Many of my political disagreements with the broad online left can be boiled down to a rejection of the politics of cultural affinity. I think that elites have come to so closely associate their politics with their cultural branding that those domains are now totally indistinguishable. They don’t know how to think politically in a way that is separate from their various stylistic commitments to language, music, fashion. This leads to problems growing the franchise, because elite cultures only stay elite through the vigorous exclusion of others. It also leads to people who don’t know how to separate political commitments from style and socializing.
So you see this in the confused, frequently angry reactions to discussion of carceral feminism. I say “confused” because that’s the most glaring aspect of when people argue with me about it. Logically, it’s simple. Of course, if you’re advocating for the presumption of guilt and for giving our cops and prosecutors broad latitude to lock people up, you’re standing with the police state. But culturally, it’s confusing– “I’m the person who accuses others of standing with the police state, not the other way around.”
Take this Allie Jones report on the (very disturbing) accusations against Tao Lin, or even more, many of the commenters. There’s a complete inability or refusal to separate disgust over allegations of sexual assault from annoyance with alt-lit’s earnestness or pretension or whatever. “The web’s most earnest purveyors of navel-gazing self-examination may have to start looking a little harder at themselves,” writes Jones. Writing about rape allegations is not the time to start complaining about other people’s art and style. Those things are not the same.
This is just one small example. You see it all the time with various celebrities and their changing political reputations: just as he was becoming a widely beloved comedian and actor, Louis CK became seen as a political paragon. As disillusionment with his show grew, so too with his politics. People annoyed by Robin Thicke’s song find sweet satisfaction in the insistence that he is also a political failure. The power of Beyonce’s feminism seems to stem from the way in which it reassures people that there is no space where their aesthetic preferences end and their politics begin. The fear is that politics become just another fashion. What are the odds that everyone you like culturally and socially also agrees with you politically?
Yes, the personal is political. But it’s not healthy for the personal to become indistinguishable from the political, I think.
Care to speculate on what’s causing this trend?
Demise of identity based on religion, community, or career.
Check, check, and check. Just making sure there wasn’t a more esoteric component to it.
Fun, that seems like a culturally conservative argument. Apolitea, anyone?
On the contrary, the presumption that politics is no more than a form of lifestyle branding seems perfectly in keeping with neoliberal economics of our time. I’m looking for political liberation.
What are the odds that everyone you like culturally and socially also agrees with you politically?
In one of your recent posts, you linked an article by Mychal Denzel Smith, which partly braches off from another piece by Mia McKenzie. I just feel compelled to point out that McKenzie demonstrates a beautiful example of pushing back against this trend:
“I’d call myself a fan of Emma Watson. I like her. I always have. I’m a Harry Potter fan (despite its issues with gender inequality), and I’ve liked her a lot in other stuff, too. I still like her. I also know that she means well in her feminist work, and that her intentions at the UN were great. Cool. Excellent. None of that is the issue here.
The issue is that the message Ms. Watson delivered is problematic in many ways………”
I’m not sure I agree with you though about conflating the rampant idea that “[consumerist?] culture is political” with “the personal is political”?? (see subheading of the same name)
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“I think that elites have come to so closely associate their politics with their cultural branding that those domains are now totally indistinguishable… It also leads to people who don’t know how to separate political commitments from style and socializing.”
^ Your comments here also reminds me of a great piece by Yasmin Nair where she discusses “neoliberalism taking over”:
“The problem with the so-called left is that it has become intractably tied to the idea that its very existence, however tattered and weary and worn, is somehow enough[…] The first step is to acknowledge there is a problem, and the vast, vast majority of the left-prog-liberal bunch has no idea there’s a problem. “
Her link to “Bill Moyers interview with Adolph Reed” seems to be driving at similar points as you are making here, at about the [7:15-8:31] mark in the video, as well!
Yes, thank you.
Yes, the Jones piece is drivel. Interestingly, right before coming here I had just stumbled upon this similar piece by Amanda Marcotte, http://goo.gl/L6pmXF, regarding the “New Atheists”, and had many of the same reactions. Apparently, we can draw some broad conclusions about atheists qua atheists, unrelated to the existence of deities, because (low-hanging fruit) Sam Harris is an asshole.
The “broad online left” seems to wish so fervently for their Great White Fathers to be immaculate, which strikes me as very odd.
I’ve often wondered about this too. It seems like politics for the elite class and their courtiers consist of lifestyle choices. For example, mainstream wisdom dictates only liberals drink lattes and conservatives eat meat, even though you’ll see “rednecks” at Starbucks and conservatives at the hippie all-natural shop down South. Politics is lifestyle to the elite people and it influences everyone else’s political talk. It’s almost like clothing rather than belief.
tl;dr: You have put into words what I was only grasping at in my little mind.
