nobody circles the wagons like the “liberal” media

Posted on 29 January 2016 by Freddie

Our political system, of course, is broken, in part because our political media is broken. And that brokenness stems in large measure from the fact that we have, essentially, two competing tribes of conservative media that think they are actually on opposite sides.

Recent weeks have seen a large, simultaneous anti-Bernie Sanders effort by Democratic media. This movement is an attempt to ensure that a specific establishment, corporate candidate receive her scheduled coronation. But more importantly, it’s one of our ostensibly liberal media’s perpetual exercises in coordinated anti-left sentiment. It’s a function that simply has no conservative counterpart; conservative media never, ever attacks to its right in this way, and to the benefit of conservatism. But it’s the most treasured ritual of centrist Democrat media, a way that young Democrat reporters make their bones in the industry: not by attacking Republicans, who hold the lion’s share of power in this country, but by ridiculing and marginalizing the left-wing fringe that controls nothing. I’ve said many times: just watch how they engage and you’ll see that this is what they really like doing. They are more motivated to hit left than to hit right; they enjoy it. Jon Chait attacks conservatives like it’s his job but attacks the left like it’s his passion. Pick a progressive Democrat writer at random and you’ll almost certainly find someone who shows more glee in attacking leftists than in doing any other kind of writing.

Here’s the real ugly part: because establishment media won’t critique itself on this issue, the existence of this incredibly obvious, politically important establishment attack is going essentially unreported. It’s utterly obvious that it’s happening; if you consume any media at all, you cannot help but have noticed the desperate, barely-concealed efforts of essentially our entire liberal media to attack Sanders and his supporters. People talk about it on social media openly. And yet no one will write any pieces about the fact that it’s happening, in mainstream publications, because to do so would be to threaten the very interests that they’re trying to protect. This is grimly hilarious because we’ve seen a dozen pieces on the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon, the product of a couple dozen people on social media with no power and no influence. That apparently merits the attention of some of the biggest publications in the world. But the simultaneous embrace of committed anti-left agitation by some of the most influential and powerful liberal media figures in the worls has been met with silence and will continue to be. That’s the benefit of controlling the message – it never gets turned back on you.

Had I the kind of sway these people do, I’d ask Joan Walsh if she has noticed that she now spends significantly more of her time attacking socialists than attacking conservatives. I’d ask Jamil Smith at TNR if it’s occurred to him that progressive politics are stuck in the mud because progressives attack and ridicule those to their left while conservatives embrace those to their right. I’d ask Paul Krugman if he thinks it’s weird that he feels it necessary to attack a candidate he himself describes as fringe and unelectable rather than the corporate interests that actual control the world right now. I’d ask the whole liberal media cool kids crew: do you think it’s some sort of coincidence that you guys participate in these periodic anti-left hate rituals, like you did before the Iraq war, like you did with Obama and drones, like you’re doing right now? And have you thought about whether our politics are so imbalanced precisely because your first instinct is to lash out at the powerless group to your left?

But then, I can’t force a consideration of our anti-left liberal media into the spotlight the way they can with a few meaningless Tweets from people who have no power of influence. Nobody can. And that’s the whole point, that’s why they’re in this together.

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fresh stuff

Posted on 23 January 2016 by Freddie
  • I just published my first piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication I’ve always wanted to write for. (I’m afraid the piece is behind a paywall.) I’m excited for the opportunity, and they’re paying me well. It’s about the pervasive sense of fear in academia, how it impacts the job market, and how the current (if they’re still current, it’s hard to say) campus political protests can either help or hurt, depending on how they turn. Though the pressure to adapt a “with us or against us” mentality to these protests persists, I will persist in saying that the actual effect of the protests will be felt in individual campuses, and those effects will be better or worse depending on the specific demands and the specific tactics of the protesters. The general demand that we recognize the ways in which students of color are marginalized on campus is totally correct and worth supporting. The specific demands vary from campus to campus. Some are brilliant; some are disturbing. I retain the right to say what I think about individual cases as my conscience dictates, while supporting the broad goal of making campus a more equitable place for students of color and while embracing the ideals of student protest.
  • My latest Observer column, though intended as an evenhanded discussion of two warring factions, has been controversial, as the accelerationists have no time for evenhandedness. It’s about the question of whether we fight global warming through slowing down capitalism’s processes or speeding them up. Please read and share.
  • I was recently on WFHB to talk about my Harper’s article on Louis Farrakhan and the #BlackLivesMatter protests with Doug Storm. I had a great time and thought it was a good discussion, so check it out.
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it’s a strategic mistake to get the case for equality bound up in aesthetics

