earlier, within that discipline’s engagements with psychoanalysis)â€â€the kinds of things done by a responsible person who sincerely believes in the intentional uses of language by subjects and not structuresâ€â€what you did was cite her use of jargon as obscuring an attempt to do something that is done by a group of people. You argue that what Dean is doing is ’another obvious attempt’, which only has meaning in the context of prior obvious attempts, and this attempt she is doing alongside other ’fellow travellers‘, whom you collect as people who not only dislike strongly Republicans but also do dangerous things with and to language. She is attempting to ‘wrest control of language from the individual’, and this is a running complaint you have been havingâ€â€so far as I have followed the links you’re supplying to collect these entries together, your own intended activityâ€â€with postmodern literary criticism.
Dean, in your criticism, is not a subject in herself but is an occasion to further display the problems you see in postmodern literary criticism, whom you intensionally define as a group including her. You read her argument and see it as just another argument in a long list of versions of the same argument supplied by postmodern literary criticism, and you attack what you read as her argument in the same way you have attacked postmodern literary criticism.
You have made her into a Bennett, then, in the very same way she is saying that Bennett, through this one comment, has come to represent the ‘voice among conservatives’ that people are responding to in their criticisms of his statement. Her singular comment on the website she authors, much like Bennett’s singular comment on the radio show he hosts, you take to reveal certain identifiable features of a community, features such as the wresting of language from individuals and the use of jargon to obscure one’s argument (and others add on that what is obscured is the non-sense of the comments) which are features we find in communities called postmodern.
So, what you have done is demonstrate precisely her point, an empirical evidence of the theoretical framework of political activity she is describing in her entry (and elsewhere on her site). This does not mean that your arguments against postmodern literary criticism are therefore wrong or inconsistent: on the contrary, what I have been suggesting all along is that you are not on “opposite” sides of the discussion but are writing about language in different ways in different contexts. She is, I take it, concerned with how language is situated in communities, especially with how language is used politically to define and delineate communities. You are, I take it, concerned with how language is to be interpreted in a way that is responsible and fair to whoever is using it. I think we can agree these are different, but not exclusive, concerns. I think it is right to suggest you are using Dean in a way that the left is using Bennett, I think you are right to be cautious about people saying language has no meaning respective of what people intend it to. I think Dean agrees with you that how people believe they intend and do intend language is very important to any political analysis of language, and I think that you (unintentionally, perhaps) follow in your criticism of Dean the same structural feature of a political practice she is identifying through the use of Lacanian categories shows that you unwittingly agree with the argument she is making about politics and the social with her Lacanian jargon. (Afterall, you wouldn’t be using Dean as an example of literary postmodern criticism going awry in the culture if you didn’t believe she represented this, or if you didn’t believe that it was possible to represent a structural feature of a group’s activities in the context of a particular subject’s linguistic activities.)
If, though, I’m misunderstanding something, please advise. I’m open to such criticism.
Oh, Christ. Give me a break, would you? I don’t cow to longwinded attempts to deconstruct my postitions.
Dean was saying that I haven’t read enough Butler to comment intelligenty on it. I’m under no obligation to answer her in Lacanian terms, particularly when I wasn’t speaking in Lacanian terms.
And I didn’t reduce her to a type. I dealt with what she wrote and what I think she meant by it. That I pointed out that she used an argot that literary critics have used to keep out the unitiated, or that her response happens to represent a type of argument advocated by adepts of particular theorists, doesn not mean I’ve turned her into a product of anything outside of her own agency, or reduced her to features of a particular linguistic community. I am arguing, in fact, that she is not determined by any of these things. Instead, I said plainly that I believed it to be an intentional dodge. I could be wrong, but that would be a product of me misreading here intentions—NOT of my having fallen victim to seeing her as a linguistic type. So no, I haven’t done to her what she did to Bennett. She is a thinking subject who is in control of her own learning and how she wields it. Any resemblance it bears to her community is the product of a decision on her part to regurgitate its rhetoric. She controls that; it doesn’t control her.
I don’t think you are under an obligation to respond to her in Lacanian terms. I think, though, you are responsible, as is everyone who engages in discussion, to the arguments a person makes. I don’t think you lived up to that responsibility with how you analysed her entry, but that is not to say that I think you should have done so using Lacanian terms. A responsible response can just as well have been entirely in logical symbols with an appropriate semantic, so long as it respected the discursive movements made in the entry accordingly.
If you see what you did in critically engaging with Dean’s entry as acknowledging her position as a subject, then so be it: my point still operates in the same way. Insofar as you attribute self-attribution to Dean by her use of a certain language, so is Dean saying this is what is happening with Bennett’s use of his language. Where does Dean ever say that Bennett has no control over his learning and how he uses it? â€â€is “having no control over learning and how we use it” a claim you take as advanced by postmodern literary critics, and one I’m saying is happening to you?
You said her use of the argot was an “intentional dodge”â€â€by that, do you mean that Dean doesn’t believe what she’s saying through the use of the Lacanian categories? You did say that her entry was another obvious attempt: are you saying that you’ve seen her, since you emphasize you were critiquing what she wrote, make other attempts in the past? You had an intended significance to saying this is ‘another obvious attempt’. I’m not sure how to take that if we are not to read you as saying that Dean is just another in a long line of people succumbing to postmodern literary criticism.
I take you as saying Dean is not a production of something not her own agency, she is not a reduction of things identifiable of a group. You want to emphasize that Dean is a subject, a person, who has a will and a choice and a capacity all her own. By eliminating these things, postmodern literary criticism eliminates people as people, and your intentions are to not join in with such reductions and eliminations. Instead, we take people at their word because they are people. Is this incorrect? Simplified, certainly, but somewhat accurate or right about your thoughts on the matter?
Why is this not true about what Dean is saying?
This is going nowhere. Sorry, but I don’t have the time to parse every statement for you. I believe my position is clear. You might find it clever to pick things out like “another obvious attempt” to suggest that you simply can’t figure out how else I could be using that phrase other than to suggest it “is just another in a long line of people succumbing to postmodern literary criticism”—here’s a hint, it is descriptive, not in any way necessary or determined—but I have other posts to write and other questions to answer.
Tell you what, we’ll go about this another way: you tell me what YOU think Dean meant by this:
And please frame your answer in such a way that you deal with subjectivity, agency, intent, and interpretive communities.
Charles R.,
I think you are violating your own dictum here.
Which of Dean’s arguments is Jeff not meeting? The reference to Butler by name, labeling an argument “postmodernâ€Â, identifying Dean with any larger group in which she may stand, are all incidental to the thrust of Jeff’s argument.
Thus Dean. Although she claims a distance between Bennett and his words, “The issue isn’t tainting Bennett specifically,†she doesn’t carry that through. Bennett’s words are in fact being used to taint him. Despite her claim that he isn’t, is the rest of her article consistent with this?
Aside from the ideology (not to say discourtesy) that allows her to obliterate the concrete individual for the sake of the abstract movement (with blame applied to the person, nonetheless), the move also divorces her abstractions from concrete responsibility. If Bennett’s, and anyone else’s, words can be divorced from the intent of their author, what anchors them but the political maneuverings of Orwellianism? Thus, what you have rightly spotted, is not Jeff’s assimilation of Dean’s methods against her, but his exposure of her method as an absurdity. What can be done to Bennett can be done to Dean.
I enjoyed following the track of your ideas, despite disagreeing with your result.
HCT
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