Isn’t this just an appearance vs. reality argument? That people having the appearance of sharing the same values as you don’t necessarily?
Actually appearances do stand for something, the same way ‘no smoke without fire’ exists as a proverb. We’re just a point where people are seeing too much connection between surface and substance that it needs to be pushed back against. So I kind of agree.
Anyone with a little background in the social sciences or humanities can construct a really smart-sounding argument demonstrating how a product of culture is revolutionary or reactionary. I suppose there are some things that are beyond criticism or saving, but intellectuals (of the academia or tumblr) have all sorts of ways we can move the goalposts. A popular musician you enjoy is revolutionary because their popularity allows them to reach the masses. A popular musician who annoys you is a means of neoliberal governmentality. A gay dancer you enjoy is breaking down barriers. A gay dancer you dislike is homo-normative and ablist.
This would all be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
The ambiguity and arbitrary character of all of this is precisely why it is such a powerful form of cultural capital. Being critical, like most working-class people are in their own various ways , is not enough. In order to know who/what is in or out you really need to follow the in-crowd. Last week’s anti-racist hero is this week’s leader of the Ally-Industrial-Complex.
Combine this with the very myopic interpretation of the “personal is political” and leftist thought becomes a rationalization of all the stuff you kinda like as revolutionary and all the stuff that annoys you as reactionary.
As you say, it trivializes important issues (which seems to be the revealed preference of the left). It also introduces more factionalism into a political tradition that has more than enough already. Now controversies of ideology or program can be manufactured out of vague interpersonal distaste. I do not doubt this happened in the past, but never has the cultural and intellectual norms of the left been so conducive to it. (No, this is not an argument that everything was wonderful in the past.)
(And, no this is not an argument against cultural criticism in itself.)
I like the blog and your comment because they make a beautiful dialectic of the contradictions. Yes, there is a lot of blather out there, but that is the nature of social reality. It is dynamic, and processual. And like most all else in nature has a fair wack of randomness. So there is value in raising these points. It is critical – not being well adjusted to a sick society and all that. Has great merit (as your response itself shows). But it lacks for the dynamic of change. Not quite, because the political is both. Kant mentioned the distinction – as an idea at a fair level of generality – of public use of reason (unfettered by interests) vs the private use of reason (thinking as individual/identity, with interests). The latter is the balance of state and market in our times (and is of recent pedigree). The former in our times is that of a self hating state (state in this comment is broadly: structured living together) ala neoliberalism. And it makes everything market related, consumerism – ideas become themeparks, breakfast cereal etc… And politics is a carnival, because of all the personal stuff. But we do have some morality, that tends to offend. In the US, EU, UK it is welfare queens, while banks are in the money. Althusser had it right in many ways. As did the dialectic of Huxley (entertainment be the death of intellectual culture) and Orwell (Panopticon with Find-and-Replace) which shows the movement of the system.
So the problem I have after all that is this, all potentially progressive norms in systems have been challenged by Capitalism. The Christians struggle with Capitalism – the Pope has a point. Islam is struggling with its own violence while being bombed to the stone age, and political Judaism (i.e. Zionism) is finding its stride again. Since we can drop the Cold War pretensions, Yanis Varoufakis points out that marx was not dialectical enough – that the system would reproduce the working class as a class which is conducive to capitalism with limited sense of itself (we just have to look at the complicity – even in the face of austerity, and we all know enough apathy).
Consensus on a diagnosis for current ills is where the discussion should be, as you intimate to in your critique.
For all the problems, the American OWS gave us globally a meme – the 99%/1%. Inequality (American code for class) is cool. There are enough entry points. It is coming together that is hard. We need to manage a programme that is deep if we are to do what you say. So fundamental that the day after the revolution (or ito 2nd law of dialectics) things HAVE changed. We can discuss, but the processual difficulty can be overcome, and that is how do we manage difference (so we can processualy prioritise for deep consensus, and solidarity). So I am glad for the article as are you, for what it evokes~…
Did you know that a popular movie made twenty years ago promotes cultural mores that today seem antiquated? And yet it was a treasured memory of your childhood –what does that say about you? Click here to find out. Did you know that some of the songs you love were written and performed by people you would not want to personally befriend? And yet still you listen –what does that say about you? Click here to find out. Which character in this decades-old TV series, popular among your demographic, are you? The answer may surprise you.
Did you know you can now attain a robust political consciousness without marching or voting or leaving your chair, purely by sorting various pop culture artifacts into piles? Click here to find out what “robust” means.
The Internet wants to rule everything. So it is in the Internet’s interests to be able to destroy every powerful person it can, to demonstrate the Internet’s unstoppable power.
Those who are more fully the creature of the Internet, like alt-lit types, are more exposed to it, and therefore easier to destroy.
But it will come for all of us, in time.