Posted on 22 January 2016 by Freddie

 

I have said, many times, that the deepening progressive obsession with pop culture minutia is a profound strategic and analytical mistake. It devotes scarce political resources to concerns that are inherently disconnected from the actual lived oppression of most members of marginalized groups. It convinces a generation of young liberal people that the work of politics is easy, that all you have to do is like the right music or movies to be part of the solution. It deepens the widespread sense that progressive politics are less about principle and more about being part of some cool elite social culture. And it does terrible damage to actual aesthetic criticism, reducing the question “is this good?” to “is this politically convenient?,” or worse, “does liking this make me look like one of the good ones?” Judging art for its political qualities first is what people used to make fun of in, say, Soviet kitsch.

It also binds up the case for equality in the inherently subjective nature of artistic taste. In this Slate piece, Aisha Harris complains about the assumption “that people of color only get rewarded for being people of color, not because they may actually be—gasp—deserving of their reward.” But of course, that’s precisely the argument that you invite when you make the case for equality dependent on the perceived quality of specific works of art. Different people have different artistic tastes, and thank god; a world where that wasn’t true would be a sad place. But when you hinge the argument for equality of opportunity in creative fields on the specific complaint that a particular movie or performance was unjustly denied, you’re inevitably weakening that case because not everyone does or should agree on what movies are good.

Case in point: Harris presents the Best Picture award for Shakespeare in Love as some sort of straightforwardly unjust outcome. And, indeed, that’s a very common complaint, a kind of aesthetic shorthand that you hear a lot. Personally, I think it’s wrong. Shakespeare in Love is a great movie, in my opinion. Meanwhile, its direct competition, Saving Private Ryan, is typically treated as having been unjustly denied the Oscar. But Saving Private Ryan is an actively bad movie, one great battle scene followed by every war movie cliche imaginable, filled with incoherent themes, one of the most uninspired performances of Tom Hanks’s career, and a metric ton of Spielberg schmaltz. You’re free to disagree — and that’s the problem. Because the people criticizing the Oscars for being so white are staking so much on the subjective merits of particular award categories, they are ensuring precisely the response that aggravates Harris. If we admit that artistic tastes don’t map cleanly onto a particular political perspective, there will always be a critical counterpoint that cuts against the perceived wrong in awards season. The only alternative is to enforce a particular taste based on its political dimensions, which is both contrary to our basic conceptions of taste and exactly the claim that Harris rightly finds offensive. As long as you build the case for equality on the subjective appeal of, say, Sylvester Stallone slurring his way through rote sports movie scenes in Creed, you’re playing into the argument you want to dispute.

All of this is unnecessary; the case for greater equality in Hollywood is clear, and doesn’t depend on the aesthetic merits of specific movies. We should pursue equality of access in all industries, including the creative industries, because we recognize that the opportunity to try your hand in a given field is a basic and cherished kind of freedom. We further know that these opportunities have been unequally distributed along lines of class and race and gender, and so we should take an active role in correcting that problem. Aesthetically, we don’t need to see any individual creative act or creator as good or bad to recognize the value of diversity in our creative class. Most people from any particular group will be bad at the creative arts, because talent is rare. But a great artist can come from anywhere, and if we fail to take an active role in seeking them out in the places where opportunities have been hard to come by, we risk missing out on genius. More, diversity in perspective is an essential element of artistic bounty, and truly diverse perspectives can’t be achieved without diversity in our creative class.

Diversity in Hollywood matters on a systemic level; there’s no need to tie our case to any individual work. And we should be clear that the real diversity that matters is much less diversity in awards season, where the already-successful are given even greater rewards to go with their immense wealth and celebrity. “Who should get handed golden statues in an annual celebration of the aristocratic .01%?” is not a progressive concern. Instead, what really matters is at the beginning, at the bottom: who gets the opportunity to create in the first place. There, the case for diversity could hardly be stronger, and it does not depend on the fickleness of individual taste.

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oppression is material

Posted on 19 January 2016 by Freddie

 

So I want to talk for a minute about my writing on geek culture and why I think it’s relevant to the questions of racism and sexism and similar problems.

I write, too often, about how frustrated I am with the self-definition of geeks/nerds/whatever as marginalized. I think that these claims are untrue, failing to acknowledge how culture has changed, and also that they have unfortunate consequences. For one thing, it turns success into a kind of failure; self-identified geeks should be happy with how culture has changed to accept their beloved media! Instead, lingering on their self-definition as oppressed leaves them unable to enjoy success. Worse, when we are caught up in our own pain, we tend to ignore our own bad behavior, and as GamerGate demonstrates, some (some!) geeks and nerds can be very poorly behaved indeed. Anyway. Like I said: you’ve heard this from me before. For now, I just want to focus on an extreme-but-common reaction, which is to compare the “oppression” of geek culture to the oppressions of race and gender and the like.

I sometimes get responses that I think are really key to understanding bigger questions of politics. First, there’s analogy to blackness and racial inequality. “Would you tell a black person their oppression isn’t real?” I get this one on Twitter all the time. I find it, as you’d imagine, very offensive. There’s another, better answer, but it makes a similar mistake: “Yes, I recognize that our beloved media properties are taking over the world of pop culture, but I still feel like an outsider. The widespread adoption of sci fi/fantasy/comic books/video games/etc. hasn’t made me forget feeling like a loser for so long. I still feel oppressed.” This is a much better thing to say, and yet I think it misses the point in an important way: oppression is material, not a feeling, not a state of mind.

When I point out that sci fi books get major awards, when I remind people that a fantasy movie won Best Picture, when I demonstrate that the most buzzed about shows on TV are about comic book characters, when I prove that academia has fallen in love with geek culture, when I point to Rotten Tomatoes or year-end best of lists, when I cite enormous sales or ratings figures, I’m trying to bring evidence to a conversation that is so often evidence-free. I’m trying to ground the discussion in reality. When someone analogizes the emotional pain of being a geek with the oppression of being black, they are failing to see the material reality of racism, its depth, its empirical reality, its destruction. This is really important: that is not me saying that the emotional pain isn’t real. I feel for people who self-identify as geeks and nerds and who feel lonely and insulted. It’s the responsibility of good people to try and make the world a less lonely and insulting place. But that does not make geeks and nerds oppressed. And that feeling doesn’t, and can’t, undermine the evidence-based case that our culture industry has embraced their beloved franchises. I am not blowing smoke when I say that I empathize with you guys. I have been surrounded by geeks and nerds my whole life, they’re in my family, they’re my dear friends. I want to contribute to erasing stigma that people feel. But that is fundamentally about confronting a set of emotions that, I believe, are out of step with reality. The experience of oppression, for people of color and women and trans people and other, is reality. Geeks feeling marginalized and unhappy is a problem, but it isn’t a political problem.

And this also gets to misunderstandings with my conservative and libertarian followers. Because I am willing (perhaps overeager) to critique the rhetorical, analytical, and political tactics of people on the broad left, I often get people on the right praising and sharing my work. And that’s cool. But it has led to this basic misunderstanding: that my purpose is to be “reasonable” in some ill-defined sense, rather than to make constructive points about types of left-wing engagement I find unhelpful, untrue, or unfair. Often, this criticism stems from the same assumption that oppression is material. Look at my criticism of microaggression discussions. When people spend endless time seeking out microaggressions , there’s a sense in which that’s simply a poor use of resources, an energy- and time-suck that searches for molehills when we’re surrounded by mountains. But it also risks a basic misunderstanding about what oppression is; it contributes to the sense that racism/sexism/etc. are problems of mind or of language, when in fact they are structural facets of our society.

That is the nature of my criticism, not a disagreement about whether racism or sexism are broadly real. Whether you find the term “white supremacy” useful or not, the evidence should lead you to acknowledge that an immense number of metrics demonstrate that white people on average benefit from structural advantages over people of color. Even if you find the term “patriarchy” annoying, you have to recognize the overwhelming evidence that the average woman faces a level of inequality, injustice, and oppression that the average man does not. We collect evidence about the world in a responsible way, we look at that evidence, and we draw conclusions from it. And when it comes to people of color, to women, to poor people, to queer people, I find the evidence that they experience deep and persistent injustice indisputable.

So on microaggressions, of course I believe that people from marginalized groups face petty insults and casual undermining in their social lives. But I happen to think that the best way to address these problems is, first, to work to eliminate the economic, judicial, political, and other material conditions of oppression, and second, to tell people “don’t be an asshole.” If you eliminate the structural oppression, the emotional and social problems will stop having so much bite. You can then confront them the way you confront other bad social behavior. I sometimes get accused of being a “it’s not about race” economic-reductionist socialist, but I’ve never said that and don’t believe that. I just think that the best frame to attack racism and sexism is through attacking their material dimension. In that I follow not just Marx and other white men but many women and people of color. Like, say, the Black Panthers.

Sometimes conservatives say to me, “you’re so reasonable about call-out culture and identity politics. Why do you support [for example] affirmative action? Don’t you think there’s a time when black people won’t need affirmative action?” And I do, indeed, think that there will come a time in our society when we don’t need to pursue new structural fixes to racism. Unlike some people, I don’t see racial privilege as an immutable fact of life; it it was, what would be the point of trying to fix it? Someday, the black/white income gap may be nonexistent, rather than huge. Someday, the black/white wealth gap may be nonexistent, rather than huge. Someday, the black/white education gap may close. Someday, black people may no longer be jailed at vastly higher rates. Someday, black people may no longer be subject to serial murder by the police. Likewise, someday I believe we’ll reach equity between the sexes. Someday, women may be proportionally represented in political bodies. Someday, women may enjoy as much economic security as men. Someday, women may no longer be subject to domestic violence. I believe in that world; it’s the world we’re trying to reach someday, after all. But the evidence tells us that day isn’t today, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and probably isn’t coming in my lifetime. That is what the evidence tells us, what our best understanding of material reality tells us.

What looks to some like a strange collection of left- and right-wing commitments is, for me, a perfectly coherent ideology. I could be wrong, about everything, easily. But none of these supposed contradictions really are. They’re just an artifact of my rejection of the progressive embrace of language, symbols, and mental hygiene over the brick and mortar of incarceration rates, income gaps, and quality of life. Because the facts are on our side. They always were.

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David Copperfield

Posted on 17 January 2016 by Freddie

David_Copperfield_08I’ve been reading David Copperfield for the last month or two. I figured Dickens was perfect for the winter, and so far I’ve been happily proven right. Most of my Dickens reading came from a single, great college course, where we read outside of the usual suspects — Oliver Twist and Bleak House, yes, but also Martin Chuzzlewhit and Dombey and Sons, along with some of his excellent, underdiscussed journalism. This is my first time reading Copperfield. I’m about halfway through. I don’t think it’s necessarily better than Bleak House, so far, but it’s more personally moving.

There’s a quality that Dickens has that I rarely ever find: I stop seeing the story as the product of a writer and start seeing it as something that’s happening organically. When a plot development starts playing out that I don’t like — not in the sense that I think it’s bad narrative, but rather something that I don’t want to befall the characters — I never say “don’t do that, Dickens!” I instead simply fear for it the way I fear unfortunate events in real life. (I tell you almost apologetically that I sometimes feel this way when reading the great dingus himself, Jonathan Franzen.) That quality stems from a lot of factors, but in part I think it comes from Dickens’s willingness to introduce characters and situations that have no clear relevance to the plot on the whole. This violates a lot of hoary old writing taboos, but it plays out brilliantly as a reader; these moments, and these characters, enrich the world, making it seem more true to life. I’ve never really been one for the whole Chekhov’s gun thing.  After all: we don’t experience real life as a series of people and events that play directly into some overarching story, but as a long collection of disconnected moments and experiences, most of which have no clear “point” or purpose. I think that MFA programs have become unfairly blamed for too many problems with contemporary fiction, but I do think a contemporary novelist would feel much more pressure to cut away at these moments, and the book would suffer.

It’s funny that a writer who is so associated with grotesques has such an ability to make characters seem real. I’m at a stage in the narrative where one character whom David dearly loves has warned him about another character David dearly loves. The care with which these characters have been sketched makes this moment very moving, and is accomplished in a book which is populated with dozens and dozens of people. In particular, I am amazed by how individual David’s many relationships are, how his various friendships each has its own life and plausibility. Add to that the evocative descriptions of Victorian-era England and the wonderful setpieces — the book has maybe the best depiction of being drunk I’ve ever read — and you’ve got such an entertaining brick of a book. The perfect illustrations by Phiz are great too. I’m loving it.

I’m usually a pretty fast reader, but the book is going slow. That’s interesting, because usually this comes from some sort of technical difficulty or because I’m just not feeling it. Here, though, I’m very content to have the book play out slowly over the course of the winter; it deepens the experience and matches the steady, unhurried progression of David’s life. It doesn’t hurt, obviously, that I’m one of Dickens’s many devoted readers who knows what it’s like to experience a childhood marked by fear and uncertainty. David goes through much of the book so far being exploited without realizing it. It would have been easy, given Dickens’s own childhood, for the book to have been something bitter, for all of those moments of petty exploitation to be played as a statement against naivety or in indictment of human beings. But so far, the dominant impression is of David’s inexhaustible good spirit and his ability to find friends among all the monsters.

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how “multi” is your multimodality?

Posted on 12 January 2016 by Freddie

Without ever really intending to, I have come to be seen by some of my colleagues as the Guy Who Doesn’t Like Multimodal Pedagogy. By multimodal pedagogy I mean the contemporary yen for teaching mediums and technologies in writing classes that are not what most people would think of when they think of writing. So instead of traditional alphabetic, words-into-sentences, sentences-into-texts writing, you get lots of podcasts, websites, infographics, video game levels, crowdfunding campaigns…. It’s not actually the case that I think this stuff should be kept out of the writing classroom. I recognize that we should be training students for a world in which their writing is integrated in other forms of media, and that multimedia skills are a must for developing nimble and adaptable workers. I do think, though, that stitching those skills together is a more difficult task than people realize. I also think that this work cannot replace the work for which our writing programs have been founded and funded.

Pedagogical discussions are essential but tiresome because they so often devolve into maximalist stances. Take the wearying lecture debate; as in so many of these arguments, the positions seemed to be based on caricatures of the other side. I am thoroughly convinced by research and experience that lecturing is often pedagogically unsound, and anyone who teaches purely through lectures is likely doing his students a disservice. I’m also convinced, however, that for certain lessons in certain classes in certain subjects, lectures can be an elegant and entertaining means of conveying information, particularly for introvert students. Lectures are a tool in the toolbox; if you use a spatula when you need a screwdriver, you’re not being productive, but sometimes a spatula can be handy. (Also, “active learning” is the worst kind of empty pedagogical buzzword, designed to sell books and get hideously expensive boondoggle facilities built. Naturally Purdue is investing millions of dollars in just such a facility.) And yet the lecture debate seemed to revolve around the question if we should ever use them, rather than how often and when. Same thing with multimodality: the notion that we should be introducing other mediums than alphabetic writing has become a maximalist position, where some instructors I know out-and-out refuse to assign anything that doesn’t involve a heavily digital component. That strikes me as pedagogically risky and, potentially, disciplinary suicide.

To begin with: I simply find that it’s not credible to argue that alphabetic writing no longer has huge relevance and importance for training both professionals and citizens. Alphabetic writing retains unusual power and prominence in all sorts of contexts, such as academia, law, politics and governance, medicine, business…. And why wouldn’t it? Writing is a remarkably powerful, adaptable technology. It’s survived the transition from clay tablets to parchment, from being hand-copied by monks to being mass produced in presses, from being printed on paper to displayed on screens, and not for no reason. Rather because it retains flexibility and power that can’t be easily replicated in other mediums. When I hear people in the field arguing that the age of alphabetic writing is past and we should move beyond it entirely — and they’re rare, but they are out there — I’m always reminded of this brilliant parody from the Onion. In the digital age, the desire to appear ahead of the curve often results in people trying to abandon things that just work.

Besides, I always want to ask, what happens if we win this argument? If the maximalist anti-writing position wins out, what do people think will happen to our writing programs? With budget cuts everywhere and the humanities under the gun, do people think that if we say “hey, you know, alphabetic writing really isn’t where it’s at anymore, it should be abandoned,” that our administrations will say “cool, here’s your paycheck, have fun doing whatever else you want to do”? Or will they say “cool, thank you for your service, clear our your desk”? That’s an especially risky argument because, to many people, our efforts in these areas will appear to be redundant, given that there are other departments more directly oriented towards those medias and technology. And in a corporate architecture (as the contemporary university surely is), the perception of redundancy is the kiss of death. I certainly believe that we approach these techniques and technologies in unique ways, and that we can bring a lot of theory and practice to bear that’s valuable. But I fear that too many deans and provosts will say, “you’re teaching HTML, but I’m already funding a computer science program. You’re teaching Photoshop, but I’m already funding a graphic design program. You’re teaching podcasts, but I’m already funding a media program.” I’m not saying that’s fair. But I am saying, in some contexts, it’s likely, and it’s is not an idle concern. We have to defend the specific expertise in which we’ve been trained, or else risk being seen as a vestigial organ of our institutions.

We have allies, there. Of all the arguments that I hear for shifting to a predominantly multimodal, minimally alphabetic approach, the least convincing is the contention that this is what professors in other departments want. Though I have no polling or any other responsible evidence, the idea that professors in other fields want writing programs to teach web design or audio recording instead of how to write papers simply does not fit with my anecdotal experience at all. In fact, despite what many people think, I find that professors in engineering, the sciences, business, etc. are often champions of the importance and value of traditional writing. They can be important allies for our programs, but only if we demonstrate to them that we are actually doing the work they find valuable.

Also, on a personal level, I will admit that it’s frustrating to have joined a field of writing studies to find that I frequently have to make the case for the value of writing. I considered getting my PhD in a straight linguistics program, but I chose this route because I value writing, I think it matters. (Do math people feel the need to defend the value of arithmetic to other math people?)

I am not a pedagogical conservative. I think there is room for both. I think that’s particularly true in programs with a two-semester sequence for freshman composition and which have advanced undergraduate writing classes where instructors can really stretch out and make connections. Part of this conversation has to involve recognizing that too many institutions ask a single semester of freshman composition to do too many things. I think that there are a lot of really enriching multimodal projects out there. But to so lose sight of the basic institutional and financial justification for our continued employment strikes me as emblematic of the branding problems of the 21st century humanities. It’s putting our weakest foot forward and calling anyone who doesn’t old fashioned.

The truth is that, at least in the research/doctoral program side of collegiate writing, the multimodalists have already won. There’s this tic in the liberal arts where people who are in a position of dominance represent their (often imagined) opponents as the conventional wisdom. Take grammar and mechanics prescriptivism: to hear many people tell it, the world of English is filled with instructors and professors who take a harsh stance on commas and gerunds, forever policing students for the smallest infraction. In my experience, literally the opposite is true. I cannot name a single such professor, but I know hundreds and hundreds of “living language” types. (I am one, more or less, myself.) So here. The textbook industry, the academic job market, our biggest journals and conferences: these all betray a multimodal obsession. Believe me when I say that as an early-career academic, there’s nothing less sexy than trying to convey the importance of writing as traditionally conceived. But that importance is real, for our students and ourselves, and as we train new teachers and build a base of shared knowledge, I think it behooves us to remember: if we don’t teach what our institutions expect us to teach, they’ll just replace us with people who will, and nobody will be around to defend the value of an appropriate amount of multimodal teaching.

Posted in Education, The Discipline | Leave a comment

how things work

Posted on 10 January 2016 by Freddie

For years I’ve said that there’s a wagon-circling function in media that makes criticism of certain connected people appear professionally risky. A lot of people in the media question the accuracy of that criticism, and I fully admit that at times I can be too sensitive to it. But I’m not inventing it, either. Here’s an email in response to my criticism of The New Republic’s Jeet Heer yesterday:

Screenshot_2016-01-10-12-26-25

This is pretty much how it goes. It’s not an explicit threat, exactly. It’s just an editor at a big publication who has the ability to trade writing for money – or not – giving vague warnings about my reputation in the industry. It’s a bit of “nice career you got here… Would be a shame if anything happened to it.” And this, essentially, is how it goes down. This is far from the first email I’ve ever received like this.

Incidentally: some will turn around and say that, by printing this email, I’ll be scaring off other publishers, that this is a bit of exposure for the sausage-making process that I’ll pay for. So the circle gets a little tighter. And you know what? Those people are probably right.

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

so woke I passed right through into being unconscious again

Posted on 9 January 2016 by Freddie

Pause and consider this line in a very short post from Jeet Heer, sharing some videos of an interview with Vladimir Nabokov: “Parts of the show are dated: three white men sitting around a fake living room, smoking away while talking about books.”

Honestly: what on earth does the reference to three white men mean, and what value can it possibly add to a post that amounts to “check out these cool videos I found?” Obviously, we’re at a point in media culture where “white men” is meant to contain profound political content, yet I’m at a loss as to how it’s functioning here. I’m not trying to dispute a particular political point that Heer is trying to make. I mean that I’m completely baffled at what that point might be.  I’m not making some sort of argument against identity politics or the politics of representation. In order to do such a thing I’d have to have some idea about what actual political message Heer means to convey, and I don’t.

I certainly understand that there’s been a sensible attempt, in recent years, to recognize the huge overrepresentation of white men in literary culture. That’s a good thing, although it’s frequently been waged in a way that’s self-aggrandizing rather than helpful. But what does announcing the racial and gender makeup of a 60-year old video do to advance that project, or any other progressive project? I have no idea what this kind of vague wave in the direction of a particular elite political vocabulary is actually doing for anybody, other than to mark Heer as the kind of person who possesses that vocabulary.

I value the input of people who have a higher opinion than I do of the language and symbolism fixation in left-of-center politics. I don’t at all assume that there’s nothing to those politics, and I often come away more convinced of the value of this type of politics when someone passionate engages me on the issue. But even those who are enthusiastically in favor of this political style should be concerned by how detached these linguistic and social cues have become from actually trying to make the world more just. We’re at risk of the signaling function swallowing the communicative function whole. More and more, these signals seem totally uncoupled from any political project at all, like we’re slouching into a world of privileged people throwing around vague and toothless accusations of white tears and mansplaining with no one knowing who it’s for, what we’re doing, or why.

Posted in Rhetoric | Leave a comment

the savviest dupes

Posted on 6 January 2016 by Freddie

Jay Rosen coined a term to describe the basic attitude of our professional journalism and commentary class, the Cult of the Savvy. Rosen:

“In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane.  Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political.”

Today, dozens of journalists and hundreds of their followers were effortlessly rolled by an unverified Twitter account that compared conservative moron Ammon Bundy to beloved Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks. A bunch of predictable pieces got posted; a thousand outraged tweets were sent into the wild. And all without anyone bothering  to consider the fact that any random person can start a Twitter account. One journalist — one– bothered to actually check the facts. MSNBC’s Tony Dokoupil, who’s on the ground at the site in question, asked Bundy, and Bundy said the Twitter account is not real. The account also posted while Bundy was chatting with journalists. Dokoupil actually did his job. Meanwhile, a ton of people who base their whole self-conception on the idea that they are savvier and smarter than everyone else got played for fools, because the narrative played so perfectly into their assumptions.

To be clear: it’s not really that the account is fake. Hell, it could turn out to be real, or under his direction, somehow, although that looks unlikely. Or he could turn around and say, “I didn’t Tweet that, but really, it’s true.” But that’s not the point. It’s that nobody bothered to check. It’s that dozens or hundreds of people whose fundamental responsibility is to find out the facts didn’t bother to investigate any facts at all. I’d love to tell you that this is all just funny, but democracy doesn’t work without a functioning media, and ours is deeply broken right now, and yet many of its members can’t even bring themselves to apologize when they get it wrong.

Here’s the dishonor roll:

I’m sure there are more.

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all those fallen, non-me white people

Posted on 4 January 2016 by Freddie

Here’s a piece on pandering in the book industry, I guess. It’s ostensibly a complaint about cultural bubbles, though it’s written in an idiom — the impossibly self-satisfied lecturing tone of the 21st century — that’s shared by maybe a few thousand liberals with a college education and a Netflix account. But here’s an attitude that’s very common to this strata of essay writing: “White people like nothing more than to feel heroic. I mean, have you read our books and watched our films?”

Is that true? I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think it’s demonstrably untrue. I think progressive white people, the ones who have absorbed the lessons of appearing to be a race-conscious person, frequently consume and celebrate art that depicts white people as unheroic. Look at Twelve Years a Slave. Fantastic movie. Most certainly did not present white people in a heroic light. And yet it was wildly celebrated by white people in the culture industry. It won every award conceivable; it was on everybody’s year end best list. Central to its reputation was the notion that it was doing the hard work of forcing white people to see what they didn’t want to see.  But if “white people” is a category that actually means what it seems to mean, how can it simultaneously be the case that white people didn’t want to deal with Twelve Years a Slave‘s subject matter and yet that white critics celebrated that same subject matter? Similarly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me sold very well and was perhaps the most critically lauded book of 2015. And well deserved. I finally got a copy and I thought it was fantastic. But there, too, the dominant narrative in the cultural media has been that the book exposes white people to a reality they don’t want to confront. If that’s true, why did so many white people buy it, and why did so many sing its praises? This functions as a kind of preening self-regard by the white members of that cultural media who loudly extolled the books virtues: I am one of the good ones, willing to do myself the injury of learning about racism. Please fav and RT.

The obvious resolution to this tension is to say that when writers like Jessa Crispin talk about “white people,” they are not really talking about themselves, but rather those other, less evolved white people. Even when they explicitly include themselves and use “we” and “us,” the very act of writing these essays exonerates them from their own critiques. Self-indictment is inherently self-aggrandizement.

I always read about how white people don’t want to “confront the past” when it comes to Jim Crow, slavery, and all of the other racist monsters that America has played host to. Bullshit. White people, at least educated urban progressive white people, love to confront the past of America’s race problems. They do precisely because “confronting” things, like “facing up to” things, or “acknowledging” things, is a way to give yourself credit for doing something when you’re doing nothing at all. It flatters the contemporary conceit that you are your cultural consumption, when the old-fashioned truth remains the same: that your behavior is what matters. A Sarah Lawrence-educated nonprofit worker who tweets support for #BlackLivesMatter and won’t stop telling you how much they love Empire can be just as racist in their behavior as the media’s portrayal of a grinning Alabama yokel. The former person probably really does enjoy art that presents white people as unheroic. But that’s the trouble with self-indictment: no matter how harsh and specific it gets, you always end up feeling yourself in relief to the others you presume are not self-indicting.

Twelve Years a Slave is a great movie. Between the World and Me is a great book. Both of them should be consumed and enjoyed, and both can teach people a lot about this evil country. But these convoluted metatheatrics about audience and intent, of which that essay is just one unexceptional example, do nothing for anyone. They exclude people who don’t have an expensive liberal arts education and obscure the truth in an impossible maze of reversals and gotchas. Meanwhile, the truth of the matter is dead simple: that America is at war on its black people, and that we all need to do the actual political work of building a political coalition that can put a stop to that war. You take part in that, and it doesn’t matter if you spend your time “facing up to the past.” Hell, maybe people will even forgive you for not buying the Hamilton soundtrack.

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